It’s the age of indie imo. We’re seeing the final chapter of studios with 100s of employees. Replacing with AI is the lazy, catastrophic way of doing through it.
Lmao replacing people in creative industries with ai is like chef’s kiss of stupidity
I think it was Cory Doctorow that described it as a feedback loop, so the people who aren’t “all in” on AI get pushed out of the C-suite, in favour of those that are until the whole show is being run by people who want AI to do everything but absolutely no idea how to achieve that. It’s bluster all the way up, driven by a psychotic devotion to shareholders. Sack everyone, raise prices, the line must go up.
And because it’s all fuelled by picosecond trading algorithms, a company who’s line goes up 2% more than another company’s line ends up valued to a hundred times as much.
It’s no longer about being a healthy trading company, you have to show you’re doing everything possible to make everyone’s lives a fucking misery…
Yeah, and it’s all made up money and value. Capitalism seems to have reached the runaway diesel engine stage, where it ain’t going to stop until we cut off its oxygen or it blows the fuck up.
Have you tried giving the engine more orphans?
The list of most valuable companies is highly concerning. It’s nearly all AI or AI-adjacent now.
The only ones that aren’t are oil and magic obesity pills.
Left my last job and they really pushed AI. Everything had to be AI and it has to be shoved in everywhere. It was mostly awful. Few places it helped was to complete bullshit HR tasks that we had been complaining about ever since they were introduced as a waste of time.
Network engineer here. My main use case for AI at the moment is for ticket management and as a glorified search engine.
Ohh yeah search and summary can be useful.
As long as it isn’t based on and continually trained on privacy violations, stolen property, and a continually growing list of ethical transgressions against humanity in a race to the bottom to fulfill greed and laziness in an irresponsible ethical laundering that I guess requires just a little too much brain power to make the leap to comprehend for certain types of people.
But, you know. It’s fine, I guess. Chase those dollar signs and defend those perfect infallible and unexamined systems, boss.
The only way forward for many developers will be as indie devs. The corpos are going to shovel AI slop into our buckets and the quality games will be from indie devs.
I just want to add, this is coming from someone who has completed a mathematics PhD, and so has a very very high bar for psychosis (seriously, math departments are fun, but also FUN).
…uh oh. How so?
While it’s not true that intelligence is correlated with mental problems, advanced mathematics tends to attract or create odd ducks.
There are multiple mathematicians in the modern era who are well regarded, technically homeless and just showed up at people’s houses to collaborate on some math. One, who coined the phrase “another roof, another proof”, was a staunch proponent of mixing amphetamines, coffee, and 70’s antidepressants.
People didn’t notice John Nash devolved into a deep schizophrenic break for a long time because it’s not weird for advanced mathematicians to be talking about very complex unintelligible ideas. Scary Wheels and Super Shrubs is an example of a good title and not-transparent description.Another was the uni-bomber.
There’s plenty of perfectly well balanced mathematicians. You just can’t help but get some weird ideas when your life’s work is to think outside the box about very complicated things all the time.
If you go deep into math work, you’ll meet people who think the universe is a simulation. You’ll meet others who think that’s silly, because the universe is clearly actually an abstract embodiment of the platonic ideal of mathematics. 7, blue, and cat are all equally real or not real, and we don’t need a simulation as the equation defining structure is sufficient to give rise to what we experience, and requiring it to be written or executed is just an odd affectation.
You’ll just nod and concede the appeal because it’s not the first time someone has shared that idea with you.So when the mathematicians start saying the ideas are getting odd, you know it’s not just “I don’t understand therefore it’s weird”.
Maybe this implies I’m one of the weirdos, but my experience has been wildly different. My experience has been mathematicians are just people, what they have in common is a passion for math. Sometimes they’re weird, but that’s because they’re people and not because they do math. I never got the impression I was talking with a schizophrenic or a Kaczynski type. They exist, but non-mathatician schizophrenics do too.
