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Of the current widely accepted papabili, Peter Turkson is from Sub-Saharan Africa. He is softly pro-LGBT, and he seeks to harmonize the progressive homosexuality views with traditional African culture[0]. I don't think Robert Sarah is considered papabile, possibly owing to his message of hate for homosexuality. Overall, it's inconsistent with the recent message of the church, and it is hard to imagine that progressive Catholics would accept it.

Here's a Reuters list for possible Francis successors: https://www.reuters.com/world/who-might-succeed-pope-francis.... Usually, Reuters does thorough due diligence before releasing something. So I'd expect their predictions are accurate.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turkson

Hah, good point.

Pope Francis has done much to transform the Catholic church into a more progressive and inclusive institution. If not for his papacy, it was somewhat likely that the church would drift too far from Millennial values to keep its former relevance.

Hopefully, the next pope will also champion unity, inclusivity, and peace, and oppose religious dogmatism. This will define the future of Christianity. Many challenges remain for the institution.

We could score comments with sentiment analysis. AI, though not necessarily LLMs, can do it very well. Depending on how child comments reflect on the parent, the parent could be scored for relevance, agreement, helpfulness, or any other metric. This would also fuzz the metric itself (karma), and make it hard to game. The Goodhart's law problem in social media (karma farming, ratio-ing, etc) could be solved.

Of course, that presents many other problems. A corporation using AI to steer what discourse is worthy of promotion and what isn't in social networks has already caused much harm. Many things can be said about it.

But as a thought experiment, I think it's an interesting one. Much good could be done, advertisers and financial interests permitting.

I had a mini stroke that was classed as a TIA at the time, though it later turned out to have some lasting effects. It's a fascinating and overwhelming experience to unlearn reading.

To me, the immediate physical aspect was that all text started to look like Star Wars languages. Another aspect was that it was difficult to even concentrate on the text. It no longer stood out from the environment. It was an irrelevant detail, a decoration you wouldn't pay particular attention to.

I can also appreciate what the author is saying about how their perspective of the world shifted. I expect that her shift was a lot larger than mine, but mine already made me appreciate that in the modern world, when we look at things, we often seek to retrieve some bit of information. We don't look at them holistically. Our tunnel vision is tremendous.

As you are reading this comment, you are so focused on the words that you don't see the boxy proportions of the rectangular screen you're looking at. You don't see the contrast on the screen; you're not even paying attention to the colors, likely. The texture of your display is expected to be different on the back, the corners, and its surface. Your display is also a rectangular light, casting a shadow of your head behind you now. Some parts of the light are stronger than others; it's not a uniform light. The device you're reading this on (whether a monitor or a phone) has hot spots and cold spots on its chassis that you may not have thought about, despite looking at it or touching it for thousands of hours.

But if you can't read, you see all these things on a computer monitor, on a TV, on a road sign, on a book, and that's all that your brain finds significant about that object. That's quite interesting - how our language abilities shape our everyday perception of reality.

I would even say that it can be an enlightening experience to take a holiday from reading. Though I don't think anyone can come close to enjoying it, considering how much anxiety the thought of whether they'll learn it again causes. In some ways, experiencing the world around them freshly anew, without that anxiety (as the author has), is a blissful and beautiful experience few people have had in their lives.

It’s why we have warnings to investors saying past performance is not an indicator of future returns.

My point is that narrative-driven funding is very often the wrong approach. Before people polish their storytelling and pitch decks, they should look at the fundamentals of their business. Then, they probably won't need the whole startup theater to try to get funding. Moreover, if the fundamentals are so bad they can't be funded, it's a signal about the business, isn't it? Maybe that doesn't apply to some one-off unicorn businesses, but it applies to the 99%.

I'd say people are better off going with fundamentals. Because if your fundamentals are bad, but let's say you manage to enthral the investors with your confidence, charisma, and selective optimism, they may fund you, but your negotiating position will be incredibly weak. If they stagger the funding over milestones, upsetting your investors for any matter - product related or not - will mean game over. If they want a lot of equity, you will have to say yes, as they'll still be the one investor tentatively interested, etc. It's a bad deal. It's risking a lot of structural damage to a new business.

With good fundamentals, all of that doesn't apply. If you start a company, get some cash flow going, and show profit, investors will start chasing you. Whatever funding you would have gotten through the usual Silicon Valley venture pitching, you will now get on actually good terms.

> they'll ask you to put up all your personal assets as collateral in exchange for a 20% loan on your existing accounts receivable

Has this happened to you? My experience is that banks offer almost up to 1:1 debt to (company) assets, so long as the business model is clear and profitable. If someone's trying to fund an unprofitable business (like I said, for market capture, for example), then there will be problems. But in that case, the fundamentals aren't great.

I see your footer > span:nth-of-type(2) { display: none; }

:)

You ask it for negative feedback, and it generates a negative feedback text. There's nothing helpful there — it's a catastrophizer's Swiss Army knife.

