Your mindset is 'harm never matters, we should never try to make things better if speech is adjacent to the topic, and by the way, I don't know what an algorithm is.'
The relentless refusal to acknowledge that real harm is done to actual people by companies like Facebook is baffling.
Here's something to think about: the first amendment isn't the only way in the world to protect free speech. Lots of countries do it. Section 230 isn't the only way in the world to write a law that protects online speech, so maybe figure that one out too. If your government sucks (it does, we know) maybe fix that first. Absolutely myopic, inflexible tunnel vision. Do better.
When I first started in the industry about 25 years ago, it was at BioWare. Folks had noticed that one of the plain text files had a string in it (a comment, I think) that said, 'ass-plugging cum bubble'.
We (as an industry) haven't always been super-careful with all our temp assets, and it's gotten harder the bigger games get. I think probably there should be a standard auditing procedure (and I've seen games with rigorous pre-ship audits) but this isn't unique to this era of AI assets.
This is still a consistent problem here. An algorithm is, of course, just a series of steps that you take to make a decision.
But to say that all algorithms are the same is like trying to make the claim that all mammals are the same, or all vertebrates are the same, or all LIFE is the same.
Depending on the context, it's absurd and misleading to make statements where 'newest first' and 'deep knowledge about a user, showing content that makes them mentally ill' are morally or technically equivalent. They're not.
TD regularly takes the effective position that all algorithms are fundamentally the same, so there's no point in trying to disambiguate them or govern their outcomes. It's absurd on its face.
Furthermore, “every editorial decision” is not now a “design choice”; just the design choices. Providers are–still!–not publishers or speakers of third-party content, and–still!–are not liable for moderation. Nothing in these lawsuits can be reasonably construed to impact decisions to publish–or not–specific content, which is all 230 protects. These lawsuits are, fully, not about the content, any more than California’s ban on Amazon’s dark patterns are a ban on having a web store. This lawsuits are fundamentally not about speech, because the problem is not the speech, but the system around the speech.
Thanks for this--this was pretty much exactly what I was thinking when I saw this article.
Facebook et al are not necessarily taking a neutral stance on how content gets to you. Mastodon has no algorithm, for instance. You follow what you follow. If you search for something, you might find it. It offers you nothing without a specific request.
The algorithmically driven systems proffer content to you and measure how long you linger on it, not just whether you explicitly like it or not. The fact that you initially made the choice to BE on the site might seem like it should be more of a factor, but a) the sites have changed dramatically in the last few years; and b) a lot of the people being harmed arguably could not have made any sort of informed decision. Instagram used to be a photo sharing site that where you and your friends follow each other. That functionality still technically exists, but it is mostly not that at all anymore.
In any case, I'm not a fan of this take; it tries to pretend that Facebook was just sitting around with a bunch of content in a back room and people were seeking it out, rather than Facebook making specific decisions to show certain things to certain people under certain circumstances. That's not a neutral publisher.
I trust the gaming market to work that out for itself.
Why? You cover so many things the market doesn’t work >out, and this fits that. The market has never >prioritized things like artistic intent or not >exploiting workers over profits.
It kinda sounds like the market gave its feedback--i.e., this tech sucks and we don't want it--and he doesn't seem to be willing to take that at face value. "The market will work it ou...no, not like that!"
I'm IN the industry. There are no upsides to this. Nearly every bit of the demo looked worse. You know how MKBHD does a camera showdown every year, and the brightest photos are the ones that win? That's what happened in this demo. But if you pay attention, you'll see that all that happened was that instead of light coming from a point source, it was averaged out and came from everywhere. Shadows disappeared. Textures became flat and average.
You can argue the faces were more DETAILED, but I'd hesitate to call that an improvement.
Look, the last few years of gaming have actually shown that smaller games with more care and attention and vastly simpler graphics punch well above their weight. Hades 2, Silksong, Slay the Spire 2--no cutting edge graphics, just games that people like playing.
