Spyke

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Software engineers are facing an 'identity crisis bordering on depression,' Menlo Ventures partner says

Cory Doctor's recent book on Centaurs and Reverse Centaurs is worth reading.

The core idea of that is that centaurs are a human top and machine / alien body, they're effectively augmented humans with all this technology to help them excel.

Reverse Centaurs are human bodies and machine / alien tops, where the humans are just checking the work of systems and are subservient to them. He points out that that's one of the fundamental differences between Amazon and the Postal Service is that in the case of Amazon drivers, they basically function as a reverse Centaurs where they are just an appendage of the delivery car, tracked and managed by that car, to do the tasks the car can't do on its own.

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Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says new multiplayer games are failing because players have no reason to leave their friend groups, touts Unreal Engine 6’s cross-game features as a solution

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Lol like thats the only possible axis or lens to view a game through.

Battle Royale shooters got more popular then traditional team deathmatch games for their inherent pacing.

Battle Royale games always involve these dynamic phases where sometimes you're looting, sometimes you're exploring, sometimes your battling, sometimes you're sneaking up on people.

That naturally creates the kind of varied encounters that games like Halo or Cod only got through randomizing game modes, and rather then only having downtime between matches to talk with your friends online, there is natural downtime built into segments of each scenario when you're exploring and looting.

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Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says new multiplayer games are failing because players have no reason to leave their friend groups, touts Unreal Engine 6’s cross-game features as a solution

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Lmfao you mean spending his personal fortune on land conservation and spending much of epic's on breaking up monopolies that harm everyone?

Oh wait, I'm sorry, I forgot, he also made you install a second launcher, and since you were mildly inconvenienced by not being able to deep throat Gabe 30%, you thought Tim Sweeney was the devil?

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Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says new multiplayer games are failing because players have no reason to leave their friend groups, touts Unreal Engine 6’s cross-game features as a solution

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Lmfao. Watch Tim Sweeney get brought up, and watch some PC gamer claim he's the devil because he had the audacity to create a second launcher and pay for exclusives.

Epic spent a massive amount of their Fortnite money on lawsuits to break up the iOD and Google Play monopolies.

And while doing so, still offer their top tier engine for reasonable costs to third parties.

And Tim Sweeney personally spends most of his money on buying up land for conservation, but yeah, he's totally the devil for making you install a second launcher to play some games.

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Tested: Microsoft just debloated Windows 11 Search without Bing, and it's crazy fast

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Sure yeah, this stuff happens all the time, and often persists until people start noticing the application being sluggish and they go and investigate and fix the slow points.

Alternatively you have tightly integrated software that only one team can work on and it takes years to come out and every time a feature needs to change its another 6 month job of reworking everything, and debugging and fixing security issues is a nightmare.

In most systems, not just computers, there's a tradeoff between a highly integrated and high performance design, vs a modularized loosely coupled one that's more adaptable and resilient.

Just look at automotives, Teslas have a unibody design that makes them cheap to build and low weight, that also makes them enormously expensive to repair and impossible to find aftermarket parts for.

Choosing maximally integrated is rarely the best path, there is always a middle ground, and one important difference between the paths is that it's usually easier to go from modular to integrated than vice versa.

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Big Tech is a thief and a liar, says New York Times publisher — ‘Hijacking of the public square is made possible by the original sin that animates their AI products, a brazen theft of intellectual pr…

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Most people in the world never faced any serious threat of jail time for copyright infringement. The absurd punishments handed down to average users is purely an American thing.

The contrast against the weirdly punitive American justice system is not the problem with AI companies.

The reality of the situation is that copyright is and always has been a horseshit system for its purpose. The entire concept of "property" is one that applies to physical goods, that are in limited supply. It does not apply to things that are abundant and ubiquitous, i.e. no one owns the air because the air is wildly abundant and everywhere.

Information: music, art, storytelling, is not physical matter. Unlike physical matter, a story can be instantly copied by as many people as can hear it, because information does not obey the same scaling laws as physical matter. Vinyls and recording equipment started exposing how infinitely copiable information is, and computers and the internet really drove that point home.

Copyright though, has always been a dumb fucking system that hamfistedly tries to apply the ownership laws of physical properties to that of information. It does so by forcing artificial scarcity on that information and creating all of these walls and systems to maintain that scarcity.

Copyright has never been fit for purpose, and the better we get at processing information, the more evident that becomes.

AI companies are problematic because they are literally burning huge amounts of resources to replace humans while there are no mechanisms in most societies to ensure humans still get resources if the robots are better than them. That's the actual problem with AI companies, and it's fundamentally a problem with capitalism.

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OpenAI made $13 billion in 2025 and lost $21 billion doing it

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Talking total debt is somewhat meaningless.

The important number is the ratio between their loss and their revenue.

i.e. the convenience store down the street could operate at a loss before turning profitable, and accumulate far less than half the debt of iHeartRadio, but that doesn't mean the convenience store is the better long term investment. When it turns a profit, it's potential profit is far smaller than iHeartRadio's was.