BougieBirdie

In a high court judgment handed down in May, Mellor said that Wright presents himself as an extremely clever person, “however, in my judgment, he is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is”. He said he was an “extremely slippery witness”.

Sick burn from the judge

Y’know, the prickly thing about using AI for these things is that it seems to be fairly difficult to accurately accuse or deny that it was used.

Like, people see a trailer or a still and there’s something uncanny about it, so AI is the first thing people reach for. It’s kind of like the early days of Photoshop, people get dragged into debate that boils down to “look at the hands” or “check out these pixels.” But at the end of the day, identifying AI is all about the vibes (read: not a super accurate methodology)

And then on the flip side, if you’re defending your work against an accusation that you used generative AI, the only defense is, “trust us, bro,” and that’s not much of a defense either.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think the trailer or the selected stills are works of AI. The trailer looks like the union of hyperrealism and stop motion that always bleeds into the uncanny for me - and it has for as long as we’ve been using graphics to tween stop motion frames.

I guess we really let the cat out of the bag with AI

If you want an out of the box distro that just works and has that old-school flavour, maybe look into Mint.

If you want something a bit more modern, then pop_os! is something of a Linux darling

Ubuntu probably has the widest community support. Although it does seem to have some issues

I’m not clear on what your bugs are, but if it’s like, you run a command in the terminal and a bunch of scary sounding messages come up, that’s normal. That’s just how it likes to be

If it’s been a while since you’ve seen used it, then I’d say Linux is probably worth another shot. It’s come a long way, and it only gets better with age

What tool are we going to use to measure the bias of the bias meter?

When I originally saw the game on steam I felt a pang of nostalgia. Then I saw the kernel level anticheat and the F2P trappings and was so disappointed

I missed that Tencent had involvement though. Weirdly that makes me feel better. Not because I think that might make it a decent game, but more because it means that the people who made a game I liked didn’t have as much of a hand in this travesty.

It’s like having to kill a zombified loved one. It might look like them, but it’s not them anymore

Steam store page legal flags:

They ought to make these red. I get that’s a tough sell for the publisher, but as a consumer a kernel-level anti-cheat is an immediate turn-off

The other comment points out that it’s only a case of selling steam keys where steam must have the lowest price.

I released a game a while back and while reading the terms it sounded like I couldn’t link my Steam store page to another storefront where the game was available cheaper. Which, honestly, also kind of fair.

But again, I think that’s really only if you’re selling steam keys. If you sold the game DRM-free on your own website, I can’t imagine they’d take down your company website.

If you link to an Itch page or something similar that might be a thornier issue because they’re primarily a storefront.

I’m of the opinion that my game costs X unless it’s discounted to Y. I don’t see the appeal to the end user of having a dozen different prices on a dozen different storefronts.

I could see a situation where a developer wants to always earn, say, $10 from their game. So on Steam it might sell for $13, on another platform it might be $11 to show the difference in platform fees. But I wouldn’t do that because it’s putting me before my players, and that’s not why I make games.

I’ve got an idea for a game, I call it “Elmo’s Steaming Pile of Bingo”

Make a bingo card with all the horrible dark patterns in gaming on it.

A monthly fee to play a game where you can buy the battle pass with cryptocurrency and you get NFTs in the lootboxes. Watch ads during matchmaking, purchasable respawns, buy your way out of chat bans. The winning team can talk as much trash as they want on the post-game lobby while the losers are sent to farm captchas until they can play again

Get five boxes in a row and you win! I mean, we all lose, but you win!

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs - I know you know what they are, but for anyone reading who doesn’t) are such a terrible metric for performance. Like, yes, well performing teams generate good KPIs because they’re performing well. The minute a suit tries to actually tie a KPI to performance, people start gaming them and the product suffers.

A little bit of a segue here, but Factorio recently released some tidbits about their performance when they wrapped up development. They said they have 0.24 sales per line of code. Now they’re a very different team making a very different kind of game for a very different kind of market, so I take this as the amusing corelation it is without putting any stock into why that is.

Some project manager from Ubisoft is going to read that and think, “Well we can do better,” and start mandating more sales for less code. Next thing you know, devs are being punished for verbosity (an ironic twist on the classic and often abused KPI of how many lines of code are written) and before you know it you’ve got compound statements, nested ternaries, and inscrutable lambdas out the wazoo that make maintaining the code base impossible.

I wonder if I minified all my source code into a single line before compiling if I could game the system 🤔

Yeah, I’m not sure this is the generational thing that the author is trying to make it out to be. It seems to me like one of those things that leans on personal preference.

The author’s sample for the behavior of generations is a few anecdotes from personal friends. How many friends does a person have, 3, or 30, or 300? That means n is pretty small when there’s something like 3 billion mellenials

Initial attempts to search for this were frustrated because my search engine kept trying to find rhymes for “FOSS” or “Open Source”

However, I did find an app with credits that showed what libraries it used.

In particular, this one might be up your alley: Carnegie Mellon pronouncing dictionary. It looks like you’d still have to combine it with an existing dictionary in order to find the rhymes, but at least you can get the pronunciation

I hope they don’t trip over that bar, it’s dangerous how they leave it on the floor

Oh wait, maybe those are my expectations of Rockstar

Well, I guess it it can be disproportionate at times

But if you’re a teenager with no money then the system doesn’t care as long as it can extract value from you

I’d like to be able to agree that nobody enjoys having their words twisted to suit others’ agendas. There seems to be plenty of that going around from both parties, and if you feel I’ve done that to you then I apologize.

Mostly I’m frustrated here because I’m advocating for the victim. I hope she gets justice and this doesn’t happen again - whatever it is that indeed happened. It’s equally tragic no matter who it was or where they were from, but 19 is just too young to no longer be here.

Perhaps I’m showing my biases here, but I don’t trust institutional monoliths like the police or Walmart. Once bitten, twice shy. The truth is we’ll never know what happened because none of us were there.

I’ve left this discussion with the feeling that you’re calling me racist and am out here trying to cause distress for the family. It’s just so far off that mark that it goes beyond the pale.

I hope your day gets better.

Would you be as suspicious if it was a white teenager?

You betcha. Exploitation is equal opportunity.

Cause of death seems pretty apparent

Now who’s adding conjecture?

We’re obviously not going to agree on this

Sure, I guess I’m just deeply suspicious when a young minority dies while working at a Walmart and police rule out foul play without further comment

At this point I haven’t even heard a cause of death. There’s nothing to go on except for conjecture

Also I didn’t make anything up. I stated my suspicions and allowed that it could be even be accidental.

But you have to admit it’s weird to discover someone in an oven. Even if it’s not foul play I want assurances that there’s an investigation being made to determine how this happened and prevent it from happening in the future

If they’re not releasing details then you’ve got to add something

Yeah, teenagers just up and die and end up in ovens all the time, nothing weird about that at all /s

Maybe there’s details that aren’t being shared, and I suppose you can’t really rule out an industrial accident, but HMMMMM

Well you try one way, and then if that doesn’t work, you roll over, and if that doesn’t work then rolling over again should do the trick

Bold strategy. When people complain about not having content it’s the best time to whine about having given away something free.

Anything except for charging a reasonable price for DLC, right?

“People didn’t like our expansion, maybe we should have been greedier”