So - Twitter has lost $40 billion in advertising revenue?

Sounds about right. Wonder how much more they can lose.

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I've been a gamedev at a couple AAA studios for almost 5 years now. I can say it's a bit of a mixed bag, and very much depends on the studio.

The studios I've worked at have treated me well. I started out working at EA, which - for all its faults when it comes to gamers - does treat their staff very nicely.

We had free snacks in the office, flexible schedules, a generous remote work policy pre-pandemic (one of the best engineers on our team was permanently in Chicago, another was permanently in Oregon), and leadership that would listen to our complaints and respond honestly. We had weekly board game lunches and D&D sessions on the clock, and a comfy place to play all the latest games whenever we wanted.

Deadlines were reasonable, and the choice was always to cut before crunching. Crunch was on the table, but only as a last resort - I only crunched once in the 3 years I worked on that game, and it was for a single weekend when we had live players running into issues. My pay was on par with a traditional tech job. I went from $15/hour at my college job to $25/hour as an intern to $100k/year as a junior. Within 3 years I was making $140k/year, plus stock options and a 30% yearly bonus.

My one complaint is that EA unceremoniously pulled the plug on us. We had started a beta period and player response was... middling. We thought we could rescue the project, but we needed another 6 months to make it happen to avoid crunching. Leadership pitched the idea... corpo execs said "You aren't getting that additional time; we're killing the project." We got shut down and all 150 devs were sent to the unemployment line.

EA's severance package was very generous, though, and even when they were firing us they went above and beyond what they legally were "supposed" to do. I wound up with my yearly bonus, half a years' worth of salary, plus 2 months of being "technically employed" but being paid to look for another job - so plenty of runway (plus unused sick time + vacation on top of that).

While it always sucks being laid off, and it sucks that the project we spent years on got the axe overnight... they really could've been far worse. Some of my former coworkers decided to do their own thing and it seems to have worked out for them, as they were able to get publisher funding well within the "runway" EA gave us.

Yep, it's been a trend all year. My studio got canned back at the end of January. Publisher called us into a studio-wide meeting scheduled during lunch with 1 hour of notice, only to say "The game you spent 6 years on is canceled and all 150 of you are fired. The media will know in 30 minutes, don't say anything until then if you want to keep a severance package." (I have since landed on my feet elsewhere.)

These studios are owned by big publishers and generally work for years at a loss. With the costs to borrow increasing, we're seeing cuts on long-term investments that might not make their money back (like movies and games).

Volition was owned by Embracer, which is now struggling with funding. So anything that isn't a sure bet is effectively canned - and in turn you see these studios shut down left and right, plus big layoffs from studios that are still open.

You do realize that just makes you look, like, actually insane, right?

Like, that in combination with everything else you wrote just makes it seem like mad ramblings and sort of discounts anything you have to say since you're leading an angry rant with "put someone else's poop in your butt".

And then when you say you've been banned from multiple sites and it's all a grand conspiracy from Reddit to be out to get you, people are just going to think "this guy opened the article by suggesting you shove someone else's poop in your butt."

I know there are studies blah blah blah. But you understand how this looks, right?

This is sort of the mission statement of Kbin. Kbin supports Lemmy, Mastodon, FireFish, and Pixelfed already. It's planned to support PeerTube (this used to work but broke) and Mobilizon.

That's the main reason why I have a Kbin account. :)

Counter-counterpoint: I've been using it since 2019. I think you're exaggerating.

• It aggressively tries to center itself, always. If you're in a lane and it merges with a second lane, the car will swerve sharply to the right as it attempts to go back to the middle of the lane.

• It doesn't allow space for cars to merge until the cars are already merging. It doesn't work with traffic; it does its own thing and is discourteous to other drivers. It doesn't read turn signals; it only reacts to drivers getting over.

• If a motorcycle is lane-splitting, it doesn't move out of the way for the motorcycle. In fact, it assumes anything between lanes isn't an issue. If something is partially blocking a lane but the system doesn't recognize it as fully "your lane", the default is to ignore it. The number of times I've had to disengage to dodge a wide load or a camper straddling two lanes is crazy.

