What a fascinating video. What a treat to hear him talk.
Much of my excitement has been dying off due to the commercialization of the hacker community, the culture war, and the constant legislative losses for privacy and effective ownership of goods you purchase because they've code in them you often cannot legally circumvent the "digital lock" on.
I'm curious what can be done to get it back. It seems the more I care, the more I get jaded due to the constant loss of freedom with tech.
I actually find that site super informative.
Specifically the hard cancellation is something I would be infuriated by as well and that you would barely know without a site like this.
And the whole app part specifically criticises the fact that while there is an option to read put some information via the web, you don't get to read out everything there and there's no valid reason to do that. They already went the extra mile so you can read some stuff via the web, so having some stuff that you can only read via the app feels malicious to me.
I think generally reading this felt like a review of stuff that wouldn't be criticized in a YouTube Review for example, but that I personally do care about.
The problem with your examples is that it's a person lying to themselves. GP is acting as an objective third party and telling the truth about their hypothetical.
There are lots of things you really can stop at any time. I could stop eating peanut butter at any time, if I had a compelling reason.
Because if you want to convince someone away from believing it's an addiction so severe it needs an act of government to address, presenting an argument that all-but-panders to their "people spend so much time on it that it must be an addiction!" priors is counter productive.
Exactly the example I was going to use. People do not get addicted to things because those things are too enjoyable. Watching people who are addicted to slots is just depressing, they just sit there gloomily depositing every single penny they have - until they have nothing. They just have a compulsion to engage with the slots. Engage, engagement, the exact thing big tech has been trying to optimize for since day 1. It's always just been a euphemism for addiction, and they succeeded.
People report spending obscene amounts of time on social media while also saying that social media makes them feel worse. So captain obvious says why not just quit? Well that's because they're addicted to it. This is probably also why you see overwhelming support for age restrictions of social media, even amongst demographics that would otherwise be quite reluctant to give the government yet more power - people don't want their children to end up being another one of these stats.
Seems a bit premature to attribute that solely (or even primarily) to Flock.
It also begs the question of if there is a deterrent effect from cameras to commit homicide, couldn't that deterrent be achieved with a far less controversial technology?
Hard disagree. Checking the accelerometer to disable tactile functionality when moving would have been a more intelligent way to go about discouraging this behavior over mandating use of a historically unpopular technology (Siri) in order to use a popular one (Maps, Bluetooth music streaming).
This reeks of the metrics-gaming desperation that we've seen in Google, Amazon, and Microsoft as well.
Shoehorn unpopular technology to gatekeep popular technology. Either way the consumer's quality of life goes down.
Newer websites are filtered through what is acceptable from a corporate lens.
The old web culture can't exist because advertisers won't let it exist on modern platforms.
Additionally the spread of information is significantly less organic because of relentless pushes to use algorithmic feeds along with far worse distractions from content than there used to be.
Once upon a time it would've been unthinkable for Google search to become awful and nearly worthless due, in large part, by Google's discretionary choices.
Related - interns these days don't seem to have any particular preference for using Google for finding information...
Buying EA for influence? With the reputation EA has in gaming? They're a joke - they're not influencing anything. Its like buying a violin to fix a flat tire.
Do you think your average EA Sports FC or Battlefield player is even aware of that reputation? These games still sell tens of million of copies. Positive influence in Battlefield alone would be huge.
I agree they're good at making games that sell to a mass audience - but I really think that a lot of franchises have wasted a ton of money partnering with EA, which makes poor quality games that are exactly the same as the one they printed out 12 months ago. I haven't heard anyone talking about an EA sports game since the PS1 era and they seem to have completely missed the e-sports era where DOTA and Fortnight made vast sums of money. Don't get me wrong, they've made a ton of money, but I think they could have made still far more in more competant hands.
Fabulously greedy FIFA seems to have realized this and is no longer partnering with them.
News to me about FIFA. SA has been trying to gain "influence" in sports overall, and their video game endeavors also seem focused on "e-sports" more than gaming as a whole. I frequently hear complaints about them in fighting game circles, which is a more niche segment of "e-sports". EA is a big step up even if it's not DOTA/LoL levels.
Yeah. Actually it looks to me like FIFA jumped the gun a bit. They stopped letting EA making their games in 2023, but then choaked and have only released two not-great looking games seemingly meant for low end systems like phones and the Nintendo Switch. I doubt either sold as well as the EA FIFA games.
I'll bet they lost a lot of money - I'm sure there's an interesting story about FIFA's efforts to get their own game development up and running. I guess they wanted EA to pay $300 million per year and EA said no, but I doubt FIFA made 50 million on the games they released.
It’s also worth noting that the EA studio that makes FIFA has been continuously doing so for over twenty years. It’s not being handed off between studios and rebuild operational expertise over and over.
If anything, FIFA was probably getting an incredible deal from EA given the cost of making AAA games today.
actually not. EA is a household name. You can ask every single person with a steam/xbox/psn account if they know ea. i guarantee you, 95% of them heard of EA and id say 80% of those have played an EA game in their lifetime.
That being said, influencing happens by mere exposure. There was a time, when Europeans bought up the kit of a bad mexican football club, just because the jersey was hyped on fifa 14. so if someone is trying to influence them, it will happen.
The 'core gamer' bubble has always been bad for this.
Sports games sell like hotcakes and have people buy them every year religiously but you never hear about them, sims too. Their other titles were heavy hitters.
Their just a seperate audience; EA certainly has influence, just not with people that talk about games.
Buying only a 40% stake in Epic, allowed China to successfully breach Apple's store monopoly and establish a foothold on a previously restricted platform. Will the gable pay off in the future or not, is not exactly relevant. The point is that they can leverage pre-existing western companies for their expansion plans in various ways.
They make all the sports games. Have you noticed all the sports and Mr. Beast type slop that's like "Wow and here we are inn Dubai / Saudi Arabia whatever and it's beautiful and luxurious and we're driving in Lambos waooowww"
If product placement didn't work it wouldn't be an industry
Much of my excitement has been dying off due to the commercialization of the hacker community, the culture war, and the constant legislative losses for privacy and effective ownership of goods you purchase because they've code in them you often cannot legally circumvent the "digital lock" on.
I'm curious what can be done to get it back. It seems the more I care, the more I get jaded due to the constant loss of freedom with tech.