The AAA industry still exists and lumbers on. I was part of it for literal decades. But they don't make the games people want to play, which is why Ubisoft's stock price is down 90% from its peak. EA is a leveraged debt-monster now. These companies have been so out of touch with what players want for so long, and now we've got a new thing that they don't want: DLSS 5.
And, amazingly, they told Nvidia, "hey, this sucks! Stop it!" before it even shipped. Real-time user feedback, and everyone seems hellbent on throwing it away even though it could save them a lot of money. But no, they'll plow on through and then when the next AAA game 'inexplicably' fails, they'll say, "who could've predicted this? It was unknowable!" and memoryhole the entire wasted endeavour.
The original DLSS was about making cheaper computers perform better. DLSS 5 is about extracting money from gamers because otherwise it's a low-margin market and they may as well just sell more GPUs to OpenAI.
Games are by humans, for humans, let's try not to forget that. You want to give my artists a tool (the artists are game devs too, btw, they're not 'contractors'. They've worked the same hours and the same crunch that I have) that makes it easier for them to realize their vision? Great, I'm all for it. Put that hardware on their desk, let them create, and let us publish a game. Then leave the finished product alone.
He's 100% correct.
There's a saying in our industry (and probably a few others): if you want to make sure something ships, mark it as temporary. I have shipped SO MANY temporary fixes. So many things that weren't supposed to be released were released. Bioware (a company I used to work for) once shipped a text file with the text "ass plugging cum bubble" in it, because it was random text that was in a text file that got shipped out and nobody thought to check.
If your processes aren't good enough to ensure that temporary assets never make it out—and to be 100% clear: nobody's are—then you should avoid them and the hassle it comes with. Particularly when it comes to art assets.
Indeed, YOU'RE the one with the binary position. He didn't say that NO AI was allowed, he said that no AI ART was allowed. He didn't say AI coding agents weren't allowed, or that AI anything else was excluded.
You've rounded up a perfectly reasonable position to "I say all AI is bad". That's on you.
"Have you ever tried that?": Yes. I do not log into YouTube on my work machine very deliberately. I still use it. I still find and watch videos. It's not terribly difficult.
"Do you know what an algorithm is?" I have a degree in computing science. Do YOU know what an algorithm is? I've been a professional programmer for my entire career. I've probably worked on games that you've played.
Let's stop playing dumb here, shall we? Algorithmic delivery of content is the critical issue here, and we all know it. To talk about sorting alphabetically is comically reductive, besides the point, and the kind of diversion I would expect from an audience much less sophisticated than the people here. That is: you know better, stop playing like you don't. I don't believe for a second you think I'm talking about sorting videos and moreover, I ALSO don't think you think the Australian law is about sorting videos. It's about the stuff that YouTube does that leads kids down alt-right pipelines, that delivers misogynist content, the kind of stuff that tells them that they're too fat or too ugly or not good enough.
We know perfectly well that the algorithms I'm talking about are tuned for engagement, and ONLY engagement. Not positive engagement, ANY engagement. We ALSO know that making people mad is the surest way to catch their attention, so that's what they do. We've all seen it.
So I'd appreciate it if everyone reading this thread (not just you) stops strawmanning this whole affair. I'm not talking about fucking bubblesort and you all know it.
If you don't like this solution, OFFER SOMETHING BETTER. I've read literally no solutions at all here, just "not like that" over and over again. I'm not married to this solution if someone serves up a better one. I'm not actually that excited about age verification either because it makes EVERYONE'S life harder, including mine. But just because the problem is hard and the solutions are incomplete doesn't mean we get to fiddle while Rome burns.
I saw a comment left by an Australian about this on a different site, and they pointed out a crucial bit of context that you're also missing here: this applies to social media apps/sites that are governed by an algorithm. TikTok and Facebook and Instagram feed you content based on an algorithm, and the algorithm is tuned for engagement and nothing else.
Youth in Australia are still allowed to use the internet. They're still allowed to chat on Discord and play in Roblox. This entire article seems predicated on the assumption that the whole internet is cut off from them, but it's not. They can still watch YouTube, they just can't log in and have the algorithm deliver suggestions to them, or let them be engage with strangers in the comments.
