So I read a lot of ideological takes like this about video games. My take: gamers take their hobby way too seriously. Maybe I'm just out of the loop but I never hear this kind of talk about music, movies, books, or really anything else. You listen to the music you think sound good, watch movies that look interesting. I'm of the same mindset with video games.
EA being bought by the Saudis and people taking a hard "moral stance" to not purchase any further EA games is another example. I've got a bridge to sell you if you think you're boycotting everything (even every video game) that's making the Saudis money. I dislike EA for other reasons and their products tend to be bland but if they make a good game I'm going to reward the developers of that game so they hopefully make further good games.
And in terms of the conspiracy theory the engine is an engine. Developers choose what to implement and can tone down all the crazy new tech as much as they want. They can also write custom stacks to do things no other Unreal Engine game would do. Unreal actually scales pretty well in that regard. Current minimum specs for Satisfactory is an i5-3570K and 1650 GTX. Recommended video card is a 2070 RTX. I have a 15 year old computer sitting in a closet that can play the game fairly well. There's so many great indie titles out there that if I only had that 15 year old computer I'd be spoiled for choice. But IMO we also need bleeding edge games to move the needle forward and keep the industry exciting. I want crazy tech in my video game that makes my jaw drop like the trailers for Witcher 4 do right now. That keeps 100s of millions of people watching things like The Video Game Awards.
In terms of homogenization I see the exact opposite happening. You probably have a slew of games to play right now that all use different engines. I myself have a backlog I don't think I can get through in my lifetime that's going to grow immensely this September. There's so many games being released and they're made in so many different ways that saying there's homogenization seems strange. Right now I'm hopping between Death Stranding 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Terratech Legion, and Resident Evil Requiem. Where is the monoculture? The idea of not giving TerraTech Legion a chance simply because the devs used unreal seems wrong.
The music sounds good? I listen to the music. The book is well written? I buy the book. The game is fun? I buy the game. You could spend your whole life nit-picking reasons why X publisher is bad, X record label is the worst (and in both cases most ARE) but in the end these companies will still make ungodly amounts of money and you're just making life less enjoyable for yourself.
I don't really understand making hard and fast rules like this. Clair Obscur is one of the best and most beautiful games I've ever played. The Witcher 4 has the best graphics I've seen come from a video game. Satisfactory is nuts to look at when you see an eloquent end game build.
I also don't understand why people knee-jerk hate upscaling/fake frames so much. I can understand for fast-paced competitive multiplayer games, but for something like Clair Obscur where the ideal way to play is on the couch on a 4k TV give me all the upscaling and fake frames you can muster.
Metroid has always been a very (very) small series in the grand scheme of Nintendo. If they screw up the next Zelda or Mario they might be in trouble. But they also seem to have actual magicians work on those games.
We're warned of heatwaves and given instructions on how to not die all the time now. Not once did this occur when I was a child where I live. Record temperatures are more shown as an almanac style this is what's happened today whenever I see them. Personally I wish more scaremongering were happening right now.
I love the dedication but isn't using a good password manager the much cleaner and robust way of fixing the bank phishing problem? Or using the app on your phone.
What programmer codes exactly the way of any other programmer? Human ability to write code is dependent on time allowed, how hungry they are, how much sleep they got and a million other non-determined factors.
If that hammer could allow people to go into people's homes / work en masse, steal all their information, blackmail them, steal their identities, break their systems (including those of hospitals and other critical infrastructure) and generally help fund bad actors through it all we'd think of having restrictions on hammers too. A hammer can't screw people over by the millions.
I don't like this argument specifically with AI. Facial recognition everywhere you go is just a tool. Your job creating a detailed profile on exactly how you work, who you talk to, and about what is just a tool. The tools have become so good and easy to use we have to have serious discussions about them before things get out of hand.
