loobkoob

Is the fully casted radio version not the best version to listen to anyway?

I agree, but at the same time, I think a lot of people are still trying to build out their subscribed communities list here - especially because a lot of would-be communities are fragmented across multiple instances. Outside of just stumbling across communities you like because they’ve been mentioned in a comment section, or checking out communities that links have been crossposted to, looking at the all feed is the best way to discover things, I think - unfortunate though it is.

To be honest, I’d love to see a “weighted all” feed, if that’s even possible. So include everything, but let the user set custom weights for communities, so ones you weight highly show up more often (and nearer the top) and once you weight lower show up less often. There are some communities that I only really see if I look at my subscriptions because they don’t tend to show up in the all feed much. And there are some communities - a lot of meme ones, for instance - that I’ve blocked because they were clogging up the all feed; if I could just weight them lower so if still see them but far less often, I would do that instead of blocking them.

There certainly was some actual “ethics in video game journalism” discussion early on that I felt was legitimate, but that got drowned out pretty quickly by the misogynists (which, from what I gather, was the entire point - it seems the misogynists started the whole thing and used the “ethics in game journalism” thing as a front to try to legitimise their agenda).

I think the discussion about the personal relationships game journalists have with developers in general was a reasonable one to have. It unfortunately ended up just laser focusing on Zoe Quinn supposedly trading sex for good reviews, which was untrue, sexist and resulted in nasty personal attacks. But I think it was worth at least examining the fact that game journalists and game developers often have close relationships and move in the same circles, and that game journalism can often be a stepping stone to game development. Those are absolutely things that could influence someone’s reviews or articles, consciously or subconsciously.

And another conversation worth having was the fact that gaming outlets like IGN were/are funded by adverts from gaming companies. It makes sense, of course - the Venn diagram of IGN’s (or other gaming outlets’) readers and gaming companies’ target audience is almost a perfect circle, which makes the ad space valuable to the gaming companies. And because it’s valuable to gaming companies, it’s better for the outlets to sell the ad space to them for more money than to sell it to generic advertising platforms. But it does mean it seems valid to ask whether the outlets giving bad reviews or writing critical articles might cause their advertisers to pull out, and therefore they might avoid being too critical.

Now I don’t think the games industry is corrupt or running on cronyism, personally. And I certainly don’t believe it’s all run by a shadowy cabal of woke libruls who are trying to force black people, women (and worse, gasp black women shudder) into games. But I do feel it was worth asking about the relationships between journalists, developers, publishers and review outlets - and honestly, those are the kinds of things that both game journalists and people who read game journalism should constantly be re-evaluating. It’s always good to be aware of potential biases and influences.

The fact that the whole thing almost immediately got twisted into misogyny, death threats and a general hate campaign was both disappointing and horrifying. And the fact that it led to the alt-right, and that you can trace a line from it to Brexit and to Donald Trump becoming US president, is even worse.

KOAN Sound - Led By Ancient Light definitely tops my list.

And a couple of King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard albums, but I’ve seen them mentioned already! I’m sure there are probably some more that I’m blanking on right now - I’ll check my music library and edit this if I think of some more!

I’m not sure I see how they’re comparable. Progressivism requires the ability to progress; if we somehow create a completely perfect utopia then there will be no room for progressivism, but otherwise there will always be some way to improve things and progress. In practice, there will always be some way to improve society which means infinite progressivism surely isn’t unreasonable?

Infinite growth isn’t possible because infinite money doesn’t exist, it’s as simple as that. And if infinite money did exist, infinite growth wouldn’t be possible because everything would already be infinitely large and therefore unable to grow any further…

… but beyond that, it also requires more and more people who can afford whatever the product/service in question is. Which requires either infinite people, infinite money or both. And as the product/service grows and prices likely increase, people will priced out of the market which is the opposite of infinite growth.

It’s also worth considering that progressivism is a mindset that is aiming for zero - zero problems, zero inequality, zero bigotry, etc. It’s not about pushing for infinite anything, it’s about trying to reduce existing issues. And while it’ll likely never reach its goal, it’s not theoretically or mathematically unreachable. It’s much more realistic to attempt to reduce something to zero than it is to increase it to infinity.

Not that your suggestion is necessarily bad in general, but I don’t really think it’s necessary when it comes to Factorio. I think it should be clear from playing the demo whether 100+ more hours of that seems worth the asking price for someone. It’s probably the most representative demo I’ve ever played; the full game is just the demo but more. There are no surprises down the line. There are no random pivots to other genres, or the game trying to stick its fingers in too many pies. There’s no narrative to screw up. There’s no “oh, they clearly just spent all their time polishing the first hour of the game and the rest of it is a technical mess”. It’s the same gameplay loop from the demo for another 50 hours until you “win”.