To be sure, this is not perfect. If nothing else, the ability to circumvent all of this is pretty trivial. But this isn't the catastrophe that you're making it out to be. You don't even offer any particularly good alternatives in the end, just more questions. They're fine questions, but we've already got plenty of those. To boldly declare that we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas simply isn't good enough anymore.
My partner is autistic. She's an excellent mathematician, has published papers on statistical analysis and AI, and is generally someone that I admire greatly.
There's some amount of evidence that Autism and ADHD are either connected or possibly the same atypical neurology, and most of the programmers I know—INCLUDING MYSELF—have some degree of ADHD.
Autism isn't strictly a bunch of downsides, there are a lot of upsides to the neurotype, and it's straight up stupid for these people to be wringing their hands about it.
I agree with this piece pretty much entirely, and I'd like to add this: the people on the right (now, all of a sudden) saying that political violence is not the answer are merely upset that they don't have a MONOPOLY on political violence. They've been actively participating in it for years. Not just privately, when they assault marginalized groups, but by enabling police to attack and kill anyone they like almost entirely without consequences, or even the bans on abortion care that lead to women dying because doctors are scared to treat them. These are all forms of political violence.
Of course, we must also ask what counts as 'political' violence. Or, more to the point, what DOESN'T count as political violence? Is a school shooting somehow apolitical just because we acknowledge those children are neither left nor right wing?
The right has never cared about your right to speech; they spend all their time talking about how THEY'RE being silenced even while Kirk held huge events like this. They have not somehow grown morals overnight, they just don't like it when they have to look over their shoulders.
So the reality is that the violence has been ongoing for a very long time, and you're probably correct: the potential to confront the problem in a non-violent way was left behind. It was probably left behind a long time behind a long time ago. But it was by Trump and Miller and Kirk and his ilk, not their opponents.
What a horrendous take.
The promise of the open web was made in quite literally a different era. I had my first webpage in the 90s, and it was hosted on a University server where I was a student. Then there was geocities and other similar sites. For a long time, the open web was predicated on the fact that text pages have almost no bandwidth costs and Universities could act as repositories of useful knowledge, or that small ads could keep servers running. A few pennies here, a few pennies there, and eventually you were talking about real money.
Now it's just Facebook and Google making the lion's share of the ad money, and their revenue is declining. AI scrapers have all of the downsides of search engine browsing with none of the upsides: they're bandwidth intensive, but they bring you no traffic at all. If you have any sort of ad support, you're guaranteed no clickthrough. If you're relying on traffic to drive engagement and possibly a subscription or a patreon payment, you're super boned--the LLM isn't going to bring someone to your site, they're just gonna gobble up your content and you'll never see any benefit.
AI is the death of the open web because the model doesn't work anymore. "Oh no," you're saying, "if AI can't scrape the web, the information is kept out of the hands of people!" You've forgotten that if nobody can afford to keep their websites running, the information ALSO disappears.
When there's a shared pasture, farmers will come together and enforce the usage because otherwise we see the tragedy of the commons. But that particular case was less frequent than you'd expect because people want to get along with their neighbours, and everyone can be made to understand what the common good is.
But faceless corporations do not care about getting along with you. They will take your information, eat your bandwidth, drive you off the web and never look back. They haven't even tried to come up with accommodations, they just consume endlessly and try to sell your own content back to you as masticated slop.
I know this is presented as a cut-and-dry case of big car company bad, but I actually think that reducing individual car ownership is good. I don't have a car, but I have to return a rental to the lot tonight. I rent about twice a year right now.
If I didn't live somewhere that is forest fire prone, I wouldn't really consider owning a car at all, but I'll probably have to at some point. I live in a smaller city, so there's no car sharing services here either.
I actually don't want to own a car. It's insanely expensive for what I actually need, but because NA is what it is, I have virtually no choice. I'd LOVE to hop on a train to get around the wider area, but they ripped out all the tracks decades ago. Canada might be the worst country in the world for train coverage, honestly.
