What a waste of time. Both the article and the researchers.

Literally by the time their research was published, it was using irrelevant models, on top of the fact that, yeah, that’s how LLMs work. That would be obvious from 5m of using them.

Showing someone Control after their minds were blown by Severence, is probably how I felt when I found SCP after having my mind blown by Control.

Skyrim’s varied gameplay systems?

It has stealth, it has magic, it has melee combat, it has ranged combat, it has dialogue options for talking your way through stuff, it has multiple ways of solving quest lines…

It’s basically Skyrim, if it was smaller and more focused, with better combat, voice acting, level design, and heads and tails better writing.

From a mechanistic standpoint I think that mostly has to do with the high cost of entry for games.

At $80-$100 for a full priced game these days, it’s hard to just buy on a whim. The only time you would is when they’re on sale, which happens well after initial release. So initial sales of games are basically entirely driven by reviews and online discourse (which itself has an effect on reviews), and you basically just have a bunch of people all waiting for the signal to buy or not.

I do think that services like Gamepass are a genuinely good way of reducing that effect, because now anyone can try anything on a lark.

People are complaining about Avowed? What the fuck is wrong with them?

I’ve been too busy loving it to be online reading anything, honestly cannot fathom what their complaints are tho. Avowed has repeatedly impressed me by being more clever and nuanced than I was expecting a game to be, in writing, level design, and combat.

Is this more dumb gamer anti-woke hysteria?

One aspect of FOSS that most people don’t appreciate is how it’s funded. Like how it’s actually funded.

Once you put a dollar value to the hours put into it, it fairly quickly becomes apparent that most FOSS projects are basically only possible because super rich software engineers (relative to the average person) have the relative luxury to be able to dedicate a ton of free time and effort to building something they think should exist.

It’s why there was a huge FOSS boom after the dot com crash when a ton of software engineers suddenly got laid off but were relatively wealthy enough to not have massive pressure to immediately start grinding a 9-5 again.