Eh, apples to oranges.

A 60$ game today is so unlike a 60$ two or three decades ago.

No physical medium. Much larger market and (potential at least) sales volume.

Proliferation of game engines; games don’t need to ‘reinvent the wheel’ each time, or write machine code anymore.

On top of that, there’s many other revenue streams. Not that I think this model is ‘fair and good’, but look at the mobile market, where a sale cost of $0 is king.

Something to be said about ‘lower cost incentivizing bad practices’ (as the article discusses), and yeah, some games could raise their price. But it’s far fron 1-1, as ‘sales volume’ trumps ‘sale price’ in importance.

538 no longer has Nate Silver or his model; Disney bought it and fired him like a year ago or so.

Still, I agree; I don’t like his politics, but his analysis of polls and numbers is probably the best out there.

Decaf does actually still have caffeine, just normally like 97% less.

Which, I guess is like the boneless wings having 97% less bones, now in convinient needle shaped shards

I think controller is only ‘necessary’ for souls games due to them not supporting keyboard and mouse well. I’d prefer to use keyboard for it, but all of the inputs and menu-ing is fucked up.

Tbh, its a testament to how good the games are, that they are enjoyable despite a huge lack of QoL across the board

I’m talking about the stuttering, caused primarily not recalculating shaders. Something I just dealt with the entirety of my first playthrough of ER. But the fact that it still isn’t fixed really makes me not want to play, or to pay them money.

Yeah, I’m holding off for a sale on this one. I liked Elden Ring well enough, but the performance issues are infuriating. Baffling that it still isn’t fixed.

I agree. I’m very much for more research into fusion. I’m still somewhat skeptical of it ever being ‘infinite cheap energy’. But even if it never becomes a ‘good energy source’, the advancement of knowledge is valuable. So its not like I think fusion is a scam overall.

But I think this particular company is.

That is what I think the owner is doing here. Scamming venture capital firms for a tech that cannot work.

And I mean, its not like I have any proof. I can’t read minds; maybe he is a true believer.

But this company feels like those companies back in the 80s that sold tickets to mars, for the rockets they were ‘just about to build’; a scam.

This isn’t a research firm. This isn’t trying to find the exact settings and layouts to make fusion possible. If the article can be taken at face value, this is a company to make a commercial fusion plant. And I find that, in 2023, patently absurd.

I hope it works.

But I’m skeptical enough to say that I think this is a scam. We’re closing in, research wise, on getting fusion to generate more power than it takes to run. Which is awesome!

But its still a far trek from that figure, to producing enough power to be practical (I’ve heard it said you really need to aim for 10x more production than input, minimum, for it to make any sense).

And that is still a trek from making a fusion plant competitive with existing grid power.

I’m skeptical if this plant they’re building will even generate power, which is like three steps away from making commercial sense at all.

Why is it “schizo edition”? Is that like, a real thing, or is sseth doing that abelist ‘schizoposting’ stuff?

Edit: man, y’all really hate people with schizophrenia, huh?

Yeah, they got that ‘no pores’ look that selfie filter give, that’s somewhat uncanny looking.

You are, of course, correct.

But even so, costs are costs. It doesn’t matter if you’ve achieved communism, and are in a moneyless, stateless existance, you need labor and materials to build nuclear, and labor and materials to maintain it (along with other infrastructure).

And, I’m not anti-nuclear; it does make sense to use sometimes, in some amounts. Its just very very costly for what it provides.

But frankly, even only accounting for current tech, wide spread nuclear just doesn’t make that much sense compared to renewables + storage and large grids interconnects.

I dunno, I really don’t get either of them. They just seem like dreadfully boring games. Played like, 6 hours of each, and I just, don’t get the appeal, at all.

Movies and TV are boring. In the past two decades, there’s been a small handful of stuff that’s watchable, but most of the media is like, painfully boring.

None? I’ve never really understood the appeal of ‘rewatching stuff’. My favorite movie(s) are the LotR ones, and I’ve probably watched it through… three times over my life?

Consuming content illegally is by definition a crime, yes. It also has no effect on your output. A summary or review of that content will not be infringing, it will still be fair use.

That their use is infringing and a crime is your opinion.

“My opinion”? have you read the headline? Its not my opinion that matters, its that of the prosecution in this lawsuit. And this lawsuit indeed alleges that copyright infringement has occurred; it’ll be up to the courts to see if the claim holds water.

I’m definitely not sure that GPT4 or other AI models are copyright infringing or otherwise illegal. But, I think that there’s enough that seems questionable that a lawsuit is valid to do some fact-finding, and honestly, I feel like the law is a few years behind on AI anyway.

But it seem plausible that the AI could be found to be ‘illegally distributing works’, or otherwise have broken IP laws at some point during their training or operation. A lot depends on what kind of agreements were signed over the contents of the training packages, something I frankly know nothing about, and would like to see come to light.

I mean, you can do that, but that’s a crime.

Which is exactly what Sarah Silverman is claiming ChatGPT is doing.

And, beyond a individual crime of a person reading a pirated book, again, we’re talking about ChatGPT and other AI magnifying reach and speed, beyond what an individual person ever could do even if they did nothing but read pirated material all day, not unlike websites like The Pirate Bay. Y’know, how those website constantly get taken down and have to move around the globe to areas where they’re beyond the reach of the law, due to the crimes they’re doing.

I’m not like, anti-piracy or anything. But also, I don’t think companies should be using pirated software, and my big concern about LLMs aren’t really for private use, but for corporate use.

The issue isn’t that people are using others works for ‘derivative’ content.

The issue is that, for a person to ‘derive’ comedy from Sarah Silverman the ‘analogue’ way, you have to get her works legally, be that streaming her comedy specials, or watching movies/shows she’s written for.

With chat GPT and other AI, its been ‘trained’ on her work (and, presumably as many other’s works as possible) once, and now there’s no ‘views’, or even sources given, to those properties.

And like a lot of digital work, its reach and speed is unprecedented. Like, previously, yeah, of course you could still ‘derive’ from people’s works indirectly, like from a friend that watched it and recounted the ‘good bits’, or through general ‘cultural osmosis’. But that was still limited by the speed of humans, and of culture. With AI, it can happen a functionally infinite number of times, nearly instantly.

Is all that to say Silverman is 100% right here? Probably not. But I do think that, the legality of ChatGPT, and other AI that can ‘copy’ artist’s work, is worth questioning. But its a sticky enough issue that I’m genuinely not sure what the best route is. Certainly, I think current AI writing and image generation ought to be ineligible for commercial use until the issue has at least been addressed.