Is open-source compatible with competitive games? As much as I love open-source in general, I feel like cheating would be a serious problem if the source code is available for everyone. That's not really an issue in single-player or co-operative games (outside of cheating leaderboard positions) but it would absolutely cause problems in a PvP game.
loobkoob
joined 1 year ago
"Landed gentry" was a social class of people who owned estates and, well, land. They didn't have to work; they made their income by profiting off the work of the farm hands, merchants, etc, who worked on their land. The estates these landed gentry owned, along with their wealth, would be passed down to their children when they died. It meant the gentry did very little to earn their station in life, but still had a fair amount of power and wealth.
How spez thinks it applies to Reddit mods, I'm not entirely sure. But he definitely meant it as an insult. His full quote was:
And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.
So I guess he was upset that mod teams get to select who else is a good fit to join the mod team? Of course, the issue is that he is the landed gentry - users didn't vote for him, nor can they remove him; and he's profiting off the work of the people who post content and the people who spend their time moderating.
The convenient thing about a handful of people controlling all the wealth is it means there are only a handful of people who need to be liberated of their wealth!
I'm not sure they're sleepwalking into it; I think there's just very little they can do without pivoting to an entirely different business sector at this point.
- Physical game sales been dropping for years as people get better internet connections, bigger hard-drives and as games come with larger and larger day-one patches
- Many "physical" versions of games these days just contain a download code which only reduces physical sales further
- People often find it easier to buy peripherals on Amazon then go into GAME. And GAME can't really compete with Amazon when it comes to online shopping.
- GAME tried to diversify into gaming and general "nerd culture" collectibles years ago and it's obviously not something that's revitalised their business.
Where do they go from here? I certainly think they handled things poorly 10-15 years ago, and could perhaps have pivoted successfully then if they'd seen the writing on the wall. But pretty much no-one predicted the current landscape back then. It's only a decade since Microsoft's disastrous Xbox One reveal where they got savaged for its always online nature and for heading towards digital-only games, with everyone saying, "but we love buying physical copies of games", and now here we are ten years later with brick-and-mortar stores looking like they might not survive the year and physical sales numbers in free fall.
I don't think GAME is necessarily mishandling things right now. I just think there's not really a market for a business like theirs nowadays.
Yeah, I don't get it. I guess I can see the appeal of some "Internet Of Things" connected appliances, like smart fridges suggesting recipes and keeping track of stock and auto-populating shopping lists for you. I don't need that personally, but I can see why it could appeal to some people.
But things like washing machines and dishwashers? You need to be there in person to fill them up just before they're ready to go on, and to empty them when they're done. And when they're not turned on, they're sat there doing nothing. What "smart" functions can they even offer?
Your assumptions aren't true at all. It looks like it's heading that way part-way through the film, when Barbie and Ken are at odds with each other. And then it goes ahead and empowers all the men as well. It's certainly critical of toxic masculinity but I think it's empowering for both men and women overall. Obviously your Ben Shapiro types were offended by it because it's not trying to appeal to incels, and it is woke, but not in a bad, inauthentic way.
I don't think it's really supposed to re-popularise the line of toys either. Sure, people who liked the toys when they were young will probably find details they appreciate, but it's not meant to sell the toys. It's not aimed at the demographic (young girls, typically) who would want to buy dolls. It's not an R-rated film, of course, but I'd say anyone under 12 probably isn't going to get much out of it, and it's probably much more enjoyable for adults overall. It's pretty philosophical and thoughtful, and has quite a lot of metaphors and symbolism that would be lost on younger viewers.
Rather than aiming to sell toys, the film is the product; it's a way to make money with the Barbie brand from audiences outside of the toy-buying demographic. And it achieved that (by being a good film).
It'll potentially just end up like emails (which are also federated, after all), where Gucci employees get an @gucci.com email address and an @gucci.com ActivityPub handle.
