Damn that’s wild. Any business that has that drastic of spikes of profit and loss cannot possibly be sustainable. I can’t see how it could be. Look at the automobile giants in the USA. All it took was one major economic event to bankrupt them, and they got bailed out which should’ve never happened. It’s bullshit.

you don’t see Apple and Samsung going out of business.

Samsung is damn near the point of going bankrupt. Samsung saw a 95% drop in profits for a second consecutive quarter 2023

Gameplay is still more important than game resolution

In your opinion*. You forgot that part. For lots of people, graphics are way more important because they want a beautiful and immersive experience. They are not wrong to want that. I respect that you feel the way you do, but I respect others who care more about graphics. I’ll even go so far as to say that I am of the same mind as you, I don’t care about the graphics much at all but there are some games where the graphics have truly wowed me, or the visual effects. For example two that come to mind, Ori and the will of the wisps, or No Man’s sky. Two very different games but absolutely crazy visual effects and graphics on high-end computers. Another game that I play a lot is World of Warcraft, gameplay is so damn fun but it’s hard to get any of my friends to play it because it’s so ugly, looks like a poorly rendered PS3 game. That horrible quality of graphics prevents people from even trying it

Most gamers don’t even have hardware that would allow that type of resolution.

This is because they refuse to innovate. Think of the DVD player. You think a DVD player costs a lot today? Of course not, there’s a million of them and no one wants them anymore. If they actually innovated and created drastic leaps and technology, then older technology would be cheaper. It’s not expensive to go out and get an RTX 2080, which is the graphics card I currently have. Is about 250 or $300 now, pretty damn solid card. If they actually innovated and kept pushing the limits, technology would accelerate faster. Instead they want the inverse of that. They want as slow growth in technology as feasibly possible, maximum amount of time to innovate, maximum amount of revenue, and maximized impact on the environment. All those carbon emissions and waste of graphics cards being thrown out

Shows that You are in the UK. Just want to clarify I’m talking specifically about the USA but I agree with everything you said. Tech stocks became so inflated! Don’t know if people are seeing it in Europe, but here in the USA, there is this really toxic and very cringe behavior from these tech companies to get people back to office, they can force people to return to office across the country, basically you have to relocate and upend your entire life which could cost you $50,000 and they’re not paying for that, if you don’t do that you get fired. Easy way to start laying off people without having to pay them anything because you can call it insubordination, since they refuse to return to office. Now they supposedly have cause to get rid of people or deny them promotions for more money. IBM for example is doing this right now, Cisco was doing it as well. One of the most major networking software companies in the market. Scumbag behavior

I wouldn’t say the movie industry is struggling, I would say that people that work for a living are struggling. Actors are still getting paid huge sums of money, so are directors and producers. They are getting their pound of flesh one way or another. They are just not producing anything that people want to watch. For example all this marvel post-infinity War bullshit, no one wants to see that. No one cares about marvel Disney anything right now, it’s low quality drivel. But Beetlejuice, Barbie, oppenheimer… These are proof that people do still want to see movies, they just don’t want to produce anything meaningful.

The people struggling that I’m talking about, however, are the supporting roles. People doing the filming, set dressing, makeup, special effects. Lots of these lower levels supporting roles get almost nothing compared to their cost of living in California, while some of the main actors can get tens of millions

Black mirror is getting closer everyday

The Lemmy user base is so out of touch with the average consumer.

This is probably true. I don’t know many people who aren’t super heavy into tech, I’ve had a gaming PC half my life, but I do have a couple friends who don’t even have a laptop, PC, computer, or anything. They just have a phone. I don’t know how they get by.

No, actually, I did my own research on it

https://www.npr.org/2024/05/14/1251072726/ai-spam-images-facebook-linkedin-threads-meta

When researchers at Georgetown and Stanford universities investigated more than 100 Facebook pages that routinely post AI content — sometimes dozens of times a day — they found that many are engaging in scams and spam.

Other people have found the same conclusion that I have

Imo, this is most likely AI. Facebook and Instagram both have incredibly sophisticated spam preventative measures. These companies are likely using artificial intelligence to generate brand new and highly intelligent scripts that continuously change to evade spam detection tools. Same thing happened on Twitter (You can look at my post history for an example). There was a bot spamming on Twitter and it had run out of credits for GPT resulting in the AI instructions to start being spit out instead of the fake messages it was supposed to produce.

It wasn’t that bad several years ago, I remember during the pandemic, lots of people were interacting with each other. It gets progressively worse every year.

can you block users by wildcard?

Nope. You also can’t prevent users from viewing your profile. It’s not like Facebook where you block someone, they’re gone and can’t even see you. On Reddit, they can see you, and just log onto another account to harass and downvote you.

Wow. Do you at least get to like write it off of your taxes or something?

Honestly don’t see how they get away with this and don’t get sued into oblivion? Or why the justice system is letting this happen? Because when you start a non-profit and claim that you’re doing it for the public good, I thought there would be some sort of legal requirement that you’re actually doing that? Meta, which is a for-profit company, has chosen to release their AI models to the public for anyone to use, you can go get a copy of llama 3.1 right now to go and use all on your own and people are tweaking it and doing all these crazy open source changes to llama 3.1. It’s crazy.