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Shouldn’t it be trivially easy to demonstrate “prior art” in this case, making the patent invalid? I guess that requires someone to get into a legal battle with Nintendo… but it’s not like this is some niche mechanic. Surely there are other entertainment megacorps who are currently in violation of this “patent” and do have the resources to fight it in court.
AI marketing is total BS, but it doesn’t mean AI is not useful in it’s current state.
But the AI only exists because of the marketing BS! The fact that AI is useful to qualified people in specialized fields doesn’t matter when the technology is being mass marketed to a completely different group of people for completely different use cases.
LLMs are called “large” for a reason — their existence demands large datasets, large data centers, large resource consumption, and large capital expenditure to secure all of those things. The only entries with the resources to make that happen are large corporations (and rich nation-states, but they seem to be content to keep any of their own LLM efforts under wraps for now). You can only say “don’t blame the technology, blame the technologist” when it’s possible to separate the two, but in this case it’s not. LLMs don’t exist without the corpos, and the corpos are determined to push LLMs into places and use cases where they have no business being.
Don’t be pedantic. Anyone with half a brain knows that when someone brings up “climate change” they’re referring to “human-made climate change” — and it’s completely uncontroversial that the changes we’ve made since the industrial revolution have greatly outweighed the changes of the Earth’s natural climate cycles.
That would be all well and good, if corpos weren’t pushing AI as a technology that everyone should be using all the time to reshape their daily lives.
The people most attracted to AI as a technology (and the ones that AI companies are marketing to the hardest) are the ones who want to use it for things where they don’t already have domain-specific expertise. Non-artists generating art, or non-coders making apps on “vibes”, etc. Have you ever heard of Travis Kalanick? He’s one of the co-founders of Uber and he recently made the news after he went on some podcast to breathlessly rave about how he’s been using LLMs to do “vibe physics”. Kalanick, as you can guess, is not a physicist. In fact he’s not a scientist of any kind.
The vast, vast majority of people using AI aren’t using it to augment their existing skills, and they aren’t using their own expertise to evaluate the output critically. This was never the point nor the promise of AI, and it’s certainly not the direction that the people pushing this technology are attempting to push it.
Are you really gonna use the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument to defend LLMS?
Let’s not forget that the first ‘L’ stands for “large”. These things do not exist without massive, power and resource hungry data centers. You can’t just say “Blame government mismanagement! Blame corporate greed!” without acknowledging that LLMs cease to exist without those things.
And even with all of those resources behind it, the technology is still only marginally useful at best. LLMs still hallucinate, they still confidently distribute misinformation, they still contribute to mental health crises in vulnerable individuals, and no one really has any idea how to stop those things from happening.
What tangible benefit is there to LLMs that justifies their absurd cost? Honestly?
People are buying entire consoles for one or two games. If folk can afford a 450 USD switch 2 for mario kart they can afford a facebook (ugh) quest for 300 bucks that regularly goes on sale.
The difference is that you don’t need an entire room to play the Switch 2 (hell, you even need a TV). It’s easier to scrape together the $500+ required for a console than it is to afford a down payment and a mortgage, or the extra rent for a two-bedroom instead of a one-bedroom apartment.
Consoles and VR are both luxury goods, but the barrier for entry with the former is much lower than with the latter.
Space will always be the most expensive peripheral of all.
This is slightly outside the bounds of what you asked for, but I think you might appreciate Vermis.
It’s an art book/game guide for a dark fantasy action adventure game, except the game doesn’t actually exists. The whole thing is entirely fake — basically all of the world building of a video game but without the actual game. The art is fantastic and there’s really nothing else quite like it.
I think originally it was only available in paperback, but a hardcover edition is available now as well for more of that “coffee table book” vibe.
DS2 gets a bad rap, but it really is a great game in its own right. Sure it’s kinda chunky to play, but you get used to its rough edges pretty quickly. It also (in my opinion, at least) far and away has the best vibes of the series. All of these games are known for being lonely and melancholy, but DS2 really cracks that up to 11. More than the others, this one really feels like you’re picking through the ruins of something that used to be great — which is sort of appropriate, I suppose, since many consider the first game to be superior…
It also has the most content of the 3 (if you include all of the DLC that you can easily get bundled), and also the most build variety when it comes to customizing your character.
Anyway, DS2 may still be the weakest Dark Souls and my least favorite in a lot of ways, but it’s also the one that I personally can’t stop thinking about. At least give it a go and see if it clicks with you, because the few things it does well, it does REALLY well.
“Then he said, ‘I’m going to be very honest, we have been testing the game with players and the results are too good. They like it too much. That means something is wrong; we have to change something.’ And he changed stuff in the script and the way some crucial stuff [happens] in the game because he thought his work was not polarizing and not triggering enough emotions.”
Is he saying people thought the script was too good? Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the first game… but never in a million years would I say that the script was good. Apparently Kojima is so allergic to good writing that he uses positive feedback as an excuse to self-sabotage.
Honestly, I’ve always felt Kojima’s greatest strength was his ideas and his greatest weakness was his execution…
If someone with a little more, uh… discretion, I guess? was given the seed of a Kojima idea and allowed to run with it without Kojima’s incessant need to over explain and over indulge, I think we’d end up with something really magical.
Escape will make me God
Other than the setting, this was the only reference to the original trilogy that I spotted, and man… the way it’s used here is just so disconnected from what made that line iconic and cool. I was cautiously optimistic before, but the media blitz they did today has completely killed any hope I had for the Marathon IP.
This was inevitable as soon as games started getting the budgets of blockbuster movies. No one wants to invest that much money into a project without getting some oversight and control in return.
Of course, very, very few people who have access to that kind of cash have any design sense whatsoever, and even fewer understand the creative process, or what makes games “good”… so they ask for shit that they think will be “safe” money-makers, and we get what we get: endless, samey, soulless shlock.
The one advantage I can think of to this approach is that it makes it harder to “snowball”.
Civ VI had a big problem with this were you’d end up so far ahead by 1000 AD that you were all but guaranteed to win the game… but you’d still have to play through multiple ages to get to the end and there would be very little challenge left for the multiple hours it would take to grind through to the end. I think I got bored and just restarted more often than I actually finished games in Civ VI because of this.
If you have multiple soft resets along the way, I could maybe see that giving the devs some ability to reset the “power curve” periodically so that you’re always dealing with some manner of challenge as you move from age to age.
Yet!