Reading the article, where did you get “audience rewards” == “maximal extraction of cash from the audience”?

IMO having a very profitable game that will comfortably fund your studio for the next 5-10 years AND that has universal critical acclaim and a devoted fanbase is reward enough. You didn’t lose because you didn’t make the most money out of all your competitors.

Different games have different audiences. Some people want arcade slop and slot machines to play with friends, they were never going to play BG3 or E33 anyway.

Important to the conversation as well is the fact that plenty of live-service games have recently failed spectacularly. Remember Concord? Within the industry, that is a clear signal that very high budget online slop isn’t as risk-free as previously assumed, which makes ambitious narrative-driven single player games an interesting diversification strategy for studios.

It’s not either or. Executives could spend 100M€ on “nearly guaranteed” online slop, or 80M€ on online slop and 20M€ on a good narrative game. And the critical and commercial success of games like BG3 and E33 are definitely moving the needle.
Especially when micro-economically, there are diminish returns when scaling dev teams. It’s kind of obvious but the first million euros does a lot more for a project than the 100th million. That further strengthens the case for a move away for big players from ONLY funding live-service slop.

(They’ve already stated they won’t do Portal: VR because of the nausea issue.)

I completely agree with your analysis, they would need to completely switch up the ambitions from a writing perspective for Portal 3 to make any sense. There are plenty of super interesting stories to be told in Aperture Labs, but I don’t think that Valve is structured to write any of them

Valve has always been “gameplay/tech first, story second”, and it just happened that Portal 2 delivered unexpectedly well on the writing. But I don’t think they can make a game with gameplay/tech twice as ambitious as Portal 2, and at the same time double down on Portal 2’s amazing writing. They’re just human and most of the people involved have moved on with their lives; in fact Portal 2 was their last truly ambitious narrative-heavy game, and they had to hire the old writers as consultants to make Alyx (which I haven’t played but from what I heard the narrative wasn’t on HL2’s level).

I’d love to be proved wrong but IMO there won’t be a Portal 3 for as long as Valve exists in its current form.

It’s one of my favorite games of all time, but I don’t think Portal 2’s basic formula would be culturally relevant if it was reused today. The quippy writing is very 2010s-coded (à la Guardians of the Galaxy), the gameplay is a bit too simple to be re-used as is in 2025, and the sweet&short linear storyline of Portal 2 would ironically be lacking ambition for a successor to Portal 2.

Like all truly Great pieces of classic media, Portal 2 is a product of a skilled and truly passionate team getting together at the perfect time with the right idea, and reaching its public at a culturally relevant time.

The Portal universe still has stories to tell, and there are still test chambers to solve, so I obviously wouldn’t complain if Portal 3 came out, but I understand why Valve wouldn’t want to make a barely decent game in the shadow of Portal 2.

It can do both, lossiness is toggleable.

If you’ve seen a picture on Lemmy, you’ve almost certainly seen a WebP. A fair bit of software – most egregiously from Microsoft – refuses to decode them still, but every major browser has supported WebP for years and since superior data efficiency compared to JPG/PNG means is already very widely used on the web. Bandwidth is not that cheap.

Mathematics articles are the most obtuse I come across. I think the Venn diagram of good mathematicians and good science communicators is very close to non-intersecting.

Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from

The entire mistake right there. Look no further. They saw a solution (LLMs) and started hunting for a problem.

Had they done it the right way round there might have been some useful, though less flashy, outcome. I agree many article summaries are badly written. So why not experiment with an AI that flags those articles for review? Or even just organize a community drive to clean up article summaries?

The questions are rhetorical of course. Like every GenAI peddler they don’t have an interest in the problem they purport to solve, they just want to play with or sell you this shiny toy that pretends really convincingly that it is clever.

This is separate from A-GPS. Google seems to be using WiFi rather than Bluetooth, but the broader point remains the same. No one is stopping any vendor from crowdsourcing the location of every BT device… which is what Apple has done, for Airtags which don’t have the battery capacity to run a GPS chip.

Sure without GPS it wouldn’t be very effective to rely on only nearby devices to guess the current location. But an attacker only has to get lucky once to get your home address. So the only safe approach is to hide nearby devices/networks from unauthorized apps.

Every Bluetooth device has a unique identifier. Any phone that has seen that Bluetooth device in the past could have told google/apple/whoever “hey BTW this device is at those coordinates”.

