nerdjon

I love that we again bring up 2 games that failed as if this is the only reason they failed.

When there are plenty of games with a diverse set of characters that sell just fine. First party Sony games are (generally) a fantastic example of this, that sell very well. SpiderMan 2 is a great example. Horizon, etc.

I already mentioned other games like Overwatch, Mass Effect, Apex, and many others that have diversity are just fine.

Simply having a gay character, a black character, a woman that isn't a sex object, isn't "bending over backwards".

I am sorry but you need to face the fact that gaming is no longer male dominated. That is a good thing. A gay person (or character) existing, is not "political" or shoving it in your face. At least no more than every single straight relationship that I see every single day in media my entire life is “shoved in my face”. But that’s fine because it’s normalized.

A man and a woman can be all over each other and no one bats an eye, but 2 men dare to express the simplest of affection and suddenly it’s “political”.

I think it depends on the size of the company and who ends up being involved in the decision amking and when.

From what I have seen, the amount that someone is making can be a contributing factor. Maybe your performance reviews but that doesn't always paint a full picture of your actual performance since those are often kinda black and white.

In every layoff I have been a part of (wether or not I was personally affected) the managers found out the morning of and were not consulted before it happened. In more than a few cases someone critical was let go.

Making it mostly a numbers game.

> bringing back places for people that just want to make and play games.

What exactly does that mean?

No one is stoping you from playing and making games. There isn't a law that says that every game has to be diverse. You can do whatever you want.

If you are playing a heavily story driven game like Spiderman, Horizon, or the many other games from Sony that are diverse and sell quite well. You should want it to reflect reality instead of a narrow view of the world. That is good story telling.

The ability to see yourself in media is a powerful thing. Something that many people take for granted since they are in a group that was already largely represented by video games, movies, tv shows, etc.

If you just want to play a game for the sake of playing a game, skip the story, play online games and just do whatever. That still exists also.

I don't understand what your complaint is.

> Gaming is probably the most diverse pastime on the planet.

Yes and no, it really wasn't that long ago that Dragon Age had their whole "straight male gamer" controversy because someone was upset at it having diversity.

LGBT representation is a lot better now but that is really only a recent change.

Non sexualized female representation has been lacking for a long time. Even look at Horizon, and you could find people complaining that in Forbidden West they made her face a bit fuller.

It is very easy (just look at this thread) to find people complaining about the idea of "politics" or diversity in gaming and who represents it. Anytime a female character in a sequel gets a less skin tight or revealing outfit it's "politics".

Yes there is a lot of diversity in the gaming audience and who makes the games. A lot of that is more in the open today. But it has not always been like that and for a long time it was largely associated with being straight and male.

Just look at comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41367392 and tell me that the gaming community is just fine. I fully acknowledge that those opinions are likely in the minority, but we see it a lot. I mean Xbox Live had a reputation (and still has) of being very homophobic in the Halo 2 and 3 days.

> Sell copies and have players? Isn't that reasonable metric for entertainment product?

What your argument was, was unclear. Not everyone knows what is going on with every game at every time. I personally have not payed any attention to either of these games so had no idea what your point mentioning was.

Counter Point:

Boulders Gate 3. Overwatch. Mass Effect. Dragon Age. Apex Legends. Life is strange.

The list goes on

The fact is that there are a ton of games that introduce "politics" (diversity) into their video games that do just fine and trying to choose 2 as "failing" isn't proving your point.

They could just be bad games with basically zero hype or marketing, I knew they existed but barely knew they even came out.

I find it ironic that I now have 2 comments focusing on a single word while ignoring the other 3.

Also ignoring that in the phrasing for that message I think it is pretty clear that I am talking more generally and most of the people that are mad at "politics" in video games fall in that category.

At least in the US, which yes that is where I am from so that is my exposure to this particular issue so that is what I am commenting on. Never claimed otherwise.

> done extremely great doing this.

Doing what exactly?

It isn't clear to me if you are advocating for recognizing a diverse group of players or to focus on a narrow definition of what a gamer is.

My absolute favorite is when the model will tell you why something should be one way, but in the same message confidently tell you it is the other way.

I had a situation where I was playing around with having it right a quick method for me. I gave it the specs it needed to work with and the other methods it will call.

Basically, it wrote calling one of the methods with the wrong (missing) arguments. When I asked it to fix that call, it first said its current call was right but then when it went to explain it (in the same message), it pointed out that a certain missing argument was required to be passed in.

I have seen similar situations with these models looking at data time and time again. It theoretically sees it, but once that wrong data (the first failed interpretation) is part of its context it's basically all over.

Yeah.... no it's really not overblown.

