I’m down for uh… one tiny part of this. I certainly think we could do to make games smaller, I’m sick of massive open worlds and colossal play times, which seem like an astounding amount of developer time to make swathes of stuff that ends up so soulless that I don’t want to play it.

More focus on fundamentals, shorter, more meaningful campaigns with well executed gameplay and ideas would be wonderful, because we’re rapidly finding the limits of every studio on earth trying to make the “forever” game. Players only have so much time.

The best recent example I have is Mario Kart World. It’s a marvellous game, wall and rail grinding are amazing, the tracks are some of the best in the franchise, it’s fantastic. But you can tell a massive amount of effort and years went into the open world, which uh… actively makes the game worse? Free roam is fun for an hour or so, but I have no idea why I’d want to do it with friends, and the game shoves its 200+ “intermission” tracks down your throat constantly. Time trials are the best mode in the game, because it’s the only real way to consistently play the excellent tracks enough to actually unpack and learn the shortcuts and tricks that are afforded by the game’s deep new mechanics. I feel bad that the team wasted so much time on something the community begs for better ways to avoid.

Honestly, the delays have increased my hype more than decreased it. I’m not one to obsess over a release, I’ve played other things and enjoyed them in the interim, so I really have no resentment for the long dev cycle.

Lately my habits have been to try to avoid games for a couple months to let them get polished up anyway (I recently regretted picking up DOOM TDA at launch after they reworked combat across the whole game, and that would’ve been a better first playthrough experience). Team Cherry is a team I know can use time well like that, in fact, HK did get broad balance overhauls before I discovered it. They also added an astounding amount of well integrated post-launch content, so I’m excited to see just how much they’ve managed to create and polish Silksong with all this time, and will feel comfortable playing at or close to launch now due to these delays.

Mhm, fair point. Although… I would say the steam deck’s popularity and proof of viability as a gaming device is doing an immense amount of work on its own. I built a gaming PC ~2 years ago, and even as a long time developer and someone comfortable with a UNIX terminal I opted to get a copy of Windows for gaming, and had to awkwardly get to grips with it and find tools to get it playing the way I wanted.

It’s only ~1 month ago that the prevalence and maturity of the steam deck (combined with Windows recall re-emerging🤮) finally had me at ease enough to give Bazzite a shot, and since jumping myself and expressing how happy I am with it, 2 of my long term “on the fence” friends have asked me questions and are starting to try Linux themselves.

Larger Linux market share, regardless of how it gets there, gives broad confidence in Linux, and also pushes developers and Steam itself to maintain Linux support and tools like Proton, which reinforces the cycle, even if it doesn’t help us “kill Windows” for as long as users don’t understand how to install it.

Mhm, of course, critical thinking in general is absolutely important, although I take some issue with describing looking for artifacts as “vague hunches”. Fake photos have existed for ages, and we’ve found consistent ways to spot and identify them, such as checking shadows, the directionality of light in a scene, the fringes of detailed objects, black levels and highlights, and even advanced techniques like bokeh and motion blur. You don’t see many people casting doubt on the validity of old pictures with Trump and Epstein together, for example, despite the long existence of photoshop and advanced VFX. Hell, even this image could have been photoshopped, and you’re relying on your eyes to catch the evidence of that if that were the case.

The techniques I’ve outlined here aren’t likely to become irrelevant in the next 5+ years, given they’re based on how the underlying technology works, similar to how LLMs aren’t likely to 100% stop hallucinating any time soon. More than that, I actually think there’s a lot less incentive to work these minor kinks out than something like LLM hallucination, because these images already fool 99% of people, and who knows how much additional processing power it would take to run this at a resolution where you could get something like flawless tufts of grass, in a field that’s already struggling to make a profit given the high costs of generating this output. And if/when these techniques become invalid, I’ll put in the effort to learn new ones, as it’s worthwhile to be able to quickly and easily identify fakes.

As much as I wholeheartedly agree that we need to think critically and evaluate things based on facts, we live in a world where the U.S. President was posting AI videos of Obama just a couple weeks ago. He may be an idiot who is being obviously manipulative, but it’s naive to think we won’t eventually get bad actors like him who try to manipulate narratives like that with current events, where we can’t rely on simply fact-checking history, or that someone might weave a lie that doesn’t have obvious logical gaps, and we need some kind of technique to verify images to settle the inevitable future “he said, she said” debates. The only real alternative is to just never trust a new photo again, because we can’t 100% prove anything new hasn’t been doctored.

We’ve survived in a world with fake imagery for decades now, I don’t think we need to roll over and accept AI as unbeatable just because it fakes things differently, or because it might hypothetically improve at hiding itself in the future.

Anyway, rant over, you’re right, critical thinking is paramount, but being able to clearly spot fakes is a super useful skill to add to that kit, even if it can’t 100% confirm an image as real. I believe these are useful tools to have, which is why I took the time to point them out despite the image already having been proven as not AI by others dating it before I got here.

True, someone else did some reverse image searching before I got here, but I think it’s an important skill to develop without relying on dating the image, as that will only work for so long, and there will likely be more important things than memes that will need to be proven/disproven in the future. A reverse image search probably won’t help us with the next political scandal, for example. It’s a pretty good backup to have when it applies though, nice that it proves me correct here.

Haha, that’s just because I used a bullet point list. No em dashes though, at the very least.

I’d recommend you get some practice identifying and proving AI generated images. I agree this has a bit of that “look”, but in this case I’m quite certain it’s just repeated image compression/a cheap camera. Here’s the major details I looked at after seeing your comment:

• The grass at the bottom left. AI is frequently sloppy with little details and straight lines, usually the ones in the background. In this case, you can look at any blade of grass and follow it, and its path makes sense. The same happens with the lines in the tiles, the water stains, etc.
• The birthmark on the large brown dog. In this case, this is a set of three photos, which gives us an easy way to spot AI. AI generated images start from random noise, so you’d never get the exact same birthmark, consistent across different angles, from a prompt like “large brown dog with white birthmark on chest”. Spotting a change in the birthmark, or a detail like it, would be a dead giveaway, but I can’t spot any.
• There are other tricks as well, such as looking for strange variations in contrast and exposure from the underlying noise, but those are more difficult to explain in text. Corridor Digital has some good videos demonstrating it with visual examples if you’re interested, but suffice to say I don’t pick up on that here either.

It’s useful to be able to prove or disprove your suspicions, as well as to be able to back them up with something as simple as “this is AI generated, just look at the grass”. Hope this helps!

At this point, my assumption whenever I see heavy handed RTO orders like this, is that you’re seeing disguised layoffs.

Don’t want to spook the stock market, but still “need” to cut people to show profit “growth” this quarter? Just be such a massive ass to your employees that a ton of them quit. It’s that easy.

Might be a good use case for Anubis, in addition to the URLParam passwords mentioned elsewhere. Enough protection to prevent trivial brute force scraping, while also being basically invisible to users.