For China specifically and at the present time this is true, but China is investing heavily into solar and other renewables that will shift its energy mix dramatically in the coming years. Not to mention that even now, it’s still a net benefit to centralize that fossil fuel consumption into plants that can burn it more efficiently and with better pollution controls than are feasible on cars.

It’s not strictly true that it didn’t mean anything, but I would say that it consisted of a couple weakly-defined and often mutually incompatible visions is what could be.

Meta thought they could sell people on the idea of spending hundreds of dollars on specialized hardware to allow them to do real life things, but in a shitty Miiverse alternate reality where every activity was monetized to help Zuck buy the rest of the Hawaiian archipelago for himself.

Cryptobros thought the Metaverse was going to be a decentralized hyper-capitalist utopia where they could live their best lives driving digital Lambos and banging their harem of fawning VR catgirl hotties after they all made their billions selling links to JPEGs of cartoon monkeys to each other.

Everybody else conflated the decentralized part of the cryptobros’ vision with the microtransactionalized walled garden of Meta’s implementation, and then either saw dollar signs and scrambled to get a grift going, or ran off to write think pieces about a wholly-imaginary utopia or dystopia they saw arising from that unholy amalgamation.

In reality, Meta couldn’t offer a compelling alternative to real life, and the cryptobros didn’t have the funds or talent to actually make their Snow Crash fever dream a reality, so for now the VR future remains firmly the domain of VRChat enthusiasts, hardcore flight simmers, and niche technical applications.

Xbox Live matchmaking was easy, sure, but before it became the norm on PC self-hosting servers was far more common, and there was something about the culture of a well-admined server that automatic matchmaking could never replicate – and in my opinion gaming as a whole is worse for losing that. Anonymous and unaccountable public lobbies give so much more leeway to assholes than you could get away with on a clan-hosted server.

All these companies that are suddenly having layoffs and/or enshittifying everything at once all shared the same basic business model (pardon the Bronze Age meme format from Slashdot…):

• Give goods or services away for free
• Attract customers on the basis of getting goods or services for free
• ???
• Profit!

Years of basically free debt service and stupid VC money let them kick the can down the road for a long time in terms of figuring out what Step 3 was gonna be, up to the point that many such services didn’t even bother, replacing both Steps 3 and 4 with “Sell to whichever FAANG is sucker enough to think they can leverage our userbase for their own product.” High interest rates have suddenly put a stop to the money party, though, and now they’re all scrambling to find ways of aggressively monetizing their services.

Priorities will always shift as we move though the different seasons of life, and for sure the launch of a big marquee title that I’m interested in doesn’t have the same drama it did, now that I’ve lived though a couple-few decades of them. I have to say, though, that I still love the experience of being transported to a fantasy setting, or exploring a strange new world with friends, or testing my skill against other players. I’m looking forward to when I can introduce the hobby to my kid, and share that joy with him.

If people want to live in a fully-automated luxury space communist utopia where everyone is free from want and able to make and release games for free as passion projects, that’s great, and a worthy goal to work towards, but promoting piracy on principle without concern for how developers will be supported during their work in the context of our current capitalist society is somewhere between naive at best and self-serving rationalization at worst.

I hit a difficulty wall in the Wrecker’s Cave and never picked the game back up. So far BG3 has been more forgiving, but Larian games don’t suffer fools gladly.

Also that example of Tomb Raider is really disingenuous, the level of fidelity in the environments is night and day between the two as well as the quality of animation. In your example the only real thing you can tell is the skin shaders, which are not even close between the two, SotTR really sells that you are looking at real people, something the 2013 game approached but never really achieved IMO.

I’ve noticed this a lot in comparisons claiming to show that graphics quality has regressed (either over time, or from an earlier demo reel of the same game), where the person trying to make the point cherry-picks drastically different lighting or atmospheric scenarios that put the later image in a bad light. Like, no crap Lara looks better in the 2013 image, she’s lit from an angle that highlights her facial features and inexplicably wearing makeup while in the midst of a jungle adventure. The Shadow of the Tomb Raider image, by comparison, is of a dirty-faced Lara pulling a face while being lit from an unflattering angle by campfire. Compositionally, of course the first image is prettier – but as you point out, the lack of effective subsurface scattering in the Tomb Raider 2013 skin shader is painfully apparent versus SofTR. The newer image is more realistic, even if it’s not as flattering.

Yeah, you guys have the Winter War and Continuation War relatively fresh in cultural memory, which probably limits the reach of Russian propaganda. Over here, we remember the Soviet Union primarily as our Cold War rival, and neither side of that conflict came out of it with clean hands. For a certain kind of person, the sins of the American CIA and State Department during the Cold War don’t just reflect badly on our government; they somehow also make the Soviet Union, and therefore Russia as its successor state, the Good Guys of the last century of global geopolitics.

