It’s been used many times before, but I like the analogy of ordering food. If I go to a restaurant and order risotto, I haven’t made the dish, I’ve only consumed it. I want you to focus on that word “consume”, it’s important here.

Another idea I’ve seen recently that I like was a summed post something like this:

• People use AI to write a 4,000 word article from a 15 word idea (introduction of noise)
• Others then use AI to summarize the 4,000 word article into a 15 word blurb (introduction of more noise)

I know I’m using a lot of analogies here; from food to writing and now the visual medium - but stick with me. Completely sidestepping any lofty notions of soul or humanity, let’s look strictly at what’s being communicated in a visual piece of art generated by AI. It’s an idea, one containing neither your specific style (the creative process) or vision (the final product), though you may feel you get a close approximation after several iterations and a detailed/complex enough prompt. If you wanted to convey the idea of “eagle perched in a tree”, you’ve already done so with that phrase (or prompt in this respect). By providing an AI-generated image, you’ve narrowed my own ability to interpret down into the AI-generated noise now taking up space between us.

The reason you’d use AI-generated art is because you need to fill space, like the thumbnail to go with an article. An empty space to dump things into. While I can’t ever claim enough authority to define what exactly art is and is not (nobody can), I can say with absolute certainty that no matter how far the tech evolves, to me PERSONALLY, AI will only ever generate content, not art. There is already more art in the world than I could possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes, I neither want nor need this garbage.

We could explain it to you, but you’re not interested in understanding.

Same on all accounts. Got the original NES Metroid for my birthday when I was a kid and impacted my taste in games forevermore. Of course I’ve played all the Castlevanias as well and Hollow Knight is a masterpiece.

It’s hard to properly compare because I’ve played Super Metroid more times than I honestly remember and have only made it through Dread 1.5x (at best). There are so many cool rooms in Super (and even later games like the Prime series) where I play them and go, “Oh, this is the room with X!” where X is a cool encounter, maybe a friendly/non-hostile creature, or an entertaining set piece. Dread doesn’t really have that, the areas check off zones like flavors of ice cream, the music is not memorable, and creatures are often used across multiple zones, further diluting any uniqueness to the areas.

It’s best summed up by this screenshot I took of Dread (I added the red outlines around the black space myself to highlight my point). Notice how the foreground has no character or texture and all the detail has been pushed into the background, which is essentially the negative space you traverse through. My eyes don’t really hold on this area, they capture the boundary of the play space and then navigate through it, passing over a lot of the inconsequential stuff in the background. Again, compare to Super.

Also the EMMI stealth sections are so incongruous with the rest of the game you could cleanly slice them out entirely (while redistributing any of the power ups of course) and the game would be the same. In fact I rather hate them because instead of taking my time to explore and soak in the environment, I’m just chased through a very samey looking area.

Oh and finally, it’s a small point and I don’t want to make too much out of it, but like … the game opens with SPOILERS beating her so hard she loses her abilities. That’s weird, right? Kinda oof, IMHO.

Metroid Dread still kinda … bothers me. At the risk of sounding overly contentious, am I the only one who thought it was like a 7/10 action game and a 5/10 Metroidvania?

I won’t go into it all now, but I feel like the difficulty spike is a knock-on from the lack of collectibles. While you can argue about the usefulness of previous collectibles in Metroid games, in Dread they’ve been pared down to Missile Tanks, Energy Tanks, and Power Bomb Tanks. To make discovering those limited things more valuable, they pumped up boss difficulty so you’d either have to come in with a sufficiently high stockpile or perform a counter.

I’m not sure if that’s 100% accurate and I may be generalizing my own experiences too much, but otherwise there’s just not really enough excuse for me to go out of my way and collect all those Missile Tanks unless I’m specifically going for a completionist run. Seeing yet another +5 Missile Tank tucked away somewhere just doesn’t make me go, “Wow, I need to get there!” but increasing the boss difficulty to a point that requires it also makes it feel less optional? Anyone agree?

certified Dread disdainer

1000% this. Without giving away too much information, I work(ed) for a cloud provider (not one of the big ones, there are a surprising number of smaller ones in the field you’ve probably never heard of before). I quit this week to take a position in local government with some quaint, on-prem setup.

1. We were always understaffed for what we promised. Two guys per shift and if one of us took vacation; oops, lol. No extra coverage, just deal.
2. Everyone was super smart but we didn’t have time to work the tickets. Between crashes, outages, maintenance, and horrendous tickets that took way too much work to dig into, there was just never enough time. If you had a serious problem that took lengthy troubleshooting, good luck!
3. We over-promised on support we could provide, often taking tickets that were outside of infrastructure scope (guest OS shit, you broke your own server, what do you want me to do about it?) and working them anyway to please the customer or forwarding them directly to one of our vendors and chaining their support until they caught wise and often pushed back.
4. AI is going to ruin Support. To be clear, there will always be support and escalation engineers who have to work real problems outside the scope of AI. However without naming names, there’s a big push (it’ll be everyone before too long, mark it) for FREE tier support to only chat with AI bots. If you need to talk to a real human being, you gotta start dishing out that enterprise cash.

