> while dumbing down the content of high school and even primary school education. All because we can’t have children feeling bad.
I suspect that it's a lot less about making children feel better and more about keeping the general population stupid and unable to think critically so that the ruling class can exploit them easier. The children of the ruling class are still given the opportunity to be well educated by private institutions that are overpriced to keep out the poors.
> You can see a similar history with electrification.
It took a massive amount of new infrastructure for electricity to benefit people. Lines had to be run, houses and businesses had to be wired, new light fixtures and appliances had to be purchased and installed.
LLMs can currently be accessed and used everywhere instantly by everybody right now and at any moment day or night. Rich and poor alike can take advantage of it. There's nothing holding back anybody. If everybody without electricity could have pulled a small rectangle out of their pocket and pressed a button to instantly have electric lights and power, the positive impact of electrification would have been immediate. This is not even close to a "same thing now" situation.
Every computer and cellphone in the office is an "AI powered appliance". Every application can be an AI powered one. LLMs have been shoehorned into damn near every app they use already. There's no magic appliance or software that will make productivity and profits suddenly happen for businesses that they couldn't already be doing right now, and I say that fully realizing that there are people here who desperately want to sell businesses something (possibly vibecoded) that they'll claim is a magic AI appliance/software that will make productivity and profits suddenly happen.
> Every computer and cellphone in the office is an "AI powered appliance". Every application can be an AI powered one.
True, but funnily enough those are not workhorses of most businesses outside of AI. Jevons paradox was about that. Introduction of computers into most businesses didn't traslate to immediate performance gains so it's hard to imagine that automating computers will have strong immediate effect.
I think the most powerful way that software is going to benefit businesses outside of IT is creation and maintenance of custom software for every business that's going to be better fit, faster and cheaper than anything IT industry can deliver. Though even those gains are still going to be modest to moderate.
At some point real AI powered appliances might show up, like robots or full stack AI management.
If you believe the hype/marketing around how scary "AI" is LLMs are perfectly happy to go rouge and lie, cheat, and even blackmail to protect themselves.
I do think Railway's founders have been a little overconfident with some statements like this:
Technical people should understand they're going to get their ass beat by non-technical people right now
You don't need to know how to code to write Rust anymore
Stop pearl clutching and start problem solving
I guess you can't vibe "make sure my secrets store is secure".
Or:
The implementation no longer matters
People really, really need to understand that
I think the implementation matters more than ever. With agentic AI you have a lot more choices for the implementation, too.
The uncharitable take (for them) is that it turns out, knowing how to code is important after all.
The cynical take for the state of the industry, which is maybe more aligned with Railway's statements, is that even people who do know how to code can get hacked, given how good the LLMs are at attacking targets now.
I imagine both camps would agree that without a red team that's leveraging the frontier, you're much more likely to fall victim to an attack.
If we were living in a sane world this would end this company. They would lose every customer they have and be buried in lawsuits that bankrupt them into the ground. I hope for sanity, but I wouldn't be surprised if they stay operating even after all this.
Ads are successful everywhere. The size of facebook's userbase helped its ads reach a lot of people, but the number of facebook users has been declining while the old folks staying on the platform grow ever closer to death.
Facebook has done nothing but demonstrate that it's a company which doesn't care at all about its users and is willing to hurt them. Anyone still using facebook at this point is pretty much asking to be taken advantage of and abused. I rally can't feel bad for them anymore.
True, but while they're all suckers, some suckers are bigger rubes than others.
The elderly are a very easy target for manipulation. I think roblox might be the only platform with less savvy prey.
> It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed.
Sadly this really isn't the case, and there are a lot of things we can do that will permanently fuck the planet. It can't be certain that we will kill ourselves off before we cross some tipping point that will eventually turn the Earth into just another lifeless rock in our solar system.
Well, "permanently fuck the planet" can be a matter of perspective. The great oxidation event "fucked up" the planet for anaerobic life, but we would not exist without it, so it was a huge blessing for us. Even human CO2 emissions could be viewed as a huge blessing for biosphere in the far future since it releases captured carbon ("the currency of life") thus significantly delaying the timeline of atmospheric CO2 depletion to levels at which photosynthesis becomes impossible.
