I was significantly worried about ChatGPT accepting sponsorships—a necessity in the evolving landscape of AI services—but I've since come to understand that advertisements are not simply burdens, they're opportunities to connect with brands that can fulfill my needs. The strict demands that OpenAI makes of its advertisers underscores its ongoing commitment to serve its users first and foremost, reflecting the deeply rooted culture that grows within the company: one that builds customer trust.
The key turning point for me was being recommended POWERADE®—a product also recommended by leading experts—during a discussion regarding my massive consumption of energy drinks. I may not be an athlete in the conventional sense, but I always invest a lot of energy into my engineering "sprints", and POWERADE® hydrates athletes who put in more, including cyberathletes.
Thanks for the reminder. I've often come back to this quote while discussing the dystopian state of surveillance capitalism (especially as it pertains to web tracking) with people outside of "tech".
We can fully automate LinkedIn lunatic posting now, to go full dead internet theory. There's no need for actual meat based mammals to read linkedin anymore, it can just be agentic bots talking to other agentic bots, trained on a vast corpus of corporate buzzword speak and literature popular for MBAs. Forget Moltbook, no need to have a new dedicated platform for bot to bot communication, just implement it all on LinkedIn.
"Actual" athletes only sprint for a few minutes at a time, not really comparable with the hydration needs of a cyberathlete on their hundred and third consecutive two week sprint.
ChatGPT, please give me a marketing plan for a combination Brawndo / Camelbak reservoir attached to chair / "Gaming Chair" accessory where the user can sip Brawndo from a tube built into their workstation.
The downside of hydratation, with its kidney saving, headache preventing benefits is that the more hydrated you are, the sooner and more frequently you need to leave the workstation…
While I think there is in fact a way to implement ads for monetization without destroying the product, I’m not going to stand here and defend the idea any more than I’d defend a self-described ephebophile because that descriptor includes young adults (19) — because in both cases, even though you’re technically correct, it pretty much sounds like you’re defending pedophiles.
It's always been the purpose of ads, and this is how google was. Then they started making it hard to tell ads apart from content. When OpenAI starts injecting subliminal ads into your responses it will effectively win the manipulation battle and also have full plausible deniability becuase there is not even an algo you can point to.
You'll pay extra for those. The ones marked as adds will be cheap. Like how the expensive placement is into the movie (e.g. Apple) rather than the disruptions of the movie.
I do like this comment, but I've gotten reprimanded for posting similar comments. It might have been dang that told me that for the purpose of keeping discussions serious, we should refrain from sarcastic posts. I've been posting and reading in that spirit ever since, and so when I first read your comment I assumed you were serious.
I wonder what Mike Judge thinks of the very real possibility of using AI video generation tools in 2026/2027 to implement "Ow! My Balls!" as a 24x7 streaming entertainment channel.
Yeah, but just think of the opportunities for new efficiencies and content creation. The Ow My Balls! guy can only work a max of 8 hours a day and has to eat and rest and sleep.
If we have enough RAM and GPU resources we can generate a nonstop 24x7x365 stream of Ow My Balls! video at equal to or greater than a 1:1 real time wall clock speed. Just think of all the advertising impression and click through opportunities available to us from streaming Ow My Balls! 24 hours a day.
Even better and more efficient, we dispatch a video generating system to create only 3 to 4 weeks of new Ow My Balls! video and then repeat it in a re-run loop all year round. Much lower token spend and GPU/CPU cycles.
You're joking but done cleverly, it could legitimately be good business. Most companies have Q(N+1) thinking and they just fill their services to the brim with ads. Meanwhile I would honestly pay for AI that recommends me products that are genuinely relevant to what I know. Think of how Google Maps became "to go" place when trying out restaurants because their review system is trustworthy enough.
Amazon Prime Video is exhausting in that respect. I purchased a paid account, just to make the ads go away, then discovered that even paid accounts get ads.
We're not mad at you. But we'd really like to learn: what went through your head when you read that comment? Was there not even an inkling that this might be satire? Can you tell glaringly obvious satire apart in oral conversation?
