Outdoors with proximity to 1-3 other people, where he can move at will and distance himself vs indoors, courtroom full of people and he’s sitting while people move around. Probably not the same. If the guy has risk factors for developing complications with COVID, which we can see he has one which is being overweight, I don’t think it’s reasonable for the court to force him to attend when he could attend remotely.
He was mere feet away from total strangers who may or may not have been masked when he opened the door (taking the video at face value, and assuming he didn’t send the production team up there to tell the residents to mask up first). Much more dangerous than a courtoom of people with N95s on, none of whom he would need to get as close to as he did for those Deck deliveries.
Interacting with maybe a dozen people outside with a mask on for a few minutes at a time is almost certainly much lower risk than being in a courtroom with, likely, many more people and stale air for hours. It’s certainly helpful if everybody is masked up in the courtroom, but people are notoriously bad at wearing masks properly, they’re going to require Gabe Newell to unmask for questions, and there’s a lot more factors you don’t control in that scenario… outside delivering stuff you can always walk away if somebody isn’t giving you the space you’re comfortable with… Regardless, all risk is cumulative and you may want to limit the number of times you do higher risk things as much as possible. Even if you rarely do some riskier things, it doesn’t mean you’re okay with that level of risk all of the time. I don’t think it’s that unreasonable to want to manage and minimize your exposure if you’re high risk.
Going door to door in fresh air is something else than sitting in a room with lots of other people and “you’ll be fine” is an insane argument. You’ll be fine until you aren’t. Every person should be able to make that risk assessment for themselves and courts should not be able to force someone to risk exposure to anything.
It amazes me that covidiots still don't understand the difference between inside and outside spaces for that matter. If people breath and cough around the outside, shit will just be swept away by the wind. If people do that in enclosed spaces, then they'll just start to saturate the air with germs over its prolonged time. And then you even expect them to take off the mask when they're in the witness stand? Do you think that's like a germ free zone? lol
My family refers to vaxxed people as covidiots. So I tend to associate it with antivax people. I will accept my negative number either way. Apologies for the confusion.
I wouldn’t say I’m hurt. More embarrassed that I accepted a definition without further scrutiny.
My philosophy is to always be learning. Sometimes trauma impedes it and a wake up call is necessary. So I appreciate your time and thoughtful response and will take this lesson as an opportunity to do better for myself.
I wasn’t strictly talking about the definition of covidiot, I was referring to the virus’ transmissibility; indoors vs outdoors.
There has been a lot of misinformation during covid, from both sides, and virtually everyone needs to accept that they were wrong about certain things.
For example, I was forced to change my mind about the safety of the vaccine. I still personally believe most people should have been vaccinated, but we need to accept that it didn’t do what was expected.
At the end of the day, Covid is a respiratory virus, and the consensus of indoors vs outdoors transmissibility had been reached decades ago.
I appreciated the measured response, it’s rare to see people sincerely reflect on their beliefs so quickly without feeling condescended.
Others have explained to you why it’s different, and that that happened 2 years ago and a lot of things health related can change in that time. But even if he had done that yesterday, even if it was the same, he should be able to choose to attend remotely, he’s not asking to be excused, he’s not asking to change anything, all he’s asking is to be able to do it from his home, and I wouldn’t deny that to anyone unless there’s a reason to be physically there, which there isn’t.
Yeah, I don’t really think anybody should have to go to court in person, and I can definitely empathize with somebody wanting to avoid COVID (even if they’re not super high risk, you never know how it will affect you it seems). I kind of understand the bias towards in person things, but I really wish people would get over it. Sometimes it’s just a lot more practical to do things remotely, and while a video call isn’t quite the same as being there in person I think it’s something we can deal with. It certainly doesn’t seem like it would be that much worse for testifying tbh.
I mean, yeah, if you drop those two as the alternative, every time, fuck those guys every day and twice on sunday. But… Gaben’s got a very different record.
I’m of the opinion that he should have to testify like anyone else just to preclude Trump and their ilk from trying to get out of testifying in person.
Court is boring AF, he’s just using covid for an excuse to avoid having to go. I can’t really blame him for trying, but I’m not surprised it didn’t work.
Actually no, I’d let the science speak for itself. Being outdoors with a mask on significantly reduces your chances of contracting COVID-19. Being in a crowded room with lots of other people significantly increases your risk. Gabe is right, just like any other CEO would be right if they said the same thing.