So if VW wants to let me use one of their cars for a subscription fee that's appreciably less than owning it? Yeah, maybe. Should it be their whole business model? Probably not. Do I understand that they're a big company that shouldn't be trusted? Yes, obviously, but I don't find it convincing that any other car company is acting more scrupulously when they SELL you a vehicle. That's capitalism, man.
There are plenty of EVs in Canada. Range is indeed reduced. Range is reduced in ICE vehicles as well. My diesel had to have a fuel additive so it wouldn't gel, and it took forever to warm up in the winter. That's not an argument against EVs, it's an argument against any personal vehicle ownership--we should really just have more trains.
But pipe dreams aside, the only one that really matters here is that right now the infrastructure doesn't support long distance travel yet. A shitty car with a small gas tank also has range problems, but put enough petrol stations between A and B and it's a non-issue. I'm planning to lease a PHEV for my next vehicle because a few times a year I'll want to drive 1000+ km, as well as the fact that I live in a part of my country where forest fires are an imminent enough threat that I might need to evacuate. But otherwise, if I use the vehicle around town, I want to rely on the batteries alone. I figure that battery technology is changing fast enough that staking any long-term position right now is foolish, but I also don't want to be stuck burning dinosaurs for 10-20 years either.
I don't understand why they don't just license their stuff to Netflix. It's free money. They don't have to incur any costs at all, let Netflix handle the actual annoying part of creating infrastructure and handling subscription fees or whatever. These idiots would rather 'grow' than just collect money on stuff they've already made. It's baffling. Why do they earn millions of dollars a year again?
So I work in the industry, and I can tell you that Stadia had better performance and less latency than me sitting at a PC at my desk in the office. There were some other problems: setup was honestly a bit of a nightmare, and the process wasn't well established, so I could never attach a debugger to my remote session, for instance. I'm sure it was possible, we just didn't seem to have a setup for it.
But as a dev that's still working from home (and hopes to keep working from home forever) I hope that this tech makes it way out into the industry more broadly and I'll be able to connect to a game instance on a cloud server and play the build directly on my Mac and still connect remotely to my Windows PC to debug it.
What in the WORLD does the Canadian blank media tax have to do with whether or not the CBC is a state funded, but not state run news organization?
The CBC and Radio Canada (the French side) both exist for perfectly good reasons, incidentally: Canada is a huge country and even today, it's not guaranteed that anyone wants to build a news outlet for a remote location. In the past, it was the only way to get any news at all, but now the CBC may honestly represent the only local news source. It is a government service that serves the broader national good of having an educated and informed populace.
It works for the same reason the bureaucracy in any Western democracy works. Everything is at arm's length; the media organization (theoretically) favours no particular government, in much the same way someone given a contract to pave a road (theoretically) favours no particular government.
What in the WORLD does the Canadian blank media tax have to do with whether or not the CBC is a state funded, but not state run news organization?
The CBC and Radio Canada (the French side) both exist for perfectly good reasons, incidentally: Canada is a huge country and even today, it's not guaranteed that anyone wants to build a news outlet for a remote location. In the past, it was the only way to get any news at all, but now the CBC may honestly represent the only local news source. It is a government service that serves the broader national good of having an educated and informed populace.
It works for the same reason the bureaucracy in any Western democracy works. Everything is at arm's length; the media organization (theoretically) favours no particular government, in much the same way someone given a contract to pave a road (theoretically) favours no particular government.
I work in games, and I work at a big studio. Last year, when we were trying to ship, some of the bugs that I was getting were only reproducible on Stadia builds.
Okay, so, debugging on Stadia was a bit of a nightmare. We don't have tools and processes set up to do that very easily.
But PLAYING the game was amazing. Like, running the game on Chrome on my Mac Mini was smoother and looked better than running the dev build on my PC at work.
The toolchain is a major issue, IMO, though I haven't actually gotten a chance to work on it in depth since last year. (What you basically needed to do is have a running and working game, and then bring it to Stadia. You couldn't run the Unreal/Unity/In-house toolset and build a game from scratch, AFAIK. I could be wrong; maybe that's better now.)