• With the removal of radar, phantom braking has become far, far worse. Any kind of weather condition causes issues. Even if you drive at sunset, the sun can dazzle the cameras and they don't detect things that they should be able to - or worse, they detect problems which aren't there.

• It doesn't understand road hazards. It will happily hit a pothole at 70 MPH. It will ignore road flares and traffic cones. When the lanes aren't clearly marked (because the paint has worn away or because of construction), it can have dramatic behavior.

• It waits so long to brake, and when it brakes it brakes hard. It accelerates just as suddenly, leading to a very jerky ride that makes my passengers carsick.

The only time I trust FSD is when it's stop-and-go traffic. Beyond that I have to pay so much attention to the thing that I might as well just drive myself. The "worst thing it can do" isn't just detour; it's "smash into the thing that it thought wasn't an issue".

There is a distinction between Communists and tankies.

Tankies are a subset of Communists. Specifically, tankies have rejected Marx in favor of authoritarianism, power for power's sake. "Everyone is equal, and some people are more equal than others" sort of thinking. They want to show anyone who doesn't agree with them the barrel of a gun.

The term came from when the Soviets invaded Hungary in order to prevent popular reforms. But I think a better example of what tankies are like (and how they differ from communists) is looking at Czechoslovakia.

Czechoslovakia was a communist country already, but they were doing reforms that would help the average worker and promote equality within the country. The plan was to transition away from a single-party state within Czechoslovakia and towards a form of democratic socialism, where the parties still held core communist ideas but no one figure could wield influence (in line with what Marx expected).

The Soviets saw this as a threat. Their model of a one-party authoritarian state where the secret police dominate everything and the proletariat have no rights is the one they wanted to push everywhere. So they invaded Czechoslovakia and sent tanks into the country.

Later, the Chinese Communist Party sent tanks in to crush peaceful protestors who were asking for human rights and democracy within the proletariat. The protesters were literally turned into jelly by the tanks and washed down into the gutters.

Tankies support these atrocities. They say that a one-party authoritarian state is the only way to do things. Don't let them trick you into thinking they're the only true Communists - tankies want an upper class and a lower class, just like capitalists do. The distinction is that to tankies, the upper class are the party elite, the ones who do and say what they're told. The lower class are the people they don't like, or those who are unlucky enough not to have friends in high places.

Tankies are absolute scum. Lemmy's founders are tankies, Lemmygrad and Lemmy.ml both push tankie politics (Lemmy.ml is more subtle about it, but does enforce it via their moderation policy), and now Hexbear is coming over to Lemmy in order to complete the tankie trifecta.

I hate that this place is infested with tankies. I don't mind communists - I'm pretty left-leaning myself - but tankies are not true communists, and they never can be unless they fundamentally rethink their views about equality and freedom.

100%.

It gets tricky, though. For example, I'm using a website called "Sudowrite" to help me write a novel. I've been kicking this idea around since 2007. I have a general idea for what it should look like, but I always struggle with Act 2.

Literally over a decade's worth of notes. And not a good Act 2.

But I was able to use ChatGPT and Sudowrite (especially its "Story Engine" tool) to finally understand what Act 2 was missing. And now I'm able to rewrite what I've already done, making it better. AI is a tool just like a word processor is a tool.

Lest anyone think I'm writing an ad here - I'm not. Per their FAQ, Sudowrite says that I own the copyright on anything that I generate with their stuff.

Who owns the copyright to what I write?

You do. Anything you write in Sudowrite and anything Sudowrite suggests for you belongs to you.

But if I don't modify it, that's clearly not true (as you mention). Furthermore, I can actually have it suggest things that might run counter to that idea.

I've had it suggest lines from Kafka - good lines, too. I've read Kafka, so I recognized them... but what if I didn't? I don't own the copyright on those lines, as Tom Scott points out in OP's video. Kafka's original German is public domain... most translations are not.