I know this is mostly posturing at this point but:
“AI” has been in big budget games for decades. Hell, the big deal with Oblivion was that they had magic technology to procedurally place trees according to various heuristics. And I think that also added a resource management system to NPCs so that we could DB Apple them?
Same with coding and art and sound and so forth.
All that cool magic wand and fancy ass filter shit in photoshop? Those are increasingly “AI” tools that will analyze the image and extrapolate what should or should not be “behind” something and so forth.
Coding? if you AREN’T using a tool to generate stubs and even tests at this point then you are wasting your own time.
Audio? Again, the same “AI” filters already exist. Same with tools to detect pauses or to split up dialogue and so forth.
The reality is just using it effectively. Oblivion was boring as hell because the entire overworld was empty and lifeless. Same with BOTW. Whereas Ubi, for all their actual gameplay flaws, are spectacular at adding POIs and “events” in strategic locations so that you find something while you are hiking across a forest to get to an objective.
Same with art and even CGI. You aren’t going to get a good outcome if you ask dall-e to make your art for you. But you are going to get good results if you start with a solid base and then procedurally add rust or spatter to it. You aren’t going to get a good result if you have your actors on a studio lit stage talking to nothing (Hi Prequel Trilogy). You are if you add lighting relative to the scene (The Volume) and use placeholders they can act off of.
And… same with writing. Ask ChatGPT to write your screenplay? It is going to be bad. Use the proper prompts to get the “voice” of a character right or to generate some background dialogue that you won’t even correctly hear because the mics are focused on Meg Ryan faking an orgasm? Suddenly you have a better “product” than everyone else who just tells extras to wing it or putty around. Same with having a Black Scottish Chick sound like she isn’t written by some white dude.
Your point about the screenplay reminds me of one of my biggest pet peeves with armchair commenters on AI these days.
Yeah, if you hop on ChatGPT, use the free version, and just ask it to write a story, you’re getting crap. But using that anecdotal experience to extrapolate what the SotA can do in production is a massive mistake.
Do professional writers just sit down at a computer and write out page after page into a final draft?
No. They start with a treatment, build out character arcs, write summaries of scenes, etc. Eventually they have a first draft which goes out to readers and changes are made.
To have an effective generative AI screenplay writer you need to replicate multiple stages and processes.
And you likely wouldn’t be using a chat-instruct fine tuned model, but rather individually fine tuned models for each process.
Video game writing is going to move more into writing pipelines for content generation than it is going to be writing final copy. And my guess is that most writers are going to be very happy when they see the results of what that can achieve, as they’ll be able to create storytelling experiences that are currently regarded as impossible, like where character choices really matter to outcomes and aren’t simply the illusion of choice to prevent fractalizing dialogue trees too much early on.
People are just freaking out thinking the tech is coming to replace them rather than realizing that headcounts are going to remain the same long term but with the technology enhancing their efforts they’ll be creating products beyond what they’ve even imagined.
Like, I really don’t think the average person - possibly even the average person in the industry - really has a grasp of what a game like BG3 with the same sized writing staff is going to look like with the generative AI tech available in just about 2-3 years, even if the current LLM baseline doesn’t advance at all between now and then.
A world where every NPC feels like a fleshed out dynamic individual with backstory, goals, and relationships. Where stories uniquely evolve with the player. These are things that have previously been technically impossible given resource constraints and attempts to even superficially resemble them ate up significant portions of AAA budgets (i.e. RDR2). And by the end of the next console generation, they will have become as normative as things like ray tracing or voiced lines are today.
While I generally agree (and that applies to almost all “an LLM can’t do that” discussions):
Head counts are not going to remain the same. Well, it might in writing, but there is a reason the WGA went on strike.
If you can apply effective filters/transforms to a base texture, you can now do the same work that would have taken you weeks in a day or two. If you aren’t “wasting time” writing unit tests or making utility functions, you no longer need junior developers to punt the Charlie Work to. And so forth.
In some fields? Being able to do more with less means you do a LOT more.
But, generally speaking, that means you need fewer people and you pay fewer people.
This is one of many many reasons that we need to have been exploring UBI decades ago. Because we are increasingly going to see a decrease in employment as technology is more and more able to “get the job done”. And unlike with farm work and factory work… there isn’t really anything on the horizon for all the “creative” workers to do.
They largely are going to remain the same. Specific roles may shift around as specific workloads become obsolete, and you will have a handful of companies chasing quarterly returns at the cost of long term returns by trying to downsize keeping the product the same and reducing headcount.