Solid businesses with a real chance at an upside don't need much convincing or fielding criticism. If you have a profitable company that needs to scale to do more business, just walk into a bank... If it's a pie-in-the-sky app idea that could maybe be monetized after market capture, then I don't think anyone needs imagined negative feedback at that point.

It's good satire, though.

This could go badly if it ends up in the mass adoption-enshittification pipeline.

That's very interesting. It seems to assume AI agents will have the same evolutionary imperative as other species. But without the ecological context, it looks like an unfounded premise. Why would AI play the 4X game, considering the infinity of alternative imperatives it could follow?

It sounds a bit like shifting the Overton Window to manufacture consent. I'm sure some people probably tried to do it.

Or maybe the internet. People love to dramatize these things.

The "terror of global catastrophe" is what doomscroller media constantly hammers onto its readers. And once someone has "bought in", it's impossible to reason with them. They'll just forever spread anxiety around them.

What's interesting is how it happens. Take someone who is mentally stable and subject them to a terminally online lifestyle for a year or two. They will have tons of anxiety about all sorts of things, not the least of which will be that the world is doomed (with no hope), that our societies and way of life are in the "late stage" and moments from collapse, and so on.

And it's a bit of a tragedy. If we took only the energy that people spend evangelizing those doom beliefs and put that energy into productive efforts, that alone could probably prevent whatever disaster is being evangelized. But maybe that'd not be good for engagement on social media or something.

I agree with you about ChatGPT "facts", but the parent commenter shared valuable information with a source. No need to treat them in such a rude way.

It wouldn't look out of place in the Severance intro.

That's true. And it doesn't even have a display on the other side — how will you yourself know if you're busy?

It can also be done with a bit of cardboard that says “Busy”.

Yes, very good point. They will sometimes try to normalize it, which makes it hard to spot.

As someone in game studio leadership, I found UK business loans easy to access up to 1:1 debt-to-assets. Perhaps it was different in the 90s. And I can understand if it's a scrappy start-up with no assets, though the older I get, the more I believe those business models are irresponsible and often have negative externalities (like someone going unpaid).

You justify working for free, and I get it. Sometimes, I worked for free in my companies, but it built my equity value. I can also somewhat get it if it’s for a good cause—if you personally want a change that your labor effects in the world.

Working for free for someone else without anything of value in return is a different matter. Even if, in the end, you became friends and got a job. Some people in the games industry will say this is normal, but it’s not (and by law in some cases). For example, the UK's living wage is where society decided to draw the line between fair labour relations and abuse.

When it comes to working for free or almost free, I think whether you'd get much better labor conditions elsewhere matters. In many cases, the answer is yes. That's a good litmus test for unfair compensation.

This is a major "vector" of abuse in the games industry. Right now, you could go on certain Discord servers and find tens of jobs that "can't pay right now" but will have various benefits in the future.

I'm happy it worked out for you, and maybe the 90s was a different time. But now, to go for the same deal would be foolish. And come to think of it, people were raising hell about it in games, even in the late 90s.

I'd say this practice today needs to die out. I'm sure 80% of companies with a temporary cash crunch (but a legitimate business model) can get bank credit to cover salaries. It's not even a big hassle - the business banking app usually approves the line of credit automatically in a few seconds, anyways. Depending on the regular cashflow, it can be up to small five figures - enough to pay a month or two of salaries. If they don't want to pay, that's a different matter.

My first client in video games was the same. They rarely paid their contractors on time (the payment was months late), or it wasn't the entire agreed sum. We kept sending in late payment notices to their finance guy, and they fired us all for being troublemakers. I believe I had a notice period of two weeks, but they fired me with one day's notice.

Suing them was out of the question. For me, as for others, it would have been international. The company was in Italy, and the contractors were all over Europe. We'd probably each spend over 10k euros on the proceedings and representation in Italian courts. And the company wasn't overdue by much more than that. Besides, even if we won and the court ruled our legal expenses were to be paid, we weren't sure the company was solvent enough. So no one sued.

I believe it was their modus operandi. The company continued firing their contractors when it got into arrears before a lawsuit made sense. Sometimes, it's just their business plan.

I agree with the article's author—no pay, no work. Before starting contract work, one should think about the line they won't cross regarding late payments. For me, it's when an invoice becomes overdue, and it's plainly a breach of contract. I will never again cross that line and keep working.

> It doesn't make sense to suggest that AI has made human effort more valuable.

In that case, I welcome an alternative explanation for the human labor price increase on UpWork and Fiverr while AI work replaced work at the previous price level. The same is seen in the hiring of affected disciplines.

By the way, the games you named are called black hole games. They capture players and don't let go. They are scarce (about 1 in 40,000-60,000), and many industry issues don't apply to them. For example, market oversaturation isn't a problem, player retention isn't a problem, network effects aren't a problem, and old growth engines aren't a problem. They are like “winning the lottery,” but most game developers live in a world where they haven't won.

