Increasingly it seems like the fact that the game needs support for online components was invented in order to give it an expiry time.

Gamers simply don't have the impression that they're getting value from the "support," rather than getting shafted come end of life.

I think if you have a market where you don't license distribution for your software mostly because "hey, you can sell that for more, maybe", then changing the market so that everybody has to buy distribution should actually force the middleware price down, if anything, because they're no longer able to segment their market on it.

It's not like the market for middleware changes by this. I honestly don't see it having much of an effect on price. They're gonna take their middleware and go where exactly?

Judges are in fact allowed to notice that someone is obviously fucking with them.

Perhaps "they" are in a country with laws, and the laws now include restrictions on "however they want"?

That's correct. This will make it more expensive to make games. However, the games will be better for it, and the games made the most expensive are those with exploitive business models such as lootboxes.

Or vote with your vote and support lawmakers that make good laws.

I am very uncomfortable with the idea of "this person or system cannot create, they can only steal". It seems very dehumanizing, and though LLMs aren't humans I could see the argument very easily turned on people. There is nothing specific to LLMs in it.

The people filling the wires with AI content they didn't write aren't fundamentally incapable of creation; they have chosen not to do it, and so are incapable only until they make a better choice.

It's not dehumanising to see the output of someone who isn't creating as uncreative.

> I am very uncomfortable with the idea of "this person or system cannot create, they can only steal".

"This person cannot create, they can only steal" is not what was said. "This system cannot create, it can only steal" is what was said.

What do you propose, then? That we aren't allowed to pass moral judgements on systems?

There's this famous saying about the design of a bear-safe waste container for American national parks: "there is a considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bear and the dumbest tourist." Similarly, I suspect there is a considerable overlap between the creativity of the least creative human and the most creative LLM. Maybe it's that I've seen the same arguments raised for years about comic artists who traced off other people's work...

This will not remain limited to AIs. Learning requires imitation. Our artistic system is already pretty heavily copyrighted, but it could still be a lot more so, and I don't think this would be good for our culture.

To be fair, take away a human's paren highlighting and see how well they do.

While I certainly like parentheses highlighting and rainbow parentheses, I've programmed Clojure without syntax highlighting and while it’s not as nice as it would be with, it’s fine.

I’ve also written C++ and Java in Notepad long ago. Not ideal, but hardly a problem.

You adjust pretty quickly. Taking away compiler error messages would be fun though.

Not everyone is a "coder" you know, some of us are engineers.

That's actually how vision language models already work, pretty much.

And there's a reason nobody uses them for face recognition

Vision language models are an incredible achievement in the generality and usability. But they pay a hefty price in fidelity and speed

Huh? The images are tokenized in the same way language is and it’s just fed into one single model. Not multiple smaller expert models.

Image gets rasterized into smaller pieces (eg 4x4 pixels) and each of those is assigned a token, similarly how text is broken up into tokens. And the whole thing is fed into a single model.

Yes I'm saying

> Imagine face recognition to work like a text chat, where the PC gets the frame from the camera and writes in the chat: "Who's that? Here's the RGB888 image in hex: ...".

that's p much how it works.

But that isn’t a specialized model like the grandparent claimed, but rather a single, multi-modal model.

Yes, the "imagine" was showcasing the opposite of a specialized model to call it a bad idea.