There are multiple mathematicians in the modern era who are well regarded, technically homeless and just showed up at people’s houses to collaborate on some math.
I don’t think heard of this and I’m skeptical. Give me a couple names to jostle my memory?
One, who coined the phrase “another roof, another proof”, was a staunch proponent of mixing amphetamines, coffee, and 70’s antidepressants.
I don’t know this quote but I’d give it a 90% chance it’s Erdös.
Scary Wheels and Super Shrubs is an example of a good title and not-transparent description.
Come on man, this isn’t weird. It’s representation theory, there literally isn’t a transparent description. It’s weird to think having fun with a title isn’t a normal impulse from time-to-time.
7, blue, and cat are all equally real or not real, and we don’t need a simulation as the equation defining structure is sufficient to give rise to what we experience, and requiring it to be written or executed is just an odd affectation.
This reads as partially random to me, what is “the equation defining structure”?
I had hoped I was making it very clear that it’s not a case that all mathematicians are weirdos or even difficult to talk to, because they’re not.
Thinking about complicated things all the time results in complicated conclusions, so you’ll end up talking to people with very detailed thoughts if you’re talking about work. Probably perfectly normal thoughts on cooking beyond a bias towards using their analytical ability where others might not.
My point was not that they’re all weird, but that the bar is higher because you deal with more people who have thought about something much more than you have.My point with the paper wasn’t that it’s weird to have fun, or that the title was bad. It’s that it was complicated and an example of the field requiring you to deal with profoundly unfamiliar ideas and terminology, potentially quite regularly. To some people “that sounded like gibberish” is a sign you dismiss it. In this case, it means you need to do more research to catch up to the terminology.
The two that I was thinking of were erdos and diffie. I’ll concede to featuring some of the more notable characters because their stories are more fun.
The idea being described was a paraphrase of platonic realism and structuralism taken to an extreme to match simulation theory. If the universe is a simulation it means there is, “somewhere”, an equation or algorithm describing our physical reality. Needing that equation to be evaluated to give rise to our universe is an odd perspective since the existence of the equation would be sufficient. An equation describing the motion of a point in a circle doesn’t need to be evaluated to describe that, nor does it need to be written down.
It’s a notion that I thought fit well with my point of “agree or disagree, it’s not delusional, and it’s not obvious”
Mostly, we all see the world in unique ways - picture a building of possessed dwarves and you have the average mathematics department.
“They’re trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game.” well technically that was already the case? Press the “send” button on Slack and an entire team of natural stupidity makes you a game for all of the profit. Sometimes multiple, even.
As long as the AAA studios are generating shareholder value this will be the future unless the workers push back collectively and hard AF because the average gaming isn’t going to do crap to push back on this.
Developers and workers in general are nothing more than a reoccurring cost account to most businesses, a faceless void where money goes to instead of shareholders and executive compensation.
“They’re trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job. So I don’t see that going anywhere sustainable, and I feel like there will simply be a pop and a reckoning and then [it’s on repeat] unless people do something else.”
If AI ever reaches the point that it can produce a creative, fun game that feels worth playing - which I doubt, because you gotta have a soul to make art - then anyone can press that button. Why would people buy their game when they can get AI to make their own?
He’s right, these people have shit the corporate bed.
“Somebody else will pay the salaries of our customers”.
As far as I can tell the individual actors extracting more from a system that its capable to support if everybody does the same (the kind of situation Game Theory calls a Tragedy Of The Commons) always think in one of 3 ways:
- They simply don’t think about systemic consequences at all, be it simply that they don’t have the kind of intelligence for it or purposefully don’t dig down into it because they don’t want to think about consequences.
- They expect the “system” (i.e. somebody else, maybe everybody else) will make up for it so it’s fine if they take more from it than the put back in, as illustrated in my first paragraph.
- They’re aware of what the commulative impact of their actions can or even will have in the future, but they think they themselves and their families will be alright and screw everybody else - essentially that if they can get ahead enough they can ride the wave whilst it crashes.
