As someone who failed mental health treatment, I interpret it as “it’s okay to hesitate if things clearly aren’t ready.” I had pressure of various sorts to “be okay,” and fix some issues, but jumping early… didn’t work at all.

I mean, I use every alternative I can. Vapoursynth scripts, libraw-based projects, random GitHub repos, DaVinci…

But there are some features I just can’t get great support for outside of definitely-not-high-seas Lightroom Classic:

• Good lens profiles for weird lenses.

• Proper HDR PQ/HLG editing and AVIF/JXL export support.

• RAW support for newer cameras, like my little R50V

I have yet to try DaVinci’s photo editing mode though. That’s very interesting.

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I have a very well off sibling, big corporate job, SO has a good job too. They’re financially smart, thorough researchers when shopping, work to exhaustion and have no kids.

Can they afford a new EV?

Hell no.

So they got a used one, at a great price.

I dunno who all these bloated, $80k+ EVs are supposed to be for. Rich old folks? I know some of those too, and they’re all scared of electric cars.

On a technical level, that makes zero sense.

AI “agents” are basically just fancy prompts with a tool calling harness. They are infinitely replicable, at zero cost, with no intrinsic value; the cost comes from the generic CPU host, and the API calls to GPU servers, databases, or whatever else that are all centralized anyway.

Wanna hear a dirty secret?

“AI” cost is going to zero.

Model capabilities aren’t scaling, but inference efficiency is exploding, thanks to more resource-constrained labs and breakthroughs in papers. The endgame of the current bubble is mediocre but useful tools anyone can host themselves, dirt cheap. Maybe a bit more reliable and refined than what we have now, but about as “intelligent.”

And guess what?

Microsoft can’t profit off that. None of the Tech Bros can.

Point being, this exec is either delusional, or jawboning, so the world doesn’t realize that “AI” is a dumb utility/aid, and they can’t make any profit off it.

Regardless of whatever fraction most of the revenue comes from, they still draw absolutely massive amounts of players.

Or effectively F2P/MTX based ones, even if they have an upfront cost.

And it’s not even counting mobile.

I hear a lot about the resurgance of honest, pay-upfront games, but revenue sure isn’t supporting that.

All the games I see are PC/console. A few happen to be on mobile too, but that shouldn’t exclude them from the list.

TBH mobile revenue probably dwarfs these games, and must have a very different looking chart.

As if the cat couldn’t get up there already. It just demanded direct placement.

Actually I think the public would generally understand this. Older demographics know what a camera indicator is, and for younger ones, a little light on sunglasses would get their attention.

Universally? No. But I’d wager the percentage is high enough for a crowd to know.

I mean, TES VI could be a rickroll mp4 and still sell millions of copies. There’s a megaton of nostalgia, and gamers are demonstrably… not the smartest shoppers, in aggregate.

Starfield and FO76 are not commercial failures, even if they aren’t hits either.

Point being, BGS is not short on time. I posit they have at least one “freebie” no matter what, or maybe a few more mediocre releases that will still sell big.

It’s generally more obvious when someone holds up a phone, but yeah.

Actually this makes perfect sense.

Starfield is… trying to be part Mass Effect with big-budget cutscenes, but it has less charisma than Wrex has in his toe.

I’d argue it’s a bad “Bethesda wandering RPG,” without the quirky, charming side areas Oblivion or even Fallout 76 have.

But it’s an alright No Man’s Sky-like.

You want some crafting? Looting? A vast amount of chill exploration area? Reasonable “I’m in space” fidelity and tasks to tickle your brain? Starfield’s got it in droves. BGS games scratched this NMS kind of “looting exploration sandbox” itch for some, when there was no big-budget alternative back then, and I think Starfield leans into it more.

Hence my hypothesis is that gamers who love No Man’s Sky like Starfield, those who are looking more for “Mass Effect 2” loathe Starfield. And you and @absquatulate@lemmy.world seem to be further datapoints supporting my observations.

The problem is Starfield’s expectation for most us internet dwellers was “Skyrim but Mass Effect.” And it’s kind of Bethesda’s fault for setting that expectation instead of leaning into Starfield’s real niche (and wasting cash on what BGS isn’t very good at).

Yep.

Have you tried KCDII? Stuff to hoard/sell is everywhere, albeit a bit more realistically.

But Bethesda aren’t really being punished for it because tons of people are still buying it and might have no idea games like KCDII or even a fixed-up CP2077 exist.

You’re selling me on it. It would make me carry a camera around even more.

I think my biggest issue would be banking, authentication, and a few “locked down” iOS-only apps.

Another is quick access to the camera for sharing, which I could do with the microSD slot or an external reader, I guess. But it’d be more clunky.

So I’d need to keep an iPhone around anyway, unfortunately. But I could certainly pare it down with some discipline.

Nope.

Not sure where OP got it from, but it’s an edit of this image:

Dating back to 2013: https://tineye.com/search/cf7d2b88446844f3df676dddf009f7824c20cabc?tags=&sort=crawl_date&order=asc&page=1

Meta’s in a strange business for that philosophy because, well… 99% of their income is ads. They model and engage users to sell ads.

It’s not great dogfood for employees to try.

And their “AI” situation is murky. They’ve actually use machine learning internally for a long, long time, but the recent rush to try and productize AI more directly is… mixed.

They had a really good open weights LLM division, and built an interesting ecosystem around those “Llama” models. Small/medium businesses helped expand them. Meta employees interacted with other open source projects, too, and posted their own experiments. It was great! And a prime example of “eating your own dog food.”

…But that lab had one failed experiment, so Zuckerberg killed the whole thing. As Zuck tends to do.

And now they have some new division which, from my perspective in the tinkerer community, I would bluntly describe as “a clash of Tech Bro egos.” It’s generous to call experiments like an “AI CEO” as an attempt to test their own product, but it more closely resembles Zuckerberg’s pattern of frantically, nervously engaging in something with the nebulous hope it goes viral like Facebook did.

Oh, that looks awesome. Bookmarking that.

It’s not just corporations. It’s influencer-grifters like Pirat_Nation.

…And, to be blunt, reposters who further spread the ragebait, like OP.

The platforms, ultimately, are what facilitate “marketing bait.” But I dunno what to do about that, as human being simply cannot help themselves once they see stuff like that. It works, apparently.