Yeah, you'll see people pointing to statistics like how many games are being released on Steam nowadays. But if you actually sort by new on Steam, and look at the quality of these games, it's 95% complete low-effort trash: gacha games, published Unreal templates with some tweaks, half-baked ideas, just stuff that no one would ever actually want to play.
If you have taste, drive, and vision, your actual competition is miniscule. Marketing and whatnot can still be a challenge, but it's not an insurmountable wall if you have the patience to climb it. And if you ever feel lost, you'll be hard pressed to find a group more ready to dispense advice than game developers.
If a game truly has "the magic", then you often don't even need to worry about this.
I think the best case study of a zero-marketing launch being successful would be the Apex Legends. That one was like a precision bomb strike in the middle of the night and was wildly successful.
The article's conclusion is exactly what you describe: that AI is bringing out latent predisposition toward psychosis through runaway feedback loops, that it's a bidirectional relationship where the chemicals influence thoughts and thoughts influence chemicals until we decide to call it psychosis.
I hate to be the 'you didn't read the article' guy but that line taken out of context is the exact opposite of my takeaway for the article as a whole. For anyone else who skims comments before clicking I would invite you to read the whole thing (or at least get past the poorly-worded intro) before drawing conclusions.
That's part of it too, but CNSA really does play its cards much closer to its chest than NASA. It's more in line with the Soviet approach of sharing the minimum information necessary to support a narrative. For example, try to find video of any Long March rocket failure, and literally the only one released is from the 90s and was only released a few years ago.
I'm not sure which is more concerning: how easy it was to fall for it in the first place, or the mental gymnastics some are going through to place the blame outside themselves.
A lie is a lie, it does not matter how plausible it is. "No smoke without fire" is complete bullshit that leaves room only for cascading hatred.
In this case, there's definitive proof of it being a hoax, and news of it seems to be spreading. But how many more subtle falsehoods are being spread, ones that aren't as easily disproven? And how many perfectly plausible lies does it take for a narrative to become self-sustaining?
There is no shortage of real and verifiable things to be outraged about (Tesla-related or otherwise). Don't waste your headspace on anything less.
It really is concerning. I have a friend who went off the rails in the past couple years and is constantly sharing twitter rage bait. When things are proven to be fake news, it doesn't even phase him. It's like reality doesn't even matter, and maximizing outrage is the end goal.
Speaking as an older gen-Z-er living in with their parents, this is very true of me and many people I know around my age (most, now that I think about it). If I could live somewhere nearby that doesn't eat up 50%+ of my income I would go there in a heartbeat. On HN there's a tendency to assume people are either well-off or destitute drug addicts who have given up on life but there's a wide range in between.
I've noticed a bit of a divide in the small web, between those who:
A. Want to get back to the web's roots as a document network, keeping a clear structure and a focus on content,
B. Want to use the web's flexible presentation itself as a medium for expression through styling, interactive content and so on
The Gemini protocol is a good example of A taken to its extreme, while e.g. Neocities leans more toward the latter. The web is by its nature fractured - the independent web even moreso - but sometimes it seems the gap between the two philosophies is the biggest obstacle to more widespread adoption of small web practices, or at least more unified tools for discovery and networking.
It also seems like developers tend to favor type A, which has led to robust infrastructure and projects around it - like Gemini, or the site linked here. But I think a lot of people looking to make a break from big tech are doing so because of the limitations, and going from one set of awkward restrictions to another doesn't look like an upgrade.
Just my two cents. I'd be sad to miss out on the wacky creative sites people build, whether it's because they're stuck in big social media, or because they took the pledge from the linked page:
> make a simple, honest website with the proper use of HTML, the use of CSS only where essential, and the use of JavaScript only where it’s absolutely necessary.
This sounds interesting! I often want to reach for Lua for general scripting in lieu of python or bash, but packaging and other issues make it a rough experience. I'd love a link!
reply