The same kind of thinking also applies to Ponzi Schemes (like the current AI bubble) - Ignorance (willful or due to lack of knowledge/intelligence), The Many Will Make Up For The Over-Extraction Of The Few and/or I Myself Will Be Alright.
And you know what?
Those people have very good reasons to believe in the second one (that I illustrated at the start) - you look at Neoliberal Capitalism so far that’s what’s been happening as Money acummulates in fewer hands and sin ce with regulations neutralized and Corruption through the roof, those holding most of the wealth can do whatever the fuck they want so they are increasingly pillaging wealth from the rest, and the “system” - i.e. everybody else - just gets poorer and instead of Revolutions and Guillotines for the rich all we see is passive acceptance so the rest so have been making up for the depredations of the few for decades. Also just look at how Governments the world over sacrificed everybody else to make sure Finance and Asset owners in general came up better of after the 2008 Crash - these people have very good reason to believe that those in power, being very much in their pockets, will use said power to sacrificed the rest in order to deflect away from the Few the consequences of the actions of those very Few.
And if they’s CEOs they also have very good reasons to believe the third - just look at corporate governance in the last decades, with getting those jobs being far more abour Cronyism than Merit and incompetence being de facto rewarded with golden parachutes a even failing upwards. From all they’ve seen their whole lives there is no reason for them to expect to ever personally suffer the consequences of their own depredations and pillaging.
In summary, some don’t even realise the problem and as for those who do, given the experience of CEOs for at least the last 3 or 4 decades, it’s pretty rational for them to believe that their depredations wont destroy the Whole enough to come back to them and even if they do, they themselves personally will be alright even if the companies they manage are destroyed.
“Somebody else will pay the salaries of our customers”.
That’s been the mindset of these business “leaders” for a few decades already.
The difference is now they have a tool that promises them that they can eliminate workers at an increasingly rapid rate.
Of course that’s a false promise, but once they realize that, a helluva lot of damage will have been done.
Wasn’t Walmart leaning on the gov to pay their employees medicare because they were paying so little in one state?
It’s unfortunately sustainable because people buy things they like before things they need.
For all of us, for everyone 1 person we know who has a decent job and loves to play games they buy with disposable income, we probably know 5 who shouldn’t buy the game they’re buying because they’re already behind on their sewer bill.
Like the video game crash of ‘83?
Like every time workers seem to be getting woke enough to maybe possibly do something on a scale that touches rich people’s yacht money some of us get some minor concessions that keep us working in the system and reproducing it for the next generation of workers.
Although the dream with ai is an economy without the need for workers (we wouldn’t be a part of it), or labour power pushed to such an insignificant little atomised role that withholding it is no longer a threat.
Instead of paying us to work they will have to pay us not to throw molotovs at their datacentres.
I think that was always the assumption except people forgot their own power.
Congratulations!!!1 You are the lucky 10000 who discovered copy pasting today!
A service for people who don’t read articles.
Nah, they’re not “getting psychosis”, AI is revealing their psychosis. We’re talking about people used to convincing themselves that infinite growth is possible in a finite world, that fascism is a solution, that they made themselves with no help, that they deserve to be paid hundreds of times more than their most basic employees, that being a billionaire is ethical, etc etc. And we used to accept all that for a contract and a salary. They’re breaking the socio-professional contract with AI, now.
CEOs, HRs, the corporate world in general HAVE ALWAYS BEEN 100% PSYCHOTIC. Why do we think capitalism and the workplace are so alienating in the first place? Why do we think they need to invest millions, if not billions, in PR, medias and propaganda? The upper you go, the batshit crazier things get.
Respectfully: no.
Psychosis is something that builds over time with many factors and AI is one that can definitely be one of the contributing factors. It can be the one that pushes someone over the edge into psychosis and that may seem as “revealing” it but the psychosis could have been avoided without.