Another similar exception to the industry rules is the top 20-30 franchises, like NBA2K, GTA, FIFA, Far Cry, Call of Duty, The Sims, Assassin’s Creed, etc. Together, they account for about half the new game and DLC sales. Black hole games take another ~30%, and the remaining 19,000 annually released games share the remaining 20%, with the top 50 games making up 19/20ths of it.

What matters for 95%+ of game developers is performing well in that 20%. And they sell close to 0 lootboxes, for example.

I think the old ones were more trustworthy, as the LLM wasn't used for knowledge retrieval. Instead, it wrapped around a search API and summarized the "10 blue links". That's not the case anymore. Now they produce the search results, hallucinating along the way.

It's not so much optimism as facts. Large AAA game companies have driven away investors[0] and talent[1]. The old growth engines (microtransactions, live service games, season passes, user-generated content, loot boxes, eSports hero shooters, etc.) also no longer work, as neither general players nor whales find them appealing.

AI is considered a potential future growth engine, as it cuts costs in art production, where the bulk of game production costs lie. Game executives are latching onto it hard because it's arguably one of the few straightforward ways to keep growing their publicly-traded companies and their own stock earnings. But technologists already know how this will end.

Other games industry leaders are betting on collapse and renewal to simpler business models, like self-funded value-first games. Also, many bet on less cashflow-intensive game production, including lower salaries (there is much to be said about that).

Looking at industry reports and business circle murmurs, this is the current state of gaming. Some consider it optimistic, and others (especially the business types without much creative talent) - dire. But it does seem to be the objective situation.

[0] VC investment has been down by more than 10x over the last two years, and many big Western game companies have lost investors' money in the previous five years. See Matthew Ball's report, which I linked in my parent comment, for more info.

[1] The games industry has seen more than 10% sustained attrition over the last 5 years, and about 50% of employees hope to leave their employer within a year: https://www.skillsearch.com/news/item/games---interactive-sa...

I was among the first to champion AI search, even before Perplexity rose to fame. You.com was the first AI search to quote sources well, and I used it extensively.

But now, the veracity of most LLMs' responses is terrible. They often include “sources” unrelated to what they say and make up hallucinations when I search for what I'm an expert in. Even Gemini in Google Search told me yesterday that Ada Lovelace invented the first programming language in the 18th century. The trust is completely gone.

So, I'm back to the plain old search. At least it doesn't obscure its sources, and I can get a sense of the veracity of what I find.

It's hopeful because AI has not devalued creative human labor but increased its worth. Similar to how if one were a skilled chef, they didn't start working for McDonald's when it came to be, but for a restaurant that pays significantly above McDonald's.

Most people's purchasing power being reduced is a separate matter, more related to the eroding middle class and greedflation. Many things can be said about it, but they are less related to the trend I highlighted. Even if, supposing the middle class erosion continues, the scenario you suggest may very well play out.

AI is the latest "overwhelmingly negative" games industry fad, affecting game developers. It's one of many. Most are because nine out of ten companies make games for the wrong reason. They don't make them as interactive art, as something the developers would like to play, or to perfect the craft. They make them to make publishers and businessmen rich.

That business model hasn't been going so well in recent years[0], and it's already been proclaimed dead in some corners of the industry[1]. Many industry legends have started their own studios (H. Kojima, J. Solomon, R. Colantonio, ...), producing games for the right reasons. When these games are inevitably mainstream hits, that will be the inflection point where the old industry will significantly decline. Or that's what I think, anwyay.

[0] https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tJdLsQzfWg

There is a small, hopeful flipside to this. While people using AI to produce art (such as concept art) have flooded the market, real skills now command a higher price than before.

To pull this out of the games industry for just a moment, imagine this: you are a business and need a logo produced. Would you hire someone at the market price who uses AI to generate something... sort of on-brand they most definitely cannot provide indemnity cover for (considering how many of these dubiously owned works they produce), or would you pay above the market price to have an artist make a logo for you that is guaranteed to be their own work? The answer is clear - you'd cough up the premium. This is now happening on platforms like UpWork and Fiverr. The prices for real human work have not decreased; they have shot up significantly.

It's also happening slowly in games. The concept artists who are skilled command a higher salary than those who rely on AI. If you depend on image-generating AI to do your work, I don't think many game industry companies would hire you. Only the start-ups that lack experience in game production, perhaps. But that part of the industry has always existed - the one made of dreamy projects with no prospect of being produced. It's not worth paying much attention to, except if you're an investor. In which case, obviously it's a bad investment.

Besides, just as machine-translated game localization isn't accepted by any serious publisher (because it is awful and can cause real reputational damage), I doubt any evident AI art would be allowed into the final game. Every single piece of that will need to be produced by humans for the foreseeable future.

If AI truly can produce games or many of their components, these games will form the baseline quality of cheap game groups on the marketplaces, just like in the logo example above. The buyer will pay a premium for a quality, human product. Well, at least until AI can meaningfully surpass humans in creativity - the models we have now can only mimic and there isn't a clear way to make them surpass.