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180703436
comment
byDrXym
6 @04:27PM
(#65959872)
Attached to: One-Third of US Video Game Industry Workers Were Laid Off Over the Last Two Years, GDC Study Reveals
It's garbage because big game studios (i.e. the project leads & management) are so risk averse they regress to a mean - new thing has to be like the old thing. And that message is hammered into the people there making the code, artwork, music, plot etc. I don't expect any firings of people who deserve to be fired, just those creating content in the narrow confines they're allowed. If things were bad before then AI slop will make them worse. Hopefully a major studio relying on slop will go bust and the others will learn that maybe, just maybe that creating games should be a human endeavour.
180676898
comment
byDrXym
2026 @07:32AM
(#65954164)
Attached to: Amazon Inadvertently Announces Cloud Unit Layoffs In Email To Employees
Amazon had a serious issue if they truly had 16,000 managers to layoff. Personally I think this is just company speak for removing people they want to get rid of regardless of their role, even if they were extremely competent & productive but had the misfortune be on a dud project. Since this Amazon I would be surprised either if there was plenty people let go who were victims of vindictive performance reviews by blame shifting managers.
180674722
comment
byDrXym
2026 @03:52AM
(#65954038)
Attached to: Gemini In Google Calendar Now Helps You Find the Best Meeting Time For All Attendees
That's what I suggested the "if you want to get fancier" method. You look for the slots where the most people can attend rather than all of them. I'm sure teams and other groupware software implement simpler or more complex strategies depending on the number of invitees. I'm just trying to say this stuff is not rocket science so I don't know where the AI angle fits into it.
180663946
comment
byDrXym
26 @03:33AM
(#65951754)
Attached to: Valve Facing UK Lawsuit Over Pricing and Commissions
Nor is it for me or anyone else to think the current system is at all acceptable. Steam are defacto dominant because they happened to launch their system with a premium game and it took off. It was by no means the first such game store - I remember using Stardock's service before that. And Games for Windows was a headless service. But Valve had Half Life 2 to propel it onto many systems.
Gaining dominance was great for Valve but it means lack of competitiveness, lack of choice, stagnation for everyone else. And of course the likes of EA / Epic et al want to avoid a 30% cut of their profits going to someone else. The problem is they want the cake to themselves and that's not going to happen either.
Which is why they should have and still should federate. However as I pointed out, that's unlikely to happen because greed.
180663876
comment
byDrXym
26 @03:10AM
(#65951724)
Attached to: Gemini In Google Calendar Now Helps You Find the Best Meeting Time For All Attendees
I don't think it matters how many people there are. You break each person's schedule into slots surrounding the proposed meeting time, then OR each schedule in turn to a result and when you're done any gaps of sufficient size are where the meeting is possible. If you want to get fancier the algorithm could compute sums for each slot of available / unavailable for required / optional and then make a suggestion based on the maximum attendance possible.
But I also block book lunch and after 4pm most days in my calendar. It normally means I get to eat my lunch in peace or go home on time.
180661884
comment
byDrXym
6 @06:50PM
(#65951196)
Attached to: Gemini In Google Calendar Now Helps You Find the Best Meeting Time For All Attendees
Finding an available slot where all invitees are free is not a hard problem to solve and certainly not one that an AI is required. Although it does point to a problem of trusting Google in the first place to plan meetings this way . Maybe its time to bring this sort of thing back in-house.
180661584
comment
byDrXym
6 @05:39PM
(#65951072)
Attached to: Google Settles $68 Million Lawsuit Claiming It Recorded Private Conversations
Not so great for the supposed victims who presumably number in the millions and will therefore be lucky if they receive even a dollar in compensation.
180661518
comment
byDrXym
6 @05:30PM
(#65951042)
Attached to: GTA 6's Physical Release Could Be Delayed To 2027 Because of Leaks
I will not be surprised if the download clocks in at 250GB or more. I wonder how many people have that amount of space to even spare on a single game.
Not that the physical media will help since it'll probably copy most of the files over to the SSD but at least users have a copy of it - at least for a little bit. Because the normal trend these days is to crap out a broken gold master and immediately drop a massive patch over the top.
180661414
comment
byDrXym
6 @05:13PM
(#65951010)
Attached to: Valve Facing UK Lawsuit Over Pricing and Commissions
On my PC right now I have Microsoft / Xbox store, Steam, Epic Games, UPlay, EA Origin, Rockstar Games launcher, GOG and Wargaming Game Center. That's 5-10Gb of bloat for essentially the same thing - a store, a signon service, an updater and a game launcher. Some services might also toss in achievements or forums but it's the same core thing. Not only is it a burden on end users, it is a burden on developers who have to build, test and support multiple builds for different platforms and are forced into lop sided contracts.
