Khrux

Also worth addressing that people are using large language models exactly because the ad driven web was enshitified enough that people clambered for this new option.

There will be at least one LLM that’s good for web searching and doesn’t give in to advertising, and in the meantime, we’ll just need to keep jumping ship whenever one becomes awful, as we did with the old web.

I have a surprisingly forgiving opinion on AI. There are many cases that I think it’s purpose is stupid or defeats the point but it has the potential to cause such a large break to employability and capitalism in general that it has it’s upsides.

People are right to take issue with the fact that it is causing people to lose their jobs or be unemployable by no fault of their own, but underlying that issue is the fact that society shouldn’t function on the employment being necessary (which I am aware is an opinion).

Even in its absurd energy and water usage, this is largely an issue with how we currently get our energy and water. Having our technocrats suddenly more invested in new and better forms of energy, even just for powering AI has the potential to be a path to better clean energy options.

AI is fundamentally a neutral tool, but as much as it may be sued for evil, it may accelerate flawed economic and environmental systems to a breaking point where a redesign of those structures will be required, which could be the greatest opportunity to implement better structures that we’ve had since the industrial revolution.

Tragically when I first switched to Lemmy, my friends convinced me to get Instagram to stay in better contact with them.

The difference in how much I engage with Instagram reels Vs YouTube shorts is huge. YouTube shorts suck and I get cripplingly bored or annoyed with them after 2 minutes, where as Instagram reels suck and I lose multiple hours to that fucking app. Fortunately I run a version of the app without ads etc so I’m only rotting myself and not contributing as directly to the end times.

I never tried tiktok and I’m too low willpower to stop using Instagram until they make it too shit to put the effort in, but I do feel that YouTube shorts sre the worst interation of this shitty format.

Sometimes The USA line goes up when the world line does, but sometimes it’s totally inverse, as the world quickly dumps US stocks and invests elsewhere.

One thing I did notice a while back, was seeing the 2022ish interface for YouTube and Google search and feeling how dated it was, still absolutely usable mind you, just clearly with a design ethos from an older era.

Most the time, I feel that changes Google make are absolutely arbitrary, rounding a button and then squaring it again, but I need to give them credit that there is something more, something about staying at the forefront of GUIs. It’s still all bullshit of course, the old one looks older but is identically useful.

This is what the US have encouraged Taiwan to do. Taiwan wanted to purchase a few incredibly expensive fighters and ship from the USA, but basically all war simulations just had China target these and secure a fast win. The USA instead encourage Taiwan to take the “porcupine” technique, spreading many small weapons, particularly handheld anti-aircraft type weaponry across the country. The plan is to make invasion too inconvenient. The flip side is that without a reliable way to show a display of strength, anywhere the larger aggressor does pick on (USA to UK China to Taiwan) can focus on one part of the country and reliably cause massive damage there.

The chances of a future where the UK and USA go to war where those military bases aren’t long since gone is nearly impossible.

Not to play devil’s advocate but I have learnt to take even the most plausible Reddit comments with a grain of salt.

I saw an announcement from Sega a couple of months ago saying that they’re looking to return to their MO: Being the punkrock to Nintendo’s mainstream pop. I think this is really the difference between Sega’s Sonic Vs Paramount’s Sonic. Paramount want to make a mainstream Sonic movie and mainstream mean filing off the rough edges.

I don’t think it’s got anything to do with today’s political landscape as much as the nature of all high budget cinema. Never mistake the film industry as anything but venture capitalism, with art being incidental and anarchic messaging being a facade and only existing for profit. Any for-profit art, particularly a $122 million cost piece of art, is going to only care about the most profitable choices.

I think he’s holding it deceptively far from his body to make it look bigger, and it’s having the same effect on his hands.

I’ve been told by literal Brewdog barstaff that if they know he’s coming, they need to encourage their female staff to either dress moderately or not come in, to minimise his sexual harassment.

I don’t know how true that is, but the city I’m based in, which is pretty happy to boycott assholes is filled with people who boycott Brewdog.

I do think a huge world with an engaging and dense design can still be made worse with size. In some games like Skyrim, Breath of the Wild or GTA 5, you could probably drop me anywhere and I’d know where I was, half due to good and differing region design and half because the map isn’t that big.

Back in 2015 I’d dream of a GTA 5 expansion that adds San Francisco and Las Vegas to the map, turning the north and east of the map in to a 500 yard straight of water, but in reality, two more large cities and their surroundings suburbs and wilderness would have never kept it’s memorability like the first region.

Honestly I think these games need more points of interest that are not marked on the map whatsoever, and don’t matter towards 100% completion.

I eventually went through the Witcher 3 post game and got every single marker but it was basically background work while I listened to audiobooks, I didn’t come across anything interesting for hours. However I do acknowledge that those markers aren’t necessary meant to be sought out, but stumbled upon.

It it to wait 30 mins then do it every 10, and pop it in startup, those were the days.

The other was Free_Cupholder.EXE. I miss disk drives for this reason more than for actual use.

The execs probably get away fine from it as well, even if the company sinks, they’ll end up high up somewhere else.

Online service games are just peak venture capitalism, grinding a small studio to dust and causing massive misery followed by unemployment for a 1/50 shot at making a money printer.

Funnily enough The Witcher 3 is one of the games I always think of for the trope of not following the plot. Often I think of the ludonarrative dissonance specifically between Gestalt’s paternal drive to find and protect Ciri Vs Gwent.

For large scale, AAA open world games, I mostly think of Breath of the Wild, which transparently sets itself up as being about taking as long as you need to get strong enough to save the world and Red Dead Redemption 2, which doesn’t care about the stakes of the world.

I sometimes can’t wrap my head around the fact that Witcher 3, BotW and RDR2 were each two years apart. I don’t feel any open world game has occupied the cultural space those games did since.

This is Call of Duty 22.

I used to play call of duty way back in the day and fell off around the time Black Ops 2 came out, mostly because I felt like there are too many games and I didn’t need another black ops.

There’s now more Black Ops games than I’ve bought games this year.

This is definitely a selfish opinion but people who block adverts or torrent being a small percentage of users can be a good thing.

If they lose even 5% of their userbase to Firefox over this decision, they’ll find a way to make grand modifications to Google search and YouTube in a manner that stops you blocking ads from alternative browsers, and while I’m happy swapping to an alternative search engine, it’ll definitely becometedious to sidestep Google’s gaze.

But if it’s 0.1% of people who swap due to this, and Google already don’t care about the small percentage they lose to Firefox then I would rather sit under the radar and not be cracked down on.

Microsoft will definitely have the power to bulldoze all other things named copilot, like Facebook did to meta. I’m still not over AI being a lame word now. I miss the time when it felt sci-fi and not like a corporate buzzword.