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What does end-to-end encryption even accomplish when you’re just feeding the information into an obscured, blackbox AI on the other end?
Like yes, I understand the importance of E2EE, I’m just making a point, it’s all rather ridiculous.
I’m not saying they were right to have done any of that, but I do have a lot of sympathy for them. Kickstarters are not simple affairs, never have been. The processes are a lot more documented and streamlined now, but especially back when this happened, having to physically produce, order, and ship all those books on a successful campaign is in fact a lot of work. Especially when you have a lot of other things going on.
Mental breakdown, very public, people lost money so I understand why they feel burned. Again, not saying it’s right but as someone who did lose money over it … it was a book. I can understand the humanity of the situation and find sympathy for that.
Some people on the other hand love internet drama and can’t let things go.
I miss the comics …
I sympathize, even just from the trailer I did have expectations and there was a bit of friction for the first hour or two as I had to work past them and meet the game where it’s at. As someone very familiar with all of the influences it draws from, this can be kinda difficult.
For the right person, this is going to be a GotY candidate.
The discourse around this one is going to be brutal already I can tell. As you say, it really is just a matter of taste and at the end of the day there’s no arguing that if this isn’t your kind of thing it’s not going to click. But it does frustrate me some already seeing people so confidently assert their taste as “simply bad game design”. So it goes, I can only argue on the internet so much, but I do want Yacht Club to do well and I want the game to find its audience without being turned off by disingenuous reviews. After Shovel Knight and this, I can see they have serious chops and I’m praying they stick around long enough to get another few games out before the industry eats them alive T_T
The game is absolutely fantastic, I plan to do a writeup here once I’ve progressed through a bit more of the game. I’m 14 hours in and partway through the 3rd of 7(?) main dungeons, largely because I’ve been picking every last scrap of meat off the bones. If I had to use one word to describe the game it would be dense. I didn’t play the demo, so I was a bit surprised to find it has less in common with Link’s Awakening and Castlevania than you might think, though it’s certainly wearing their skin. I’d call it Saturday morning cartoon Bloodborne with a heaping helping of adorable, furry characters and I mean that all 💯 positively.
Unlike Link’s Awakening, progression isn’t tied to finding items in dungeons. A lot of traversal is tied to subweapons you find unceremoniously strewn about the world that opens things up for you and you can really go most anywhere you want if you can figure it out. Instead of simply navigating each screen there are secrets and bones tucked in almost every corner encouraging you to observe, explore, and platform every inch. Dense.
There’s already discourse about the difficulty and if I give one concession, it’s that the early game is perhaps a bit “overtuned” like Silksong was, partially because the early game power curve is just rough when you don’t have a lot of stats or options to work with and part of it is maybe spending ~6 years in the oven. Stick with it, it’s worth it. Go slow, be deliberate, and I promise you losing your bones is not that big of a deal. Grinding is actually fairly easy and painless once you figure things out and if you decide to go that route (grinding is not necessary but you can absolutely do it if you want to accrue an early edge with a lot of items). Other than that, use the build in modifiers. They disable achievements, but also some of those achievements are just ass anyways and there’s no way I’m 100%ing this game (beat the game without ever entering the underlab, are you for serious?!)
Starter tips:
Ultimately, this is a game for sickos. If you are a sicko, especially a Fromsoft sicko, then this is a no-brainer.
US taxes are the worst homework you can imagine. Do them poorly and you end up fined even deeper in a hole or possibly jail. Do them correctly and you get to fund a genocide! Woo!
I don’t normally like indulging in speculation and I certainly can’t speak for anyone else, but suicide is very deep, dark pit of despair. It’s a last resort for end of the rope, no other options, extreme loss.
If I’m in a position like this where my testimony is being used to move forward a case against a giant corporation doing harm to others, I’m hanging on. At least until that’s accomplished. That’s the motivation, that’s the light. To get your voice heard and have an impact. Suicide nullifies that. As does murder … and yeah it sure seems like one party is more invested in not having his voice heard.
I go back and forth with Metal Slug. 3 is absolutely peak, but sometimes it’s just too much, you know? 2/X is a bit more of a focused, compact adventure and I really like it for that.
Commercial for AI: Now you can order a cake while planning your child’s birthday and sending an email to your boss while printing the tickets for your trip to Italy!
My unemployed ass, sitting around in boxers eating cereal at 10PM watching cartoons from the 90’s: Sweet, this is gonna change my life!
Nah, I’m another nano guy. You can set up syntax highlighting for it you know?
