Goodeye8

Somehow I doubt they’d let Luigi Mangione off the hook if his defense was “nobody is perfect”.

But that extra time is then wasted because humans still have to review the code an LLM generates and fix all the other logical errors it makes because at best an LLM does exactly what you tell them to do. I’ve worked with a developer who did exactly what the ticket says and nothing more and it was a pain in the ass because their code always needed double checking that their narrow focus on a very specific problem didn’t break the domain as a whole. I don’t think you’re gaining any productivity with LLMs, you’re only shifting the work from writing code to reviewing code and I’ve yet to meet a developer who enjoys reviewing code more than writing code, which means code will receive less attention and thus becomes more prone to bugs.

None of what you brought up as a positive are things an LLM does. Most of those things existed before the modern transformer-based LLMs were even a thing.

LLM-s are glorified text prediction engines and nothing about their nature makes them excel at formal languages. It doesn’t know any rules. It doesn’t have any internal logic. For example if the training data consistently exhibits the same flawed piece of code then an LLM will spit out the same flawed piece of code, because that’s the most likely continuation of its current “train of thought”. You would have to fine-tune the model around all those flaws and then hope some combination of a prompt won’t lead the model back into that flawed data.

I’ve used LLMs to generate SQL, which according to you is something they should excel at, and I’ve had to fix literal syntax errors that would prevent the statement from executing. A regular SQL linter would instantly pick up that the SQL is wrong but an LLM can’t pick up those errors because an LLM does not understand the syntax.

I would add to this that any interaction that happens in the world (as opposed to some kind of a menu) is an instant immersion boost.

For example Vintage Story has ruined crafting for me, at least in other games. Most games crafting is something that happens in a menu: you get the resources, you press craft and you get what you wanted to craft. In vintage story a lot of crafting happens in the game. For example I just finished smithing out my bronze chains for the chain armor and to do that I had to take 2 bronze ingots to a forge, fill the forge with coal, light it on fire, heat up the ingots, take one ingot to an anvil and then voxel by voxel start hammering the ingot into chain. When I run out of the metal from the first ingot (which you will because one ingot is not enough to make one piece of chain) I take the second ingot and place it ontop of the half-shaped chain and finish it up. That entire process uses only two menus, both at the anvil. The first menu lets you pick what you want to make from ingot so the game could show the shape you have to hammer out. The second menu isn’t really even a crafting menu, it’s just so you could choose what kind operation you want your hammer to do (which way to hammer voxels or to remove voxels from the ingot). I feel like I’m not doing the process proper service so I found a Youtube short that shows the same process but with shears instead of chains.

It’s so immersive for two reasons. First reason is that you literally shape the metal into the tool and the second reason is that the process takes actual time. I had to make 20 chains for my chain armor and it took me multiple in game days to make them because chains are very time consuming to make.

Now compare that to what that crafting would look like in most games. You’d have a smithing station, you take your 40 ingots to the station, you choose chains, pick 20 for the amount, press craft and maybe you have to wait a few seconds until all 20 chains are ready. Not only do you not actually make anything, making all that stuff also takes no time in the game because the crafting process is almost completely detached from the rest of the game world.

I no longer find that kind of crafting enjoyable because I’ve drank the forbidden immersion fruit and now a basic menu just doesn’t cut it. I want to see the thing get made. I want to see the effort and time that goes into making those things. It’s like you’ve had a taste of the best coffee ever and then you go to your friends place and they offer you instant coffee. You don’t want that cheap swill, you want the coffee Gale made in Breaking Bad.

EDIT: I will add that I’m not saying all games should have complex immersive crafting minigames. I’m completely fine with menu crafting in games where crafting is just a means to an end, but when crafting is supposed to be a core concept of the game why reduce it to a simple menu? It’s like having exploration a core concept of the game but then all travel happens in a menu.

The sad part is the substance doesn’t even matter much, what matters is that it was a successful attack. Had it been a gun she’d be dead. I don’t think it was his goal but he ended up sowing terror because it has shown all the opposition leaders that if the right wanted to they can just walk up and kill you.

Stardew Valley. I needed something kid friendly and I’ve ran out of rally games so I decided it’s time to check out what has been added since I last played it when it released. I know it’s had some big updates but I’ve never paid attention to what the updates have been about, so there’s a bit of wonder going into the game. There are already moments where I’ve gone “I don’t remember this being in the game”.

Sekiro has the most immersive sword combat I’ve experienced, which is weird considering how simplistic the fundamentals of Sekiro are. But the visual representation of the fight is what makes it immersive. You’re not just flaying your sword around and the enemy isn’t just tanking slashes like they’re made of steel. Most enemies use their weapons to block your attacks and in the same vein you use your sword to block their attacks. Combat mostly revolves around breaking posture which creates an opening you use for the killing blow.

In case you were not paying attention you said Valve has to remove abusive clauses, which there is only one in question here and that’s about price parity, so other stores could compete. At not point did you mention any actual laws and at no point did I mention anything remotely related to laws. I said you thinking that removing that one clause will make other stores competitive is delusional thinking.

EDIT: And I got blocked. I guess that says all there is to say about OP.

If you think removing those abusive clauses will have an impact on the market you’re delusional.

Third party sellers have no reason to have a lower price on a different store, unless the store itself is paying them the offset of a lower price. That’s only going to suffocate smaller stores that don’t have money to burn.

And the stores with first party games can already create a bigger incentive for their store by keeping their games store exclusive because it would be the only place to play that particular game (it’s why streaming services have gone down the route of exclusivity). Also having the game with a higher price point on Steam would just lead to a controversy which will hurts sales and damage the reputation of the company.

Removing the price parity clause will do nothing.

