speak_plainly

What I mean by "interactive Hollywood" is a game with a $200M+ budget that relies entirely on high-fidelity graphics and cinematic stories to differentiate itself, while offering almost zero new gameplay innovation.

Neither of your examples fit that description. Metroid Prime 4 wasn't chasing Hollywood cinematic design; it was a highly targeted attempt by producer Kensuke Tanabe to make a tight, isolated first-person exploration formula resonate (especially in Japan where it has consistently failed). Its goals are mechanical, not cinematic. Meanwhile, Star Fox is a classic arcade rail-shooter remake with modernized cutscenes, not a prestige movie-game. Early sales data shows it's actually working well, too, having just debuted at #1 on the physical charts in Japan and nearly doubling Star Fox Zero's launch week in the UK.

Ultimately, Nintendo operates like a Consumer Packaged Goods company. They treat their library of IPs like a diversified product portfolio rather than betting the farm on individual interactive movies. They use massive, high-margin, mechanics-first games like Tomodachi Life and Pokopia to generate enormous cash reserves. They then use those profits to subsidize legacy IPs like Metroid or Star Fox to keep core fans happy and feed their broader brand ecosystem. Because Nintendo spreads its risk across a wide spectrum of lower-budget games, they can easily absorb a minor product flop. Sony's interactive Hollywood model sinks $300M into a single basket, meaning one bad miss can completely wreck a studio.

At some point, the games industry decided it wanted to be interactive Hollywood, and the consequences are entirely predictable. Meanwhile, Nintendo just quietly shipped 3.8 million units of Tomodachi Life in two weeks, and 4 million of Pokopia in five. They're making actual games. Sony's obsession with prestige cinematic bloat, like Xbox, has also put them in a slow-motion death spiral that's going to become painfully obvious in a few years.

Thinking about customer support as a ‘differentiator’ or a way to drive profit is depressing. You should simply strive to do what’s best for your customers. The sort of feedback you’re getting is golden and in the right hands can be put to use rather than be dismissed. Assuming that people who disagree with your pricing model just don’t understand how business works is really telling. You have to accept that your pricing model sucks to a group of people (who are likely experiencing subscription fatigue) and decide if it’s worth losing or never getting their money.

Your support strategy is missing an outlet for needy users to ask questions, effectively blaming customers for a structural flaw in your own setup. You could easily spin up a forum where power users help each other and devs can occasionally jump in to help or note pain points. Furthermore, your development and QA processes clearly need scrutiny. The reason bug reports feel like a ‘waste of everyone’s time’ is likely because you don't have the right error logging or telemetry built into the app itself. Having to wait for a manual bug report from a user is already a failure.

It’s completely okay to define your product however you want and to reject feature requests, but to say you’ve singularly thought through every problem in an armchair, in comparison with the distributed minds of the rest of us, is pretty arrogant.

Medieval grifts are back. We urgently need a modern Jack and the Beanstalk movie.

The author is making a big mistake by making a normative claim about 'true' intelligence and consciousness.

Is there a correct way to cognize? And although he feels cognizing works in a very specific direction, his brain is basically doing a very similar guessing game on a deep level with training of pathways that started at birth. Basing the argument in a feeling about consciousness is not convincing.

The author thinks they are describing a unique human magic, forgetting Augustine's insight that human thought doesn't precede the word, but is brought into consciousness by it.

This is true. While Humboldt designed the overarching structure of the school, Johann Gottlieb Fichte argued that Prussia lost to Napoleon because they were too individualistic and was able to influence ideas of early education in those schools. The aim, through Fichte, became a system designed to break parental bonds, who he believed filled kids heads with selfish, private interests, and in turn, the goal of education was to develop children into workers and soldiers. Fichte famously suggested that a proper education should destroy a student's free will so thoroughly that they could never choose to do anything other than what the state required.

I think the technology industry has a long track record of selling false promises, dead ends, and over-hyped solutions.

AI is an interesting experiment with some real-world applications, but it’s no tractor or mechanical loom... not yet, at least, and it’s far from clear that it ever will be.

As things stand today, AI is not the future. It’s a tool with genuine uses that is being marketed as a revolution.

It's weird that a company can hype investors with bombastic AI announcements on one end to get some boost in value and then on the other end divvy out those results like they're in the Great Depression. Gemini and AI Overviews feel like they're running on war-time rations half the time. Hey investors, start to get worried because this may not end well if all consumers are lied to constantly and pissed off. I say this as someone who just bought a Google Home Speaker.

Governments are casting a wide a net but it all seems aimed at a foreign influence and espionage Cold War going on. The thought of using this for crime in most countries is tertiary and the real reasons for implementing these systems are so embarrassing to their respective governments that they will rarely mention what's actually going. In Canada there has been two recently large omissions, one is the Chinese government influencing Canadian elections and the other was Indian spies killing Indian immigrants on Canadian soil. Maybe this will all result in mission creep, but the upside will be getting to pay for things with your face.