But now that working from home is common and many people aren't going to want to change that, I think Google should also set themselves up as a way to do AAA game development with full fidelity without needing as much on-site hardware. Right now I run RDP to a PC in the office, and if it hard locks, I need to find someone at the office to go find it and power-cycle it.
Long story short, Stadia works way better than I ever expected, and it could be a great tool for devs.
Photos already does client-side scanning of your library. It would be easier to build in a back door to that than to repurpose a system that's built for CSAM scanning that theoretically has protected sources. If China is looking for pictures of Winnie the Pooh, it's a million times easier for Apple to train their photo scanning system on existing Winnie the Pooh pictures than find a way to integrate it into their CSAM system and then generate a whole bunch of strikes against the account so the police get called.
Everyone keeps talking about how foreign governments will demand that Apple add pictures that they want to use to trump up charges against people, or to hunt down dissidents. Well, bad news:
Those governments can already compel Apple to do anything they want, irrespective of these image databases. They'll just tell Apple to hand over the unencrypted backup and they'll scan it (or modify it) directly.
In the case of China, they already have all the users' data in servers that are located in China. Why waste time scanning on the phone and having it report back?
If a government is going to gin up some fake crime and throw someone in jail, they don't need Apple there to do it. They'll simply confiscate the victim's phone and CLAIM that they found images on it. Due process doesn't matter to them, so why spend time pretending that it does?
I'm not saying that Apple's client-side scanning system is good or without problems, it's that it makes no sense to use it even if it does exist. For a government that's a bad actor, data security doesn't matter. This is like the XKCD about the wrench: governments that don't care about your digital rights will also beat you with a wrench until you confess anyway. https://xkcd.com/538/
This discourse around Apple's system pretends like it's the most obvious way to scan someone's photo library and find incriminating data and it absolutely isn't.
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Your mindset is 'harm never matters, we should never try to make things better if speech is adjacent to the topic, and by the way, I don't know what an algorithm is.' The relentless refusal to acknowledge that real harm is done to actual people by companies like Facebook is baffling. Here's something to think about: the first amendment isn't the only way in the world to protect free speech. Lots of countries do it. Section 230 isn't the only way in the world to write a law that protects online speech, so maybe figure that one out too. If your government sucks (it does, we know) maybe fix that first. Absolutely myopic, inflexible tunnel vision. Do better.
Basically as old as game dev
When I first started in the industry about 25 years ago, it was at BioWare. Folks had noticed that one of the plain text files had a string in it (a comment, I think) that said, 'ass-plugging cum bubble'. We (as an industry) haven't always been super-careful with all our temp assets, and it's gotten harder the bigger games get. I think probably there should be a standard auditing procedure (and I've seen games with rigorous pre-ship audits) but this isn't unique to this era of AI assets.
This is still a consistent problem here. An algorithm is, of course, just a series of steps that you take to make a decision. But to say that all algorithms are the same is like trying to make the claim that all mammals are the same, or all vertebrates are the same, or all LIFE is the same. Depending on the context, it's absurd and misleading to make statements where 'newest first' and 'deep knowledge about a user, showing content that makes them mentally ill' are morally or technically equivalent. They're not. TD regularly takes the effective position that all algorithms are fundamentally the same, so there's no point in trying to disambiguate them or govern their outcomes. It's absurd on its face.
As a game dev
He's 100% correct. There's a saying in our industry (and probably a few others): if you want to make sure something ships, mark it as temporary. I have shipped SO MANY temporary fixes. So many things that weren't supposed to be released were released. Bioware (a company I used to work for) once shipped a text file with the text "ass plugging cum bubble" in it, because it was random text that was in a text file that got shipped out and nobody thought to check. If your processes aren't good enough to ensure that temporary assets never make it out—and to be 100% clear: nobody's are—then you should avoid them and the hassle it comes with. Particularly when it comes to art assets. Indeed, YOU'RE the one with the binary position. He didn't say that NO AI was allowed, he said that no AI ART was allowed. He didn't say AI coding agents weren't allowed, or that AI anything else was excluded. You've rounded up a perfectly reasonable position to "I say all AI is bad". That's on you.
