I just really hope they select games that have a good story or even better have a great story that and attach it to some IP that has very little storyline. People come for the IP but stay for the story. Unfortunately they’ll probably just pick the game with the largest fan base, attach some well known actors to it and then cram a bunch of nostalgic references into it and call it a day. Especially since the success of sonic means a lot of money will be sunk into it and a lot of suits will try to push dumb shit through.
Like, I know the megacorps that control our lives do (since it’s a cheap way of adding value to their products), but what about actual users? I think many see it as a novelty and a toy rather than a productivity tool. Especially when public awareness of “hallucinations” and the plight faced by artists rises.
Kinda feels like the whole “voice controlled assistants” bubble that happened a while ago. Sure they are relatively commonplace nowadays, but nowhere near as universal as people thought they would be.
I think it's those stupid hard coded buttons on my remote that I accidentally press every so often then have to repeatedly try and back/exit out of the stupid thing it launched that I cannot remove/uninstall from my tv.
If you can figure out how to get the remote open, you’ll probably find that the buttons are all part of the same flexible rubbery insert (unless it’s 10+ years old). Put a little tape on the bottoms of the ones causing you problems. The insulation should keep them from working, and it’s 100% reversible if you ever do find a use for them.
If it’s one of the older, more expensive remotes with individual switches, then, yeah, pliers and superglue. 😅
I want a voice controlled assistant that runs locally and is fully FOSS and I can just run on my bog standard linux PC, hardware minimum requirements nonwithstanding
All I want is a real life iteration of J.A.R.V.I.S. and several billion dollars so I can blurt out cool ideas and have them rendered and built in a couple hours.
Current LLMs are manifestly different from Cortana (🤢) because they are actually somewhat intelligent. Microsoft’s copilot can do web search and perform basic tasks on the computer, and because of their exclusive contract with OpenAI they’re gonna have access to more advanced versions of GPT which will be able to do more high level control and automation on the desktop. It will 100% be useful for users to have this available, and I expect even Linux desktops will eventually add local LLM support (once consumer compute and the tech matures). It is not just glorified auto complete, it is actually fairly correlated with outputs of real human language cognition.
The main issue for me is that they get all the data you input and mine it for better models without your explicit consent. This isn’t an area where open source can catch up without significant capital in favor of it, so we have to hope Meta, Mistral and government funded projects give us what we need to have a competitor.
Sure, all that may be true but it doesn’t answer my original concern: Is this something that people want as a core feature of their OS? My comments weren’t that “oh, this is only as technically sophisticated as voice assistants”, it was more “voice assistants never really took off as much as people thought they would”. I may be cynical and grumpy, but to me it feels like these companies are failing to read the market.
I’m reminded of a presentation that I saw where they were showing off fancy AI technology. Basically, if you were in a call 1 to 1 call with someone and had to leave to answer the doorbell or something, the other person could keep speaking and an AI would summarise what they said when they got back.
It felt so out of touch with what people would actually want to do in that situation.
Not a single soul wants this. They just want to use every foul trick to get you to use copilot (by accident even) just like they do with bing and their other garbage.
This is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard of. I’m not buying any keyboard or laptop that has this key. There’s enough Linux-first vendors these days that it’s easy to avoid (Framework, System76, Tuxedo, etc). It’s time to be done with Lenovo and Dell.
It depends on how and what you’re measuring. A lot of Linux first, like system 76 and purism, do so e serious work on the firmware and boot systems of their systems. Which for some is a huge value add compared.
Taking a stake is different than buying it out. To me this is Disney trying to get better deals for their characters/properties to be in FN, while also raking profits on both ends.
I have this conspiracy theory where Disney and Tencent concocted 20 year plan to merge through a common stake in Epic. Just don’t ask about any details because there are none.
