Discord is great as chat program. It should’ve only ever been used for that. It completely sucks as forum replacement. Discord should’ve had very little value to any decent organization.

Every single small game I play has effectively the entirety of their support, community and forums run through discord. Instead of easy to search and discover forums, I have to use crappy infinite chat logs. It sucks.

And you can absolutely trust that tons of executives will definitely not understand this distinction and will use AI even in areas where it’s actively harmful.

Agreed. I keep waffling on my feelings about it. It definitely doesn’t feel like our laws properly handle the scale that LLMs can take advantage of ‘fair use’. It also feels like yet another way to centralize and consolidate wealth, this time not money, but rather art and literary wealth in the hands of a few.

I already see artists that used to get commissions now replaced by endless AI pictures generated via a Lora specifically aping their style. If it was a human copying you, they’d still be limited by the amount they could produce. But an AI can spit out millions of images all in the style you perfected. Which feels wrong.

Also no golden parachute to pay out

Both sides are twisting words. Pirating truly isn’t stealing, but rather closer to unauthorized use. The word ‘steal’ is used because they want to imply that it’s the same thing as taking a physical thing that can be lost. It engenders a certain feeling that they’re wanting to invoke. Stealing sounds worse than unauthorized use. Doesn’t mean it’s not wrong to do, but it isn’t the sort of wrong that they’re implying.

Things I need a storefront/launcher to provide me:

• Reviews
• Wish list
• Beta/Alternate build installations
• Friend list, chat, game invite functions
• Mod browser
• Refund policy
• Excellent search and discovery tools

Nice to have:

• Forum for guides/support
• Game sharing
• Ability to move game files

Famously the music for that famous ‘you wouldn’t download a car’ anti piracy disclaimer was stolen and used without permission from the creator.

Some ideas are so bad you make sure they never get released

Which is ultimately the biggest reason companies suck so much worse now than they used to. Over a long enough time frame profit isn’t the worst way to steer an organization. Negative actions have repercussions and companies used to avoid those.

But investors shortened the time frame so that everything and anyone is disposable. We have a handful of rich people hollowing out pretty much all companies in America and stripping them of value as fast as possible. We’re destroying our economic base in a fire sale for like 9 people.

It’ll only be weak for the presidents they don’t like

I realize gaming on Linux is already very doable (I have a steam deck), but for me specifically, I need the majority of the mod developers to have shifted over to Linux gaming before I can switch. I primarily play games that tend to be heavily modded and it’s really common to need to run some sort of 3rd party tool to mod. One that is often not Linux compatible. I realize there are utilities that can sometimes help with this, but between extremely spotty mod documentation and my own lack of familiarity with Linux, that kind a tricky ask for me to accomplish. I’ve pretty much given up on playing modded games on my steam deck for now. I hope someday most of the gaming world will switch, but until then I feel somewhat chained to Windows if I want to enjoy my hobby.

It’s kind of crazy to me that their AI product is already 50% of the revenue of their OS product. The thing that a stupidly high amount of computers require to even function for most people.

It’s kind of curious to me about search because honestly my Internet world has only grown smaller and smaller. Where I used to use Google to find new websites, I feel like most of my searches on Google are now to search a handful of sites I already know. Ironically if Reddit had a better search function, a lot of my Google usage would fall off as I’d just go directly there, as it’s still the best place I’ve found for troubleshooting support and real reviews of lots of products. A competitor to Google wouldn’t really need to index the entire web for most people, but rather a relatively small number of website super giants like Amazon, Reddit, Wikipedia, etc.

I’m not sure there could be any sort of legitimate threat to them, but I could definitely see a Netflix situation playing out. That is a popular upstart temporarily seems poised to take over, but then suffers from extreme levels of interference from bigger players who artificially hold the upstart down while they desperately catch up and then ultimately come at least equal while the Netflix equivalent is mostly a shell of what it could’ve been.

Never underestimate how much buckets and buckets of cash reserves can overcome even incredibly out of touch laziness when it comes to competing with any start ups. Apple in particular could probably afford to let competitors get a decade ahead and still be able to come back based on the ridiculous amount of cash they have to float their business along with.

Maybe I’m just really good with talking to robots, but the AI drivethru voice at my local McDonald’s is way, way, way more accurate than basically all of the employees they used to have running it before. A few times it’s been down for whatever reason and an actual human takes my order and I remember how shit they are at their jobs when they get my order wrong yet again, or can’t hear me, or talk with gum in their mouths or whatever.

I realize it’s gross and icky and morally problematic, but I really wonder if trying to have the government crackdown on AI generated CSAM is worth the massive risk to freedom of speech and privacy that it seems like it’s going to open us up to. It’s a massive blank check to everyone to become a big brother.

I have Teams installed on my phone (in a special work partition). A mouse jiggler let’s me move around the house, go on walks, change the laundry all while being able to immediately respond to anyone reaching out.

Management is pretty bad about actually doing their jobs to keep a steady stream of work coming my way. They’re too disorganized to actually plan effectively so there’s always one team under crunch while everyone else is waiting around for them to finish.

If I ever actually tell them I don’t have enough work to do, they’ll happily fill my time with extremely obvious bullshit busywork (like, why don’t you take yet another HR diversity survey?) So I just don’t say anything and let the work trickle in and everyone seems really happy with this setup (3 straight years of very positive reviews). A mouse jiggler letting me be ‘on call’ during the slow months has been huge for my sanity.

I hate that they took away my analyst title. I’m not a software engineer dammit. I don’t even have an IDE installed and haven’t done any programming in 10+ years.

Agreed. It’s comical how he’s seemingly able to rapidly build stuff that requires experience in multiple high end fields and then he even surrounds himself with his own tech and is not buried under maintenance hell for it all.

My alternative head canon is that he’s actually only good at building AIs and Jarvis and Friday are the ones who actually make all of his crazy ideas work.