Those making entertainment products aimed at the mass market can either avoid making political and social statements or they can accept being a niche market product. It’s about making enough money that people don’t have to be laid off. The people running these companies for the last 10 years have failed to accomplish that.

Startups are real companies. They are not the comfortable lazy jobs you would have on a big tech company campus or even a post-IPO tech company. They are still trying to “change the world” or else they figured out it’s not going to work. The founders typically leave within 5 years of starting them, either because they succeed and get bought out or because the investors stopped financing their continued existence for a particular reason. Maybe the idea was great at the time but the market changed. Maybe they were wrong about the idea from day 1. They are often 1 mediocre executive decision from going out of business.

Big companies are full of people who aspire only for a comfortable existence in a relatively easy job offering a career path or a lucrative compensation package that will get them the nice 2 story home in the suburbs and pay for the kids private school this year. They work a standard 40-50 hours per week unless they’re on the management track and then they may leave the baby at home with the nanny until they make Vice President of something very ordinary and mediocre.

In a startup, depending on what it is, you could be working for or alongside the next Steve Jobs and not know it yet. You could also be working for and alongside total bozos. Figuring that out is key to knowing whether its worth your time. Steve was kind of an a-hole according to some, so it might not be apparent until you talk about serious things having to do with the vision for the future. You will probably have 5 to 10 jobs that change frequently and will work way more than a standard workweek.

It’s like saying “I’m going to join the military and can either become a supply clerk or join an elite unit whose name is not publicly acknowledged”. Most people should probably stick to supply but the others will never be fulfilled there.

Nano’s used because it’s easier to use, which means the user interface is more intuitive than the others who insist you hit a key before making an edit.

Chances are, nobody’s following most of the laws there regardless.

The free to play listen to player feedback and incorporate related design or development features in a timely manner. If there’s a bug they fix it. If they want a new feature, they strongly consider it. The AAA gaming industry has been inwardly focused for about 10 years now. Watch The Game Awards and you see its just like the Oscars. Awards going to a lot of very obscure titles for checking some box on the social justice agendas. Some games like CS2 stay at the top by simply not making major changes for the worse when they already have a winning formula for their market that nobody wants to see changes.

Aside from the California-western europe developer culture, I think a lot of it has to do with the people above AAA gaming who make the major decisions are not themselves in the industry but in enterprise services or the business community. Microsoft top people may know how to squeeze profits out of enterprise customers but they’ve been clueless on gaming.

The Xbox is a dead platform and PS is right behind it. Look at active player counts for the info on who matters. It’s not Microsoft, EA or the others. It’s indie studios and free to play studios on the PC and Steam. Until those guys decide they need to comply, none of these laws are going to matter. Any country telling some indie dev somewhere else that they need to set up software to verify ID cards is going to be ignored. Then, the people who want to play those games are going to ignore them too. If you walk around in any major city in Australia today, you see people ignore the law routinely. This is just one more law they will ignore.

It’s a simple supply-demand issue that took 30 years to arrive and will take at least 5 years to solve unless the AI bubble pops a lot sooner to stop the hoarding by big tech cloud companies, Chinese state-backed investment and others who are betting it all on black like a has-been Hollywood actor at a Caesars roulette table on a Saturday night. The US never penalized US tech companies for shuttering the dozen memory plants since the 1990s so they just relied on the Koreans and a few others. Now Korea can’t keep up and the US tech companies have been caught with their pants down. While these kinds of people are very bright within their areas of expertise, leading to huge earnings, they’re not bright on most business topics and eventually the market shifts and they’re struggling.

This is where the tech companies founded in the 1970s-2000s are right now. Their original ideas are long in the tooth at best and about to be disrupted, if not already disrupted. The cash cows are looking a little fatigued. They’re looking for a lifeboat to keep the good times going, thinking its AI, just now realizing their industry screwed itself with all of the offshoring but its too late now. They have to once again “fake it until they make it”.

They just hope the people providing the capital don’t start asking about when the market will accept the higher price points so they can break even. That’s a question nobody acknowledges today when it’s asked because they know it could sink the boat if it becomes a hot topic of the month on CNBC and Bloomberg.

AAA gaming is full of execs who have not grasped how their industry has already begun imploding. The survivors in the all digital potato PC world will be the indie devs and Steam since Steam sells their games. The indie game devs write their games to run on anything. The other survivor will be the free to play studios who have already won every market they’ve entered. If they don’t own a gaming market yet its because they haven’t bothered winning it. Look at active player counts. Franchises like Battlefield and Call of Duty are way down the charts from the free to play shooter games.

Probably true, although Ballmer didn’t screw it up and Nadella did screw it up for one simple reason. He’s a 1 Cloud Pony. He came from the cloud and that’s all he really knows, and his narrow Senior VP perspective helped him extract earnings from cloud but nothing else at Microsoft.

