The Fourth Step of Enshittification
We already know that AI is ruining the internet and if this trend continues, it’ll turn into a vacuous space with 90% bots posting shit and then replying to each other with other shit. But even without AI in the mix, After watching Jenny Nicholson’s video on the Star Wars Hotel I have become painfully aware of the fourth step of Enshittification. After pandering to the investors at the expense of business partners and actual users of the platform, corporations create groundbreaking, disruptive bullshit NERPS that are only there to entice more investors to invest more so they can grow their market share and capitalization without actually releasing anything that people actually want.I think that’s what all this AI bullshit is doing now, just like the Metaverse bullshit last year or the crypto-nft-blockchain bullshit two years ago. They’re just riding the wave of what’s hot in the industry so speculating assholes with too much money and too little sense give them a higher evaluation and a year or two from now it’ll all fizzle out with nothing to show for it except some die hard fans who’ll swear by it, some gullibles who lost their money, and C-Suite dipshits retiring with a golden parachute.
Posted in Humanity, Practice, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with 2 comments.
Ten Out of Ten
In the gaming spheres, scoring is, for some reason, a really big deal. People often go to shaming campaigns if the game they really loved gets a 7 out of 10. First of all, that’s stupid. 7 out of 10 is pretty good. For me, it means mostly fun with a few caveats. 5 is not atrocious but decent if it weren’t for some flaws that should have been fixed. Then there’s the 10 out of 10, also a very fought over score. Because it looks so final. It’s saying, this is the best there is and can ever be. The point is, it’s not. 10 out of 10 is the best that reviewer thinks things can be right now. But then something new comes along that is better. So, consider this: Every time something gets full marks, 5 stars, 10 out of 10, it actually makes every previous 10 out of 10 in their category slightly less 10-ish. It might still count as a 10. If you go back to it at that time, it might be 9, comparatively. That doesn’t diminish its original value. It just means the scale has been expanded. This is true for anything that is an infinite game. A finite game like a school test can have a 100 and no more. But in art, the game is never over.
Posted in Gaming, Philosophy, Practice, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.
Audiobook Narration and AI
Like everything related to AI, with the ability to mimic human-sounding voices coming to the forefront, audiobook narrators now also feel threatened and, while I understand being afraid of something new and misunderstood, I see it mostly as an extension of our existing abilities and doing more with less. First of all, I’m sad that the first thing I see in that article is “circling the wagons”. You can’t avoid new technology. It’ll come no matter what. Some form of legislation can be made to restrict research and development but if the technology is not immediately or excessively harmful (like nuclear weapons or engineered viruses), a lot of people will work towards it and, as a person affected, what you really should do is find how to adapt and where you fit in in the new order. Secondly, if we move towards an industry in which voices are largely AI generated, the voice templates will still have to come from somewhere. Those providing the templates will still be a part of the process. They will be licensing their vocal likeness, like you do with a visual likeness. It will be up to them and their agents to make sure the contract benefits them and that they may have some right of refusal on projects that might not align with their views. And those around the narration will still be required. A director will need to make sure the reading is what the client wants, an audio editor will be needed Continue Reading →
Posted in Practice, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.
News: Average User has no Concept of How Much Game Dev Costs
Recently, some clueless joe on Twitter said he will pay 10,000$ to the person who adds a multiplayer aspect to Zelda: Breath of the Wild. If he was going to donate to a modder who was working on it, that would have been fine but it seems like he was thinking that he could hire someone to do something like that for that kind of money. Here is a long, detailed response to this which you should read but here’s the summary: 10,000$ would pay for about two work months of the average+ programmer. Also, networking is hard. The hardest networking challenges in gaming usually arise in fighting games because they usually need to be exactly per pixel and per frame accurate and, probably over distances where network traffic takes more time to go back and forth than it takes pro players twitch reflexes to react. You can see how important this is if you go back and read about the network woes of Street Fighter V. Now, the demands of a PvE, open world, action RPG would probably be a lot less strict but these are still difficult problems. Especially if you’re talking about tacking on something like this onto a game that was definitely not designed for it. You want a more current example? On the one hand, Battlefield 2042 is out now and it’s buggy as hell. On the other hand, Halo Infinite’s multiplayer is also out and it’s much better. Probably because the team is backed Continue Reading →
Posted in Gaming, Less Interesting News, Practice, Programming, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.
