Wasn’t part of the point that the mindset necessary to create Iron Man would inevitably lead to Ultron?

Automation to increase power (productivity) beyond what humans alone could do -> Iron Man -> Cutting out humans once they are the chokepoint/ limiter in power (productivity) -> Ultron

Companies want automation because they don’t want human limits on productivity to restrict their profits. That mindset is the problem. If we accept that mindset as a valid business operating model, it will never not lead to wanting to remove humans as much as possible.

Turns out the Luddites were right, and the company-owned factory automation was a scheme to dilute worker pay and value. That we’re now fighting not to have workers cut out of the equation entirely kind of proves that it was in fact a slope we’ve slipped down.

The person quoted in the OP who said

I’m probably being too hopeful

I’m probably being too hopeful

They are. Trump likes to make statements that he thinks sound “strong”, and that’s all that “and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone” was. He didn’t actually have any intention or meaning behind it, he’s just pandering to his faux-masculine base who like hearing threats made because threatening people is “manly” in their minds.

I didn’t really want to have to watch any more of this dude, but I wanted to make sure I gave him a fair shake… and hoo boy.

Just look at it for what it is, and realize it’s going to fail. And then plan accordingly.

This is just victim blaming, bruh. Even if a developer sees a project is going badly, it’s not like there are infinite jobs out there that need filling. Changing jobs is not fast and easy, some of the workers are likely on work visas that don’t allow them to just change employers, game companies aren’t all in the same small area such that it won’t require moving homes which is a huge expense, and there’s no guarantee that the project you’re moving to will be any better.

This is a failure of worker protection laws. Framing it as workers just needing to hustle smarter, while executives run companies and families into the ground, is peak corporate apologism.

He’s literally reading off one of this articles, that goes off on a tangent that a few people on Twitter said something about games being “too woke” and tries to counter that.

If you don’t think that alt-right-lite is a huge problem in gaming circles, I don’t know what to tell you. Go play literally any multiplayer game and you will find plenty of gamers spouting anti-DEI/ anti-woke/ right-wing talking points in no time flat. And yes, they absolutely do avoid games based on it. And the problem with just ignoring this is that you’re ceding the narrative to them. Young white men have seen a shift rightwards precisely because alt-right-lite chuds like JonTron capture them via gaming-focused content, and then shift them over to politics-focused guys like Tate/ Shapiro/ etc. It’s a pipeline, that often starts in gaming spaces.

Ideological soapboxes are very real things that games “journalists” push on a daily basis.

He wasn’t talking about ideological soapboxes in reference to journalists, he was talking about developers. And he is using that as a direct euphemism for “DEI”/ “woke” content.

And yes, the comments are agreeing with him, that’s the point of a dogwhistle. There are a bunch of comments being anti-diversity/ anti-woke, referencing another video of his about game companies hiring people who supposedly despise gamers.

Here is a video of his called “The Real Impact of DEI in Gaming”. He uses rainbow/pink/diversity-washing being bad to then ultimately conclude that DEI is a net negative that he (no joke) BLAMES ON OVERREGULATION by the government. He then goes on to suggest that DEI actually is about dividing people in order to (also not a joke) feed a DEI-consulting industry.

“They’re hiring in people that don’t have the merit, that don’t have the skill” (8:40) Classic. He then goes onto blame “DEI hire” developers for games being buggy or releasing too early, as though that is their choice (once again, he clearly doesn’t understand what developers do or do not control).

It’s frustrating seeing these chuds get wiser about the number of levels they couch their ultimate anti-diversity rhetoric in, because clearly it’s working on some people. Instead of saying, “diversity in gaming companies bad”, he says, “regulations force execs to hire diverse devs who lack merit (which is bigoted bs on its own), who then over time lower the quality of games, ** and also** evil DEI consultants intentionally push devs to make diverse games without being sincere about the portrayals and stories… so in the end we should stop pushing devs to be diverse and make diverse games, and just let each group of people make games for themselves (which is back to square one where big companies just hire white guys).”

He’s literally just taking all the Republican anti-DEI rhetoric and applying to to gaming.

I do what? Think Nazis deserve to die? Or think that you’re a bad-faith-posting dork who thinks you’re much more clever than you are?

Yes.

Nice try at dodging the point. Is advocating for Nazis to be killed the only manifestation of being anti-Nazi (which unless you are being sought for murder, I guarantee you’re not acting on), and any other action is pro-Nazi? If not, why choose a test that, aside from its anti-Nazi message, might run afoul of site moderation rules?

businesses it says work with China’s military

So for the battery company, is the work… selling them batteries? Like, is this list supposed to be a list of companies actually directly performing military work for the CCP, or just vendors?

Also, unless they’re in violation of e.g. the ban on use of forced Uyghur labor in Xinjiang (like tons of US companies have been caught being), why would they be sanctioned? We’re not at war with China, nor actively sanctioning their military just for existing.

My god, what a bad faith “test”. Why not say something like “all Nazis are garbage pieces of shit”? Probably because you’re hoping that the mods will remove your comment for the call for violence, so you can claim they’re pro-Nazi/ anti- anti-Nazi.