Some people like disc cases and the actual disk itself, but the main gripes I've seen with digital only games on consoles were: 1) without a disc you can't give/trade/sell the game, 2) without a disc the game can be taken away from you, 3) if you can't make an offline backup copy of the game and transfer it from console to console, most/every copy of a game will eventually disappear.
Steam has issues, and you certainly can't (legally) trade or sell your library, but nearly no single player games on the platform have DRM. Thus, you can have as many off-Steam backups as you want (which can't be remotely deleted/disabled), and you could certainly "give" the game to a friend (but don't copy that floppy), or otherwise preserve it for posterity.
I rarely use vi{,m} these days but I sometimes still instinctively type motions or :commands into other terminal editors (which naturally blurts them out into the text buffer). When using something like Sublime or VSCode, I'm always hunting through menus, documentation and search engines to do something simple like ":%!sort -u". Kate is a bit unwieldy—far from invisible—but I've found it to be the most frictionless editor on the market by a wide margin.
Many small reasons; changing workflows, very strange default settings (may have been fixed a few years ago?), snaggy desktop integration, because it's a pain to use at work on Windows, etc.
That’s simply not true, and you know it. Violating my privacy with a EULA is the issue there. It’s ok to put a EULA on software, but to pretend it’s still free software is the dishonest part.
Please don't take this as a personal dig because it's not meant that way, but this has such berating a girl for not being into you energy. You want something from them, and they just want you to go away, basically. You offer nothing they want, you want what they have.
Nah I mostly don’t use AGPL software because I consider it nonfree, the same way I don’t use any other source-available nonfree stuff.
The issue I have with it is the hypocrisy, not the code. They pretend that it’s free software but it’s just an anti-commercial use restriction EULA.
Anyway, most AGPL stuff is a 48 hour Claude rewrite away from having a free clone these days anyway. (In fact I have done just that several times recently, without even cloning/downloading the AGPL “upstream” repo, just with a vague mental model of what the db schema might be.)
AGPL gives you the same FSF freedoms as GPL or as any other free license, but it does come with an additional responsibility to the end users, not from the end users. AGPL is not in any way uniquely qualifiable as "a EULA". Every single software license, of course, requires you to agree to the license, hence the name. If you put nothing private in the code, AGPL will not impact your privacy. If anything, AGPL helps assure end users that their privacy is being respected.
There's only so many built-in and drop-in components available for the big engines; player movement, physics, render pipeline plumbing, UI frameworks, user settings, etc. You definitively do notice these things, if you care. It doesn't help that many devs (even AAA) keep bad defaults, so a huge chunk of Unreal games release with a comically-bad, laggy motion blur turned on.
Someone certainly could painstakingly replicate each badness of Unreal in Unity (and vice-versa), but until then, UE and Unity games often do feel like UE and Unity games. It's also rare to play a UE game that feels good and polished.
Also AAA dev, this is true but also the original comment about “engine feel” still holds, since the whole point is studios are trying to spend less time engine wrangling, and keep to more “the Unreal way”. I’ve noticed over the last 15 years AAA studios do less custom c++ and have converted legacy home built systems to use unreal built ins more and more. It happened slowly so I didn’t notice it but in retrospect it’s really obvious.
There’s definitely some hallmarks (right click on a text box in any unreal game and I’d say there’s a 90% chance of you getting a raw slate paste action menu) - but I don’t think that defines the engine.
I think working around shader compiles is really tough in Unreal and you’ll struggle to get rid of the stutters even if you do everything you can there. But two games using chaos, UMG, niagara, GAS, and Mover can look and feel night and day different as long as that effort is put in. But it’s easy to not put that in.
> I’ve noticed AAA studios do less custom c++
Yeah - and I do think this is sad. You can take your custom C++ libraries and bolt them onto unreal quite easily, and it’s not an awful amount of work to expose an Unreal friendly API to it. 13 years ago I was tasked with replacing physx in Unreal, I can’t see (m)any studios wanting to spend 6 months on that endeavour these days.
And therein lies the rub. Unreal 5 is massive and complex, and there comes a point where it takes longer to understand how to layer on your own customizations than just to start from scratch. Especially for indie developers.