Portugal just became nicer to employees
Portugal recently passed a law they fondly call “Right to Rest”. It contains various measures to help employees have a better work-life balance such as the ability to work remotely when you need to take care of a child or companies contributing to household bills when an employee is working remotely a lot. But the nicest thing about it is indeed the ban on contacting employees after work hours. I’m guessing there is a stipulation about emergencies or people like server administrators and doctors who are supposed to be on call but the fact it’s enshrined in law is just amazing. Kinda makes me want to move to Portugal. :)
Posted in High-Tech, IT, Less Interesting News, Practice, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.
How to Make a Unity Package (For the Unity Package Manager)
Let’s say you have a bunch of code you want to drag around with you to every new Unity project, or maybe just the next project you’re doing for the same company. Don’t just copy and paste the same directory over and over again forcing you to also copy changes and updates. Create a package instead! Unity has switched over to a package model for a lot of the engine’s capabilities. And it also allows you to import non-Asset Store packages straight from GitHub or even locally. So how do you take what you have and make it an easily distributable package? Follow these steps. In your Project window, below all your regular files is a Packages folder. Right click on it and select Show in Explorer. In that Packages folder, create a new directory and name it however you like. This will be the root of your package. Do remember that the folder name can not contain spaces. Create a new “package.json” file. This page right here explains everything about the structure of the file. And here is an example file. Back in Unity, your new package should be visible with the name you gave it. Clicking on package file will open it in the Editor UI, allowing you to edit it more conveniently so you don’t have to go back to the JSON. In that Inspector window, you can also easily add Dependencies if your package requires it which is a much easier workflow than typing them out. Continue Reading →
Posted in Practice, Programming, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.
Payment Structure
I’ve heard and read a lot recently about how companies structure their payments, which employees get what and how much should a CEO be paid. For one thing, I agree with California trying to enforce a maximum difference between a CEO’s salary and lowest paid employee. I don’t think it should be compared to the average salary but the median but it’s a good direction. I know that the community sharing type of structure isn’t for everyone but I like the idea of employees sharing in the benefits of a company like the way pirates divvy up treasure: everyone gets one part. Maybe team leaders get two or three parts. Higher management gets five or six parts. The chief officers might get eight or even ten parts. The point is, after you determine how many parts there are, you divide the revenue. This way, even the lowliest employee benefits when the company is doing better. The top brass earn the most because they do the hardest work, but every employee is invested — and rewarded — in the company being successful.
Posted in Humanity, Philosophy, Practice, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.
Podfasting? It sounds like abstaining from listening
Hi. My name is Eran and I like podcasts and audiobooks. Recently, I found out about the term Podfasting. No, it’s not about abstaining from listening to Podcasts. The average person types at 40 words a minute, speaks at 150 words a minute but thinks at about 400 words a minute. I know I type at 70 words a minute, I probably speak at closer to 200 words a minute, and I think my thinking speed is also higher by a similar percentage (Probably around 450-500). So, I think it makes sense that I like watching TV and listening to podcasts at very high speeds (My current rate is 1.8-2.1x). I even like to speed read, which is how I calculate my thinking speed. Roughly 30,000 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every hour. More and better content creators are currently creating more and better content. I want to have as much of it as I can. And, as your brain processes information about twice as fast as a person speaks, this problem is a solvable one. Creators can record their content at their own speed and today’s tools can speed it up without losing the pitch so it still sounds human. It’s only logical for someone with a huge backlog. Another thing they say in the article above is that understanding drops as you go up in speed but I think that’s entirely variable and dependent on the individual. I only aim for the speed in which I Continue Reading →
Posted in Me, No Category, Practice, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.
Is Urbanisation Over?
With the pandemic on going, and large tech companies telling their employees to stay home for, possibly, the next year, and many realising that having an office to work out of is not a necessity, what I’m mostly thinking about is… What are the odds the pandemic will just be ever present? Or, what if it will stick around long enough so that the general urbanisation of the planet over the past few decades will just stop and people will start spreading around so that we end up with small rural communities that are more spread out? Reference: Lake Tahoe real-estate brokers are running out of homes to sell.
Posted in High-Tech, Humanity, Less Interesting News, Practice, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.