Hard disagree. There’s plenty of games that are little more than dressed up choose your own adventure stories. Plenty that are meant for chill and relaxing gameplay. Plenty that do little more than guide you through horror scenes. And so on.

And even beyond that, most people don’t even play a game long enough to have any real “skill development over time.” I read from the Civ7 director recently that if you’ve ever finished a game of Civ you’re literally in a minority of the player base. And that tracks with what I’ve heard about other games as well.

Most players of any given game never finish it. Most of those quit at the first sign of frustration and most are on the easiest game difficulties. This would indicate to me that the majority’s conception of “fun” has little to no relation to skill development in the game. They’re there for the moment to moment experiences. Rubber band mechanics are there to evoke those fun experiences more often in the majority of the player base.

The thing is I don’t think it has anything to offer to bring in people from outside the genre. Some people really enjoy it but you kinda have to already be into that kind of thing (DOTA).

I think you’re overstating the importance of games as a platform for skill development as opposed to a platform for, you know, having fun. The fact is that the vast majority of players play any game on one of its lowest difficulty settings.

Rubber banding is made for the core of the game’s audience and challenge-seekers are just not large enough to be that core. Some of those rubber banding mechanics can and are disabled at higher difficulty settings. Others are needed at higher difficulty because the AI can’t compete and the investment in dev time to improve the AI just isn’t worth it because, again, very few people actually play the game at those difficulties.

Yes. Not just “imagine you were given a tool box.” Imagine you’ve been told your entire life that all you’re good for is being a basic handyman and you work incredibly hard against people biased into believing that about you to become an astronaut. You finally make it to space. You’ve done it. You’ve proven you’re good for more than handiwork.

And you get onto the space station and your peers spend their time joking that you actually ought to be the station’s handyman instead.

Apparently not the Dementors in Harry Potter. However, the suspense when Harry might get in trouble with the school admin is too much to watch.

My kids love the box just as much

Sad part is that voters trust him more on the economy than the Democrats.

There are multiple facets here that all kinda get mashed together when people discuss this topic and the publicly available/public domain difference kinda gets at that.

• An AI company downloading a publicly available work isn’t a violation of copyright law. Copyright gives the owner exclusive right to distribute their work. Publishing it for anybody to download is them exercising that right.
• Of course, if the work isn’t publicly available and the AI company got it, someone probably did violate copyright laws, likely the people who distributed the data set to the company because they’re not supposed to be passing around the work without the owner’s permission.
• All that is to say, downloading something isn’t making a copy. Sending the work is making a copy, as far as copyright is concerned. Whether the person downloading it is going to use it for something profitable doesn’t really change anything there. Only if they were to become the sender at some later point does it matter. In other words, there’s no violation of copyright law by the company that can really occur during the whole “training” phase of AI development.
• Beyond that, AI isn’t in the business of serving copies of works. They might come close in some specific instances, but that’s largely a technical problem that developers want to fix than a fundamental purpose of these models.
• The only real case that might work against them is whether or not the works they produce are derivative… But derivative/transformative has a pretty strict legal definition. It’s not enough to show that the work was used in the creation of a new work. You can, for example, create a word cloud of your favorite book, analyze the tone of news article to help you trade stocks, or produce an image containing the most prominent color in every frame of a movie. None of these could exist without deriving from a copyrighted work but none of them count as a legally derivative work.
• I chose those examples because they are basic statistical analyses not far from what AI training involves. There’s a lot of aspects of a work that are not covered by copyright. Style, structure, factual information. The kinds of things that AI is mostly interested in replicating.
• So I don’t think we’re going to see a lot of success in taking down AI companies with copyright. We might see some small scale success when an AI crosses a line here or there. But unless a judge radically alters the bounds of copyright law, at everyone’s detriment, their opponents are going to have an uphill battle to fight here.

Because that’s not what copyright is for. It exists to give the creator exclusive rights over distribution. That’s it. So unless the company is planning to distribute the work and they obtained a copy willingly and legally distributed to them, then copyright is the wrong law to lean on.

I mean, it’s in the name. The right to make copies. Not to be glib, but it really is

A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time.

You may notice a conspicuous absence of control over how a copied work is used, short of distributing it. You can reencode it, compress it, decompress it, make a word cloud, statistically analyze its tone, anything you want as long as you’re not redistributing the work or an adaptation (which has a pretty limited meaning as well). “Personal use” and “fair use” are stipulations that weaken a copyright owner’s control over the work, not giving them new rights above and beyond copyright. And that’s a great thing. You get to do whatever you want with the things you own.

You don’t have a right to other people’s work. That’s what copyright enables. But that’s beside the point. The owner doesn’t get to say what you use a work for that they’ve distributed to you.

Training literally is consuming. A copyright license doesn’t get to dictate what computer programs the work is allowed to be used with. There’s a ton a entertainment mega corps that would love for that to be the case, though.

You’re saying that you’re not allowed to do a statistical analysis on a copyrighted work. It’s nonsense. It’s well-established that copyright does not prevent that kind of use.

Copyright licensing allows the owner to control how a work is distributed, not how it’s consumed. “Personal use” just means that you can’t turn around and redistribute a work that you’ve obtained. Not that you’re not allowed to consume it in a corporate setting.

It’s a pretty typical part of their style. Often they’re wearing ties. Sometimes even a suit.

You’d better not be reading on the toilet!

Kid legitimately prefers reading in the bathroom to doing it in his room and will spend well over an hour in there because of it. It’s a problem when we’ve got somewhere to be…

Kid: I forgot.
Me: You need to work on remembering things a bit better.
Kid: Well somebody told me that as you get older you can’t remember things as well.
Me: Not at 7 years old!
Kid: Well maybe you told me and you just don’t remember.

Customers tend to view quality more holistically than that, though. Not a lot of people are going to flip their conception of product quality on a single change, but will after a long series of changes. Once a company gets that reputation for poor quality, it’s not as simple as reversing the last corner they cut. It’s a hole that takes a lot of changes to dig out of. More than most companies are willing to reverse.

I’d call them weird like you would the ultra fundamentalist Christian old guys that go to college campuses and yell at people. It’s not weird in a good way. It’s just fucking strange. Like something is legitimately wrong with them.

Weird.

To be fair, they haven’t stopped using hard language either. They released a statement after his “you won’t have to vote ever again” rambling with very direct warnings about how dangerous he is and has been. “Weird” is just another line of attack, hoping to cut in a way that might resonate with some more than the (imo rightful) high stakes talk.

My understanding of the ruling is that, no, a law cannot do this. The ruling is mostly a separation of powers argument. Basically, if the president is not above the law then that means that Congress can override the Constitution by writing a law that, for example, makes the President’s constitutional duties illegal. Therefore, the president is allowed to officially do anything he wants limited only by the Constitution.

Obligatory: this is not an endorsement of the ruling and IANAL. It’s an awful ruling and terrible for the present and future of our country. It’s a violation of primary ideals of democracy and it needs to be overturned ASAP.