Google already uses this with WiFi to help “bootstrap” GPS localization. It is much faster to get a GPS fix if you already know roughly where you are (a few seconds vs a couple minutes), so they use nearby WiFi/Bluetooth devices to determine that. Remember 10-15 years ago when getting a GPS fix took forever? GPS didn’t change, this did.
Apple went further and does this with Airtags now. Every Bluetooth device that ever went near an iPhone is in Apple’s database with GPS coordinates.

So unless you live alone in a mountain cabin that has never been visited by someone with a smartphone before and you didn’t disable the “enhanced localization” feature on your phone, yes your Bluetooth is at risk of giving up your location.

Plenty of cars flash their brake lights when ABS(/ESP?) engages, which is reasonable and should be a legal requirement IMO.

There’s lots of room to give additional info in between that and “brake light is on because the driver doesn’t understand that they can do mild adjustments by letting off the gas / stupid bitch-ass VW PHEV computer thinks using cruise control downhill with electric regen requires the motherfucking brake lights”. It’s like no-one realizes or cares that brake lights lose all purpose if they’re on when the car isn’t meaningfully decelerating. ARGH.

Or way worse, what you said but senior techs.

Microsoft has been at this long enough that there is an army of old guys whose only - but extremely specialized - skillset is navigating arcane GUIs for group policies and AD administration. But drop them in a bash terminal and they’re like a fish dropped on a tennis court.

Finished severance s02 this weekend. Very disappointing ending to me (that I will not spoil), even though it seems like it’s all anyone could talk about a couple months back.

Maybe it’s because I just played Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and we were spoiled with incredible writing that does foreshadowing excellently with deep and nuanced themes, but while Severance’s execution is great in the details the overarching plot left me severely disappointed. As if they got great directors, actors, set designers, dialogue, but just wrote the s01e01 hook and then kind of just made up the plot as an afterthought. Keeping up mystery for its own sake because once the curtain is pulled back, we realize the stage pieces are not that impressive.

It’s still good TV but it ain’t that deep and IDK why everybody’s raving on about it. Anyway thanks for coming to my ted talk.

It’s because the ~*~tech~*~ sector fundamentally relies on different economics than most engineering companies, and that has investors absolutely bricked up.

What investors being sold by “tech” companies is infinite ROI. Sure, [YouTube/Twitter/Uber/whoever] has never been profitable more than a few quarters in a row (if that), but think! They have virtually no fixed costs! That means if we just inject a few more millions in R&D we will finally reach the threshold where we can scale deployments to hundreds of millions of users who will be paying us MRR! Hosting costs are virtually nothing and at that scale R&D is basically free as well! And if push comes to shove, we can reduce costs to nearly zero by firing all the engineers! The economies of scale are practically infinite, they say.

It’s the rare instance where capitalists actually care about long-terms gain a bit too much. The tech industry tends to be single-mindedly chasing monthly user counts first and revenue second or third. Then at some point reality catches up, the accountants start getting their way, the product starts getting enshittified, and the users leave for something else. Did the product actually turn a net profit over its lifetime? Who knows, who cares. Everyone who made those early business decisions has long since cashed out.

Where the markets are unbelievably irrational is that this frenzy has spilled over into industries where the the sales pitch for infinite economies of scale doesn’t even make theoretical sense. Tesla sells physical products, so why are they worth more than every other automotive company combined? OpenAI operates at an enormous loss because LLMs are just expensive to train and run by nature, so they cannot be profitable under the current business model at any scale. Yet here we are. Just because it’s labeled as “tech”, investors are throwing our retirement funds into it. And any time the markets are being irrational, there’s a risk that investors wise up to the bad fundamentals and the whole thing comes crashing down.

In Europe we’ve been spared some of the worst of the craziness. Although venture capitalism is alive and well in the software sector, I would wager that European companies tend to have stronger fundamentals on average (but that’s just a gut feeling, I’m not an economist).

Suse has been trying pretty hard with Harvester. KVM-based, VMs-as-k8s-pods which leverages all existing k8s tooling, as well as the same multi-cluster federation as RKE2.

Seems pretty great from afar, though it’s very much under active development.

I know people in that predicament and they’re, charitably, helpless little babies when you tell them to read two paragraphs of documentation on how to run one command in a Linux CLI.

Fundamentally nothing out there really caters to the needs of resellers. Your average resale company couldn’t automate a backup job to save itself from bankruptcy if it doesn’t come with a neat GUI, a 24/7 support contract, and preferably a Microsoft or oracle logo somewhere in the corner to inspire confidence.