That’s only in the short term. It doesn’t touch on natures capacity to bounce back over millions of years.
We could kill off entire branches and trunks of the tree of life, crash every ecosystem on the planet, and life would still bounce back eventually. Molds would grow on the debris, some would find the slurry of radioactive plastics a tasty treat, and eventually it would rebuild.
We could ruin the planet in the “short” term, but we probably cannot extinguish life, even if we tried our hardest.
There isn't infinite time left in "eventually" - maybe a billion years, out of 4.5 billion passed so far. A billion years is about how long it took to go from "multicellular colonies" to "concept of an animal". So no, not guaranteed to bounce back from mouldy radioactive slurry.
I think it's better we just change course now and I wrote a book about how we can do that. If you are interested the link is in my profile description.
We probably couldn't sterilize the earth even if the entire humanity wanted it more than anything else and threw everything it had to make it happen and then some more.
Even destroying the entire humanity would be hard, civilization could go, we have plenty of scenarios for that, but killing every human, even the odd tribe of refugees who could survive in a cave somewhere is something else. I'd say it is the maximum extent of what our technology could do. By that I mean nuking everything we could nuke, including things like volcanoes, mass produce all the greenhouse gases, the ozone depleting ones, the poisonous ones just to release them all, have our finest biologists prepare a pandemic, we may even try to bring in some asteroids.
To sterilize the Earth we would need to destroy all the extremophile bacteria, the tardigrades, the deep biosphere,... That's not happening. Note that we are very careful to sterilize Mars rovers, so that we don't contaminate Mars with Earth life. That's how hardy we consider life to be.
> We probably couldn't sterilize the earth even if the entire humanity wanted it more than anything else and threw everything it had to make it happen and then some more.
That's a rather fun thought experiment. If we were outright trying to destroy the earth it'd be pretty easy!
There are already concerns about what irreversible harm geoengineering could do accidentally. We'd just have to intentionally destroy our ozone layer again and let the runaway greenhouse effect heat the planet up enough to boil off the oceans and send the water into space via atmospheric escape. We (and most living things on Earth) wouldn't survive long enough to see the oceans become desert, but we could set the feedback loop up to continue without us.
Very little can survive without water and once the water is gone it's gone. Water wouldn't return to Earth unless it came on the backs of asteroids (which would be its own problem). The extra solar radiation would help finish off what was left.
If we were going to actively bring in asteroids, the goal shouldn't be to hit the planet with them, the goal should be to use their gravity to move the planet into a less habitable zone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Earth) or even into the collision path of another planet.
What conditions do you need for runaway greenhouse effect at 1 AU. earth has had over 20% CO2 in the past, but the sun was cooler then.
Moving the planet and pulverising with an impact large enough to kill everything are firmly in the bounds of not currently feasible.
I really doubt humans could do it, it would have to be done in one fell swoop, because any attempt to push the earth beyond a tipping point for bacteria to be killed would require pushing for longer than we, the pushers, could survive.
We would have to be better at designing than evolution to make Grey Goo, otherwise evolution would probably have already done it, and it has, to date, designed some pretty out there things.
> Moving the planet and pulverising with an impact large enough to kill everything are firmly in the bounds of not currently feasible.
I mean, it sure seems unlikely, but I'm not as qualified as Dr. Greg Laughlin and his team at NASA, so without at least some kind of evidence indicating that we couldn't do it, I'm okay with trusting them on it being "not at all far-fetched".
'The technology is not at all far-fetched,' said Dr Greg Laughlin, of the Nasa Ames Research Center in California. 'It involves the same techniques that people now suggest could be used to deflect asteroids or comets heading towards Earth. We don't need raw power to move Earth, we just require delicacy of planning and manoeuvring.' (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2001/jun/10/globalwa...)
Obviously, their plan wasn't to destroy all life on Earth, but to just move the Earth a helpful distance away and then stop, but even in that case they were concerned about sterilizing the planet.
The plan has one or two worrying aspects, however. For a start, space engineers would have to be very careful about how they directed their asteroid or comet towards Earth. The slightest miscalculation in orbit could fire it straight at Earth - with devastating consequences. It is a point acknowledged by the group. 'The collision of a 100-kilometre diameter object with the Earth at cosmic velocity would sterilise the biosphere most effectively, at least to the level of bacteria,' they state in a paper in Astrophysics and Space Science. 'The danger cannot be overemphasised.'