It’s not that any one is better than the other, it’s up to your use cases. I’ve learned vim a few times in my life already (and mostly just know the hjkl bindings from playing tons of terminal roguelikes) but it always decays because I don’t put the knowledge to use. Because it just doesn’t fit my use case.
I write small scripts, some Python and stuff and I’ll usually use PyCharm to debug that these days. So nano is relegated to the small tasks like config editing or quick, in place fixes to scripts.
The thing about this though, is that it’s not a new problem at all. LLMs didn’t start to get good enough in the early 20’s and only then did they come up with this idea. I worked for a company out near Seattle back in ~2014 that was already well into trying to tackle this problem.
They ran callcenters with a variety of contracts for different companies and took calls, chats, and emails. The main business model wasn’t the centers themselves but the information gathered by the ticketing system to help build tools like this.
Personally, with that insight and assuming surely there must’ve been other companies moving along that path, I find it quite telling that they still haven’t sufficiently stepped up to the role. There are some hard limits on cost and hallucinations that I think will ultimately fail to deliver a truly long-term, viable product. When you see they can’t maintain the veneer on even that use case, you’ll know the bubble has to be close to popping.
Of course no one can really say for sure, we’ve all been predicting it for some time and when there’s this much money invested they’ll protect that reality ferociously, so who really fucking knows. But still …
The “Cloud to Butt” extension appeared around 2013 and I think that’s about when things started to go downhill quickly.
I was a tech enthusiast back then already running my own homelab and I think myself and a lot of others began to see that the cloud wasn’t really so much a tech advancement as a marketing gimmick. The new thing to shove into all other things. The cloud is just someone else’s computer and having a coffeepot connected to it isn’t really a new, innovative piece of tech, is it?
Smart phones felt big, but since then a lot of consumer tech feels like it lacks true innovation and follows on the cloud pattern. We’ll be stuck in the cycle until it’s broken
All Bats Are Cute smooch
Anyone familiar with this, would you recommend the original here or the DS one? It’s been sitting on my list for awhile now, too …
AI slop is the output of all generative AI, full stop.
Slop itself is anything produced for the sake of being produced. Something without feeling or soul, just more content for the content machine.
Like, yes it does take some level of skill to “prompt engineer” the AI and get it to show you the thing you want, but it’s still not a distinctive style, it’s still not your style. If you say, “sloth astronaut” I can imagine that in my head in my own way, there’s no value in producing an AI image. As far as I’m concerned, an AI image narrows down all the possibilities of my own imagination into the specific piece of slop from the slop machine. If I wanted to see it, the point would be to see an interpretation in someone’s style.
I can’t remember where I saw this argument recently, it was something coming out of Capcom saying they’d use AI for background details and people citing specific examples from Pragmata maybe? Things like vending machines and environmental details that could be streamlined with the help of AI. But even these small details are places for environmental artists to shine. Show off their skills, hide small details and world building, and little in jokes. It may not be much but it adds to the overall texture and flavor of the product. It does matter.
AI is slop, is slop, is slop. There’s absolutely no reforming it and if I detect even a whiff of it, I’m out.
On the other hand, those opposed to AI also have a subgroup that wants anything and everything with AI in the name dead, without any regard to what it is or what it does.
This might be a bit of a hot take, but I don’t really see anything inherently wrong with this. The scientists and engineers will continue doing their serious work regardless of public opinion, and while some of them may have tangentially benefited from from increased interest and funding in the field, most of it is going to these corporate LLM models which are taking up all the oxygen in the room.
That’s a bubble that needs to burst. I think it’s more important to keep public sentiment rightfully focused in that direction. Let’s face it, you’re really not going to be able to educate the general public on these nuances. The field at large will persist regardless.
I don’t have any sort of synesthesia, but tried to engage with the question. Was utterly unable to summon an opinion of my own, but reading through other answers yellow seems to “click” the most.
What you have to keep in mind is that the 80’s were a much more innocent time and they didn’t even know what fisting was back then …
I appreciate your cynicism, shit sucks.
But I do choose to see this as a good sign; that they were pressured into taking even this much action when they could’ve just continued doing nothing and it would’ve been easier and probably less controversial. I hope it amounts to something, but tides are shifting even on the business end.
Gary Marcus has put forward articles theorizing that’s why the LLM/neural network models are so appealing to American capitalists. They at least have the appearance of something that can be infinitely scaled with investment (screw diminishing returns, right?)
It was both, and that’s the problem. If that’s what our optimism looked like, what chance did we even stand?
Been awhile since I watched that video, but I believe he does arrive at that point or something similar. Good video, would recommend, don’t have another 1:30 to dedicate to a rewatch right now.