… and then another 50 hours after that when you decide to optimise things. And then another 100 hours when you decide to make a train-themed base. And then another 700 hours when you discover some of the mods that exist…

And also just websites compressing images without the user getting any input. A meme that goes from Facebook to Twitter to Reddit to Twitter to Tumblr to Reddit to here will likely be compressed every time it gets reuploaded. Most social media sites use some form of image compression.

And it obviously doesn’t help that artefacts from compression are multiplicative.

Yes, as long as they’re also white and middle/upper class!

I’m kind of surprised Apple is willing to fragment things so much just to avoid these consumer-friendly rulings as much as they can. Obviously it’s profit-driven - I get that - but it seems to go against their branding a little, where the Apple ecosystem is typically very simple to use and has parity across devices.

I don’t think all adverts are propaganda. For instance, someone in my village has a sign outside their house that says “EGGS FOR SALE” - that is 100% an advert, but I’m not sure you could convince me it’s propaganda.

I agree that there’s a lot of overlap between advertising and corporate propaganda, but they’re definitely different things.

Unfortunately, I doubt it’ll have much of an impact. Most of the properties/studios Embracer owns aren’t popular enough to get people to make noise about it. And people don’t tend to see the bigger picture - especially when these stories about studio closures are trickling out rather than all happening at once. I’m sure there’ll be a lot of talk about it if something happens to do with Gearbox/Borderlands or The Lord Of The Rings, or if multiple studios all get shuttered at once, but other than that, I expect it’ll just be small stories that continue to fly under the radar.

And regulators don’t seem to care about video games unless people make noise. They get involved in things like loot box regulations or Microsoft acquiring Activision because those are big deals that almost everyone in the gaming sphere has an opinion on. But unfortunately, I don’t see Piranha Bytes having issues or being closed getting enough attention for anything to change.

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.

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.

“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.

“That means that you won.”

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?

You’ve got some good answers already, but I can expand on it a little: businesses in most sectors are feeling the impact of increased interest rates - both because they can’t borrow as much themselves any more, and because there is less money coming in from investors because they can’t borrow as much either - but tech (including games) is doubly impacted because there was such a surge in demand during lockdowns. While other businesses tended to struggle during lockdowns, and have simply had that struggle replaced with a different struggle due to the interest rates, the tech sector grew massively during the pandemic.

People working at home, or furloughed, had more personal time and more disposable income because they weren’t spending money on travelling to work, on overpriced lunches, on dining out with friends, going to concerts, etc. It all added up, and they spent that money on streaming subscriptions, video games and just generally on recreational, home-based activities, many of which revolve around tech these days. So the tech sector grew a lot because of the low interest rates, and it grew a lot because more people were buying its products/services. And now, rather than having more disposable income, a lot of people are facing a cost of living crisis, meaning not only have they reduced their spending because they’re back in the office and dining out and going to concerts again (and all those other things people spend money on when they’re not confined to their house), but many people have less money to spend on gaming, subscriptions, etc, than pre-pandemic.

Also, because the tech sector was doing so well during the pandemic, it was an attractive prospect for investors (who themselves had increased money, as well as great interest rates), meaning it grew even more. Everything kind of fed into each other and the tech sector grew exponentially as a result. Whereas right now, not only does the increased interest rate for borrowing mean investors are throwing their cash around less in general, but the fact that the tech sector is struggling makes it a less attractive prospect for investors, meaning the whole sector kind of doubly loses out on that front.

So these tech companies invested their money into growing their companies and expanding their businesses’ scopes like good capitalists. Which does generally make sense - if you find yourself sat on a huge pile of money, it’s generally better to find a way to invest it into something useful (or to invest it into something makes you an even bigger pile of money if you see the Monopoly Man as aspirational). The issue is, most of them were somewhat short-sighted (plus global economics is a tricky thing to predict); they spent money as if it was always going to be coming in at the same rate. And now that they’re being impacted by increased interest rates on their own borrowing, the loss of investors, and the reduced spending power of consumers and they’re very suddenly having to make massive cuts to stay afloat.

“Trump” is synonymous with “fart” in British English. Plenty of Americans already did celebrate and vote for a fart.

My keyboard (Swiftkey) gets very excited about the possibilities when I start to hyphenate words to create compounds. It accepts that they exist, but it starts trying to throw all sorts of random suggestions in for what the second word could be (and it rarely gets the right word).

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:

1. have an idea of the output they want
2. know what to input in order to reach that output (or something close to that output)
3. 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).