But most labor is supply constrained not demand constrained, and the only way reduced headcounts would remain the status quo across companies is if all companies reduce headcounts without redirecting improved productivity back into the product.
You think a 7x reduction in texturing labor is going to result in the same amount of assets in game but 1/7th the billable hours?
No, that’s not where this is going. Again, a handful of large studios will try to get away with that initially, but as soon as competitors that didn’t go the downsizing route are releasing games with scene complexity and variety that puts their products to shame that’s going to bounce back.
If the market was up to executives, they’d have a single programmer re-releasing Pong for $79 a pop. But the market is not up to executives, it’s up to the people buying the products. And while AI will allow smaller development teams to produce games in line with today’s AAA scale products, tomorrow’s AAA scale products are not going to be possible with significantly reduced headcounts, as they are definitely not going to be the same scale and scope as today’s leading games.
A 10 or even 100 fold increase in worker productivity only means a similar cut in the number of workers as long as the product has hit diminishing returns on productivity investment, and if anything the current state of games development is more dependent on labor resources than ever before, so it doesn’t seem we’ve hit that inflection point or will anytime soon.
Edit: The one and only place I can foresee a significant headcount drop because of AI in game dev is QA. They’re screwed in a few years.
How do you train AI to notice bugs humans notice? Kinda seems like thats the softwares exact weakness, is creating odd edge cases that make sense for the algorithym but not to the human eye
One of the big mistakes I see people make in trying to estimate capabilities is thinking of all in one models.
You’ll have one model that plays the game in ways that try a wider range of inputs and approaches to reach goals than what humans would produce (similar to the existing research like OpenAI training models to play Minecraft and mine diamonds off a handful of videos with input data and then a lot of YouTube videos).
Then the outputs generated by that model would be passed though another process that looks specifically for things ranging from sequence breaks to clipping. Some of those like sequence breaks aren’t even detections that need AI, and depending on just what data is generated by the ‘player’ AIs, a fair bit of other issues can be similarly detected with dumb approaches. The bugs that would be difficult for an AI to detect would be things like “I threw item A down 45 minutes ago but this NPC just had dialogue thanking me for bringing it back.” But even things like this are going to be well within the capabilities of multimodal AI within a few years as long as hardware continues to scale such that it doesn’t become cost prohibitive.
The way it’s going to start is that 3rd party companies dedicated to QA start feeding their own data and play tests into models to replicate and extend the behaviors, offering synthetic play testing as a cheap additional service to find low hanging fruit and cut down on human tester hours needed, and over time it will shift more and more towards synthetic testing.
You’ll still have human play testers around broader quality things like “is this fun” - but the QA that’s already being outsourced for bugs is going to almost certainly go the way of AI replacing humans entirely, or just nearly so.
Do you think that same result would have happened if horses had other skills outside of the specific skill set that was automated?
If horses happened to be really good at pulling carts AND really good at driving, for instance, might we not instead have even more horses than we did at the turn of the 19th century, just having shifted from pulling carts to driving them?
I’m not sure the inability of horses to adapt to changing industrialization is the best proxy for what’s going to happen to humans.
You jest, but yeah, there very likely will be, especially given that there’s already full self-driving cars today on roads. The difference will just be that in ~10 years (by the end of the next console generation) that there will be better full self-driving cars on the road.
My experience with starfield is “ughh this is annoying, ughh this part sucks, oooh thats kinda cool” and then I check my save file and have over 130 hours. So basically my typical Bethesda experience. 10/10 would do again.
This also shocked me when playing Starfield, I basically just completed one of the faction quests and basically just spent time building and stealing ships and my playtime is more than 100 hours. WTF.
I saw a bit of those on stream and thought maybe the time affected the quality of the result… but no. It’s just filler shit to get your space dragon speech spell or whatever. Then the enemies are all bullet sponges. It all seemed very transparent and very familiar.
Don’t bite off more than you can chew with the sequel, or you’re just going to repeat history. I liked the game since launch, but it was still very evident CDPR wanted to do more than they realistically could while still actually releasing a product.
Great vision, perhaps too much; but poorly managed their time and resources. Stretched too thin on portability to every available console at the time of release. Constant changes of scope. Etc.
Just do like Baldur’s Gate and release a portion as early access, then release the full game on all platforms when it’s ready. Ideally skip early access and just release when it’s actually ready, but the early access option is acceptable.
Honestly part of the benefit of early access is the diverse hardware and diverse playstyles being tested. I’m sure part of BG3’s success was due to them taking feedback and bug reports from the early access players that submitted things and implementing the fixes and changes based on customer feedback. It definitely gives unique insight for the developers while the game is still being made.
