Veraxus

I worked for them back when they were SCEA. They were a GREAT company to work for, but the Japanese leadership was notoriously stubborn and set in their ways… in exactly the same way Nintendo still is. Definitely a traditional console-centric cultural hangup they haven’t quite overcome just yet.

Of course.

But why would you want to!?

Reminder: DRM is theft and the DMCA is government sanctioning of theft.

And it would have been bigger if they didn’t refund and block half the planet before it released.

❤️

Oh, we are fucked. But I also won’t pretend that mostly solar-powered data centers, which don’t emit greenhouse gases, are in any way a remotely meaningful contributor to our climate crisis.

If a bull is bucking around in my house, I’m not going to worry about the faucet slowly dripping in the bathroom. I want to deal with the bull, first.

No, that’s valid… but it’s also a problem with all cloud technology in general. As models shrink and run locally more often instead of giant, dedicated data centers, that will improve. Right now brute force is how the bigger, cutting-edge models (e.g. ChatGPT) operate.

I always narrow my eyes when I hear someone talk about “safety” in the context of AI, because they usually just mean that the AI doesn’t engage in enough moral grandstanding when you ask it sketchy or risqué questions. That’s the same level of pearl-clutching that Tipper Gore espoused over music in the 90s.

But there are legitimate concerns, like lying about real people and topics, reproducing training data (especially personal information) too closely with the right kind of prompting, etc. The problem is that I can’t tell what kind this person is. Are they upset because the AI can recommend marijuana strains… or because it can do something like leak peoples personal information? The article (and people involved in these efforts) too often lump it all together. See, for example: Anthropic

Now, all of that said, OpenAI is suuuper creepy. The way they started as a non-profit and then somehow managed to add a for-profit component… that is not acceptable and it’s disgusting that it’s allowed. It makes everything they do suspect and I’m inclined to believe what this exiting researcher says.

Their story is interesting, but also depressing. They were competing for government EV subsidies at the time and then the rules changed at the 11th hour, and they were excluded because their vehicles had 3 wheels instead of 4. Meanwhile, Tesla did get the funding.

Aptera was forced to sell everything to a Chinese firm, who never did anything with it. Then, a few years ago, Aptera’s original founders found the money to buy it all back and drafted a new roadmap to market.

It’s been touch-and-go this time around, too, but their technology and basic principles are just brilliant. The sheer practicality of what they are making is unmatched by anyone anywhere. I’m excited to see this finally come to market!

And tomatoes. Tomatoes used to be amazing. Even the worst ones were amazing.

Now they just taste like “wet”. If you want a good tomato you have to track down lovingly and carefully bred heirloom plants and grow them yourself.

All those different kinds of banana. All we get is cabendish which is, like, the worst of all the amazing banana varieties.

They’re readily available in the LA area. You just need to visit an asian specialty market.

“Tyranny of the majority” was an ur-fascist Republican mantra even when I was a kid. These people were always anti-democratic.

They’ll just get some corrupt judge to wave their hands and rule “not like that”.

When people complain about AI (including the above screenshot), it’s almost always just complaints about Capitalism. Yeah, big corporations are pushing AI hard. Yes, they are trying to replace workers with AI. These are not AI problems, they are Capitalism problems. People do know it’s okay to criticize Capitalism instead of just the things that Capitalism abuses, right?

And it’s like they don’t see the ways that AI can help in the fight against Capitalism by empowering individuals.

Plus, AI is not solely the providence of corporations… and even if they are in the lead on advancements, they won’t be able to keep it locked down, either. There are community AI projects and open source/weight/etc models… and they are also advancing quickly. The libraries that interact with the models are almost all open source, too.

And while people complain about corporations scraping peoples data for training they neglect to consider that we, the community, can scrape corporate data as well… that’s ALL fair use. Attacking, diminishing, or destroying fair use benefits rich corporations infinitely more than it benefits us plebs and community efforts. “License your training data” is something only deep pockets can achieve. If I want to train something and have to pay for training data (which, btw won’t ever be reproduced/redistributed)… I can’t do that, you can’t do that… 99.999% can’t do that.

The fear of Capitalists replacing us all with software has somehow managed to make people miss the forest for the trees. AI isn’t the enemy - not any more than the cotton gin, the telephone, or the internet - Capitalism is.

I hate beets. HATE them. I will eat durian, thousand-year eggs, stinky tofu, and a million other things that most people won’t touch… but beets? Fuck beets. Their sweet-yet-earthy funk is like a dead animal that has just started to decompose. I don’t care if they are cooked, pickled, or stewed in borscht… hate them and won’t touch them. They ruin everything they touch.

This is like that. They are cooking with lots of beet-like ingredients. Some people will love that. But as for me…I hate it… I hate just everything about it… and I hate it because I’ve experienced all those ingredients before. Over and over and over again. What they are making is for a very particular crowd, and I am not part of said crowd.

To be faaaaiiiiir… D:OS (both of them) make the age-old mistake of having really slow, uninteresting, prologuish RPG starts. It takes a solid 5h of powergaming or 10h+ of normal play to get past that hump. That’s the point where the story picks up and you have enough tools to start really taking advantage of the games sandbox.

With BG3 they really seemed to have learned their lessons.

All fair points, and given the way Valve operates (like a free collective) this would only happen if there were some really passionate people leading and working on it.

That said, it’s still a mix of things I just really do not have any interest in. Competitive online game, esports focused, MOBA-like, PvP, hero shooter… that’s a whole lot of hard no-thanks from me.

I’d love some new light-narrative single player and/or co-op stuff from them, though.

I’m in California. Anecdotally, mine is almost exactly 50%. And I don’t even own.

For Karl!