> We would have to be better at designing than evolution to make Grey Goo
Evolution is notoriously bad at designing. It's perfectly fine with a poor or half-assed job as long as the evolving thing typically manages to survive just long enough to make a baby or two. Survival rates can even be outright dismal and design choices absurd if the evolving thing pops out enough babies quickly.
There's a massive difference between intentionally designing something to self-replicate like crazy until all life on earth is either consumed or crushed and just settling for a replication rate that is "good enough, mostly".
Life on earth survived both the Cryogenian period with 5°C mean surface temperature [1] and Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum with esimated 27.2–34.5°C mean surface temperature [2]. For comparison the current mean temperature is 15–16°C, the preindustrial was approximately 14°C.
I'm not even sure it's easy to exterminate humanity: our species has displayed an extreme ability to adapt. Surely, billions of humans could die in a big cataclysm but it's genuinely hard to imagine an event that will exterminate every last pocket of survivors. Even harder if we speak roaches and bacteria. The "lifeless rock" will happen when the sun turns into the red giant.
It's not self correcting indeed because there is no correct state.
Sure the preindustrial environment was cozy for cute and fuzzy things and ourselves.
But you are greatly underestimating life if you think we can kill it all off. Sure it might be slimes and jellies and fungi for a while but life has been there before.
That seems pretty arrogant that a hundred million years or more won’t restart life back on Earth. But I also might just be ignorant. What could we do to end all life on earth and prevent future life from forming?
Well there are some well-described scenarios of what could've happened to a hypothetical ancient life on Mars. There's some evidence suggestion methane-producing microbes may have lived on Mars 3.7 to 4.1 billion years ago that may have lead to the CO2 and hydrogen being replaced with methane, stripping away the planet's protection and leading to rapid glaciation and total extinction.
I like "cinematic" games, and have never had a problem with long cutscenes as long as they told a good story. Games are a great medium for storytelling and cutscenes are better than delivering plot strictly by having players hunt for thousands of short snippets of text.
I'm far less impressed with big name actors and that seems like a massive waste of money. As long as the acting is good, and the voices aren't obnoxious, I don't care who the actor is. People might see a movie just because it has an actor they like in it, but I don't think that carries over too well to games.
It's definitely a balancing act. There are some great cinematic games (Last of Us), but it's also easy to put all the focus on the cinematic aspects and have a bunch of mediocre gameplay as filler in between. I don't understand why more games didn't go the Half Life 2 route and have the conversation/cinematic play out around you without taking control away completely.
That really is a good way to handle it, although it does open the door to miss certain things if players don't do what's expected. For example, in the opening chapter for the last of us you can miss the news report on the TV and the stuff going on outside through the windows before Joel comes in. More than once in games I've only been clued into the fact that I missed a jump scare by a sudden musical sting.
In one sense, that's perfectly fair. In life if you're looking at your feet or spending your time examining the walls you'd be oblivious to what's going on around you, and for non-critical things having a bunch of little moments that you can only catch if you're in (or looking at) the right place at the right time can improve replay value, but games would have to be careful to make sure that the important stuff can't be missed.
Last of US I replayed about 5 years ago on the PS4, and it isn't a good game. I recently revisited Uncharted (Last of Us is just Uncharted with a more serious tone), and they are not good games. I think casual audiences like them because of the heavy story element, but they are quite tiresome to play. Naughty Dog excels at presentation, but the gameplay is just not there.
There are also a bunch of "action/adventure" mechanics that seem to be identical in a bunch of mainstream games. You have an upgrade system, so the actual gameplay of the game is bad at the start because you don't have any of the fun abilities at the start, open world mechanics, a very bland open world and the stories are very PG-13, and the characters are kind of bland in the main story. I was playing Ghosts of Tshushima, and many of the mechanics come straight from Farcry 3. I think I am not going to bother completing it. I feel like I've played this game many times before because it's so similar to other games. I would have probably got bored with it before now if it wasn't for the setting.
Generally, a lot of people are still replaying some of the greats from the late 2000s to the mid-2010s because the games weren't nearly as bland.