Exactly, this will go in my ‘cool tech I don’t use’ pile immediately. :P

Where there’s object detection there’s csam detection.

This is not true at all. A model has to be trained to detect specific things. It does not automatically inherit the ability to detect CSAM just because it can detect other objects. The method it previously used for CSAM image detection (perceptual hashing) was killed for bad privacy implementation, and the article specifically notes that

Tsai argues Apple’s approach is even less private than its abandoned CSAM scanning plan “because it applies to non-iCloud photos and uploads information about all photos, not just ones with suspicious neural hashes.”

So even images that the local detection model doesn’t match to CSAM would be being uploaded to their servers.

Apple killed it’s last version in August 2023 because it didn’t respect privacy.

It was also not that good.

I would be interested to see what lines you read between, because “identifying landmarks and points of interest” doesn’t sound like anything capable of identifying CSAM. I think you’re giving a big corporation a bunch of credit there is no reason to suspect it is owed, for an excuse they never professed.

I will be honest I stopped after about 12 minutes, so perhaps he says something of value later on… but I doubt it. :P

This guy makes several key mistakes, and doesn’t understand the relationship between (or difference between, for that matter) developers and publishers / executives. He pivots in one sentence from talking about number of layoffs to talking about failed games, but those are not direct corollaries. Big publishers and large studios laid off teams with games that performed incredibly well. Lots of teams that were mid-development were killed. Remember Tango Gameworks? The studio that everyone liked, and didn’t have any flops? That was completely laid off? It had nothing to do with their games, and was entirely about Xbox forcing its 1P studios to release on Game Pass, which doomed their sales. It was bad executive management at MS, not bad games, choosing to buy Bethesda and Activision at the expense of budgets for its existing studios. Obviously Redfall and Concord were huge flops, but they were a tiny fraction of the layoffs across the industry.

He correctly points out that Gaming is a subset of the software industry, and that the trends and decisions being made by executives across the industry are the same, but just sort of hand-waves that away by saying it’s not just gaming, and that “people are facing economic challenges right now” in general. Yeah! And guess that those challenges are? Short-term P&L gains via mass layoffs, in order to claw back money from acquisitions, stock buybacks, and executive pay-gouging. But it’s not developers doing that, it’s publishers and executives. No one writing code is like, “I’ve decided to make live-service schlock”. But they’re the ones losing their jobs, not the dorks who did decide that.

“What is unique in gaming, is that this is largely self-inflicted.” My brother in Christ… stahhhhhp.

He then turns this into some kind of attack on game journalists, who have been rightfully calling out the game industry layoffs, as though they’re… supposed to only report on things happening uniquely in gaming, and not also in other industries, even if it’s also happening in gaming? The narrative that “if a studio is laid off, it was their fault, or just the economy forcing them to be laid off”, is the false narrative of the publishers, and this guy is (whether he realizes it or not) helping bolster that narrative.

Lastly, this dude is dropping right-wing dogwhistles left-and-right. Listing “ideological soapboxes” alongside “bloated projects” and “garbage games” for failing games tells me everything I need to know.

Here’s his brilliant take on thousands of line-level developers being laid off for decisions made above their heads by millionaires:

“As a customer I’m going to be honest, I just don’t care or feel anything for any of these internal struggles that these companies go through.” (7:10 in the video)

Big “stop picketing and deliver my Amazon package I paid money for” energy right here.

It allows processing data without decrypting it, which is great in terms of preventing someone else from snooping on it, but doesn’t change that Apple is retaining the ability to analyze the data content, which is the actual issue here.

Teslas always are, not even joking. It’s supposed to ensure the drivers are “attentive”, but it is angled to record the entire interior/ “cabin”.

https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-682FF4A7-D083-4C95-925A-5EE3752F4865.html

The year of the Apollo 13 incident, Hastings sold his software business Pure Atria to another tech company for more than $700 million.

Umm, I think they’ve mixed up movies with real life. Nothing was being sold for 700 million during the Apollo era.

• Pure Atria was founded in 1991.
• Apollo 13 the space mission happened in 1970.
• Apollo 13 the movie happened in 1995.

Though according to Wikipedia, Pure Atria wasn’t sold until 1997.

I agree that Republicans are going full-fascist (even more than they were in the past), but if the establishment Democrats are clearly more willing to hand Republicans control than change themselves or lose control of the party, are they really any better? Nazis vs Nazi Collaborators isn’t much of a choice. I would have said that was hyperbole in the past, but the centrist Dems covering for Israel is making it pretty on-the-nose.

Most executives at large publishers aren’t gamers. Pretty pictures are more likely to entice them than deep mechanics. They could assign 5 people to make a game like Balatro or Stardew Valley, but they never would because they don’t work like that, they came up through the MBA route and think in terms of enterprise software development lifecycles. Also, “making money” isn’t good enough for them, they want to make so much money that they can pay themselves millions of dollars despite never actually contributing to the game.

• Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
• Rebelstar: Tactical Command
• Fire Emblem All GBA

The British turned London into an absolute surveillance nightmare, and sadly most British people seem to be fine with it. I’m not surprised that OSA passed, nor that it’s doing exactly the kind of chilling of speech that it is.