It is a serious problem when these tools are being pushed as trustworthy when they are anything but.

On an almost daily occurrence I deal with some sort of hallucination in code, in summarizing something, we see it constantly on social media when people try to use Google's AI summary as a source of truth.

Let's not try to lie to push an agenda about what the capabilities of what these models can do. They are very powerful, but they make mistakes. There is zero question about that, and quite often.

The problem isn't that they hallucinate, the problem is that we have comments like yours trying to downplay it. Then we have people that, it is right just enough times that they start trusting it without double checking.

That is the problem, it is right enough times that you just start accepting the answers. That leads to, making scripts that grab data and put it into a database without checking. It's fine if it is not business critical data, but it's not really fine when we are talking about health care data or.. oh idk, police records like a recent post was talking about.

If you are going to use it for your silly little project, or you're going to bring down your own companies infrastructure go for it. But let's not pretend the problem doesn't exist and shove this technology into far more sensitive areas.

Hopefully they review it very carefully and not well after the event so the memory is fresh.

Otherwise, you may forget important details and just think it was correct if you need to reference it later. We know how influential someone's memory can be.

There is something to be said about needing to write this stuff down fully to commit it to memory.

I agree that this is likely going to end badly.

I just tried it and it is currently at about 918, which yeah it is high and using a lot of the available speed.

I mentioned Xbox getting to 500, so yeah there are some that are. But you're not downloading a game every day, at least not ones that are 50gb and won't just finish very quickly.

So that is 2 things that actually seem to utilize the speed that I can get, but it doesn't seem like the rest of the internet is anywhere near this capability and hasn't really been changing much.

That second step hallucinating is far more likely when you are feeding it incorrect information from the first hallucination.

LLM's are very easy to manipulate.

At one point with a system prompt telling Claude it was OpenAI, I was able to ask what its model is and it would confidently tell me it was OpenAI. Garbage data in, garbage data out.

Admittedly that is an extreme case, but you're giving that second prompt wrong data in the hopes that it will identify it instead of just thinking it's fine when it is part of its new context.

Well the website seems to be down so I can't actually see any information about what LLM you are using, but I seriously hope you are not just sending the data to OpenAI API or something like that and are forcing the use of a private (ideally self hosted) service.

I would not want any data about my infrastructure sent to a public LLM, regardless of how sanitized things are.

Otherwise, on paper it seems cool. But I worry about getting complicit with this tech. It is going to fail, that is just the reality. We know LLM's will hallucinate and there is not much we can do about it, it is the nature of the tech.

SO it might work most of the time, but when it doesn't and you're bashing your head against the wall trying to figure out what is broken. This system is telling you that all of these things are fine, but one of them actually isn't. But it worked enough times that you trust it, so you don't bother double checking.

That is before we even talk about having this thing running code for automatic remediation, which I hope no one seriously considers ever doing that.

> You need to set up your fine-tuning and prompts and then test well for consistent results.

Tell that to Google...

Seriously, it is well established that these systems hallucinate. Trying to say otherwise shows you are trying to push something that just is not true.

They can be right, yes. But when they are wrong they can be catastrophically wrong. You could be wasting time looking into the wrong problem with something like this.

That is just so lovingly on brand for every UI transition Microsoft has attempted to do with Windows since Vista.

I get it, this is a lot of work and there are a lot of things that need to change. But having 2 places for system settings is wild.

I get what you are saying, but Fios launched their 1gb internet in 2017 and it feels like most services have been stuck at their specific speed since then.

I was curious, so I just went to download the Windows 11 ISO from Microsoft. That is capping out at about 70 mbps. Downloading an almost 7gb file in 2 minutes.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying "oh we don't need this speed". But clearly things have not been changing. We have been past my current download speed from Microsoft being a minimum for a while.

That I agree with, I guess I kinda always figured that businesses could already get internet at higher speed / bandwidth. Otherwise many offices would be abysmal.

I am struggling to see a use case for more than 1gb up and down. Which I have with Fios right now.

Very few things seem to go above 100mb (hard wired). The single exception I have seen is my Xbox which sometimes gets up to 500 when downloading a game.

I guess if you have a big family and a lot of things are downloading or streaming at once, but are people really hitting a limit. Even Netflix’s recommendations are super low.

It just seems like we have some pushes for these crazy speeds(maybe for marketing or increments) when the reality is the speeds to you will never utilize it.

I feel like I am missing something for how you could possibly justify this in your home.

I agree with you in sentiment. I don’t have chrome on my personal computers.

But I have a critical plugin I use for work that is Chrome only.

I didn’t mean to imply they were the same people.

But it is interesting that we have 2 groups of gamers.

