BTW AoE4 is nowhere near doomed, i play AoE4 multiplayer regularly and hear this often. AoE4 has about half the number of daily players (12-15K) that AoE2 does, but it’s easily enough to play multiplayer. It also gets regular DLCs and updates and has had a stable playerbase for years now. Basically its less popular and many AoE2 players will never switch, but it’s an active game.
Probably went something like - we need infinite growth to appease the stock market morons - we can’t raise prices any more for our shoes - what if we cut out the middlemen retail stores and disintermediated to save money - we will be digital native, COVID is here, the world is digital - RIP.
Also, ironically, the pitch was supposed to be a win win: If we cut out the middleman and stop spending so much on sponsoring athletes and sports, we can pass those savings on to customers, bringing us more sales at lower cost to consumers and higher margin for us because our cost structure is lower.
Turns out people don't always want lower-priced products.
Man weve lived through this playbook already with Facebook and Google and an entire industry already over the last decade, we can’t be this naively trusting of entities which ultimately maximize shareholder/owner value and nothing else.
Meta already pirated all the books in the world to train the models, lied about it and got caught. We know the models all stole copyrighted information and somehow got away with it - where even if it is fair use to train on it, they pirated it in the first place. Sam Altman is already known to have made serious lies throughout his career. OpenAI apparently doesn’t even know what websites their own damn models are hacking.
It’s insane to trust these same people at their word now. The whole company will not know, someone at a high level could easily steal the data. Apparently even this tweet is saying they use your de-identified data to train on even when you explicitly turn off those options in settings. It’s the same old tricks again.
Im really concerned about what big tech is going to do the nezt few years. They have historically been on a good day mediocre stuarts of trust. This was when they had no competition and a money only flows in business model.
Now they are facing near unlimited CAPex expenses and possibly existential threat to their product. I think we will be astounded at how vile they become.
> This is how brazen, how toxic and destructive, we’ve allowed the industry formerly known as venture capital to become. We must understand that it is no longer a financial machine that is used to fund startups, but a political and social machine focused on dismantling democracy and civil society. And it’s time to act accordingly.
Its at least heartening to see a broad recognition across many circles and communities of how insane wealth/power concentration, corruption and insane laws like Citizens United are dismantling democracy today. But a16z and others are still pushing their own techno-utopia anti-doomer message that a lot of useful idiots buy into, even though it serves to detract from the political and social root causes of our problems today and instead says even more technology will fix it all.
I think the logic behind most of this trash is law enforcement gradually ridding themselves of all responsibility or accountability. They don’t handle theft or burglary anymore, they dismiss stalking or harassment even when people end up in danger, they stand by afraid in school shootings, they take reports of whatever happens and then do nothing about them. Every crime is either too big or too small for them. Kidnapping is a serious sensational crime that would make the news, and they’ve learned they don’t have to deal with that either if they just force children to be indoors or supervised all day.
Right the US government definitely isn’t detaining people, sending them to foreign gulags or sending mobs of masked morons shooting innocent people like Pretti in broad daylight. We don’t even know the names of the ICE officers who did that to this day so they seem pretty free of scrutiny as well.
You should see how the datacenter companies operate. They have massive teams of lawyers bigger than the entire city staff threatening all sorts of lawsuits and even pressure cities into signing NDAs against discussing their negotiations with any other city. They have buckets of money and perks waiting to bribe a defector or fund an election campaign. Any old scummy company with a couple of billion dollars is frequently more sophisticated and powerful than a piddly local government.
I think the point is these home systems are controlled centrally and can be used the same way flock can. I personally removed ring and installed my own system that doesnt export video out of concern with the governments lack of checks and balances anymore.
IIRC other tech companies like Meta and Google attempted to build housing in SF but were shot down by NIMBYs and city regulations the same as any other construction. Most of the US can barely build a lego house without years of permitting and consultations now, then it gets cancelled or overruns the budget and time by 20x. Any actual plan to rezone or build anywhere in the west, a 1000 boomers descens like a zombie army at the city meetings and stop it. Dumping money into the city can’t solve this particular problem.
The regulatory environment for housing construction has changed a lot in the past 5 years, and in SF in particular the new "Family Zoning Plan" is a big deal. If OpenAI has been attempting to build housing in SF and got shot down by NIMBYs and regulations, I would agree that discharges their responsibility, but as far as I know they have not done this.
These arguments only ever look at one side of the ledger, as if the immigrants only ever take jobs and tax money and houses. But immigrants also buy things and create demand, pay taxes and build houses. Looking at only one side is just pure nonsense and looking at both sides basically disproves your claim.
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