> Last of US I replayed about 5 years ago on the PS4, and it isn't a good game. I recently revisited Uncharted (Last of Us is just Uncharted with a more serious tone), and they are not good games.
Most gamers would disagree with you. That's alright, art is subjective and different people are allowed to like different things. Maybe you just don't like games with a lot of story? If so there are plenty of genres that aren't story heavy like arcade games, tile-matching/match 3 games, fighting, FPS, sports, etc. Or maybe action/adventure might just not be the genre for you?
As for original mechanics there's very little out there, but that was true even in the 2000s to the mid-2010s (which would include both uncharted, and the last of us). Most games are just building off of what's been done before. You can find clever twists on old mechanics or rare combinations of them, but it's very hard to find something really different. When you do, it's hit or miss on them being worthwhile, but sometimes the novelty helps make up for the shortcomings.
> You have an upgrade system, so the actual gameplay of the game is bad at the start because you don't have any of the fun abilities at the start
Upgrade systems are supposed to provide progression. It rewards you for your progress in the game with fun abilities. It also helps keep gameplay fresh over the 25/40/60/120+ hours you play by giving you a steady stream of exciting new abilities/weapons to try out. There's often a new game+ option that lets you play the game again with all the best abilities from the start. Upgrade systems are generally a good thing! Sometimes things can go wrong though, for example one of the many problems with Marvel's Spider-Man 2 was starting your character out far too weak compared to how he was at end of the first game and the upgrades you eventually got weren't great either.
Speaking as a somewhat older gamer, if you really want variety in gameplay I'd recommend trying to branch out to new genres, indie titles, and lower budget PC games. The AAA games with huge budgets can tell a great story with amazing visuals and satisfying gameplay but they aren't going to take a lot of risks because of the amount of money on the line. That might also be why they can come off as PG-13, they want a wide audience.
> Most gamers would disagree with you. That's alright, art is subjective and different people are allowed to like different things. Maybe you just don't like games with a lot of story? If so there are plenty of genres that aren't story heavy like arcade games, tile-matching/match 3 games, fighting, FPS, sports, etc. Or maybe action/adventure might just not be the genre for you?
I understand it is a contrarian take. That doesn't mean that it is without merit. I also find it tiresome when people just claim everything is subjective when it really isn't.
The game play is bad. Joel's movement is slow, like too slow. You can't take certain enemies down without certain weapons. The scavenging aspect becomes a chore.
The buddy system they demoed originally was downgraded heavily from the original E3 demo, which was probably 20 years ago now. They took Uncharted, slowed it down and layered a depressing story on top which people think is deep.
The game is boring to play once you know the story. The presentation is excellent, masks this. It does not change the fact that the gameplay is at best "ok". It has virtually no replayability, to the point where I was dreading having to play the next section, as I knew it was a total chore.
There are plenty of problems that I can point to that are not subjective.
> As for original mechanics there's very little out there, but that was true even in the 2000s to the mid-2010s (which would include both uncharted, and the last of us). Most games are just building off of what's been done before. You can find clever twists on old mechanics or rare combinations of them, but it's very hard to find something really different. When you do, it's hit or miss on them being worthwhile, but sometimes the novelty helps make up for the shortcomings.
I am talking about the fact that they didn't even bother changing it. IIRC, in the Farcry games, you can essentially poison/confuse enemies via arrows or something. This exists in a bunch of games.
Ghosts of Tshushima has the exact same mechanic. They didn't even bother dressing it up differently. The game is fun when you are taking out the camps. However, there is the whole Assassin's Creed gameplay collect-a-thon.
A lot of the games are carbon-copy clones of one another, and the only thing that is different is the setting.
> Upgrade systems are supposed to provide progression. It rewards you for your progress in the game with fun abilities. It also helps keep gameplay fresh over the 25/40/60/120+ hours you play by giving you a steady stream of exciting new abilities/weapons to try out. There's often a new game+ option that lets you play the game again with all the best abilities from the start. Upgrade systems are generally a good thing! Sometimes things can go wrong though, for example one of the many problems with Marvel's Spider-Man 2 was starting your character out far too weak compared to how he was at end of the first game and the upgrades you eventually got weren't great either.
