I will say, as a 30 year old man I had the urge to start playing games because they just looked so good these days. I played a little here and there growing up, but all of my friends were gamers and I just wasn’t interested. When I got interested, I found a lot of fun and joy in it.

I’m still not your typical gamer. I find a few games I really love and I keep playing them over and over—great campaigns with great story telling and great characters and great graphics are so much of it. Since I started playing video games in like 2020, I’ve basically played four games, but two of them I’ve played a bunch of times (red dead redemption II and Cyberpunk).

Now I’m looking at Stalker 2 and I think that might be my next game I want to play to death. Gotta wait to hear how people feel about it though.

My friend really likes meundies. Extreme restraints and square space are both pretty good too.

Right? That’s what I was coming to comment

I use aura, but mostly for credit safety and ease of access to freeze/unfreeze my credit report. Got it after the experian hack ordeal. They have a ton of other services, including a data mining record deletion service and a call monitoring service. I would recommend it for pretty much everything I’ve listed. It’s made my life a lot easier, put my mind at ease. I also work a job where my personal info gets put in a lot of hands I basically have no choice but to trust. So this was kind of a necessity for me. Look into aura’s cheapest plan, see if it includes the data mining removal stuff. The extra layer of security for me is worth it, no question, but the added benefits of this, for example, and the spam call blocking just seals the deal in my opinion.

They may take our creative writing, they make take our digital art creation, they may take our ability to feed ourselves and our families. Hell, they may even take every single creative outlet humans have and relegate us to menial work in service of our capitalist overlords. But they will never take away clicking on boxes of pictures of bicycles and crosswalks!

Def watch the first season of Westeorld if you haven’t. The rest I can’t speak on, the first couple eps of s02 made zero sense and I totally lost interest. The first season can stand alone as a self-contained piece, though.

I mean, that’s how production works. It’s an investment. The company invests in the games, spending their own money, and then sell it to make that money back and profit. That’s how it works in every other industry. And, the most similar thing to compare it to: video production. Movies, tv, etc.

This stupid method is what ends up creating all of the problems with game production, namely that stupid “crunch” shit. They take peoples money, creating impatience in the customer, and then squeeze the programmers in order to deliver when the company creates this sudden ticking clock because they didn’t want to do business like every other company ever. Invest in the product, make it good enough to profit. If you fail, it’s your money lost, just like it is for movie studios.

You’re definitely right the journos are pouring gasoline on this fire, but it’s an entirely self-created problem for the studios.

“I’ll finally have he strength to kick this heroin habit if I just do more heroin.”

What trillion dollar problem is it solving? In the minds of investors, that “problem” is paying people for labor.

I mean, a big part of why this is such a problem these days has to come down to them getting pressured to release games, right? Why even announce them so early then? Why are we talking about these when they’re not even in production yet. The studio can just say, “yeah, we’ll be making sequels to the games you love, but they won’t be out for a long time, longer than I can even predict.”

They light their shoes on fire and then run around doing stupid shit, releasing games too early by trying to create hype before they’re remotely ready to deliver on them. It just seems like such a self inflicted wound that does not need to happen. Don’t announce shit until you’re really about to button the game up. What good does years of “it’ll be coming out soon-ish!” do for them? Is it all about preorders to fund the last legs of production? I just don’t get it. It seems like a huge problem that they’re just creating themselves for absolutely no reason. Why go through the months of bad reviews, bad press, angry customers, and getting shit all over for a massive fuck up when they could’ve just released it a few months later? The game will be bought either way. And you skip the whole “everyone is pissed because our otherwise good game just isn’t ready yet” stage. So bizarre.

Fuck round earth, fuck flat earth, I’m “Italian Sub Compact earth” all the way

It’s adorable you think “shoelace tightness” is all that app has awareness of.

lol yeah because that “what” was because I didn’t understand your super deep shit. You always get so worked up over someone suggesting capitalism isn’t the best? Some real bootlicker shit, that

Honestly? The hardware just seems so much more solid. I was a longtime android user. My brother is a techie and was going on and on about how I should switch to iPhone. I was pretty much like you guys. “Why wouldn’t you use android?”

But then I changed jobs and went through two android phones in a matter of a year or two. I decided to spend the extra money on an iPhone. I wasn’t able to get an android to last me much past lunch, battery-wise. I bought an iPhone 11pro and noticed the difference straight away. First of all, the bloatware on android is ah-bsurd. Yeah, iPhone feels more like a walled garden, because it kinda is. But who am I kidding? I wasn’t jailbreaking and rooting my phone or whatever. I’m not super tech savvy. I’m also not a big phone user. My screen time sits around 1hr these days.