- "Have you ever tried that?": Yes. I do not log into YouTube on my work machine very deliberately. I still use it. I still find and watch videos. It's not terribly difficult.
- "Do you know what an algorithm is?" I have a degree in computing science. Do YOU know what an algorithm is? I've been a professional programmer for my entire career. I've probably worked on games that you've played.
Let's stop playing dumb here, shall we? Algorithmic delivery of content is the critical issue here, and we all know it. To talk about sorting alphabetically is comically reductive, besides the point, and the kind of diversion I would expect from an audience much less sophisticated than the people here. That is: you know better, stop playing like you don't. I don't believe for a second you think I'm talking about sorting videos and moreover, I ALSO don't think you think the Australian law is about sorting videos. It's about the stuff that YouTube does that leads kids down alt-right pipelines, that delivers misogynist content, the kind of stuff that tells them that they're too fat or too ugly or not good enough. We know perfectly well that the algorithms I'm talking about are tuned for engagement, and ONLY engagement. Not positive engagement, ANY engagement. We ALSO know that making people mad is the surest way to catch their attention, so that's what they do. We've all seen it. So I'd appreciate it if everyone reading this thread (not just you) stops strawmanning this whole affair. I'm not talking about fucking bubblesort and you all know it. If you don't like this solution, OFFER SOMETHING BETTER. I've read literally no solutions at all here, just "not like that" over and over again. I'm not married to this solution if someone serves up a better one. I'm not actually that excited about age verification either because it makes EVERYONE'S life harder, including mine. But just because the problem is hard and the solutions are incomplete doesn't mean we get to fiddle while Rome burns.Crucial context missing
I saw a comment left by an Australian about this on a different site, and they pointed out a crucial bit of context that you're also missing here: this applies to social media apps/sites that are governed by an algorithm. TikTok and Facebook and Instagram feed you content based on an algorithm, and the algorithm is tuned for engagement and nothing else. Youth in Australia are still allowed to use the internet. They're still allowed to chat on Discord and play in Roblox. This entire article seems predicated on the assumption that the whole internet is cut off from them, but it's not. They can still watch YouTube, they just can't log in and have the algorithm deliver suggestions to them, or let them be engage with strangers in the comments. To be sure, this is not perfect. If nothing else, the ability to circumvent all of this is pretty trivial. But this isn't the catastrophe that you're making it out to be. You don't even offer any particularly good alternatives in the end, just more questions. They're fine questions, but we've already got plenty of those. To boldly declare that we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas simply isn't good enough anymore.
My partner is autistic. She's an excellent mathematician, has published papers on statistical analysis and AI, and is generally someone that I admire greatly. There's some amount of evidence that Autism and ADHD are either connected or possibly the same atypical neurology, and most of the programmers I know—INCLUDING MYSELF—have some degree of ADHD. Autism isn't strictly a bunch of downsides, there are a lot of upsides to the neurotype, and it's straight up stupid for these people to be wringing their hands about it.
What commentators on the right are upset about
I agree with this piece pretty much entirely, and I'd like to add this: the people on the right (now, all of a sudden) saying that political violence is not the answer are merely upset that they don't have a MONOPOLY on political violence. They've been actively participating in it for years. Not just privately, when they assault marginalized groups, but by enabling police to attack and kill anyone they like almost entirely without consequences, or even the bans on abortion care that lead to women dying because doctors are scared to treat them. These are all forms of political violence. Of course, we must also ask what counts as 'political' violence. Or, more to the point, what DOESN'T count as political violence? Is a school shooting somehow apolitical just because we acknowledge those children are neither left nor right wing? The right has never cared about your right to speech; they spend all their time talking about how THEY'RE being silenced even while Kirk held huge events like this. They have not somehow grown morals overnight, they just don't like it when they have to look over their shoulders. So the reality is that the violence has been ongoing for a very long time, and you're probably correct: the potential to confront the problem in a non-violent way was left behind. It was probably left behind a long time behind a long time ago. But it was by Trump and Miller and Kirk and his ilk, not their opponents.