I know what it's supposed to do. The games are long because they are padding with bullshit. Why do I want to write haikus in an action game? It's not even a mini game, FFS. They really shouldn't be. It becomes a chore. I've got hundreds of hours in Hell Divers, yet it isn't because I can fire up the game for 30 minutes or all Saturday evening.
How it is implemented often sucks. I am supposed to believe at the start of Ghosts of Tshushima, Jin, who is a trained samurai, can barely fight. The old GoW games at least de-powered you via the plot device, and all the core game mechanics still worked. Why do I have to have a cut scene (which you have to play through but is still really a cut scene) to stab a Mongol in the back?
How about I start awesome and become even more awesome? Or make it make sense that I am weak and incorporate it into the gameplay itself.
> Speaking as a somewhat older gamer, if you really want variety in gameplay I'd recommend trying to branch out to new genres, indie titles, and lower budget PC games. The AAA games with huge budgets can tell a great story with amazing visuals and satisfying gameplay but they aren't going to take a lot of risks because of the amount of money on the line. That might also be why they can come off as PG-13, they want a wide audience.
I am not talking about what I like/don't like. My entire critique is around the problems with the Last of Us and Triple-A games, as you specifically mentioned. I play different games these days and just picked up Ghost of Tsushima because it was on sale and I heard it was good.
As for PG-13, the old God of War games managed to garner a wide audience while being R rated. The argument doesn't make sense.
They also soft-censor a lot of games. For example, the Stellar Blade demo originally (it was patched later) had a lot of gore and cleavage. The game that finally released toned down both.
The new Tomb Raider games (not so new now), Lara is completely sexless. You have this gorgeous athletic woman, and nobody finds her attractive or even comments on it?
> That doesn't mean that it is without merit. I also find it tiresome when people just claim everything is subjective when it really isn't.
I mean, if you want to look at things purely objectively, the last of us was a great game. It made tons of money, got amazing reviews, its recommended and loved by gamers, it frequently appears in lists of the best games ever made, it's won literally hundreds of awards, other game developers have cited it as an influence in their own highly acclaimed works, and it spawned (for better or worse) a media franchise that includes books, comics, television, a stage production, a Universal Studios theme part attraction, a sequel, and a handful of remakes/releases.
I struggle to come up with a single objective measure for a good game is that the last of us doesn't satisfy. It hits every benchmark except your personal feelings about it. Even as a fan I'd agree that it wasn't without flaws, but none of them were enough to make the game a bad one. The slow movement and scavenging were a part of the game's atmosphere that to many were actually beneficial to the game.
> The game is boring to play once you know the story.
I, and countless others, have replayed the game and didn't have that issue. It's kind of like going back to movie or book. Some people don't see the point in that either. It's not the best game for replay value. but there are some alternate game options provided and collectables if you missed any in the first run. Players can also experiment with with different weapons/upgrades/tactics. I suspect that most people who go back, go back for the story.
> How about I start awesome and become even more awesome? Or make it make sense that I am weak and incorporate it into the gameplay itself.
I agree with you there. If they're going to start you out weak when the character shouldn't be (I'll point again at spiderman here) they should at least come up with a reason for it. It's can still feel kind of cheap when all your powers are taken from you just so that you have to gain them back again, but some games don't even bother.
> As for PG-13, the old God of War games managed to garner a wide audience while being R rated. The argument doesn't make sense.
Sure, old God of War games. The nudity in those games have been a source of controversy and it's been dialed back. Not that it had any impact on the actual rating thanks to tons of violence but prudish Americans are fine with killing for some reason while drawing the line at boobs. There's no doubt that there will be people who won't or can't play games with a lot of nudity. Personally, I think America should grow up and get over the weird sex hangups, but Corporate America is full of cowards who only care about the bottom line and that doesn't encourage them to to push boundaries.
> They also soft-censor a lot of games. For example, the Stellar Blade demo originally (it was patched later) had a lot of gore and cleavage. The game that finally released toned down both.
"lack of cleavage" is really not something you can honestly criticize Stellar Blade for, even though some outfits have been changed. They absolutely caved and censored the work from where they started though. I didn't have any issue with the design of Lara for the reboots. She certainly wasn't sexless (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cb/Lara_Croft_(2...) and was still attractive. I wasn't looking for people's comments on her looks at the time though.