I'm sure a lot of the people who said they were going to boycott it did boycott it. But a boycott was never going to work for this game. The IP alone meant it was going to sell 10M+ copies, even if it was absolutely terrible.
I agree completely. I think AI can be a valuable tool if you use it correctly, but it requires you to be able to prompt it properly and to be able to use its output in the right way - and knowing what it's good at and what it's not. Like you said, for things like brainstorming or looking for inspiration, it's great. And while its artistic output is very derivative - both because it's literally derived from all the art it's been trained on and simply because there's enough other AI art out there that it doesn't really have a unique "voice" most of the time - you could easily use it as a foundation to create your own art.
To expand on my asking it questions: the kind of questions I find it useful for are ones like "what are some reasons why people may do x?" or "what are some of the differences between y and z?". Or an actual question I asked ChatGPT a couple of months ago based on a conversation I'd been having with a few people: "what is an example of a font I could use that looks somewhat professional but that would make readers feel slightly uncomfortable?" (After a little back and forth, it ended up suggesting a perfect font.)
Basically, it's good for divergent questions, evaluative questions, inferent questions, etc. - open-ended questions - where you can either use its response to simulate asking a variety of people (or to save yourself from looking through old AskReddit and Quora posts...) or just to give you different ideas to consider, and it's good for suggestions. And then, of course, you decide which answers are useful/appropriate. I definitely wouldn't take anything "factual" it says as correct, although it can be good for giving you additional things to look into.
As for writing code: I've only used it for simple-ish scripts so far. I can't write code, but I'm just about knowledgeable enough to read code to see what it's doing, and I can make my own basic edits. I'm perfectly okay at following the logic of most code, it's just that I don't know the syntax. So I'm able to explain to ChatGPT exactly what I want my code to do, how it should work, etc, and it can write it for me. I've had some issues, but I've (so far) always been able to troubleshoot and eventually find a solution to them. I'm aware that if want to do anything more complex then I'll need to expand my coding knowledge, though! But so far, I've been able to use it to write scripts that are already beyond my own personal coding capabilities which I think is impressive.
I generally see LLMs as similar to predictive text or Google searches, in that they're a tool where the user needs to:
- have an idea of the output they want
- know what to input in order to reach that output (or something close to that output)
- know how to use or adapt the LLM's output
And just like how people having access to predictive text or Google doesn't make everyone's spelling/grammar/punctuation/sentence structure perfect or make everyone really knowledgeable, AIs/LLMs aren't going to magically make everyone good at everything either. But if people use them correctly, they can absolutely enhance that person's own output (be it their productivity, their creativity, their presentation or something else).
I don't think AI will be a fad in the same way blockchain/crypto-currency was. I certainly think there's somewhat of a hype bubble surrounding AI, though - it's the hot, new buzzword that a lot of companies are mentioning to bring investors on board. "We're planning to use some kind of AI in some way in the future (but we don't know how yet). Make cheques out to ________ please"
I do think AI does have actual, practical uses, though, unlike blockchain which always came off as a "solution looking for a problem". Like, I'm a fairly normal person and I've found good uses for AI already in asking it various questions where it gives better answers than search engines, in writing code for me (I can't write code myself), etc. Whereas I've never touched anything to do with crypto.
AI feels like a space that will continue to grow for years, and that will be implemented into more and more parts of society. The hype will die down somewhat, but I don't see AI going away.
You're right about osu! Although it's probably one of the few competitive games where there's no gameplay interaction between players - if another player is cheating, it hurts the overall competitiveness, of course, but it doesn't directly affect your gameplay experience.
It's not like playing a shooter where someone has an aimbot and wallhacks, or a racing game where someone can ram you off the track without slowing themselves down - those things directly ruin your gameplay experience as well as obviously hurting the competitive integrity. I don't think those kinds of games would work at all if they were open-source and without anti-cheat unless there was strict moderation and likely whitelisting in place for servers.