It makes total sense. Both companies existing in a pseudo-merger makes a lot of advantage sense. Disney gets to keep its image clean of the anti-consumer practices of epic these past few years, while epic sharks its way around Steam and corners small devs, bullying them into exclusivity. (Were they bought out, “Disney subsidiary” might be a dirty word)
Epic gets to make games-as-services with ever more integration, with fortnite, league, and car soccer. This begins also the availability of Disney exclusive GAAS, but also with tie ins to epic titles.
In return Disney gets, for no effort, access to the market American companies can not tread - China. Tencent comes with Chinese party seal of approval built in. Marketing into the country nets Disney the market saturation and brand recognition they’ve been wanting in a new audience, and all they’d have to do is have epic make a game and sell it with their IP. Disney doesn’t have to ask the cccp for marketing permission because it’s a Chinese company product trying to make Chinese people sales.
The whole thing is so…dystopia that it just fits so well with the Disney that Walt built, and expanded as a cutthroat businessman.
This would fit in with some of the weird shit Disney has pulled in recent years with editing films for Chinese releases, and how they toed the line about the “camps” around the release of the Mulan live-action remake. They’ve been trying to break into the Chinese market hard for years now.
Fug. Wish I could say this theory makes me sick, but it just makes me feel empty.
Interesting play here. I’m not sure if investors understand that games don’t last forever, and a game out of nowhere can take the top relevancy spot overnight. Pal world is a good recent example of this.
I’m not claiming fortnite is going away anytime soon, but might not be worth a $1.5B investment.
Either way, I’m not mad if the gaming industry gets more jobs.
Epic should count their blessings considering what the game started as and the billions they raked in during the meantime. I bet their active player count is well down from its peak though. Probably the kids grew up and/or got fed up of all the monetisation.
As for Disney they’ve tried many times to get into gaming and failed. I wonder if their corporate culture which is a subtle blend of naked greed, political correctness, risk aversion and schizophrenia over licensing IP just scuppers them every time. I’ve played a couple of decent games but most of their content is either shovelware or naked cash grabs. Even when they make a critically acclaimed or successful games, there is a sense that if they don’t get ALL THE MONEY, then they’ll shitcan it right then and there. Look at Disney Infinity or Club Penguin as examples of games that were killed for very unclear reasons.
Their games are notoriously bad. They simply rely on their fantastic reputation irl and can’t give a fuck about making good games - they sell enough games, even of the worst, just because they’re Lego.
It’s 2024 can we stop pretending headlines like these are some kind of potential indicator of good rather than just putting pins in a map for the sake of records where billion dollar companies ravage mile wide swathes through forests of smaller functional companies and destroy everything good about them?
Yes I know in this particular case Epic is already a dysfunctional massive trashfire but this will just accelerate the enshittification into more of a drag race.
Can one take a stake in a company? Or do they buy a stake in a company by purchasing shares? Why can’t we just use the words that are meant for the thing we’re describing?
Taking a stake implies that they just yoink grab it and it’s theirs. Buying a stake means spending money to own a share. Maybe it’s a silly technicality, but words matter goddamnit.
No I’m more thinking they would remove them and keep them exclusive on epic as they are part owners now. Sure the games are shit but that is not the point
Yup. There’s a few old re-releases there, not sure if they’re patched up for modern Windows though. Actually, they had a publisher sale on Steam quite recently.
And not just that, when they acquired LucasFilm they not only got a backlog of old Star Wars and Indiana Jones games already on Steam, but also Sam & Max Hit the Road. AFAIK Sam & Max is an independent franchise but LucasArts and thus Disney own the rights to Hit the Road.
I have been blindsided before, but honestly right now I’m in the same boat on that. Disney isn’t interested in app deployment or distribution, just to advertise their products to kids.
And even so, my copy of SAMHTR is still on my Steam account and the files are there to use with ScummVM (which I believe LucasArts actually did when the game hit Steam)
I... yeah, what? Disney is what does it? You were cool with Tencent, Sony, Lego, the massive fine for mishandling underage information? Disney. That's your line.
Godot is honestly just so much nicer to use. I switched to it back in the day because of that after using Unreal and Unity. I didn’t even know what open source was at that point, I just liked it more.
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