lmao the comments in that video.

This one basically sums it up:

Brave of them to turn the comments on.

This is all local though, thus encouraging everyone to get their own GPU. Wouldn’t that work against the goal of getting more people on their cloud services?

Real people need jobs

Do we really? We produce way more than enough for everyone already with very few people involved. What we need is better distribution of those resources.

How would Microsoft benefit from this? I thought they were mainly in the LLM and user information hoarding business.

It all started with the LAION “pretty images” dataset (I don’t remember exactly what it was called). This style was pervasive in that dataset, and to be fair to the curators, it did look good at the time. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the art style. It’s just that it’s now become so overused, and always with slop, so we associate the style with slop.

The way it seems to work in Canada is that the government decides on a set of topics they want to fund that are fairly high level, and as long as your work falls in one of those categories, the grant gets approved. So the government doesn’t choose the specific drug to study. They choose which medical condition we want to try to treat, then they let the PIs tell them what they want to do and how it relates to those priorities.

I see nothing in my library that can be abbreviated to MK1.

I dream of a world where people can follow their passion without having to worry about where their next meal will come from.

I don’t know if they managed cheaters well, but it’s one of those games where the presence of cheaters really doesn’t affect how enjoyable the game is unless you’re at the very top. I don’t understand why they had to impose the anti-cheats on everyone equally.

I’ve been told the French is rather mediocre compared to the English.

Alright, I guess that’s fairly relatable then.

Real. Give me a state of the art lab for multidisciplinary scientific research and some of the world’s best scientists to do as they wish in that lab. I have so many unanswered questions about the universe.

A non-profit which owns a portion of OpenAI, the for-profit company.

I didn’t expect my decisions to actually affect anything when I played it. Big surprise when I just clicked every dialogue option and things went poorly.

You can also load your save file into the second game and have that affect the story in minor ways, which I thought was pretty cool.

Yes, because they still allow you to spend your money elsewhere if a new storefront appears on the market. Epic is actively preventing that.

I’m Canadian. Marriage doesn’t have the same meaning here.

The main reason for me is the implication of a certain legal status when you say husband/wife/spouse and that of a short term relationship when you say [boy/girl]friend. The only word I know of that says long term relationship but without the legal status is “partner” or “significant other”.

I’ve been picking them up religiously after I found out I missed Frostpunk. The only ones I’ve played were the big names like Control, Death Standing, and the old Fallout games. For everything else, the client doesn’t give you enough information to decide if it’s worth your time or not. I keep having to go back and forth between Epic and Steam to read reviews and the “similar to other games you’ve played” thing. It’s not worth the effort.

Denuvo works on a subscription basis. Sooner or later, they’re going to decide it’s not worth paying for anymore and the game will be available to pirate. Waiting a year is nothing.

I’m honestly tempted to get back into the game just to figure out how to cheat now. All the added anti-cheat stuff makes it a much more interesting challenge, and I do have the right skillset to tackle this. It would tie in nicely with some of my research projects too.

Sad that pepe is still on these lists after all the efforts to take it back.

GT Sophy on Gran Turismo

The game trying to force that plot twist felt very jarring and pulled me out of the immersion right from the start. My guy, you have no idea how long you’ve been in there. Why are you asking around for a child?

Loot box and that gambling business aside, wouldn’t the FOMO argument also apply to the video game itself? If everyone around you is playing this game, you’ll be pressured into purchasing it yourself as well.

You don’t pay people because it’s the only motivator. You pay people because you need money to survive in this world. If we don’t, then the only people who can afford to spend time making mods are those who are already have their basic needs taken care of through other means.

I would like to see a world where anyone with the passion for modding can make mods.

Someone still had to make the decision to put all of these elements together in one characters.

Considering that both were designed with the same historical period and location in mind, that’s not surprising. But the hood? And parkour? That can’t also be a coincidence, can it?

Ah, I see. Though I would call this manipulative, not dishonest.

entities that seems honest are the most secretly dishonest

It’s the converse. By definition, dishonest entities (that are good at what they do) will appear honest.

