More like continuing to try to will something in to existence that can replace smart phones because they want to be in charge of the hardware so they don’t have to go through Apple and Google.

Whole other part of the company.

Like, Samsung is a big company, really like 3 or 4 companies in a trench coat.

Most professional actors who are decently well known and talented still make most of their income from ad work, and couldn’t afford to stay in the industry without it. Like, really, very very few actors get by just on work in creative production.

I suspect a lot of these layoffs are actually just cost cutting in response to these companies doing really poorly, the idea that the jobs are now being done by generative models is largely a smoke screen to save face and avoid admitting that companies are scaling back operations due to a lack of demand.

Those few cases where they actually are just replacing people are going to vanish the moment that the people hosting the models run out of money to burn and have to charge full price. Like the scale of operating losses is orders of magnitude greater than anything we’ve seen in the past.

This is the thing that really kills me, like, what an LLM can do is not a revolutionary leap, it’s an evolutionary step beyond basic grammar, tone, and spell checking. It’s more capable than traditional auto complete, but it’s not a fundamentally different capability.

Most actors don’t make much money playing roles in theater, movies or TV shows (obvious exceptions for big name stars), rather they do those when they can get them, but make most of their money doing ads. If that ad work disappeared, way fewer people could afford to be actors and the overall talent pool would shrink.

Same goes for people doing drawn art or photography, the commodified work provides a stable income that allows them to pursue the career and creates space for them to produce genuine art.

There is absolutely a lot of issues regarding things going on in certain discord servers, or in certain subreddits, less so on twitch or steam.

But a lot of those issues are due to different use cases being pushed into proximity by being pushed off other platforms, ether by moderation decisions, or by their structure and user engagement maximizing algorithms making certain communities unviable.

So you end up with communities that need forum or chat room style organization being pushed in to close proximity to communities that run afoul of corporate moderation. This was less of an issue when these things might have just headed off to dedicated websites, but with everything ending up on platforms now, you have this milieu of mundane game or hobbyist communities, communities for mental health discussions, communities about drug usage, explicit adult content, and fringe politics, all right next to each other. Thus cross pollination between all of them becomes inevitable at a far higher rate than if they were on separate platforms, or on a mega platform with a bunch of other things that would dilute the cross pollination.

I’m not even saying that any of those are explicitly bad things that shouldn’t exist, just that having them all confined in such close proximity is a time bomb. This is not a result of careless management by these companies, but rather the result of pressures pushing these things off of other major platforms, and thus forcing them on to ones that are inherently more permissive.

They get things wrong at a far higher rate than most of the websites that tend to end up at the top of a web result, and they get things wrong in weird ways that won’t stand out to users in the same way a shitty website will. These probabilistic text generators are much better at seeming like they have the correct answer than actually providing it.

It’s crazy how much money they are losing, and that’s with most of their compute being provided by Microsoft at cost, if not for free in exchange for the use of their models in Microsoft products.

Both they and Anthropic talk about their business as if they’re a software as a service company, but most SAS doesn’t get more expensive to run the more users there are, not to mention their conversion rate of free users to payed users is abysmal. Like, it’s an unsalvageable train wreck of a business model, I don’t see ether surviving more than a year unless they radically change their business models.

As other’s mentioned, probably more a way to fire a bunch of people without having to do so explicitly.

Microsoft seems to be on a warpath this year regarding layoffs. I wonder if maybe they’re trying to compensate for some giant black hole in their budget. Like, keep the costs looking stable even as some specific department balloons out of control without providing commensurate revenue. Wonder what that could possibly be?

Yah, I agree.

At the very least much better optimized, with what length there is focused on meaningful content rather than low effort padding.

Again, it requires market pressure, something that a boom in portable games on less performant devices could cause.

Would be interesting to see a study looking at the overlap between political support and developmental lead poisoning.

Like, it’s well documented that, at least in the US, there was a catastrophic amount of developmental lead poisoning among the population cohorts that were born between the introduction of leaded gasoline and the phasing out of it.