And my now much older iPhone has not given me any of the problems I was having with the many android phones I went through. I don’t have to think about how poorly my phone is working. I don’t have to worry about the annoying problems I had with my androids. It’s maintained its battery capacity from like three years ago, when I bought it used. From my perspective, when I’m forced into buying another one, what, three, four more years from now? (barring some accident) I’ll probably stick with my second-ever used iPhone. Because then I don’t have to worry about it again for another five+ years.

I was refusing to get an iPhone because it was basically the juggernaut. But it’s not like Samsung/android is some scrappy underdog protecting my privacy. They’re another massive, shitty corpo. I just don’t see much difference in ethics using one over the other. Or privacy. If I’m not sticking it to some shitty corp, sacrificing my convenience for my moral compass, why sacrifice usability

lol wut

That’s what my shoes were missing: spyware!

I just don’t see any scenario in which companies eliminate the need for employees, but keep paying them. And I don’t see any scenario in which these capitalist enterprises, clearly that give zero fucks about the impact of the tech as long as they hold the keys, don’t take that money and power to fight tax increases to fund UBI.

I see exactly what is happening now, and that has happened with all technological advances: careers getting eliminated for the bottom line, only for more meaningless jobs to be necessitated in their absence—jobs that offer less buying power for the paycheck they’re signing.

I obviously don’t know what will happen in the future. But trends don’t lie. Richer, more powerful companies, using that power and money to get richer and amass more power. Our government is already broken at current levels of corporate capitalism. More powerful corporations will not make things better for us. They will undoubtedly make the worse. Because the worse things are for us, the better they are for the ownership class.

We are all working class. And the class war is raging. We have just been losing.

And this is all before we even discuss the environmental impact of this stupid ass tech. Which is devastating. When we don’t have time for more environmental devastation.

“You’re gonna make an argument against my stupid position?! But I don’t wanna read four paragraphs!”

The mark of a truly confident, well-intentioned debater. Won’t take three minutes. To read…four paragraphs. mwah love it

I always know when someone doesn’t have a good argument when they give me a dozen bad ones. 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 … Still equals 0. No matter how many times you do it.

This. This is what you actually said. Directly after quoting exactly what I said. There’s…no other way to read that. You’re calling them non-problems that pale in comparison to the unabated advancement of capitalist expansion.

These tools, in the right hands, could be very useful. They could free us from work in the future.

But they’re not in the right hands. They’re in the hands of capitalists.

Whether those are Russian capitalists, US-based capitalists, Chinese capitalists, the aim is the same. Having these people own this tech isn’t good for humanity. As evidenced by the problems I listed; not only is it underage, nonconsensual porn made of real-ass people that you wrote off by saying some shit like, “it’s at best in poor taste and at worst harassment”…these are people’s fucking lives you’re talking about. So, you’re clearly a man, probably a white man. Because no one else would be so flippant about something that can so fucking devastate the lives of those affected.

But not only is that a problem we aren’t even trying to solve in the name of being “pro-business,” the biggest problem that somehow even manages to rank above kids killing themselves after their still-forming brains are fucking shattered by devastation, is what this does to the ongoing class war. Someone else ITT likened it to the invention of the nuke. And that’s true. But they said, in the geopolitical race it’s akin to the invention of the nuke, whereas I see it as nuke in the class war. And the ownership class is getting closer to holding it in their hands. But since it’s good for the economy and the politicians are on the side of the ownership class anyway, this problem isn’t even broached in this discussion. But it badly needs to be.

In a time of near unprecedented inequality, we are watching them hit the accelerator. Which is an apt comparison, because this tech is also hastening our head-on collision with climate apocalypse. While developing nations are being told to curb emissions, we in the superpower states are increasing our co2 output with this stupid tech. And you said some shit about nuclear and renewables and fuckin carbon taxes? Well, sure, those are hypothetical bandaids on this festering wound, but they’re just that. The acceleration of LLM/“AI” energy consumption while we break heat and natural disaster record after heat and natural disaster record—as that fucking climate apocalypse cliff edge approaches faster and faster is just…utter lunacy. And this alone should give us reason enough to change course. But that’s not the only reason.

So, yeah, I vehemently disagree with your characterization of these problems as “0+0+0” when it comes to the argument against AI.

“Kids no longer desire to go play outside.”

Outside: record heat waves; strip malls; endless, soulless commodification of human experience; hostile adults; constant, overprotective ties to the rest of the world via invasive tech; hostile capitalism…

Oh, and all this is depressing everyone.