Hey, if they’re actually securing funding for this instead of pushing the cost off onto eager fans, good for them. At least they’re doing one thing right. Unfortunately that only increases the potential for this to turn into a trash fire that sinks their whole company.
Hopefully it doesn’t come to that.
It feels like this has disaster written all over it.
Sorry if I’m harshing anyone’s vibe, but I can’t escape the feeling that a group of people whose main involvement in the games industry is as voice talent are basically saying “How hard could it be?” and not understanding that the answer is “Very.”
Ideally they would team up with an experienced studio to build something off of their creative ideas. But if they try to do this whole thing themselves, it has the makings of a Wha Happen? episode all over it.
Maybe it’ll work. They pulled off Vox Machina, so who knows. I’d certainly like to be wrong. But I can’t help but feel like we’ll all be talking about the fallout from this in five years, when eager backers are still waiting for the game they were promised.
Criminal behaviour honestly
Not pictured, her alternate “tornado” mode.
We’ve had this little goober for exactly a week, and I would fucking die for her.
What about the kids who come to terms with their gender or sexuality through social media?
What about the kids who use social media to connect with other people who share their experiences of being visible minorities?
What about the kids who get their sex education from social media because their parents pulled them out of sex ed classes at school and you sure as shit don’t get that stuff on the tv?
What about the kids who never understood that what their uncle is doing to them is actually sexual abuse until they were able to talk about it through the pseudo-anonymity of social media? The kids who learned survival strategies through social media? The kids who only managed not to kill themselves because of the friends they made online?
Do any of them matter?
Honestly, there are so many things to be mad at Justin Sun for, but this is a tempest in a tea cup.
The artwork itself was intended to be ephemeral. The banana inevitably rots. Eating it is, arguably, participating in the artist’s intent. The work was itself a play on the insanity of the high art world. Buying a piece of art just to destroy it is a perfect way to engage with that.
And the artist got paid. A creative person doing creative work made money in a world where so much creativity is being ground down to dust or offloaded to machines.
I’d rather focus on being mad at Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and all the other billionaires. This is a million miles from being the real problem.
Utopia for a select few, dystopia for everyone else.
Obviously, the real goal here is to replace fighter planes with Tesla cybertrucks which will be strategically dropped from orbit onto the target, and then drive themselves back to base using their world class autopilot that definitely doesn’t ever try to drive under a flatbed truck.
Ed Zitron (search up his blog) has some excellent and extensive writing on why this is happening. Cory Doctorow also covers a lot of it.
The short version is this; corporations no longer exist to be successful by any normal metrics (ie, you have lots of customers that you sell lots of product to). They exist to serve shareholders. Shareholders don’t want stability, they want growth. They want a stock that will 2x or 3x so they can dump it and make a killing. So everything is about growth. No one cares how big you are today, they only care how big you will be tomorrow.
This is especially bad in tech, because tech was the growth sector for the past forty years. But there’s no growth left. Almost everyone who can be online is online. Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook have signed up every customer they possibly can. There are no opportunities for explosive new growth left. This is what has lead to enshittification; they can’t bring in new customers, so now they have to squeeze their existing customers by upping prices, cutting services, and cramming ads into everything.
Then OpenAI showed off ChatGPT and the tech companies lost their shit. Here, finally, was something new, something big. Something that promised meteoric growth. Something with limitless untapped potential. Entire industries erased, entire workforces made redundant, all replaced with a product that Microsoft, Amazon, Google or Facebook/Meta can sell to millions of companies. The sky was the limit.
So they all shovelled billions of dollars into AI, either their own projects or startups that are functionally wholly owned subsidiaries. And they told their shareholders that these billions were worth it for the untold riches that would rain down on them all very soon.
And then it turned out that ChatGPT was not the seed of something, but rather the withered old husk. LLMs are, functionally, a dead end. They cost so much power to run that there’s literally no way to make them profitable, and every attempt to solve their deep shortcomings involves strapping more of them together in giant AI voltrons, upping the already ridiculous operating costs.