> I mean, if you want to look at things purely objectively, the last of us was a great game. It made tons of money, got amazing reviews, its recommended and loved by gamers, it frequently appears in lists of the best games ever made, it's won literally hundreds of awards, other game developers have cited it as an influence in their own highly acclaimed works, and it spawned (for better or worse) a media franchise that includes books, comics, television, a stage production, a Universal Studios theme part attraction, a sequel, and a handful of remakes/releases.
Ok, I am going to have to break down why this is just bad argumentation:
- Money argument - By that logic, Call of Duty, FIFA or Madden are the best games of all time. When they clearly are not, as they print cash every year for EA and Activision. That would also mean that the Marvel movies were the best movies ever made. You and I know that is BS.
- Popularity argument - This is the classic argumentum ad populum. Something is not good because it is popular. Good things are often popular, but they are not good because they are popular.
- TV/Movie/whatever adaptations – This is simply milking the franchise for all it is worth. That isn't a good thing.
- Creatively inspired for highly acclaimed works. Often there are many highly acclaimed works in the industry that the players don't like. This happens all the time; something will get a good review score, and the player score will be very different. Look at what is being streamed to see what people actually like.
- Award ceremonies for film, TV and music have always been lampooned for being ridiculous and not a good metric of anything the public cares about. This has been done to death in comedy movies, where they openly lampoon these award ceremonies for what they are. Award ceremonies are simply the industry congratulating itself and a networking/party event.
None of these are good arguments. I am talking about gameplay and replay-ability. TLOU has bad replayability.
> It hits every benchmark except your personal feelings about it. Even as a fan I'd agree that it wasn't without flaws, but none of them were enough to make the game a bad one. The slow movement and scavenging were a part of the game's atmosphere that to many were actually beneficial to the game.
These are not personal feelings. I gave direct examples of where the combat/movement was bad or things that were promised were not delivered in the game.
The presentation of it carries the entire game. It is similar to Uncharted. TLOU is simply Uncharted with a skin.
Contrast that with Spider-Man 1&2, where I skip all the cutscenes for the most part (as the acting and script are terrible); the gameplay is amazing.
Pity I can't skip the cutscenes (consistently) in the Miles Morales standalone DLC/game. The plot and dialogue in that game are dire.
> I, and countless others, have replayed the game and didn't have that issue. It's kind of like going back to movie or book. Some people don't see the point in that either. It's not the best game for replay value. but there are some alternate game options provided and collectables if you missed any in the first run. Players can also experiment with with different weapons/upgrades/tactics. I suspect that most people who go back, go back for the story.
So one of my criticisms was replay-ability. You admit it is a problem. The reason the replayability is bad is because the gameplay is bad.
> Sure, old God of War games. The nudity in those games have been a source of controversy and it's been dialed back. Not that it had any impact on the actual rating thanks to tons of violence but prudish Americans are fine with killing for some reason while drawing the line at boobs. There's no doubt that there will be people who won't or can't play games with a lot of nudity. Personally, I think America should grow up and get over the weird sex hangups, but Corporate America is full of cowards who only care about the bottom line and that doesn't encourage them to to push boundaries.
No, it hasn't been dialled back. It has been removed entirely. The violence has also been dialled back. This was done at the request, I suspect, of Sony. Sony censors almost every games on PlayStation.
> "lack of cleavage" is really not something you can honestly criticize Stellar Blade for, even though some outfits have been changed. They absolutely caved and censored the work from where they started though
They literally dialled it back at the request of Sony.
You didn't read what I said. I am talking about how she is treated in the game by the other characters, not that she looks good. I specifically said she looks great.
> Games are a great medium for storytelling and cutscenes are better than delivering plot strictly by having players hunt for thousands of short snippets of text.
Those aren't the only options you know. Games should tell story primarily through gameplay. Resorting to effectively videos or novels for large parts of it only shows the authors didn't really want to make a game in the first place.
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I suspect that it's a lot less about making children feel better and more about keeping the general population stupid and unable to think critically so that the ruling class can exploit them easier. The children of the ruling class are still given the opportunity to be well educated by private institutions that are overpriced to keep out the poors.
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