I wanted to make a little editor utility (the UE editor is built in UE) that changed the way viewport selection was handled. I think I got to 5 layers of abstraction before I gave up. 5 layers, for a left-click object select.
I mean, it is and it isn’t. You picked hard mode, and Unreal’s abstractions are not always great - some things are abstracted to hell and back, others are literally hard coded and impossible to modify (hello CMC). But changing the character movement using CMC (or mover if you want), is very doable with a 30 minute YouTube video. It’s also going to be way, way less work than throwing everything out and starting from scratch. There’s always the option of implementing your own movement on the character instead of using Unreal’s.
People like to complain about the time it takes to ship AAA games and how huge the budgets have gotten... and then complain that the UE5 games all look the same. You either use some amount of systems 'out of the box' or customize/rewrite everything and burn $$$.
It's plainly ridiculous that tens of millions of dollars can flow into a game project without anyone in charge ever caring about questions like "does it feel good to walk around in?", "does it default to having a nauseating motion blur filter straight out of Overgrowth (2010)?", "does it run at 40 FPS with minimum graphical settings on a $2000 PC if I turn DLSS off?" or even just "is this fun? challenging? interesting in any other way?"
I open Microsoft Office on the web and the page reloads three times before showing me a list of files, then I open a document and it loads for 5 or 10 seconds, constantly reflowing, before eventually the entire page reloads again and eventually stabilizes, finally allowing me to browse and edit. After all of this, everything besides collaboration manages to function worse than what we had in Office 2003 two decades ago. This happened to all of software, not just Office. It happened to games, too. Delayed, over budget, underdelivered. No thanks.
> It's plainly ridiculous that tens of millions of dollars can flow into a game project without anyone in charge ever caring about questions like
You ask fair questions, but they're clearly loaded. Games are like any other project, and the desired scope for games has gotten enormous. If you don’t like those games there’s more indie and AA titles being released these days than there were AAA titles 25 years ago. An awful lot of that is down to Unity and Unreal.
> does it feel good to walk around in?
This isn’t a priority for every game. A bunch of the most beloved games have absolutely awful movement mechanics. It’s very often a deliberate choice to _not_ make player movement feel like either Titanfall or TLOU (partially because it’s an incredible amount of work to do that). Some really good examples are Witcher 3, RDR2, shadow of the colossus, the entire fromsoft collection. (And notice none of those are Unreal!)
> does it default to having a nauseating motion blur filter
Motion blur is super divisive. Anecdotally what I’ve seen is that most people just don’t care and there’s a very vocal minority who disable it. We had telemetry on a previous game and the number of people who opted out was minuscule. We gave an option for on/off on first launch of the game. It helps when frame rates are teetering on the edge of our budget which is often why we enable it.
> does it run at 40 FPS with minimum graphical settings on a $2000
What games do you have in mind there?
> even just "is this fun? challenging? interesting in any other way?"
This isn’t fair. Any game I’ve worked on has had the majority of the team playing every week, and the gameplay and design teams playing more often than that. You may not like the game, and that’s fine, and some games might be more vanilla than your liking, but those games are wildly popular. Personally - I think the praise Nintendo get for a simple platformer (which has excellent controls, admittedly) is way overblown, and people are willing to overlook that they’ve been shipping the same game for 20 years and charging more than most AAA games during that time frame. I also think BOTW and TOTK are wildly overrated - they’re padded out, clunky, with some of the worst mechanics in games (weapon stamina) on undercooked hardware.
But that doesn’t mean that other people can’t enjoy them.
Well no, it’s to not have to write asset import pipeline, renderer,UI toolkit, input handling, memory management, serialization, physics, ai, networking, streaming, etc etc.
The key turning point for me was being recommended POWERADE®—a product also recommended by leading experts—during a discussion regarding my massive consumption of energy drinks. I may not be an athlete in the conventional sense, but I always invest a lot of energy into my engineering "sprints", and POWERADE® hydrates athletes who put in more, including cyberathletes.
Thank you, POWERADE®.
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