This line of thinking feels dangerous to me.
That “build-up” you are talking about, that’s called business school followed by entry level management or internship, where modern managers brush over learning their business, in favor of seeking efficiency purely in terms of dollars in/dollars out, in opposition to any other metric.
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Idunno man, sounds like you’re trying to shift the blame from AI inducing psychosis in people towards the people affected by it
No, like the article said: “it’s not as if the current industry problems are unprecedented, or came out of nowhere. Since the advent of modern capitalism (and likely a long while before that), those in charge have often misunderstood, underestimated, or dismissed the hard work that goes into labour they don’t understand.”
This and a tendency to abuse workers have always existed. Management isn’t the victim here, the AI has just removed the limiter, such as it was.
Did AI remove the limiter? Or is it actively pushing people towards delusion by agreeing with whats being said and validating the persons delusionary thoughts as how reality works?
Are you suggesting the ‘line must go up’ mentality only emerged after the advent of AI?
No.
I’m mad about the misrepresentation of psychosis
Ah, ok. So for my next question, why is seeking infinite growth not a psychotic delusion?
You’re making the assumption that all “bosses” mentioned in the article are people seeking infinite growth.
You’re making an assumption about a group of people you know nothing about and trying to link them with people suffering from psychosis. Essentially grouping “people suffering from psychosis” together with “greedy CEO’s”. Whereas greedy CEO’s could also simply be narcissistic, evil or simply lying to others to get more money.
By grouping them with psychosis sufferers you’re denying the sufferers their lived experience in favor of assumptions.
a state of distorted reality, marked by disturbances in perception and thought, disorganized behavior, and negative symptoms
Ticks those boxes
Or they’re lying for money rather than suffering from a mental condition.
You’ve hit the nail on the head with the Infinite Growth statement. Most companies see AI as the next way to cut bottom line costs and hit those annual goals. It’s an ouroboros that most companies haven’t seen the end of yet. Eventually they’ll be left with no talent (arguably the most valuable thing a company can acquire) and uninteresting products nobody is interested in.
How do you train newbies into useful employees when you let AI handle the easy stuff. Where’s your pipeline of promotions so you’re developing your next generation of developers? Once the shit starts to hit the fan, you’ll see them crumble and ask how we got here. Human talent takes YEARS to cultivate and is extremely hard to buy, especially when competition builds from reducing the supply when people stop going into these fields for lack of entry-level jobs.
Its Cronus devouring his children. Feeding on the young for short term sustenance
It really is an ouroboros pretending there is no problem nibbling on the back of its own head after consuming everything else
It’s near the bottom but Tarn Adams notes the same thing, that it has been happening far longer than just starting when LLMs became popular.
“It’s been going on forever. That was before AI—or this form of AI,” Adams says, before lamenting: “They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can’t even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn’t exist. It’s dwarf behavior, and they misbehave sometimes.”
I’m always amazed at people who can’t understand that EVERY system is finite.
We’ve gotta be almost out of bullshit by now.
Eventually the sewer pipes become clogged and can’t carry any more.
Well, the amount of bullshit is limited by the number of sources producing it (whether occasionally or frequently, accidentally or intentionally) and their respective capacities. Between human fallibility and the invention of machines to automate bullshit production, I fear that this limit may be much higher than either of us would like.
“They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can’t even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn’t exist. It’s dwarf behavior, and they misbehave sometimes.”
An under-appreciated AI gripe: professionals can’t discuss it anymore.
Anyone working with AI-other-than-llm is now constantly getting weird looks and stupid comments from LLM bros
Similar problem, I had to remind my daughter that I work.in a data center when she was complaining about data centers the other day, and that data centers are pretty coon, her beef (and frankly mine), is with wasteful hyperscaler data centers for AI use.
Our city sent out a map of all the existing data centers in town claiming it’s proof that they dont cause problems.