You can understand deeply what you're doing and still make a huge amount of mistakes. This is what we're ironically (in terms of this conversation) seeing AI point out over and over now that companies have mythos in their hands. If I had to bet on it at some point we'll see the shift where if AI hasn't fully reviewed and edited code it's considered unsafe to use. Similar to how we all understand how once self-driving cars are good enough human driving should probably be minimized because we're so bad at it.
They really are though. There seems to be some confusion about "determinism" as if everyone writes perfect code and every compiler interprets that code perfectly. There's bugs and nondeterminism in every step of the chain with human coders and, say, a .NET compiler too. The idea that we've got coding down to a pristine and exact science and AI is some random chaos element that muddies it makes no sense to me after seeing how most human created code works.
I see this as a type of psychological manipulation. Almost everyone is interested in other people's story and the basic human trait of listening gets you over that hump. The "and align your request with their self-interest and self-image" part is what gets me. As an off-the-cuff example that someone might use this advice to craft:
“You’re such a generous person. I know you love being there for friends. Could you help me move Saturday?”
It's an example that of course sounds ridiculous to anybody that reads it, but it's essentially what the book teaches. Gather information not even about the person but how the person feels about themselves and then use that as a tool to make them feel good when you're talking to them.
I suppose it's also not helped that many of the people I've met who use this and admire this book have psychopathic traits. They're very good at faking caring but actually can't. It's a cold calculation to them and admittedly it's very effective at getting them ahead.
>Search engine AI summaries flat out lie and deceive people all the time.
What was the alternative you were using that gave you 100% accurate information before? Search engines lied all the time as well. As did news sites and any other place you could go to for information. AI just makes it easier to get the information people were already consuming.
If at any point in a natural conversation you're going to a trick a book taught you instead of just speaking your mind I'd argue it's a mask of a kind.
Example: if at the start of a conversation a personal anecdote comes to mind but you think 'no that's not what the book said, I should talk about the other person instead' I'd argue you're masking your natural persona. If your natural inclination is to raise an eyebrow but no that's not what I was taught smile instead, that's a mask. You see it often among high earning people and it's pretty transparent. Luckily you often also see people who are not at all like that everywhere and they're the ones I'll prefer having a drink with 10/10 times.
I just wonder if some people don't often get to their end years and regret putting on an inauthentic mask their entire life because a book told them to. Having dialogues with people like it's a transaction to win instead of a conversation.
>it's solely because that book made me more likable and personable.
This is the part that gets me to have an almost allergic reaction. It feels like an almost homogenization of people's personalities. In my mind I picture it like this: business man A reads How to Win Friends and Influence People. Businessman B also reads it. Business man A meets B and see that they're doing the psychological tricks of the book and think "wow this guy sure knows how to win friends and influence people like I do" so they get along fantastically.
It's similar to my aversion to books like "The Game" where some men seem to have the idea there's a surefire way to pick up women. Humans are diverse and should have differences in how they treat others and react. "Remember their name, smile, talk about the other person" and all the other tricks often gets me in the mindset of "this person is media trained / inauthentic".
Many of the research went under my radar when I was researching it ~15 years ago then. Specifically sucralose was what I was researching, because it's what I drank, and there seemed to be no real evidence of harm that I could come up with or that anybody arguing with me about it could point to. And everyone defending it (including me) always had the line about how extensively studied it was at the time.
But research kept coming in. In 2013 CSPI changed their sucralose recommendation from "safe" to "caution". Then in 2016 it changed it again to "avoid". [1] Insulin sensitivity was more of a concern as of 2018 [2]. Sucralose + carbs causing further insulin problems was added in 2020 [3].
There's several more but I'm not going to make an exhaustive list. The point is the more research done the more the sweeteners go from almost completely benign (which you could easily say about sucralose ~2010) to problematic. So saying "the science is in, these sweeteners don't cause cancer" seems off-putting to me after going through the journey of so much of the science being wrong. It reminds me that we didn't classify processed meat as carcinogenic until 2015. And we only classified nitrates as "probably carcinogenic" in 2010.