Google seems to be filled with really talented people, technology, and every resource anyone would ever need, but their execution and management seems to be severely lacking. This account is a pretty damning indictment of Google.

Look at the entire Bard-to-Gemini launch, and from my experience, Gemini's performance is slipping hard recently. Then you have the sheer scale of the Google graveyard. And finally, take a look at Youtube lately.

The company increasingly feels optimized for internal politics and corporate metrics rather than building the best possible products for real people. I guess this is why monopolies suck.

In Canada the approach is going to be that social media and AI companies will need to figure out a system where those under 16 can’t access content. The government will be able to grant exemptions if the company can satisfy regulators that they have built and maintained adequate, alternative structural safeguards to protect children on their platform.

Further to that, companies are required to do this in a strict data minimization approach, results need to be anonymized and destroyed immediately after the check is complete.

The internet has grown into a bit of a letdown to some degree, especially social media. If I have to upload an ID or insert a grey hair into a scanner, that website or app will be dead to me and I will move on to something else or nothing at all.

I think people fall into two distinct camps here: the wildly exploratory, who chase everything from lost civilizations to aliens, and the hyper-rationalists, who refuse to budge from safe, conventional explanations. When it comes to Giza, It may be disingenuous to write all the banter off as either conspiracy or bona fide science. While we understand the general progression of pyramid-building in Egypt, the sheer scale and precision of Giza creates blind spots.

There are major gaps in all explanations provided and there are a huge array of interesting but unprovable theories. People fill those gaps with whatever is compelling, but really, none are good enough to prove anything definitively and that includes the academic explanations.

It's entirely possible that we may never have the definitive answer for how they were built or even exactly why, and will have to live with the mystery. But humans rarely will accept that conclusion and we would rather invent certainty than put up with open questions.

Thanks for adding RSS! Bringing Bubbles (and HN) into NetNewsWire is a game-changer for content discovery and keeping a clean reading list.

You mean the Coke flavour co-created by AI wasn't a resounding success with consumers? Who could have possibly known?

https://www.pcmag.com/news/coca-cola-uses-ai-to-create-a-fut...

The quality of Gemini varies so much throughout the day, the week and the month that it’s hard to rely on it for anything. It feels like Google is trying to throttle costs but has completely missed the mark.

The demo Mike Rockwell gave at WWDC was interesting. He kinda showed off Siri as like the Star Trek computer for your phone. I hope this is the direction Apple is going to continue in. Having AI as a user interface is way more interesting than chat bots, image editors, or copy editing.

It probably feels this way if you're terminally online, but the US government recently revealed the existence of UFOs and no one even blinked or cared. A minority cares, but most people have zero interest.

I think the French theorist Jean Baudrillard hit the nail on the head in the 1970s (Essay: In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities). He argued that modern media and technical systems neutralize political will through saturation. As a result, the public has essentially become a massive psychological black hole that absorbs political discourse and flattens it into inertia and apathy. The public is no longer a 'proletariat' or a political class that can be awakened; instead, the masses are a silent majority that will accept every iPhone upgrade or political speech and do nothing with it.

There's not going to be an uprising, few, if any will even put their phones down for a minute.

I host my website on Cloudflare and looking at my stats, I can confirm that bot traffic is not only up, it's totally insane.

There is nothing on the site, just my name and an email account and it should have no traffic at all.

Instead in the last 30 days I've had 26K requests. 93% resulting in a 4xx error as most of these bots seem to be looking for vulnerabilities in various platforms like WordPress.

My dumb phone solution: an Apple Watch with a cellular connection.

You can’t browse the web or install addictive apps. But you can get your mail, texts, and phone calls and you can listen to music, check the weather, and navigate with a map. It also has a physical dial you use for scrolling.

There’s enough friction with the device that you aren’t glued to it, but it’s functional enough that you won’t miss leaving your phone or wallet at home. It mostly becomes a watch first and foremost but also has the perfect feature set as a phone replacement.

There’s over 400 years of philosophical debate about consciousness starting with Locke, shifting with Kant, and continuing onward with real world implications throughout. By some more modern definitions an iPhone has consciousness while others explicitly exclude certain humans, and these definitions served as part of the justification of slavery and sexism, colonialism and more. I started writing an essay on this on my phone in response and I gave up there are so many examples.

To name a few you may want to investigate:

John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, G.W.F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, William James, Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Nagel, Ned Block, David Chalmers, Giulio Tononi, René Descartes, Daniel Dennett, Julian Jaynes, Michael Graziano, T.H. Huxley, Otto Weininger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Searle, Christof Koch, Bernard Baars, Max Velmans, Victor Lamme, Stanislas Dehaene, Antonio Damasio, Anil Seth, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Galen Strawson, Philip Goff, Colin McGinn, Patricia Churchland, Paul Churchland, Frank Jackson, Jerry Fodor, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm Wundt, Franz Brentano, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault.

