On a movie set, the director has a huge amount of authority. It’s been baked into the culture for about a hundred years that the director is one step below God. A studio treats films as investments, but they also hire a director and (mostly) get out of the way. Sure, producers do meddle, but it’s nowhere close to the same amount as with games – and all the meddling is still pointed at the director, not the crew. I think this limits the damage that can be done.

Also, the film industry has strong unions. Most of the abuses in game dev simply aren’t allowed. I suspect that the horrible culture of game dev can cause developers to stop caring, which bleeds through to the final product, and that won’t happen to the same extent for movies.

Granted. “Arbitrarily large” would probably be a better phrasing: if I buy a stock for $100 and the value drops to $0, I’m out $100. Can’t lose more money than I put in. What I meant is that short positions, by their nature, don’t have this ceiling on the amount of money you lose.

If EA, having been purchased, is milked for cash, strip-mined for IP, and then unceremoniously abandoned, it will be very funny.

You can hold a short position by repeatedly borrowing more stock – but you run the risk of running out of money completely, because short positions have (theoretically) infinite downside risk.

If you imagine it like making a bet, nobody’s going to take a bet with you where they pay you when it pops, but there’s no time after which you pay them – because they’d never get any money out of that bet. Buying stock is different because it’s a thing you can own, but you can’t invest in the idea of something failing, because there isn’t any business which will take your money and make something more likely to fail.

You could buy every stock except AI-related stocks, which I believe is functionally equivalent to buying an index fund and shorting AI stocks based on the percentage of AI stocks in the index fund. You could also think about what businesses would do well (or less poorly) in the case of an AI-instigated crash, and then buy those.

Maybe more of a mystery story? Just take the “investigative reporter” angle and run with it.

They’re condemning microtransaction-based models, so it might not be bad… but I’ll believe it when I see it.

That seems to be Tynan’s MO. I like it. No hype, no teasers, just quietly works until he has something worth selling.

Perfect! We’d have pretty low utilization on those 80 CPUs, though – if we made them smaller, the power draw would be lower and it would be cheaper. We could then get away with adding more CPUs. It would then make sense to put the array of simple CPUs on its own card, dedicated to graphics processing… wait a minute.

With a name like that I hope it involves nuke-powered spaceships.

Vulnerable workers who need the job and don’t know that this sort of thing is usually illegal.

The publisher also did Rise of Kong, and they’re literally called GameMill. And it looks like they’ve made a whole lot of terrible games, most based on well-known franchises. Seems their MO is to make games as cheaply as possible, cash in on the franchise fans buying before reading reviews, and turn a profit even on lousy, lousy titles.

It seems that hyphnenation is becoming a lost art.

Minecraft has the wonkiest difficulty. After you pass the first three nights or so, Hard is generally easier than Easy.