There’s no retreat but there is a response from the administration to what is happening in Minnesota, which is something. Previously they’d just do what they wanted and they didn’t react to any domestic backlash.

They will absolutely defend him. There was a clip that went viral a few weeks back from a podcast where leftist children chat politics with their MAGA parents and the seriously MAGA-pilled father said (paraphrasing here) that he’d be okay with his son getting shot and killed because of Trump because Trump must’ve had a good reason to order whatever killed his son.

You can also go to the leopardsatemyface community where you regularly see Trump supporters get fucked by Trump only to have them say they’ll still support Trump.

They’re also justifying the murders of American citizens with the “just obey. If you agitate them and you get killed that’s your fault”.

I’m not saying give up. I’m saying some parts of MAGA (hard to say how much) are so lost in the sauce I don’t know what Trump would have to do to get them to change their mind.

We don’t really know what the add-on argument is because the article doesn’t really say much about it. I didn’t mean Steam prohibits modifying game files, which is pretty much what you did to add the expansions. I meant it more like you describe in the last paragraph where your purchases are platform agnostic, you buy where you want to and you play where you want to.

I don’t mind someone going after Valve but I think the arguments presented are bullshit.

The price parity argument is an argument on paper but in reality we’re not going to see different pricing, except maybe on the super rare occasion a company has their own storefront they want to build up with their first party games while also keeping the game on Steam for extra sales. Realistically that first party game is going to be exclusive to the store (see Alan Wake 2). And 3rd party publishers have no incentive to sell for cheaper on a different storefront because a lower cut by the platform holder would just mean they get to make more money per unit sold. I guess maybe if the storefront pays the 3rd party publisher extra so the storefront itself could set a lower price on the games, but I fear that might end up having the opposite effect where money-rich competitors (like Epic) can end up taking away market from smaller storefronts like GOG or Itch because despite selling games for less it’s still not competing with Steam in terms of features so the market has to grow from somewhere. But I’ll happily be wrong here.

The same way the 30% cut being too much is an argument on paper, but in reality if the cut does go lower the customer, the people actually buying the game, won’t see it. One could argue that it has already gone down for AAA because Steam brings it’s down to 25% after certain threshold and I think once more to 20% after the next threshold. Meanwhile AAA pricing has only gone up in the form heavier focus on MTX alongside an actual price increase from $60 to $70. The cut going down is just going to put that money in the publishers pocket. It would be a win for the publisher but not really a win for the customer.

The only argument that actually could be beneficial to the customer is the add-on argument. I’m not entirely sure what they mean by add-ons. If they mean Steams own made up marketplace of trading cards and stickers and all that shit what is the solution here? Have Steam close it down because there’s no way in world other storefronts would ever make something like that and if they did it would never be made in a way where it could be interchangeable with Steams implementation. I hope by add-ons they mean DLC-s and I would 100% love it if I could buy a game on one platform and DLC-s from a different platform and just have them work together. That would actually be beneficial to the customer. But I don’t see anyone codifying that as a regulation and if it were to happen it would be pretty big strain either on the storefronts or the publishers, because it would be a huge mess to track purchase across platforms to make sure what combination of games + DLCs any particular account has. I would love to see it happen, I just don’t see it actually happening.

The arguments are there on paper but even if Steam did anything about them it probably would have little to no effect on the customers so the lawsuit doesn’t really feel like someone is fighting for the consumer, it just feel like someone trying to take Steam down a peg. It’s fine but it’s unlikely to have an impact on the market, Steam will still stay the biggest seller because Steam offers features to the consumer that no other storefront offers.

Excuse me but what the fuck? I can somehow rationalize the US wanting some additional security for their athletes. It’s weird but America is weird so whatever. But what part of fucking IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT agency indicates “we do operations on foreign soil”? Considering the level of their training they’re probably the biggest threat at the Olympics.

My bad, I meant marketing strategy not advertising budget. Concord definitely had a bigger budget considering they got a Secret level episode deal before the game was even launched. But the budget and bits of marketing don’t matter when it doesn’t gain any traction and whatever their strategy was it gained no traction what so ever.

As for highguard, they did pay for the TGA spot. They didn’t pay extra to be the premier trailer, that Jeff gave them for free. And they did had a weird strategy of going completely radio silent after TGA. But despite that people at launch knew this game existed and has already beaten Concord numbers (at least on Steam) by hundredfold and I don’t think that’s solely because this game is F2P.

If it seemed so clear I’m sure you’ll have no problem backing that up with some actual sources.

So they knew it was going to be a complete failure before they even released it?

I’m 100% of the opinion that the main reason Concord failed is because it didn’t get any advertising. The first time I heard about Concord was the news that it completely flopped at launch and I wasn’t the only one. When that’s the first thing people hear about the game they’re not even going to bother to get interested in what the game is about. To this day I don’t even know if Concord had any redeeming qualities because I haven’t even seen any gameplay outside of 5 second no-context clips. Even bad games receive better numbers than Concord.

Highguard is going to have more staying power than Concord solely on the fact that it actually had an advertising budget.

This is the stupidity of NATO. Article 5 was invoked because article 5 is ambiguously worded and left open for abuse. A terrorist cell doing an act of terror is grounds for invoking article 5. But terrorist cells don’t have borders so who are you defending yourself from? Depending on how brazen you are you can point the finger at any country and say “that’s where the terrorists are” and then go invade that country.

There are moderate Republicans. Not in the sense that they’re moderates but in the sense that they’re moderate (compared to MAGA) within the Republican coalition. They’re the Republicans who don’t like MAGA but they’re devout Republicans and will never vote Democrat. That’s probably the 11% who is unhappy with Trump.