The sensible option, would be a single sign on for the user and the platform would be federated, allowing me to buy from anywhere (and DLC from potentially somewhere else) and the service would be agnostic aside from taking a small commission from the vendor to facilitate things like sign on, feature development, downloading & patching. But that won't happen because every company including Valve is so fucking greedy they want the pie all to themselves. They're not competing on quality of service or value, they're competing on lock-in.
180649256
comment
byDrXym
026 @05:43AM
(#65946306)
Attached to: PowerShell Architect Retires After Decades At the Prompt
PowerShell is longwinded with a bizarro Verb-Noun fixation and a heavy runtime behind it. Yes there are aliases but unfortunately those aliases suck - e.g. when you type "dir" in PowerShell it is an alias on Get-ChildItem which conspicuously not "dir" in the conventional sense and does not support the same arguments.
Would it have killed Microsoft to have written a cmdlet called Get-DosChildItem that behaved like the old command and alias to that? Same for the other commands - deltree, rmdir, cd, cmd, xcopy move, if, rename etc. - and even cmd itself. If they had done that then chances are command prompt would have gone away entirely because PowerShell would be a complete superset. They could have even written decent analogues for Unix file utils in the same way but they didn't do that either.
The only time I'll use PowerShell is when I'm forced to, when there is no other way to do something from a prompt to manage Windows. Otherwise I use a prompt which is terse and familiar and doesn't inflict verbosity or runtime complexity on me for no reason.
180642428
comment
byDrXym
6 @05:09AM
(#65943656)
Attached to: EU Parliament Calls For Detachment From US Tech Giants
Europe does have some pretty substantial cloud providers but they're minnows compared to the likes of AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. But they provide analogous services, sometimes using the same or similar APIs. So European governments and critical infrastructure businesses need to be legally incentivized to store their data in a sovereign fashion with certain rules about encryption, storage of keys, data recovery, data retention etc. European cloud providers would be defacto sovereign so there is an advantage to these requirements that would help them grow. I know AWS is trying to produce EU sovereign data centres too so its not like US providers can't compete, but not in the laissez faire way they've been working up until now.
180642416
comment
byDrXym
6 @05:03AM
(#65943654)
Attached to: EU Parliament Calls For Detachment From US Tech Giants
Software, software services (cloud, AI etc), chip design & fabrication, satellite internet, pharmaceuticals, weapons manufacture, defence, aerospace and a bunch of other things are vital to European independence and to act as a bulwark against coercion by China and/or USA. It is time for Europe to realise that - it just takes one senile asshole being puppeteered by adversaries for the whole situation to change.
180618676
comment
byDrXym
26 @03:27AM
(#65936532)
Attached to: A Second US Sphere Could Come To Maryland
The Las Vegas sphere is a gimmick that has yet to turn a profit and and still has the expense of construction and ruinous electric bills to cover. Even if it manages to break even some day it will be decades before it pays its debts off, if ever. And no doubt we'll see them turn the lights off to save money to hasten that on.
So why the hell would anywhere else want one of these things? Maybe Vegas has a conveyor belt of idiots willing to pay $200+ for a lightshow to make the model just barely viable. Maybe Vegas residents are used to all the light pollution or put up with it because their entire city depends on it. I doubt anywhere else can say the same.
180597386
comment
byDrXym
6 @04:00AM
(#65928670)
Attached to: New York Introduces Legislation To Crack Down On 3D Printers That Make Ghost Guns
How exactly is any software supposed to know a 3d part is for a gun and not some other purpose? Even if the software maintained a database of every known part and were to somehow match a piece before every print, how ridiculously compute expensive would that be? When - a) the piece could be rotated on any axis, b) trivially modified to circumvent the check (e.g. changing the mesh, STL ordering or superficial details), c) would incur false positives and negatives galore.
3D printers don't even require specific software. There are a multitude of slicers that emit G code for pretty much any printer on the market. Slicers are open source so any check code could simply be removed, not that any open source project would accept the code in the first place. Printers can even be flashed with new firmware, or lobotomized to use push functionality out into software like Klipper. Printers can even be assembled from parts with new mainboards or built entirely from scratch.
How enforceable is any of this? Not even slightly. And it makes criminals of the 99.999% of 3d printer users who are NOT printing gun parts. Would the state of New York also require people in Lowes undergo checks in case they are buying a pipes or nails to make a shotgun?
They would be better off boosting the penalties and consequences of owning such a gun, or printing/selling/providing/importing parts or designs. And focus their attention and investigations on communities that engage in this sort of thing. And 3d printer forensics is a nascent field but there is plenty of things that could be done there too to increase the probability of securing convictions if someone was suspected of committing a crime.
180584522
comment
byDrXym
026 @06:59AM
(#65925874)
Attached to: Meta Closes Three VR Studios As Part of Its Metaverse Cuts
No they weren't involved directly, but the parent company depressed sales for the entire platform by utterly failing to grasp what people want. I think social is fine if there is a reason to be social which I suggested an MMORPG where there are things to do and people can express themselves. But Metaverse as it stands is just trash.
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