For example OpenAI currently spends $2.35 to make $1.00. That’s not one dollar of profit. That’s one dollar. Period. Yes, that means they lose a dollar thirty five in that exchange. And that’s with the ridiculously subsidized compute rates they get from Microsoft. The flagship gen AI name is a horrendously unprofitable mess.
AI might still have vast and explosive growth potential, but the current methods will not get us there, a fact that is becoming increasingly clear to everyone.
Which leaves the big tech companies with a serious problem. They promised untold riches, and if they do not deliver their shareholders are going to absolutely fucking eviscerate them. It will be a bloodbath. So they have to either come clean now and get dragged through the streets, or they have to double down, keep promising that the explosive growth is right around the corner, and keep spending money in order to signal just how incredibly confident they are that this bet is going to pay off. They’re going to take every AI product they can cobble together and force it onto their customers so they can produce fabricated metrics for their shareholders demonstrating massive and steadily growing demand. And all the while they’re going to pray that maybe, just maybe, these overconfident engineers they’ve been handing dump trucks full of money to will pull a rabbit out of a hat and actually deliver the promised miracle tech.
For the same reason that the subprime mortgage crisis wasn’t; line go up.
It doesn’t actually take any expertise to figure out that Musk’s idea is moronic.
You just have to understand what the words “Beyond visual horizon” / “Beyond visual range” actually mean.
The F-35 is designed to eliminate targets that it literally cannot see, in some cases because the curvature of the Earth is in the way.
No camera can solve that. Even if you get the Earth out of the way, no camera small enough to mount on a combat vehicle or weapon exists that can identify something the size of an F-35 at modern engagement distances.
Musk claims they’re “not invisible” but at the distance they can kill you at, functionally, they are.
There’s a secret co-op mode they never tell you about where you and all the other workers in the company team up and fight your way through together. It’s way easier, because the enemy entity count and strength don’t increase to scale with the numbers on your side.
Xpipe has become an essential part of my workflow, both professionally and in my homelab. I cannot recommend this software enough.
Ah, sorry, my mistake.
I took you for someone who was at least attempting to argue in good faith.
Supposing all of that were true, it wouldn’t matter.
Defending Ukraine against unprovoked foreign aggression would still be the right thing to do. Because a free Ukraine can eventually have a better government. An occupied Ukraine cannot.
There’s a guy in Hawaii selling “I bought this before I knew Elon was crazy” bumper stickers for $10, and he’s already sold over 10,000 this year.
You’re skipping right past the really simple thing that so few of the Dems; tell them that they’re right.
These people are hurting, and both Harris and Biden simply told them “No you’re not, look how high the NASDAQ is.”
That’s a bullshit way to treat someone when they’re struggling and asking for help. The simplest thing to do is just to say “Yes, you’re right, shit fucking sucks and we need to make it better.”
That’s why people love Bernie. That’s why there’s such a huge crossover in people who voted for Trump and people who voted for AOC. Cortez doesn’t bullshit people. She knows they’re hurting, she knows they’re poorer now than they were four years ago and she says it.
This is what Bernie means when he says the Dems have abandoned the working class. The crazy part is, Biden was actually great for unions. The NLRB under his tenure oversaw one of the largest expansions in union membership in US history. But instead of talking about that they talked about how great people’s fucking investment portfolios are doing. That doesn’t mean shit to people who can’t afford a fucking investment portfolio.
Before they worry about selling people on the details of the plan, the Dems could start by just addressing their problems, instead of telling them they don’t have any problems.
Yes and no. All power, ultimately, depends on compliance. Even autocracies. There would not have been a “divine right of kings” if kings did not have a pressing need to assure people of their right to hold power.
The “mandate” narrative is aimed at convincing everyone that their objections are in the minority. That even if they stand up and say something, they’ll simply be the odd one out.