I wish I could blame it all on these kinds of people. In reality it’s about 60% of the story or so. They’ve always been around but they weren’t this bold a decade ago.

A small part is the political climate over the last decade. That’s a topic worth its own encyclopedia one day, and games is affected as well.

A large part is that games just isn’t doing well financially right now. Because everyone in tech wants to invest in AI so there’s a lot less money in the space. Smaller or medium sized teams can’t get funding and less pitches get approved. Larger studios are “fine” but companies are using this time to cash out. Which is why you hear about Activision selling out to Microsoft and EA to Saudi Arabia. Layoffs at small companies happen because they need to (or companies simply shut down) , layoffs at large companies happen to make the number go up.

Last decent chunk of the problem is the landscape of games is changing. Converging more on “forever games” rather than traditional console experiences. This is an emerging problem that will get worse over the coming years, something even the consoles themselves are trying to shape itself around.

And to the people, not knowing your employees (or giving a damn to look them up) implies a structure where leadership is disconnected from the craftsmen that actually bring value to the company. Making leadership look out of touch, unrelatable, and outright crass.

Not to mention that he proves the writer correct in their accusation by admitting he does use AI and relishes in it.

Untitled Avatar: The Last Airbender title

That one was already cancelled, by the way.

Firefox mobile has unlock origin.

Didn’t block this, and yeah the elements needed to block this behavior is tricky. Because if it’s not just a full screen modal it’s actually disabling your scrolling and taps

Yes, those things are true, but it’s kind of like an ACAB situation.

Cops are unionized and work as a team. Ultimately, most therapists work by themselves. Not to mention that systematic abuse of power gives cops that reputation. Which is a hard argument to make for therapists.

So I don’t really think the comparison applies here. If you feel you were wronged: since it’s a licensed profession, there is a board you can report to. It varies by state, though. If what they did was especially egrigious in terms of the rules in your state, you can get their license revoked.

Short of that, you can be as terrible a therapist as long as you can keep getting clients.

A license is to make sure they follow the laws and regulations of their state. Not to make sure they are “a good therapist”. The license is to meet a minimum bar of quality and from there make sure they stay in good standing with laws. Just like how a driver’s license can be given to people of varying skill levels.

The closest aspect to your scenario is a therapist’s rating and testimony. Most services (if not, a 3rd party website) will have a review board for such thigs to read and a scathing review can be a softer way to damage their reputation than the licensing board.

That tells me that professionalization of therapy isn’t being done to help and protect clients, but to help and protect therapists.

If you look at any job cynically enough, you can apply this to anything, and anyone. A firefighter doesn’t want to put out fires, they want to protect their job. An athlete doesn’t care about the game, they just want to be famous and get sponsors. [insert literally any job ever] is only doing it for the paycheck.

At the end of the day, it come down to trust. if you can’t trust your professional, you shouldn’t hire them. That’s for all of life. But your lack of trust alone isn’t enough to invalidate an entire field.

An ad is an ad. It being a bad idea doesn’t change that fact 🤷

describe or draw attention to (a product, service, or event) in a public medium in order to promote sales or attendance.

Meets the definition. I just want to make sure we make distinctions between general ideas and why we actually hate the concept in the modern day.

I’m heavily downvoted in this comment section because I dared ask a hypothetical philosophical question?

If you do it in a way that feels like you’re “just asking questions”, that’s a dishonest gesture often used in alt-right pipelines to astroturf discussions. sealioning is what it’s grown to be called.

If you were being genuine, I’m sorry you weren’t believed. But this is sadly an increasingly common internet tactic out there.

old school 80’s/90’s sci-fi humor. They’d often use some superpower or new tech with “x-ray vision” that can conveniently see through clothes but not skin…

I imagine the rest can be left to your imagination on how that humor was utilized.

I don’t hate tech. But we are definitely in time of techno robber barons who have long drained any benefit of the doubt. Meta especially deserves no grace.

There’s a clear disctinction these days bewteen “Tech” and “Big Tech™️”. This is firmly in the latter.

Are there alternatives outside of paging. I know the risk of texting sensitive information, but I figured there’d be a more modern system than paging.

I will:

“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

I didn’t read this Steinbeck in school (I read Of Mice and Men), but I thought back then “I’m glad we moved past this. We wouldn’t allow such work today so blatantly”.

Well, education definitely isn’t wisdom. And it sure isn’t experience.

the answer to your question is “K-shaped Economy”. Lot of people doing this are in fact doing way better than they were 4 years ago. Some of them are indeed taking out more debt to do this, but most haven’t felt the pain of this modern economy.

I would argue that Valve should’ve just have upgraded the Steam Deck and I find that a far more worthwhile device.

They still do plan making a Steam Deck 2. But given that the Steam Deck OLED also needed a 300 dollar price hike, it’s clear that it would have had a similar fate. IDK how many steam deck players being ready to pay 4 figures for a handheld.

( I say this owning an 800 dollar GPD Win 4).

I know, it can be bad. I had a sudden hospial scare and was in there for a few days without insurance. If I had to pay everything out of pocket (and holy shit there is so many 3rd party bills) it would have been 11k.

But that’s the thing: 11k isn’t 100k. An accident bad enough to drain 100k is probably way more debilitating.

well that makes the hiring or trial process much easier, no? I don’t think the problem here is “I can’t tell if my employee gives a fuck”.

And I can tell you that passion is not something lacking in the games industry.

How is a small company realistically going to test if someone is worth hiring or not.

we got into this stupid market because we spent decades neglecting training. When you don’t train for what you need, you don’t get good at identifying what skills you really need in order to succeed.

So this question is already too far gone. If someone has most skills but is missing one: train them for it. Even if the training is as informal as "give them a few weeks in a low stakes environment to work on less valuable (but less risky) work.

Because at this point, with this comic, it’s not about holding him to account.

To remix an old saying: “A controversy can travel halfway around the world before the apology has time to put on its shoes”. Sadly most outlets who reported on Hank’s AI accusations aren’t rushing to say “oh yeah he apologized”. Maybe they stick it in an update in the article without changing the headline.

The world sucks. So this will stick around much longer than it needed to.

Hank makes a video that appears to have AI assistance, and people are ready to drop them on the spot like none of that matters.

Trust takes a lifetime to build and a second to break. This is no different.

Hank even apologized for his reliance on it. Gave receipts that it was never used in any of his other works. Used his experience as a cautionary tale of how AI it take over a process, and promised to do better.

That’s all I care about, though. admitting fault and bettering oneself. I’m not one to think using AI once taints you forever. It’s just a slipperly slope to outsourcing your brain, and I don’t think Hank is doing that.