One that is so used to and accepting of a practice to not only sometimes buy 2 nearly identical boxes to play exclusive games but also complain when one of them does the right thing and is ending the practice (see drama about Xbox).

One that complains about installing another piece of software with no cost.

Why do these 2 groups of gamers have very different opinions on this.

That only explains a couple of the stores but not all of them.

Xbox and Epic don't fall in that category. I don't believe EA does either, but not 100% sure.

To be clear here. I am referring to the being forced after buying a game. None of these, to my knowledge, you were forced to use after buying the game on Steam. Unlike Ubisoft.

> One reason I’ve heard is the stats and Achievements consolidation.

I have not seen that referenced much so I am curious how many people that is the reason vs just some weird loyalty to Steam.

But, as someone who is mostly a couch gamer so my console of choice is Xbox. I can see that, I have a PS5 but all of my cross platform games is Xbox.

I have my PC for a lot of games that I would prefer that setup (for me its a game by game decision), but with game pass and cross buy it already didn't make sense for me to go all in on steam, but some games are only on steam.

So what was the harm in adding other stores when it made sense.

> I wouldn’t buy a PS5 for an exclusive. TBH exclusivity is annoying and I don’t want to reward it.

I don't want to reward it. But I also view myself as a gamer first before any platform loyalties. If I want to play something, that takes priority. So annoyingly I have both under my TV.

rant I am so annoyed at the people complaining about Xbox going Multiplatform as if it isn't a good thing for consumers to not have to buy nearly identical hardware. I don't care that it is how the industry has ran for so long, it's still anti-consumer. end rant

I never really understood this mentality, especially when on the console side people seem just fine with the idea of buying multiple consoles for exclusives. (not that I am agreeing with that either).

There isn't a cost to having multiple stores, you don't even need to keep them running at all time. I get the concerns over the Epic app, but Heroic exists.

Personally I have games on Steam, Xbox (cross buy between xbox and PC), Epic, and EA. Plus Game Pass.

The only annoying part is when I go to install or buy a game, finding where I have it or making sure I don't already own it somewhere. But there are launchers like Playnite to address that.

But it does feel like I am in the minority with this opinion.

> … only to have Google to force feed “You should install Chrome” on every Google search page.

It drives me insane whenever I get this "finish setting up your iPhone" emails from Google after signing in on my phone.

How google continues to get away with such a heavy hand in pushing their products everywhere is beyond me. Yes I know they are being investigated, but it is seriously too late and the damage has been done.

Edit:

Oh and unless I am mistaken, you still can't disable the prompt every time you start chrome (if you do need it for some reason but not as your primary) to make it your default, at least on Mac. I caved and clicked it because it was driving me insane, but I hate it.

I disagree, many of the competitors do what is necessary just fine.

There is a strong sentiment with many gamers of just not wanting to use an alternative and it is basically a non starter for many other stores. Many complain about the very idea of not all of their games being in the same place.

This isn't necessarily anything monopolistic done on Valve's side. But it would be very hard for another store to make any meaningful impact regardless of how they are.

Microsoft's branding is seriously all over the place with all of this... They have at least 3 "Copilot" things now I think? Github copilot, the one built into Windows, and now this apparently. sigh.

Regardless, my other points still stand. All of these tools remain a leak waiting to happen.

Good, this was a poorly conceived idea to build into an OS and turn on by default.

It is the same problem with a lot of the AI tools right now. Using them for your code, looking at your documents, etc etc. Unless you self host it or use a 'private' service from Azure or AWS (which they say is safe...) who knows where this information is ending up.

This is a major leak waiting to happen. It scares me to think what kind of data has been fed into ChatGPT or some code tool that is just sitting somewhere in a log or something plaintext that could be found later.

I might have lucked out since I was using 10 LTSC up until 11 LTSC was... leaked? I don't know the full story.

I never had any compatibility issue, it does get some updates.

Unfortunately no, Microsoft really does not want normal users using this since it removes a lot of the features they are pushing (like Copilot) and a lot of the telemetry is removed. Especially since it really shows how well Windows can actually run when all of the crap isn't there. So there is not a way for a normal user to get a key.

My personal ethical opinion, I have a license key for Windows 11 already. Microsoft does not give me the ability to get a key for LTSC, so I don't have any qualms about using a script to activate it.

Yup

Don't fall for Microsoft's marketing that it is somehow a Windows that can't do normal things, that it is only suitable for Kiosks, or whatever other tactic they seem determined to use to discourage its use.

It is a perfectly capable Windows installation just without a lot of bloat. Any missing features (like the Windows Store) are easily installable.

I got better gaming performance compared to normal Windows 11.