Like I jest but there are Microsoft outfits and FOSS outfits and there is essentially zero professional overlap even though they both sell IT products/solutions. The disconnect is a mile wide. Which translates to wildly different business models where the FOSS people have been running shit in containers for 15 years while the Microsoft slaves are still licensing their monolithic solutions by the CPU Core and doing weird-ass shit like buy 4-core xeons because it’s more economical with these archaic licensing models.

So sure Proxmox/Suse are certainly very happy with their sales number right now but anecdotally I’m not seeing the migration frenzy that one would expect under such intense price gouging. Broadcom correctly identified that it will take years for these super corporate structures to steer away from “the way we’ve always done things” and in the meantime that’s untold millions in additional short-term profits.

The main difference in difficulty between the modes is the parry window. If your problem is the parry window, switch to normal mode.

I find in normal mode the game is not very hard for main quests, but extremely punitive with the many optional bosses. So if you still want a challenge, they’re right there.

This can be hard to implement and avoidable through “creative accounting” (e.g. living off daddy money with no declared income) so as a hybrid/additional solution fines should turn into penalties over repeat offences.

Some countries use points licensing where your driver’s license will simply be taken away if you have too many recent infractions on record.

Companies should also be prevented from doing certain kinds of business if they repeatedly break the law. We have legal frameworks for this, we are just refusing to apply them due to politics and corruption.

That’s a broad topic where I would avoid making generalizations. It’s a matter of tradeoffs.

The key indicators I’d look at are, in no particular order:

• Cost. Does cloud hosting provide economies of scale that dramatically reduce operational costs?
• Risk. If your cloud provider hikes prices or turns out to be based in a hostile fascist dictatorship, can you easily switch to another offering?
• Liability. For better and more often for worse, companies love delegating business because it relieves them of liability if someone cocks it up. It’s a harsh reality that some SMEs have IT infrastructure that looks fine and inexpensive until they find out the hard way that their “IT person” doesn’t know what a firewall is.
• Accounting. Companies strongly prefer OpEx to CapEx due to the way modern accounting incentives, and cloud hosting is tailored to that.
• Practicality. If you want your email to sync to your phone abroad, you’ll need a cloud (though it could be a private cloud, but then I’d recommend a VPN which is more secure but less practical).
• Security. Does the NSA looking at all your files matter? For governments I would hope it does buuuuut…

Either way it goes, be mindful of blind spots. Companies often don’t (IMO) properly assess the risk of locking themselves into walled gardens due to short-termism. But at the same time IT gremlins such as myself tend to underestimate the costs we represent, not just as salaried employees but as people who might cock something up or leave behind us an undocumented mess that will costs hundreds of thousands to rebuild a few years from now.

I can’t help but notice that your comment is highly upvoted, with one down vote at the time of writing. I also notice that whenever someone comments something like “Americans deserve Trump and everything that is happening to them” their comment is usually around 50 % downvoted.

Regardless of your opinion on whether a people can collectively be held responsible for the actions of the majority, it looks like a lot of Americans on this website need to reevaluate their own cognitive dissonance.

(Also what the fuck is up with the comment at the top of the chain. That is literally hate speech and could get you fined in my country).

Belgium has some of (if not the) lowest income inequality in the OECD due to our very harsh income tax (highest median tax wedge of the OECD, yes even including the nordics). With quite a few asterisks attached to that statement of course because our fiscal system is a complete mess so if you’re special kinds of well off (e.g. you make your income on capital gains) you’ll be taxed very little.
How low income inequality doesn’t correlate to very high standards of living like it does in the Nordics… Well I’ll leave it to historians and economists to hash it out. The answer you get will almost certainly reflect that person’s personal politics. Harsh industrial decline is worth mentioning though.

Wallonia is measurably poorer than Flanders, but both regions are developed western economies. The US has a murder rate 535 % of Belgium’s, and I don’t see anyone warning students away from studying there (or well, not until the past few months).
That judge should be investigated and the prosecutor should definitely appeal, and besides there is a lot of work to do safety-wise, especially for women to be able to feel safe, but that’s hardly a problem specific to Leuven or Belgium.

1. He’s dumber than you give him credit for
2. What is the point of the supposed cover story? To cover from who, about what? He’s literally paying people to vote, again. Next to that, buying a social media to influence it almost sounds democratic.

The reason that conspiracy theory is appealing is the same for all conspiracy theories; it’s more comforting to think the powerful have a clever masterful evil plan than the sad reality that we’re all making it up as we go, even the literal Nazis.

Relevant ContraPoints from 4 days ago