I can live with that.

“Counsciousness” is the ultimate moving goalpost, and historically, it’s been one of humanity’s most effective intellectual weapons. An indefinable black box we intentionally gatekeep to draw an arbitrary line between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

I don’t know if AI is conscious or not, and I honestly don’t know what it even means to be conscious. historically, by claiming a monopoly on it, we’ve successfully manufactured the philosophical cover to exploit animals, subjugate other cultures, and appoint ourselves the top spot of the cosmic hierarchy guilt-free.

There will be a learning curve for some, like the person behind this article. Searching in AI mode will mean your query is going to need to be a bit more pointed.

The example given is you want evidence from an original source in Stack Overflow. So instead of just typing a few keywords and digging through pages, your query needs to ask Google exactly what you want and the format you want it in. If that’s a list of Stack Overflow pages, then that’s what you ask for. You can test this out now with AI summaries and a well-written query.

The quality of your results is going to depend on what you put into it. It will probably be annoying for some at first but for those that get it it’s going to be a step up.

To be charitable to Ellison, it worked well in China.

I think you may be misreading why the lack of philosophy education matters here. The point is that billionaires and CEOs now present themselves as intellectuals or thought leaders, without having done the homework, and end up using and abusing philosophy as a guise or shield. They end up creating short- and long-term negative effects that could have been easily avoided as all of these philosophies have been heavily litigated in even undergraduate level philosophy courses.

It's not that these individuals are not smart or capable, it's that they lack the dedication or care required to do these ideas justice. It's easy to see how someone can read Girard and obsess over the antichrist in the twilight of old age. However, a more rigorous engagement with philosophical foundations would offer them the breadth and perspective to be free of that narrow obsession.

It's about diagnosing why billionaire/CEO intellectual hubris makes them incredibly dangerous and sloppy thinkers.

I think 'expertise' is a bit of a red herring when what is being discussed is experience.

I've always believed that coding and development is an art and something analogous is the experience of a visual arts student. There's a level of experience required when one applies to an art school. The student builds a portfolio of passion projects and demonstrates a passion and skill along with creativity and other beneficial traits. If they are accepted, they learn the deeper theory, techniques, and more that will aide them in their career. This increases their exposure and overall experience.

Experience for a young developer is going to start with passion projects and be supplemented and bolstered through education in a similar way. You can take shortcuts as an arts student or a developer but you really just end up hurting yourself.

I came here for the performative anti-AI intellectualism and was not disappointed.

I know lots of people are excited because an ancient institution has something to say about AI.... But what's said is not really novel or even interesting.

The letter aims to maintain the status quo of the project of the Church.

The world is shifting under the Vatican's feet and the crappy system they once lorded over is done.

It's time for change, maybe people don't need to work anymore and maybe people should aim to reengineer humanity and eliminate illness, old age, suffering and vulnerability. We can fundamentally change how society distributes wealth.

Some of the arguments are rich coming from the Church: being scolded about centralization of power, claiming truth and shared information is a common good, and consider the history of the Church in their anti-war declarations.

The most astonishing thing in this letter is the pope declaring that modern technology has rendered Aquinas's just-war theory out of date.

It comes down to the kind of society we want to create, not some existential threat. Social media has an outsized effect on everything from the food people eat to the medical care they receive. The incentives of social media create a great number of distortions within the social media sphere but also in the real world.

Is traveling to Tokyo just to sprint across the Shibuya Scramble for a slightly less-crowded Instagram selfie really a model of the good life? Should someone like Zuckerberg have this level of control over the activities and minds of the human race? Is Mr. Beast a role model for children by industrializing the exploitation of human virtue?

Human social pressure and follower mindsets are part of the human experience but systematically gaming those instincts in real-time so money flows to a social media company at all costs in some strange digital sharecropping scheme is what’s new and the hierarchy of others trying to capture a small piece of that pie creates these distortions.

The argument being made seems plausible but it’s complete fear mongering. The surveillance mechanisms already exist and are in play and people can be identified in endless ways.

States have broad power to do what is being feared in the thread and haven’t already and to think that they’re waiting for this final piece of the puzzle to enact some insane regime is laughable. They could do that right now without the internet at all.

Social media is probably not healthy and kids should probably not be on social media. Age verification and age limits for social media will be a good thing for kids.

Instead of fear mongering, finding a middle ground, like governments adding some rules and protections on how this information or system is used is probably a better response.

I might be in the minority, but I think incorporating an identity layer into the internet itself should happen with the right protections for users and should have happened at the beginning of the net and is probably a result of lack of foresight by the creators of ARPANET.