The so-called open web
What a horrendous take. The promise of the open web was made in quite literally a different era. I had my first webpage in the 90s, and it was hosted on a University server where I was a student. Then there was geocities and other similar sites. For a long time, the open web was predicated on the fact that text pages have almost no bandwidth costs and Universities could act as repositories of useful knowledge, or that small ads could keep servers running. A few pennies here, a few pennies there, and eventually you were talking about real money. Now it's just Facebook and Google making the lion's share of the ad money, and their revenue is declining. AI scrapers have all of the downsides of search engine browsing with none of the upsides: they're bandwidth intensive, but they bring you no traffic at all. If you have any sort of ad support, you're guaranteed no clickthrough. If you're relying on traffic to drive engagement and possibly a subscription or a patreon payment, you're super boned--the LLM isn't going to bring someone to your site, they're just gonna gobble up your content and you'll never see any benefit. AI is the death of the open web because the model doesn't work anymore. "Oh no," you're saying, "if AI can't scrape the web, the information is kept out of the hands of people!" You've forgotten that if nobody can afford to keep their websites running, the information ALSO disappears. When there's a shared pasture, farmers will come together and enforce the usage because otherwise we see the tragedy of the commons. But that particular case was less frequent than you'd expect because people want to get along with their neighbours, and everyone can be made to understand what the common good is. But faceless corporations do not care about getting along with you. They will take your information, eat your bandwidth, drive you off the web and never look back. They haven't even tried to come up with accommodations, they just consume endlessly and try to sell your own content back to you as masticated slop.
I'm torn
I know this is presented as a cut-and-dry case of big car company bad, but I actually think that reducing individual car ownership is good. I don't have a car, but I have to return a rental to the lot tonight. I rent about twice a year right now. If I didn't live somewhere that is forest fire prone, I wouldn't really consider owning a car at all, but I'll probably have to at some point. I live in a smaller city, so there's no car sharing services here either. I actually don't want to own a car. It's insanely expensive for what I actually need, but because NA is what it is, I have virtually no choice. I'd LOVE to hop on a train to get around the wider area, but they ripped out all the tracks decades ago. Canada might be the worst country in the world for train coverage, honestly. So if VW wants to let me use one of their cars for a subscription fee that's appreciably less than owning it? Yeah, maybe. Should it be their whole business model? Probably not. Do I understand that they're a big company that shouldn't be trusted? Yes, obviously, but I don't find it convincing that any other car company is acting more scrupulously when they SELL you a vehicle. That's capitalism, man.
There are plenty of EVs in Canada. Range is indeed reduced. Range is reduced in ICE vehicles as well. My diesel had to have a fuel additive so it wouldn't gel, and it took forever to warm up in the winter. That's not an argument against EVs, it's an argument against any personal vehicle ownership--we should really just have more trains. But pipe dreams aside, the only one that really matters here is that right now the infrastructure doesn't support long distance travel yet. A shitty car with a small gas tank also has range problems, but put enough petrol stations between A and B and it's a non-issue. I'm planning to lease a PHEV for my next vehicle because a few times a year I'll want to drive 1000+ km, as well as the fact that I live in a part of my country where forest fires are an imminent enough threat that I might need to evacuate. But otherwise, if I use the vehicle around town, I want to rely on the batteries alone. I figure that battery technology is changing fast enough that staking any long-term position right now is foolish, but I also don't want to be stuck burning dinosaurs for 10-20 years either.
I hope they go back to it
I don't understand why they don't just license their stuff to Netflix. It's free money. They don't have to incur any costs at all, let Netflix handle the actual annoying part of creating infrastructure and handling subscription fees or whatever. These idiots would rather 'grow' than just collect money on stuff they've already made. It's baffling. Why do they earn millions of dollars a year again?
Re: Remember thin clients?