Mix all that together and then put the remaining pressure on the human aspect still holding things up and there’s a collapse coming. Once businesses get so big they’re no longer “obligated” to provide support, they’ll start charging you for it. This has always been a thing of course, anyone who’s worked enterprise agreements knows that. But in classic corpo values, they’re closing the gap. Pay more for support, get less in return. They’ll keep turning that dial until something breaks catastrophically, that’s capitalism baby.

I know it’s a 45 minute Youtube video, but I love Tom Nicholas and all his stuff is fascinating and worth watching. Check this out as he does a sincere deep dive on it to get an honest answer and it’s pretty enlightening! It’s actually evolved even in the short time since its inception on the internet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmzyGNXxwdo

Check out https://www.giuspen.net/cherrytree/, lightweight note-taking app with interesting scripting function built in.

Even if that’s not your cup of tea, it has the option to save your notebook to a single sqlite file, so I take that as good enough proof it’ll work for your similar purposes as well.

Other backers include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

WTF, no, this is worse in every way. So instead of being involved with the people and topics I choose, it’s instead left up to an algorithm? Somehow even more opaque than usual because of AI involvement.

This isn’t solving any problem, this is yet another mask to push content in front of people.

So it could possibly be construed to “Microsoft’s Dirty Operating System”, yeah?

I keep seeing people make this argument and I think we all need to realize that different people use social media in different ways.

I moved to Bluesky as well. It’s where my friends went, it’s where the artists and authors I follow went, it’s where some of the bigger names I care to keep up with went.

Feels a little gross, I’m not gonna defend Bluesky or anything, but there are more reasons for the choice.

The rollout already hit me and passed. I use Chrome at work with uBlock mostly because it’s mandated and I burnt through all the warnings and videos were starting to not play. I thought that was that, I was too lazy to fix it on my work PC but a day later uBlock updated and it hasn’t been an issue since.

Procrastinating wins again, I never took direct action. I don’t want to get too hopeful, but I think even Google is going to have more trouble with this than they anticipate

In response to a perfectly valid question about dumbass plan I just came up with:

“we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it”

There is a very meaningful difference between humane, highly regulated animal testing and what Musk is doing. Compounding this is the feeling that Musk’s high profile is what’s letting him get away with this in the first place. He wants to slap his name and face on everything for the credit when it’s good, be gets to be the lightning rod when it’s not.

There are no legitimate uses, full stop.

As others have pointed out, it’s just a fully public database. Its use case is among trustless parties, and that’s why it fails. At some point, somebody is going to want to take action off the data and that’s going to involve a trusted party enforcing it. Sooo … just have the trusted party host the data (and make it public if you really care). And if all the parties are truly that trustless, 1) why are they dealing with either and 2) get a third party trustee to broker your deals

No.

If I’m sitting on the couch and I want sushi, I can open up a website, pick exactly what I want, even maybe make a few substitutions for me specificity, and get it delivered right to my house, but that doesn’t mean I made sushi. I just HAVE sushi.

Anyone who has ever actually supported a real artist and commissioned work understands that they don’t own the copyright, unless extra agreements have been made to transfer it. It still belongs to the original artist.

And as stated, AI can’t own that. So no one does. Who would want to? It’s garbled, derivative work and anyone with access to the same prompt and models could generate it themselves, which is why I find the prompt guarding so hilarious. It’s all so blatantly dumb and transparent.

I’ve heard this is often a tactic of theirs, especially if they’re being recorded by a body cam or such. Just simply declaring loudly that they smell alcohol or suspect drugs sets it on the record so now it’s your word against the cop’s. If it ever ends up as evidence or in courts, it now appears as if there was probable cause for everything that follows and it’s only your word to say the record straight (good luck!)

One of my favorite examples of this was playing The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventure on the Gamecube back in they day. Me and a friend were really into it, but had trouble rounding up extra players. We got his little sister and an unwilling third friend to join. After about 30 minutes the unwilling friend, Marcus, gets bored with the game and starts sabotaging the rest of us. He’d run around smacking us with his sword making us drop rupees or refuse to stand where we needed him. That’s honestly when it became fun for all of us, though.

The other three of us would plan out the room and then we’d figure out how to wrangle Marcus back into place. Someone would hold him so he couldn’t go rogue and hit us while the others got in place to pull some levers before the wrangler would toss Marcus onto a pressure plate or something. He got to continue being a little bastard while we (slowly) made progress through the game. He eventually came around and helped us when it was absolutely necessary, but it was always clear it was just so he could keep being a bastard again. I really enjoy that asymmetrical style of gameplay and wish more things capitalized on it.

Also on the Gamecube of notable mention was Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. Always fun when someone would get the personal mission of “take the most damage” and become a suicidal maniac in every encounter, much to everyone else’s detriment. Ah the good old days.

But if I give them one of my nickels, what will I rub the other one against?

Thank you, that’s good clarification on what the actual motivations are here. Was having trouble following all the threads and sussing it out myself. Appreciate it.

Am I missing something obvious here? What is motivating such stringent measures to be put in place when things have been sufficient without them thus far? Who is asking for this?

I live in my own little online echo chambers, but even I can’t believe there’s enough ground swell for the government to step in on … What? Violence? Addiction? This is very confusing.