You can highlight some text in the tool and say "Write this in the style of Douglas Adams." It knows who Douglas Adams is. It knows what his work sounds like. And the only way it knows is because its model was trained on his work. When I did this, one of the suggestions included Zaphod Beeblebrox, which was certainly not mentioned in my text. It also suggests spaceships and aliens and futuristic gadgets, all written in the kind of prose that you'd expect from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

How would it know that, if it hadn't read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

It's why Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI. While the model may be a bunch of statistics, it also must know what her text is like - to some degree. We can argue over how, but going back to the AI suggesting Zaphod Beeblebrox... if I didn't know HGTTG maybe I'd think that's a cool name for a character? How can Sudowrite say I own the copyright when it's clear that they don't own it, either?

Which sort of brings me back to the beginning. AI has the potential to be a wonderful tool - again, like going from a typewriter to a computer. I have had this idea for literally 16 years now, and Sudowrite was literally a game changer. I knew all of act 1, act 2 was... ehhhh, and then act 3 was never satisfying without a good act 2. I knew where I wanted to go, but not how to get there. AI really helped, because it understands story structures - and how to make good stories (with some prodding - it's not perfect). And now, whenever I'm stumped, I can type some stuff into the prompt and it'll generate ideas for me.

But that only works if we really figure out where the line is for copyright. I'm trusting what Sudowrite is telling me... but I'm taking a risk, because what if they're wrong?

Based started on 4chan. People stole memes from 4chan, where it spread and became Zoomer slang.

Cringe I think has a similar but slightly different etymology; I don't know if it necessarily came from 4chan or if it came from Reddit.

But with Arch you have to pay attention whenever you update or else you brick your whole system. Ask me how I know.

I've decided it's not worth my time trying to figure it out. I just use KDE Neon and press the "check for updates" button. Don't get me wrong - I know my way around a terminal - but honestly it's just not worth my time anymore. Just give me a thing that works without me needing to think about it.

You're the one who chose to post it without fixing it yourself to make it readable. ChatGPT didn't paste it into that box and hit the "add comment" button.

@nonexcludable @masires

On top of this - a lot of mods (like a lot of users) dislike the fediverse. The Twitter -> Mastodon exodus left a bad taste in a lot of peoples' mouths, and that holds true for mods as well as users.

I'm in a Discord with a bunch of other Reddit mods. We originally were using it to organize the protest, but it's become a place to discuss next steps. A lot of them pony up the "the fediverse is too confusing" angle. Even when it's explained, they say "No, it's too confusing" and refuse to even try to ask questions about where they're getting lost. Instead, they push alternatives like Squabbles (which seems to be the most common among the anti-fediverse folks).

On top of that, both Lemmy and Kbin don't have much in the way of moderation tools. There doesn't appear to be a spam filter and certainly no AutoModerator. Kbin's API is (currently) read-only, so a bot can't even be written to work like AutoMod. This makes large communities much harder to moderate and should basically be the next step for devs once they stabilize from the Reddit exodus, as anything with more than 1000 users will quickly start to become basically impossible for human mods to keep up.

The fact that those tools don't exist turns a lot of mods off from joining as well, and fuels the anti-fediverse sentiment.

Some of the holdouts understand the limitations and just don't think it's a good platform for them. They have legitimate criticisms and point out ways that their communities wouldn't work properly on Kbin/Lemmy. Other holdouts are stubbornly pig-headed and refuse to understand. They derisively dismiss anyone who tries to explain as a "tech bro", dig in their heels and draw a hard line in the sand for reasons they can't even explain other than "I don't like anything fediverse."

But there is a list of subs that are advertising their fediverse equivalents; my sub (500k+ members) has an ad for our community in the "we're reopening, sadly" sticky and the sidebar. You can also see a list of places which have equivalents over at https://sub.rehab/; anything with the "official" label is advertised somewhere by the mods that run that sub on Reddit.