So I work in the industry, and I can tell you that Stadia had better performance and less latency than me sitting at a PC at my desk in the office. There were some other problems: setup was honestly a bit of a nightmare, and the process wasn't well established, so I could never attach a debugger to my remote session, for instance. I'm sure it was possible, we just didn't seem to have a setup for it. But as a dev that's still working from home (and hopes to keep working from home forever) I hope that this tech makes it way out into the industry more broadly and I'll be able to connect to a game instance on a cloud server and play the build directly on my Mac and still connect remotely to my Windows PC to debug it.
Aren't all NFTs a joke, tho'?
Frankly, NFTs and the Olive Garden deserve one another. A pox on both their houses.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
What in the WORLD does the Canadian blank media tax have to do with whether or not the CBC is a state funded, but not state run news organization? The CBC and Radio Canada (the French side) both exist for perfectly good reasons, incidentally: Canada is a huge country and even today, it's not guaranteed that anyone wants to build a news outlet for a remote location. In the past, it was the only way to get any news at all, but now the CBC may honestly represent the only local news source. It is a government service that serves the broader national good of having an educated and informed populace. It works for the same reason the bureaucracy in any Western democracy works. Everything is at arm's length; the media organization (theoretically) favours no particular government, in much the same way someone given a contract to pave a road (theoretically) favours no particular government.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
What in the WORLD does the Canadian blank media tax have to do with whether or not the CBC is a state funded, but not state run news organization? The CBC and Radio Canada (the French side) both exist for perfectly good reasons, incidentally: Canada is a huge country and even today, it's not guaranteed that anyone wants to build a news outlet for a remote location. In the past, it was the only way to get any news at all, but now the CBC may honestly represent the only local news source. It is a government service that serves the broader national good of having an educated and informed populace. It works for the same reason the bureaucracy in any Western democracy works. Everything is at arm's length; the media organization (theoretically) favours no particular government, in much the same way someone given a contract to pave a road (theoretically) favours no particular government.
As a dev, Stadia could be very useful to me
I work in games, and I work at a big studio. Last year, when we were trying to ship, some of the bugs that I was getting were only reproducible on Stadia builds.
Okay, so, debugging on Stadia was a bit of a nightmare. We don't have tools and processes set up to do that very easily.
But PLAYING the game was amazing. Like, running the game on Chrome on my Mac Mini was smoother and looked better than running the dev build on my PC at work.
The toolchain is a major issue, IMO, though I haven't actually gotten a chance to work on it in depth since last year. (What you basically needed to do is have a running and working game, and then bring it to Stadia. You couldn't run the Unreal/Unity/In-house toolset and build a game from scratch, AFAIK. I could be wrong; maybe that's better now.)
But now that working from home is common and many people aren't going to want to change that, I think Google should also set themselves up as a way to do AAA game development with full fidelity without needing as much on-site hardware. Right now I run RDP to a PC in the office, and if it hard locks, I need to find someone at the office to go find it and power-cycle it.
Long story short, Stadia works way better than I ever expected, and it could be a great tool for devs.
This system isn't the problem
Ugh, look, this is actually kind of a bad take.
Photos already does client-side scanning of your library. It would be easier to build in a back door to that than to repurpose a system that's built for CSAM scanning that theoretically has protected sources. If China is looking for pictures of Winnie the Pooh, it's a million times easier for Apple to train their photo scanning system on existing Winnie the Pooh pictures than find a way to integrate it into their CSAM system and then generate a whole bunch of strikes against the account so the police get called.
Everyone keeps talking about how foreign governments will demand that Apple add pictures that they want to use to trump up charges against people, or to hunt down dissidents. Well, bad news:
I'm not saying that Apple's client-side scanning system is good or without problems, it's that it makes no sense to use it even if it does exist. For a government that's a bad actor, data security doesn't matter. This is like the XKCD about the wrench: governments that don't care about your digital rights will also beat you with a wrench until you confess anyway. https://xkcd.com/538/
This discourse around Apple's system pretends like it's the most obvious way to scan someone's photo library and find incriminating data and it absolutely isn't.