We should demand mastercard shut down all payments to everyone, as their very business model clearly falls afoul of the laws of the People’s Republic of North Korea.

Exactly. Have people forgotten how Project 2025 explicitly wants to classify trans people and queer people more generally as inherently pornographic? Like, ultimately they fundamentally do not accept that trans folks just want to live as we are. They believe that people transition as some sort of public act of sex exhibitionism. They believe it is akin to child abuse for a child to be exposed to the concept of gay people existing. That is what they truly in their hearts believe. They believe that any LGBT content is inherently pornographic. If the theocrats can pressure Mastercard to shut down porn, they can do the same for any content produced about or by queer people of any sort. If they can pressure Steam, they can pressure YouTube or Nebula. As the smaller player, Nebula would be a lot more vulnerable to pressure. What would happen if Nebula had to choose between accepting credit card payments or hosting queer content creators?

Or imagine the worst case. Gabe is the world’s greatest prankster. He’s a true internet troll for the ages. He’s spent decades getting millions and millions of people dependent on his game hosting. He’s got hardware. He stands astride the game industry like a colossus. But the key is that Valve is still a private corporation. In theory, Gabe could do whatever he wants with it. Including, finally committing the last stage of his ultimate prank. One day…he just flips the off switch. Steam never enshittifies. It just shuts off forever without warning.

And thus, with one stroke, his master chess move concluded (to reasons comprehensible only to Gabe), he just shuts it off and walks away. His last words in public are, “it turns out, I was the greatest gamer of all the whole time…”

Tale as old as time. The abused grow up to become the abusers.

If I ran a business, I wouldn’t engage in any political events whatsoever.

So you won’t have holidays, period.

Only a Nazi conflates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

Those on the right, being Nazis, use the Hitlerian definition of anti-Semitism. In this Hitlerian definition, Jews can never actually be full citizens of any other nation besides Israel. Regardless of their personal loyalty or belief, any Jew in the US or Europe is suspect, only a partial citizen, a foreigner at their very core. This is Hitlerian, as it is the very way the historical Nazis viewed Jewish identity.

For modern Nazis, being a Jew and being Israeli are interchangeable. A criticism of the Israeli government is an attack on Jewish people in general. Nazis like the modern Republican Party believe that Jews can never be real Americans, and that they will always have some connection and loyalty to the Israeli state. This is the very logic that justified the Japanese internment camps. If you think every Jewish person must be loyal to Israel, you are literally a Nazi.

Yup. I’m pretty sour on Bethesda RPGs after getting burned hard by Starfield. But I have a hard time imagining even they could fuck up a simple remastering of a game I already loved in the past.

An entire town of dead people. It was hilarious.

I see you also follow the life philosophy of, “if you’re not on at least one watch list, are you even really living?” :D

I still remember my first playthrough. Low level character. I save scummed until I could sneak into the tower in the heart of the Imperial City. In the council chamber was a mage with an incredibly powerful staff. I pickpocketed it off of him, again using save scumming. I then traveled to Bravil and entered the castle there. As the Count of Bravil was giving a speech, I pulled out the staff and zapped him dead on his throne, right in front the of the whole court. I then got away from the assassination through the brilliant escape plan of running out the front door, murder weapon still in hand.

Damn I loved Oblivion.

Muuuuurrddeeerrr!!!

IDK how to feel about rising video game prices. On the one hand, prices were stagnant for decades. On the other hand, companies can sell far more copies of games than they could back in the 1980s and 1990s. The cost of games is all in the development. The more you sell, the cheaper the price can be. They cost next to nothing to package and distribute (or are distributed digitally.)

On one hand, games are a lot more complex and expansive than they were back in the day. On the other, game devs now have tools the creators of old couldn’t even dream of. No one is hand coding the next Mario game is assembly.

There’s a lot of variables here. And it’s really just hard to make a fair judgment about it.

LLMs as tools,

Yes, in the same way that buying a CD from the store, ripping to your hard drive, and returning the CD is a tool.

It’s not about hampering proliferation, it’s about breaking the hype bubble. Some of the western AI companies have been pitching to have hundreds of billions in federal dollars devoted to investing in new giant AI models and the gigawatts of power needed to run them. They’ve been pitching a Manhattan Project scale infrastructure build out to facilitate AI, all in the name of national security.

You can only justify that kind of federal intervention if it’s clear there’s no other way. And this story here shows that the existing AI models aren’t operating anywhere near where they could be in terms of efficiency. Before we pour hundreds of billions into giant data center and energy generation, it would behoove us to first extract all the gains we can from increased model efficiency. The big players like OpenAI haven’t even been pushing efficiency hard. They’ve just been vacuuming up ever greater amounts of money to solve the problem the big and stupid way - just build really huge data centers running big inefficient models.

There’s nothing wrong with the fundamentals of the technology, just the applications that Westoids doggedly insist it be used for.

Westoids? Are you the type of guy I feel like I need to take a shower after talking to?

I love the fact that the same executives who obsess over return to office because WFH ruins their socialization and sexual harassment opportunities think think they’re going to be able to replace all their employees with AI. My brother in Christ. You have already made it clear that you care more about work being your own social club than you do actual output or profitability. You are NOT going to embrace AI. You can’t force an AI to have sex with you in exchange for keeping its job, and that’s the only trick you know!

There are many clear use cases that are solid, so AI is here to stay, that’s for certain. But how far can it go, and what will it require is what the market is gambling on.

I would disagree on that. There are a few niche uses, but OpenAI can’t even make a profit charging $200/month.

The uses seem pretty minimal as far as I’ve seen. Sure, AI has a lot of applications in terms of data processing, but the big generic LLMs propping up companies like OpenAI? Those seems to have no utility beyond slop generation.

Ultimately the market value of any work produced by a generic LLM is going to be zero.