Definitions aside, let’s go back to my original argument. To rephrase it a bit: A transparently manipulative entity is better than a deceptive and manipulative entity. So why protest the added transparency and not the manipulation?

I think I’m missing an important part of your argument here. What are they doing that you consider to be dishonest?

Worse than what they’ve been doing for the last decade? It seems to me like this is a better state of things because it’s clearly a lot of money for one big purchase, so you know immediately that it’s not something you can afford. Better transparency, so less manipulative.

I feel like if anything has the right to be ridiculously expensive, it’s art.

• It’s not a necessity for survival.
• It’s not a necessity to live a fulfilling life.
• There’s so much else available to us that can fulfill the same purpose that are cheap/free.
• A one time $435 cost feels a lot more expensive than lots of small purchases adding up to the same amount, meaning this is more likely to be purchased exclusively by people who can actually afford it, unlike the latter which can trick people into spending more than they can afford.
• It funds free entertainment for everyone who don’t have the ability to pay.

What’s the downside?

I have no interest in this game, so I wouldn’t know how it actually affects gameplay. But do you not agree that this is shitty business practice? You have a game. Sell the game. If you want microtransactions, then produce extra art or something and sell that. You can even make the case that separating out parts of the game into various DLCs on launch is acceptable. You’re at least charging for something of value that you created.

Implementing anti-cheat costs resources and makes the end result strictly worse. Now you want people to pay you to undo that? That’s creating negative value. We want the economy to run on people creating positive value.

I think a more apt comparison is if you’re renting out a place where every light switch is three-way with one switch near the light it controls and another in a closet with all the other light switches. You can control the ones in the closet for free, but the ones in a reasonable location are pay-per-use. The problem isn’t that the features aren’t available for free. It’s that they poured resources into deliberately making things worse, then they charge you to undo that. Literally creating negative value.

I really enjoyed those tbh. One of my favourite things to do in RDR2 is just riding around and enjoying the scenery, or chilling in Saint-Denis at night time. Gaming time is chill time. There’s no rush to finish a story.

I remember playing the first game and getting stuck on the tutorial because I was mashing the left click button trying to swing my sword only to have Geralt hip thrust at the enemies.

But once you figure out how to swing the sword, the game’s actually pretty fun. One thing I particularly liked is that there’s an investigative storyline where you actually have to go and investigate and figure out the answer with the clues provided, and you can fail. I went into it thinking it would be like most modern games where you only get obviously correct or incorrect dialog options and angered everyone in the process.

Same here. The game needs such a big time investment and there just isn’t time for that anymore these days. They did do a pretty good job with the item and skill order recommendations, so at least ARAM is still kind of accessible.

Sure, cracks still exist, but I’ve stopped downloading them in favour of buying off Steam because the user experience was a lot better. I’m sure I can’t be the only one to do this.

It sounds like we just disagree on what constitutes a core element of a game. I’m very happy to not have to pay for things I don’t care about, but I can understand that it sucks when you do care about it and there aren’t as many people to split the costs with.

What about microtransactions makes them evil? Is your gripe just about loot boxes? Or paying for art? Or is it the middleman? I don’t understand how charging for art in the context of a video game can be inherently evil.

Would that actually be sustainable for a game that’s constantly changing? The ones I’m familiar with are League of Legends and TFT, so I’ll use those as examples. These games rely on having a large playerbase, or else matchmaking will be all over the place and it wouldn’t be any fun for anyone. Having to pay for the game would shrink that playerbase considerably. Having to pay for updates makes this essentially a subscription model, since it’s makes no sense to maintain old versions of the game and further fracturing the playerbase that is already small to begin with, and subscriptions will also deter a lot of people from playing the game.

If it’s one of those single player story-based games that you play once and never touch again, then yeah, the model makes sense. Though I don’t see the harm in having the option to buy cosmetics. It’s not something I’m personally interested in so I just don’t touch that stuff, but I like that we’re valuing the work of artists more.