It’s a very noticeable improvement in realism in games that do this. Quantic Dream games have also done this, even in Heavy Rain from 2010, and it really goes a long way in making a game into a story.
The title is wrong. It’s not about proving that the owner is dead (which is easy, you get a death certificate when a relative dies).
It’s about proving that the person requesting access of the dead person account is actually the person legally receiving the dead person’s possessions (or GOG account specifically).
He told his friend about the game. I don’t think he would have done so if he copied or felt he had “stolen” anything. If he remade the game with this own code and assets then he put a lot of work into it and he can be proud of that (and telling his friend shows that he was). Comparing the game, i do think the clone is better made / more polished. So he really like the game and made a better version of it. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. IP has to be respected (can’t just copy assets or code) but if that’s the case then anything goes and that’s a good thing, it gives us better games.
Think PalWorld, for example, Nintendo, one of the most copyright abusing companies in the world, doesn’t sue them and it’s arguably a better game than anything Nintendo has come up with recently (no new / modern / good / 3D Pokemon games).
I don’t respect the way IP is abused by large companies. I support short-term IP as I think it does help individuals in a net-positive way for everyone.
I could be convinced that short-term IP is bad too, but regardless I think long-term is the the big problem. Games from the 80s should all be public domain by now.
If you have any interest in playing a good Pokemon game, Pokemon Legends Arceus is excellent. Palword may be just a bit better, but if you have a lingering nostalgia and a desire for some fresh and well executed mechanics in the Pokemon universe, PLA slaps.
This looks much more egregious than palworld/pokemon. Palword has very distinct gameplay from pokemon and adds many features and gameplay elements that nintendo has never done. It’s much more similar to Ark if anything in terms of gameplay. The only thing it takes from pokemon is the fact that it’s a creature collector game and a couple of the pals look like they were generated by ai trained on a database of creatures from other games, but even that isnt conclusive. It definitely takes inspiration from Zelda, but again thats a few gameplay elements, not the whole game.
I mean, this game has a meta war that determines all available planets, mission types and rolls out content based on community involvement. It would be nice to have an offline mode, too, but this game is not completely decoupled from being online, unlike Hitman or something.
Its just an arbitrary mechanic added to justify an always online requirement. Helldivers had an offline option. There's still a game there without the need for "community involvement", the missions etc could be completely random or seeded for people who dont want to connect to a server.
Its always sad to see potential great games ruined by greed.
Did the first one really have offline? I played the shit out of it, but I was always connected. Sure, they should implement something similar here, too, but it is genuine work they need to put in to get it there, I'm sure they had to invest that for the first game especially since it was on the Vita.
It isn't arbitrary, though, go on any of the communities that care about the meta war and you'll see people really do keep up with it and enjoy it, they work with each other to focus on the major orders and do a bit of roleplaying at the same time.
I know that you're very anti always online, and I understand and agree that it should be optional, but to say that nothing comes out of it would also be disingenuous.
You are right, it does provide something. I just personally don't value it over a more typical online co-op setup. I just wish options weren't scary and implemented more.
Me too. I know it's a bit of work to set up an alternate mode and method to get to different planets and missions, and I'm sure ships are run really tightly on what gets worked on or not due to paying for whole teams to work, but I do wish they did what they could to future proof it.
A lot of always online games are awesome, have artistic merit, and can be looked back upon later as gaming history, and if they don't preserve these "art pieces" then a huge chunk of gaming history will likely disappear into the ether in 10 or 20 years. It seems a little silly to me that we can go back and play Mario 64, or even Helldivers 1 and see what that was like, but Helldivers 2 will become an inaccessible splash screen, it's a waste of all of the time and work, and even the money that went into making this happen in the first place.
How the digital ownership normalized the fact that any service, game can disappear easily. The full digital future empowered the corporations, and that issue is here clearly shown by Ubisoft.
Idk about you guys, but I will wait until they’ve patched out the game breaking bugs and system compatibility issues. And then I’ll pay them 17$ for 1 month of their game service, beat the game, and cancel the sub.
IMO worker-owned businesses should be the future. There should also be a forced role-switch or shadowing for managers and workers, so that both understand better what each others respective jobs look like. Managers often think they should be earning their money because their work is more important and set the salaries as such: “Without me, you wouldn’t know what to do, so my job is more important should be compensated more”. They are out of touch with their workers and their realities.
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