Ooooh but with Starfield they called it “Creation Engine TWO”, you see.

The least well-kept industry “secret” is that the major version number of a hidden technical component literally doesn’t matter as soon as you hear it because the marketing people will get their grubby little hands on it and force an update whenever they need to capitalize on some kind of wow effect.

“CE2” is clearly barely any better or different than skyrim or fallout’s CE; in fact as far as I can tell the script extender dropped pretty much immediately after the game’s release, which clearly indicates no major architectural change to work around. Also if Bethesda really did enough work to warrant a “version 2” why the hell are there loading screens everywhere like it’s 2008.

Skyrim 32 bit to Skyrim 64 bit was probably a much bigger generational leap than anything Bethesda has done since then.

As a developer I believe “just rewrite it from scratch” is a cardinal sin and a beginner’s mistake in 95 % of cases. Creation Engine though? They are clearly carrying around technical debt that was already very dated 15 years ago, like the constant loading screens. Now the loading screen look soooo bad it’s a complete meme yet they don’t seem capable of fixing that. At least apparently they managed to get rid of the FPS lock with Starfield? Only 20 years too late.

Any source on any significant amount of children wasting time talking to AIs, or just anecdotes and a bad case of “youth these days”?

The whole concept smells like fringe NEET 4chan-adjacent behavior. LLMs aren’t capable of maintaining an even remotely convincing simulacrum of human connection, and anyone who would project companionship onto these soulless computer programs obviously has preexisting and severe mental issues (relying on AIs to fill a void in human connection is certainly unhealthy but a symptom, not the root cause).

The potential market for these AIs will never be any bigger than the market for anime waifu body pillows, because it’s same audience, different decade. Literally everyone else thinks AI girlfriends and body pillow waifus are weird as all hell, and that’s not going to change because neurotypical people want and need human connection and can tell the difference between a rock with googly eyes and a friend.

Also arguably a rock with googly eyes has more charm and personality than Zuck’s horror show.

Cease&desist every casino would be a good first step. Casinos are well outside the original intended purpose and if the ToS don’t prohibit their existence that can easily be changed. Valve doesn’t owe anyone the right to gamble their items, especially not with the weird third party escrow system that casinos use IIRC.

But if we’re touching on the subject then we need to reopen the contentious subject of the lootboxes themselves, which are gambling. Which Valve (and the video game industry) has an enormous stake in. To fix that whole mess, I expect a government crackdown will be required.

You’ll have a hard time finding a jurisdiction where minors gambling (even behind the veil of “we don’t check who our customers are”) is legal. The “IRL item gambling” site in the video was in fact blatantly illegal in Denmark despite the lengths to which they went to pretend “it’s not gambling because the house always loses”.

Asking Valve to police gambling is the next best thing to do if governments won’t step in. You say it like it’s an impossibility, ignoring the fact that “state-run gambling” is quite a common setup. In France for instance all money games are run by la française des jeux, a state-owned monopoly whose profits are meant to go to charity. In the US it wouldn’t be a crazy idea either, given how many US states already have state-run monopolies for alcohol sales for example. It’s not like historical precedent is lacking to show that regulating a parasitic industry is possible…

Maybe you can find examples of other industries that are heavily infected with gambling bullshit, but that’s whataboutism and in no way relevant to the discussion.

I was there Gandalf…

Before that date their algorithm was soft-locked to around 5k upvotes. If a post was extremely, massively popular it would climb to maybe a bit over 10k but that was insane. There was clearly a logarithmic scaling effect that kicked in after a few thousand upvotes. Not entirely sure why, perhaps to prevent the super-popular stuff from ballooning in some kind of horrible feedback loop.

The change was to uncap the vote counts. One day posts just kept climbing well beyond the 5k mark. Now what they also did was recalculate old posts in order not to fuck up the /top rankings. Kinda. Took a while and I’m not sure they got to every post.

I don’t know or care if reddit does vote manipulation, but this ain’t proof and I don’t see how it is unbelievable that a website with tens of millions MOA would occasionally have a post with 100k+ upvotes.