Something like the steam deck or the original switch were probably on the upper end of meaningfully “portable” in that sense, and even they can’t really compete with smartphones on that front. But with the currently available chips/batteries/screens, you cannot really get much smaller without starting to limit the games that can be played on them.

There is a whole other conversation to be had about game optimization and the push in large parts of the games industry towards more power intensive games. If the PC/console games space had an incentive to better optimize for lightweight devices, that could change. Especially if something shifted on the smartphone storefront market that created more demand for better less exploitative games there.

But, they do for mobiles, because mobile app storefronts force micro transactions to go the through them and they take a significant cut on each one. The 30% apple tax for example.

So they have a huge incentive to put F2P slop front and center which other storefronts on other devices don’t. In the context of steam, they do make money on the micro transitions of games that valve owns, but they make more money selling everyone else’s games over all, so they still have a reasons to show those.

It’s not so much saying that other storefronts are angles who love their customer, but more that their incentive structures are aligned differently.

If there were significant shake up in the mobile storefront market, or in terms of how they can make money, there might be a shift in they type of content they push.

How much of it is that no one is willing to pay 20 or 30 dollars for a mobile game, and how much is it that anyone willing to pay is unable to find them, or has just given up on the segment entirely.

Of course the mobile store fronts have no incentive to increase the visibility, because a free to play game is liable to make them significantly more money in the long term due to their cut of each micro transaction.

PC game and console storefronts are full of free to play slop, but they’re not the first thing people are shown, even when they are popular. They make an active effort to highlight quality games, and thus users willing to pay for them can actually find them.

There is a lot to be said of the atrocious design of mobile application storefronts.

It’s a very interesting trend, it seems like companies are convinced that this form factor is the future, that consumers will choose something with a portable option over something stationary.

Like when the steam deck and switch came out, they both did well, I think the switch did well mainly on the grounds that it was the Nintendo device for that console generation generation. But they’ve hardly taken over the market.

I think the console industry kind of just wrote off the mobile market because they were late to the party, despite it being immensely profitable and a huge market segment. It seems now they’re becoming interested in it again, and I wonder if it’s due to there being an unmet demand, people who want to play games outside of their living room, but who are turned off by the state of games on mobile.

Like, the mobile games market is just a swamp, and people who want a more meaningful experience than a time waster puzzle game, or a cash grab gatcha game, are kind of left out in the cold. Maybe this is the legacy games companies seeing an opportunity, all it would take to smash that opportunity is for the mobile phone games market to start being… not awful.

The problem is that for a lot of people it has become a substitute that has filled the void left by the slow destruction of other social organizations and institutions. It’d be easy to say that social media sites like Facebook killed them, but I think they were already throughly hollowed out and made inaccessible by the economic pressure on people to be ever more productive workers and ever more economy driving consumers.

To ask people to dispense with whatsapp, instagram or facebook is to ask them to abandon their ability to be part of communities that matter to them. It’s sort of an intractable problem as it requires whole communities to abandon ship together, which is difficult to do. The solution to the problem is to easy that process and decrease barriers to doing so.

It’s one of those situations where we see how kind people can be, and how indifferent and cruel to that kindness a depersonalized organization can be.

The type of thinking that says “ well, yah, sure users won’t like ads in the start menu, but we need to make money on the unlicensed installs, and they’ll switch to something else if we brick them for not paying, so we’re going to inflict this on paying users as well, because they’re not going to switch.”

Is the same type of of thinking that says “well, this government is willing to sign a huge contract to use our infrastructure, but only if we punish anyone in our organization who speaks out against them, so we’ll just fire anyone who does so. This would be much harder if they were all unionized, but luckily we nipped that in the bud.”

Microsoft’s organizational and incentive structure makes these outcomes inevitable. Profit before people is the rule.

The Streisand effect.

It’s so crazy to me that people will rush out and try and ban tools like these, rather than force car companies to use more secure systems. Like, banning these is futile, they’re not that complex of a device to make, the core issue here is that car companies have fallen over them selves to be “tech forward” to justify pushing further in to the premium price range, but have completely failed to secure their systems.