So nice of them to help with Spotify’s off-site backup.

Ukraine did not have the infrastructure at the time to be able to even safely store the nuclear weapons they had. The nukes weren’t going to stay either way at the time.

Not even. E coli is fucking everywhere. Why that of all things?

Agreed, the assets did make it to production, but were replaced in a patch 5 days later. That definitely seems like it was placeholders that just got missed. Which happens, especially for a new small studio releasing their first game.

GenAI being used for temporary placeholders is arguably a correct use case for it. Especially with a smaller development team. If you have a limited number of artists, having them spend time crafting unique placeholders that will be replaced is a poor use of their time and talents that would otherwise be spent working on final art that will actually be in the released game. That is a 100% valid use case scenario for it, as long as the assets are replaced for the launch. And missing a few and fixing that within a week is entirely understandable, not something they should be indicted for.

There is some concern about the exact wording I’ve seen in various articles. Some say that Sandfall told the awards that GenAI wasn’t used in the development, but the articles don’t use a specific quote on their side, and then later saying it was used for placeholder assets. They seem to imply that Sandfall lies about the use to qualify, then later came clean. I’m wondering if that is simply miscommunication, potentially language issues, about the final game not using GenAI. Just because people speak multiple languages, that doesn’t mean that they understand nuanced differences in meaning when not using their native language. I can see the difference between the final game release and overall development being misunderstood depending on the exact wording used.

Exactly. Simply being in a photo isn’t damning by itself. Depending on where the photo was taken of course.

Especially if you’re a journalist in New York, Epstein worked in finance in NY for over a decade and was at many exclusive events.

Sounds like there needs to be additional fines. Better get to investigating all the other shit he and Twitter have done.

Surely the 50+ year long embargo preventing them from commerce and trade with half the world had absolutely no bearing on that whatsoever.

Not really… According to Pew Research Approximately 45% of Republicans report owning a gun, compared to about 20% of Democrats. Considering the parties are often roughly equally sized when it comes to these statistical models, that’s not actually a massive difference. There are plenty of armed Democrats, they’re just not vocal about wanting to worship their tools.

There’s no way they can implement a VPN ban without breaking every corporate network in the process.

Well of course. He was a Russian Asset “Krasnov”, and had tens of millions of dollars in loans from them. And he’s always been open about admiring Putin.

Oh no nothing so user-friendly. They’re gonna require them to be loaded via adb every time. And they’ll say that’s the only way they could do it for security or some shit.

$100 says they’re just going to make it require adb.

That was 2023, and one of very few things made not to specifically promote their hardware or as a cheap spinoff of existing IP. And define “actively maintaining”, because general bug fixes for decade old multi-player games and managing item marketplaces doesn’t require much manpower.

Going further back there’s Aperture Desk Job which was a tech demo for the Steam Deck in 2022. Then an extended cut version of Artifact originally meant as a sequel in 2021, which is a Dota 2 card game, but still remains unfinished, so effectively abandoned. Then Half Life: Alyx in 2020 which 90% of gamers can’t play because it’s VR only, and clearly made to further promote their VR hardware. Dota Warlords in 2020 which was originally a community game mode. The original Artifact in 2018, which had abandoned iOS and Android ports. The Lab in 2016 which was made to promote the launch of the HTC Vive. A zombie CS spinoff in 2014, Dota 2 in 2013, CS:Go in 2012, Portal 2 in 2011, and Left 4 Dead 2 in 2009.

If you remove the spinoff and niche stuff from the list you get game releases in 2023, 2020 (arguable since it’s VR only and thus inherently niche), 2013, 2012, 2011, 2009.

That’s a pretty big gap of not much for the last decade game-wise. Its been previously documented and published that Valve has issues getting games developed because of the flat organization structure. Articles like this.

Which is also one of the reasons so few new things get done, and why they (until now) haven’t been able to count to 3.

To get anything done you either have to be able to do it entirely by yourself which is unlikely, or get enough others organized and on board to make it happen.

The numbers just show that they are 8x as efficient. I only referenced Facebook because they’re the next closest company for comparison.

I never said they were worse than Facebook. That’s your assumption, reading what you want, not what’s actually being said.

Notably Epic charges less than 30% (something like 12% IIRC) to try to get more of that market. They even give away games. But their app is still inferior so it gets less use.

That’s because they make an insane amount of money by taking 30% of every sale on their platform, which nearly everyone uses because they’re a near monopoly and the alternatives are terrible. Around $3.5 Million per employee, nearly 5x the next highest company, which is Facebook at around $780,000 per employee.

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valves-reported-profit-per-head-from-steam-commissions-is-out-there-and-at-usd3-5-million-per-employee-it-makes-apple-and-facebook-look-like-a-lemonade-stand/

This doesn’t surprise me at all.

At Circle K, the video system in the back uses “police” to access the footage so they can review and make a copy. Not sure if that’s the only access level, wouldn’t be surprised given how old many of those systems still are.

Depends on what the jury decides. Did they manage to find 12 people that will consider a sandwich a weapon and completely discount the protest aspect and all current events?

Considering the prosecution doesn’t get to pick the jury, and both sides decided on the jury via voir dire, I doubt it.

That dude is still gonna have to live with all the jokes about him being a little bitch overreacting to a sandwich. His buddies will never let him love that down regardless of the verdict. And that gives me a tiny spark of happiness in these dark times.

To be fair, that’s because of a 1972 law that classifies bread as a staple food with extremely specific requirements. Namely that sugar content is no more than 2% of the flour content, above that is technically a cake legally.

Ignoring the fact that cakes usually have a sugar content of about 35%. The bread is nowhere near actually being cake, no one would actually mistake it for cake, and the courts only classify it that way because of those legal definitions.