Humble used to be an event that celebrated and showcased indie developers while at the same time raising many millions for charities. Then IGN bought it and rapidly enshittified it into a bog-standard, for-profit corporate enterprise like any other, and I'll never forgive them for it.
Do they even give any of the profits to charity any more? If they do, I bet they only keep it around to take advantage of the tax writeoffs.
Reading into the updates some more... I'm starting to think this might just destroy CloudStrike as a company altogether. Between the mountain of lawsuits almost certainly incoming and the total destruction of any public trust in the company, I don't see how they survive this. Just absolutely catastrophic on all fronts.
"Product Degradation" has been the modus operandi for nearly every online service for like 10-15 years now, but it's the Gamepass price increase is what got the FTC's attention? Where was the FTC when the movie/TV streaming service market balkanized itself in an arms race to reinvent cable?
Granted, I doubt the FTC could really do anything meaningful to stop enshittification given that corporations are effectively above the law these days, but it's been blatantly obvious that this was going to be Gamepass' strategy from day one. If this actually surprised anyone at the FTC, they really haven't been paying attention.
I hate that the focus of AI/ML development has become so fixated on generative AI - images, video, sound, text, and whatnot. It's kind of crazy to me that AI can generate output with the degree of accuracy that it does, but honestly, I think that generative AI is, in a sense, barking up the wrong tree in terms of where AI's true strengths lie.
AI can actually turn out to be really good at certain kinds of problem-solving, particularly when it comes to optimization problems. AI essentially "learns" by extremely rapid and complex trial-and-error, so when presented with a problem with many complex, interdependent variables in which an optimal solution needs to be found, a properly-trained AI model can achieve remarkably effective solutions far quicker than any human could, and could consider avenues of success that humans otherwise would miss. This is particularly applicable to a lot of engineering problems.
Honestly, I'd be very intrigued to see an AI model trained on average traffic data for a section of a city's street grid, taken by observations from a series of cameras set up to observe various traffic patterns over the course of a few months, taking measurements on average number of cars passing through across various times of day, their average speed, and other such patterns, and then set on the task of optimizing stoplight timings to maximize traffic flow and minimize the amount of time cars spend waiting at red lights. If the model is set up carefully enough (including a data-collection plan that's meticulous enough to properly model average traffic patterns, outlier disincentives to keep cars at little-used cross streets from having to wait 10 minutes for a green light, etc.), I feel that this sort of thing would be the perfect kind of problem for an AI model to solve.
AI should be used on complex, data-intensive problems that humans can't solve on their own, or at least not without a huge amount of time and effort. Generative AI doesn't actually solve any new problems. Why should we care if an AI can generate an image of an interracial couple or not? There are countless human artists who would happily take a commission to draw an interracial couple (or whatever else your heart desires) for you, without dealing with investing billions of dollars into developing increasingly complex models built on dubiously-sourced (at best) datasets that still don't produce results as good as the real thing. Humans are already good at unscripted creativity, and computers are already good at massive volumes of complex calculations, so why force a square peg into a round hole?
'90s-'00s McDonald's primarily appealed to kids, as the colorful characters and Happy Meals were a big part of the draw.
'10s-'20s McDonalds has pivoted to marketing towards adults, in part because they had come under fire for marketing greasy, oversalted calorie bombs to children as the US obesity epidemic took off. The other reason is that mid-to-low income adults became a much more lucrative demographic after decades of wage stagnation basically created an entire generation that's too tired and overworked to cook for themselves but too poor to go out to eat anywhere else.
You know, years ago, I used to really like Neil before he adopted this "Well, ackchually..." shtick over scientific inaccuracies in works of fiction. I find him absolutely insufferable now. It's the same kind of brainworms as CinemaSins.
The problem with the Steam Awards is that they try to get as many people to vote as possible, even if people haven't actually played the games in question.
People will see a bunch of games they haven't played, be like "oh hey I at least know the name of that one" and vote for it even though they have no idea if the others are more deserving or not.
It's kinda crazy how quickly people just... stopped talking about Starfield after release. Like, even if it ended up being bad or disappointing, people would've at least still been talking about it in that capacity.
Starfield was one of the most hyped releases in years, at least since Cyberpunk, yet when it finally released, it seems like the entire gaming world played it for a few days, collectively decided, "eh, this is alright I guess," then moved on. I don't think I've ever seen the mood towards a game shift so rapidly from massive hype to complete indifference...
Man, the "only a Sith deals in absolutes" line was really one of those things that sounded a lot better on paper than it actually turned out to be.
Even beyond the obvious self-contradiction, "dealing in absolutes" is such a weird attribute to describe as unique to the Sith... Like, the identifying mark of a Sith isn't their hunger for power and control, nor their mastery of the Dark Side, it's that they aren't moral relativists? Really?
Then another message popped up. This time with a console.warn() logging level, so I just couldn’t ignore it.
That's how you know this one's fake. Most unrealistic part of the whole story.
I wonder how much it has to do with how much of a shithole the Fandom network is. Between the godawful UX, aggressive SEO to bury competing wikis in search results, and scummy business practices that effectively prevent wiki admins from migrating to other hosts, the idea of maintaining a game wiki probably isn't all that appealing these days.
I miss Wikia...
Not as drastic as the headline makes it out to be, or at least so they claim.
We'll see how that actually works out. Tumblr’s backend has always seemed rather... makeshift, so I'm curious to see how they manage to do that. Given Tumblr’s technical eccentricities, a backend migration could probably do a lot of good for the functionality of the site, if done properly. I have my doubts that WordPress' engineers will be given the time and resources to do a full overhaul/refactor though, so I'm fully expecting even more janky, barely functional code stapling the two systems together.