When I read her thread, the first thing that came to mind was that in addition to whatever labor rights claims she could have, there’s a clear potential claim of promissory estoppel with regard to her move back to Canada and some of the statements made about how LMG would support her independent efforts.

There’s a certain kind of reactionary-left personality that I think is more common in parts of the west that used to be colonial powers, where if you’re far enough along the political spectrum that the mainstream parties all look like different variations on corporatist-fascists, you’re particularly vulnerable to messaging from geopolitical enemies of your own country for the simple reason that they’re opposed to the political structure you’re also opposed to. Here in the US I’ve run into a few such people, and it’s also clear that Russia’s soft-power operations have made efforts to cultivate relationships with the American left wing (people like Jill Stein and others in the Green Party). It’s pretty obvious, though, that they’ve had less success than they have on the right. It takes a particular kind of useful idiot to think, as a anti-colonial socialist or communist, that an oligarchic and socially-repressive right-wing autocracy is actually in your political corner.

About $500 of the ~$600 million they’ve raised is mine, dating from the original crowdfunding campaigns and the first year or two of development. I still check in every year or two to see if they’re any closer to having a complete game, and every time I do, I come away with the sense that they’ve put vastly more effort into developing and selling spaceship JPEGs than they have into making the game those spaceships are supposed to be used in.

I’m fairness, incomplete chunks is all that exists of Star Citizen.

Well, that and a whaling operation on the scale of Victorian England’s.

I’m willing to be surprised by it, but I’m not optimistic for Starfield. What I’ve seen of it so far looks mainly like they grafted chunks of No Man’s Sky onto a Bethesda Fallout game and are trying hard to pitch it as The Next Big Thing. Frankly, I’d much rather have the next mainline Elder Scrolls game instead, but at this rate I’m going to be 40 before I get to play a sequel to a game that came out in my 20s.

Honestly, I remember playing full 3D titles on friends’ PS1s back in the day and thinking they’d given me eye cancer, even with the fuzz of an old CRT TV working in their favor. I don’t think I would want to play them now without a boatload of emulator graphic enhancements to deal with all the wonky 3D projection and unfiltered low-res texture mess of OG PlayStation games.

In the AEC field we have Bluebeam as a de facto industry standard for PDFs, and it’s vastly superior to Acrobat in every way for our typical use cases. I imagine it’s a bit harder in other industries, though.

This article from Jane’s lists their strength in 2021 at 45,000, which would imply a ~20% casualty rate.

Along the lines of @AnonStoleMyPants – the trouble with longtermism and effective altruism generally is that, unlike more established religion, it’s become en vogue specifically amongst the billionaire class, specifically because it’s essentially just a permission structure for them to hoard stacks of cash and prioritize the hypothetical needs of their preferred utopian vision of the future over the actual needs of the present. Religions tend to have a mechanism (tithing, zakat, mitzvah, dana, etc.) for redistributing wealth from the well-off members of the faith towards the needy in an immediate way. Said mechanism may often be suborned by the religious elite or unenforced by some sects, but at least it’s there.

Unlike those religions, effective altruism specifically encourages wealthy people to keep their wealth to themselves, so that they can use their billionaire galaxy brains to more effectively direct that capital towards long-term good. If, as they see it, Mars colonies tomorrow will help more people than healthcare or UBI or solar farms will today, then they have not just a desire, but a moral obligation to spend their money designing Mars rockets instead of paying more taxes or building green infrastructure. And if having a longtermist in charge of said Mars colony will more effectively safeguard the future of those colonists, then by golly, they have a moral obligation to become the autocratic monarch of Mars! All the dirty poors desperate for help today aren’t worth the resources relative to the net good possible by securing that utopian future they imagine.

Alternately, frog vent the bug hole?

as a counterpoint, when the use-case for the tool is specifically “I want a picture that looks like it was painted by Greg Rutkowski, but I don’t want to pay Greg Rutkowski to paint it for me” that sounds like the sort of scenario that copyright was specifically envisioned to protect against – and if it doesn’t protect against that, it’s arguably an oversight in need of correction. It’s in AI makers and users’ interest to proactively self-regulate on this front, because if they don’t somebody like Disney is going to wade into this at some point with expensive lobbyists, and dictate the law to their own benefit.

That said, it’s working artists like Rutkowski, or friends of mine who scrape together a living off commissioned pieces, that I am most concerned for. Fantasy art like Greg makes, or personal character portraits of the sort you find on character sheets of long-running DnD games or as avatar images on forums like this one, make up the bread and butter of many small-time artists’ work, and those commissions are the ones most endangered by the current state of the art in generative AI. It’s great for would-be patrons that the cost of commissioning a mood piece for a campaign setting or a portrait of their fursona has suddenly dropped to basically zero, but it sucks for artists that their lunch is being eaten by an AI algorithm that was trained by slurping up all their work without compensation or even credit. For as long as artists need to get paid for their work in order to live, that’s inherently anti-worker.