I used to be in this same boat whenever someone questioned my sugar-free drinks. Trust the science! Then more science saying new things about artificial sweeteners kept coming out. And then I personally (with the mindset of "they can't possibly do harm") started getting stomach issues that I can pretty much definitively link to any time I drink sucralose. Which is a shame because I loved me a coke zero. If I drink/eat it by accident I'll always know within 2 hours from an intense stabbing pain in my side. This didn't happen until I had already been drinking it for many years.
Aspartame is listed as possibly carcinogenic now after having "0 problems" for decades and having that same claim of being some of the most tested food additives on the planet. Most artificial sweeteners are also still linked to problems with insulin response, weight gain, and diabetes which are the things we were trying to prevent by drinking them in the first place. Do some more research and you'll find things like links to cognitive decline, clotting with things like xylitol, depression, gut microbiome problems / even possibly intestinal wall integrity issues (sucralose-6-acetate).
The science was settled (and probably mostly funded by the companies that sold the products) right up until it wasn't. Now there seems to be huge concerns. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these substances are banned within our lifetime.
You're proving the idea that the science wins out though. The vaccine that caused problems in a vanishingly small amount of people was almost instantly recalled. I believe here in Canada we started giving it to people in February and stopped in March. The signal was so clear even though it was something like 1 in 50,000 people who had a problem.
We have giant populations of people who refused the vaccines. We also have a giant resurgence of measles now because those people are so large in number and so influential. Long covid is far more prevalent in those populations than anywhere else despite the seemingly blanket belief that covid was inconsequential among them.
The trials for the Pfizer vaccine came back as 95% effective. Not sure what paper you're holding saying blanket immunity for all time but it was probably political not scientific. It then did an insane pivot with omicron. Way too many mutations at once for any vaccine to accommodate.
The science is very broad and very clear on all of these matters. I feel bad if politicians or news agencies lied to you but my advice is to take an aggregate of every country / health authority in the entire world and disregard your own anecdotes / the Joe Rogans of the world. There's just no way that a conspiracy can be as far reaching as what you're implying.
EA being bought by the Saudis and people taking a hard "moral stance" to not purchase any further EA games is another example. I've got a bridge to sell you if you think you're boycotting everything (even every video game) that's making the Saudis money. I dislike EA for other reasons and their products tend to be bland but if they make a good game I'm going to reward the developers of that game so they hopefully make further good games.
And in terms of the conspiracy theory the engine is an engine. Developers choose what to implement and can tone down all the crazy new tech as much as they want. They can also write custom stacks to do things no other Unreal Engine game would do. Unreal actually scales pretty well in that regard. Current minimum specs for Satisfactory is an i5-3570K and 1650 GTX. Recommended video card is a 2070 RTX. I have a 15 year old computer sitting in a closet that can play the game fairly well. There's so many great indie titles out there that if I only had that 15 year old computer I'd be spoiled for choice. But IMO we also need bleeding edge games to move the needle forward and keep the industry exciting. I want crazy tech in my video game that makes my jaw drop like the trailers for Witcher 4 do right now. That keeps 100s of millions of people watching things like The Video Game Awards.
In terms of homogenization I see the exact opposite happening. You probably have a slew of games to play right now that all use different engines. I myself have a backlog I don't think I can get through in my lifetime that's going to grow immensely this September. There's so many games being released and they're made in so many different ways that saying there's homogenization seems strange. Right now I'm hopping between Death Stranding 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Terratech Legion, and Resident Evil Requiem. Where is the monoculture? The idea of not giving TerraTech Legion a chance simply because the devs used unreal seems wrong.
The music sounds good? I listen to the music. The book is well written? I buy the book. The game is fun? I buy the game. You could spend your whole life nit-picking reasons why X publisher is bad, X record label is the worst (and in both cases most ARE) but in the end these companies will still make ungodly amounts of money and you're just making life less enjoyable for yourself.