I don’t think our healthcare facilities data center even remotely compares to Colossus. That’s like comparing a regional grocery store to fuckin Walmart
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What’s wrong with coal, eh?
We run ours on diesel, but only when the power goes out.
that data centers are pretty coon,
Pretty Coon:
I have no idea why it did that, I think it was supposd to be “pretty much everywhere”.
Typing on mobile? I assumed you were going for “common” but hit the backspace key by accident, since it’s right there, and ended up with c-o-m-backspace-o-n.
I do it all the time lol
Ugh, this keeps happening and now I wonder if auto complete somehow got reenabled. I turned it off because it kept stickimg random words in.
I think this particular one is unrelated to auto complete and more to on screen keyboard.
For example in my keyboard the backspace is next to “m” so hiring it accidentally is easy. It also is close to enter and I’m frequently hitting it instead. It is frustrating, and makes me wonder why they just didn’t put it in the top right corner as it is on normal keyboard.
Your subconscious just needed everyone to know how pretty Carrie Coon is. Simple as
Well, “AI” in games was always behavior, rather than having anything to do with AI. It was just marketing.
And even then, artificial stupidity is usually more accurate than AI. FPS bots could easily headshot you immediately on sight but like, what good is that. It’s literally more work to make them worse at the game.
True thought there were some exceptions, like Black & White.
At least the cryptographers could fall back on the full name!
Lol I just call it IA (interaction algorithm)
Sx one way, Xs the other.
Management is a cult.
No, seriously. You have to participate in large scale acts of groupthink and demonstrate performative conformity just to be accepted; and once in the group you better not stray too far from the messaging of executives.
Absolutely, if I can just chime in here and address the elephant in the room, we really have to focus on the low hanging fruit and leverage our KPIs to really drive home any wins. From a 30,000ft view it looks like we have synergy and alignment here, but if we zoom in we can see that there are nothing but roadblocks and pain points with our holistic approach. I propose we circle back and try to realign our core competencies and remember what really made us a rock star team in the first place.
And just make sure that you’ve got enough cycles to onboard the efficiency innovations recommended by Claude. I know you’re all excited to have a boost in productivity, but make sure to balance the infrastructure goals against the priority backlogs. Like Claude says, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. So get out there and have a great sprint, we’ll meet at tomorrow morning’s stand-up for updates.
Great points, we had a strong Q2 and our projections show a very strong Q3 as well, but we don’t want to split our focus too much with all the market uncertainty. Remember, there is no I in team, but there is an I in Key Performance Indicators. So make sure you are moving the needle and let’s keep our bandwidth high so we can finish strong. I sent everyone an email and a DM and a voicemail and a paper letter with a printed QR code. Don’t forget to use that to fill out the feedback survey by EOW.
You guys have really solid points and good thinking there. I’m just wondering if we have enough bandwidth to achieve the goals ?
I propose we book a meeting with ALL the relevant stakeholders and their mother to facilitate the project pre-kick-off.
Thank you for your attention to this matter!
You don’t get to COD 49 with original creative ideas.
Nik Suresh said the same thing.
Nice to see something like this on a gaming site (but fuuuuuuck their popups):
Since the advent of modern capitalism (and likely a long while before that), those in charge have often misunderstood, underestimated, or dismissed the hard work that goes into labour they don’t understand.
CEOs get rewarded for getting rid of staff so here we are. Who gets rewarded when the CEOs are let go? Oh right, they get golden parachutes.
This is why companies should be worker owned cooperatives. Yes, management is a useful skill, and the workers can hire it.
Wishful thinking I know, but so much more sustainable.
It’s become particularly nasty with generative AI, however, because now said CEOs can still see an end result that mimics the thing they don’t understand
CEO looks at AI quake: “it’s literally the same thing!”
(for those who don’t know what AI quake is: https://youtu.be/iBmjTXOK9xw)That looks suuuper fun to play!
Kinda like “I had a dream I was playing Quake 2”
a fever dream