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It’s a totalitarian move aimed only at establishing a police state for the average people. It will not affect the criminals or terrorists in the least. They’ve managed to figure out how to operate without cell phone tracking apparently. Seems the gadgetcops need to figure out how to do real police work again. I’m sure a few guys in their 60s-80s might remember how it was done before the gadgets showed up

X loses money so no margins there. Twitter has never made a profit in its history that I’ve ever heard of. Facebook’s on the way out. 20 years ago it was college age users. 10 years ago it was people over 50. Now it’s a lot of commercial accounts posting as they do on other basically dying or dead platforms. The only sign of life is streaming video and chats related to streaming video. YouTube has been losing users and content creators to both Rumble and Twitch. The right 1/3 of America is on Rumble while Twitch took the gamers. Youtube still has business but they basically gave away enough business to make those 2 relevant.

Alphabet’s dependent on Youtube, cloud services, web search, and related ads to pay for the unprofitable parts of the business, which appears to be where the bulk of their employees work, rather than at the earnings-generators. If they screw up youtube, then they will have to lay a lot of the people in the fun and interesting jobs off, along with the many layers of bureaucracy and non-coders working in jobs that nobody’s quite sure what they do there. They can’t really afford to screw up youtube any more than they have. It can’t merely do well. It has to do great to pay all of their bills. Very similar to the action-hero movies at the movie studio paying for all the unprofitable ones that most people work on

Starting fights is an easy way to get tossed in jail A lot of people just need to calm T.F. down or maybe just go talk to a doctor and get some prescription pills to make them less antisocial

Seems the same pattern at X, probably because they hired in an ex-YouTuber at the top. Moderation algorithms are universally very poorly written and don’t appear to have gotten better in the last 6-8 years when they began using them to replace human moderators. On X they seem to have a timer for new accounts that puts a fake label on accounts as if they’re spamming or a bot, when it’s just a real user with opinions the algorithm is trained to dislike. Same exact crap the old Twitter did. They put the source code on the web and it showed how if you posted or replied on any of a broad range of topics, your account was scored lower until you were deemed low quality and made invisible. It’s like they just wanted cat memes and recipes from elderly women, but not many of them on Twitter or X. Probably because they hired in people from companies where non-controversial topics were a much larger share of what was discussed there. 1 trick ponies who weren’t suitable for doing the same job at X.

There’s no way to boost ad views or MAU with that approach. I believe X will never be profitable due to those people running the show and Musk not ever hiring anyone a lot better to run X. Musk had a similarly bad experience with Solar city. Another company he didn’t know enough about to manage himself and the people he hired to do it weren’t good enough either.

Software developers will always be needed, at least to make sure the vibe code didn’t make a logic error that will cause the elevator to crash when someone pushes the wrong series of floor buttons, etc. However its making a lot more coding equivalent to an Excel Macro, where an end-user can do it without a pro developer being involved. Things like JSONs for AIs or basic python apps. It might even lure some of those people into learning a little about the language.

There’s no way possible an AI can hack anyone unless the people running it intended for that to occur or were negligent. Anyone with questions about that should install a copy of LM Studio or Ollama on their PC, download a model, and see how easy it is for the AI to hack someone. It’s impossible. Only human intervention can make it possible.

These stories seem like propaganda intended to get the US government to block usage of open weight models, since they pose an existential threat to the marketshare of expensive closed AI services these companies offer. Open weight models exist in all sizes, from very rudimentary small models to massive near-frontier quality models, and anyone with the tech know-how and a computer able to run them can do so without paying the AI companies or involving the AI companies in any way. It’s like Linux for AI.

It comparable to if Microsoft declared Linux a hacker OS that hackers can use to take down networks. Fear, uncertainty and doubt are the first resort, not last resort, of big companies who know they can’t possibly compete with a better alternative.

I’ve been using Linux and Graphene for a long time and welcome all third party OS phones not controlled by Google and Apple. Jolla never marketed theirs in the USA and it always seemed more like a prototype phone for hobbyists more than a daily driver (same as all of the others).

This will probably continue to be the case until someone with deep pockets in the USA does a deal with a friendly phone OEM who makes a decent quality product and a mobile OS group who can make it at least as user friendly as Android. Considering the Byzantine labyrinth that Android’s user interface is today, the last part should not be that difficult.

oh no, it’s not just in the USA. Big companies in China are making AIs, like GLM, Wan, Hunyuan, Kimi, Qwen, Kling, etc. The difference is, except for Kling, GLM and Kimi, you can also run those on a gaming PC at your house rather than just in a cloud server farm. American AI companies don’t really do that except Google’s Gemma (which they turn into Gemini) The American hyperscalers are probably buying up most of the world’s GPUs, Ram, and SSDs but the Chinese aren’t far behind. They have state money to spend. Some say they are way ahead on expanding energy production to power all those data centers.

Some companies are in a race to the bottom on customer service, quality and customer satisfaction. They seem to assume the hogs will continue slurping up what’s at the trough. It’s allowed some to take marketshare that’s been off the table for upstarts for the last 20 years. Example: Independent game developers on Steam, some of which are lone developers without a team, now have a healthy business thanks to the big AAA game companies faltering. It’s not 100% about AI, but that’s part of the issue they have. Knowing when to rely on AI, possibly allowing a reduction in staff, versus when they’re over-relying on AI, seems elusive for them.

They’ve not had a lot of success in the 2020s except for sports games they obviously pay a lot of money in licensing fees for.