Now that people are shunting easier requests to local models and sending the harder problems out, the hyper scalers have less income, so they have to charge more.

While you’re 100% correct about the fact that this is happening, and it is a serious problem for the hyper-scalers, it’s really, really important to note that even before this started happening, LLMs were already hilariously unprofitable, both on the software and the hardware side. For the AI companies, there is simply no way to charge people what the models actually cost to run and still turn a profit. On the data-centre side, the turnover on burned out GPUs is going to annihilate any hope of profitability. They’re treating as capex what is essentially a consumable and their business models simply do not account for this reality.

The behaviour you’re identifying here is basically just a swift kick in the guts to someone who was already bleeding to death from several bullet wounds. Seriously unhelpful, but not remotely the impending cause of death.

Basically, yes.

This comes back to the basic problem with LLMs as a business proposition; any digital service can either be cheap and frivolous, or expensive and necessary. You can even, if you do things right, be cheap and necessary. But you cannot ever be expensive and frivolous.

LLMs were supposed to be expensive and necessary, but it turns out they’re just so unreliable that they simply cannot perform an essential role. They must always be disposable; fun, or useful, but never essential.

Which leaves only cheap and frivolous as an option. And they’re just not cheap, nor does it seem likely that they ever will be.

So you get Character.ai filling chapter 11, because people simply will not ever pay what it actually costs to run these models just so that they can have a computer program pretend to be Lois Griffin for them.

I’m going to be completely real with you, I’m really not sure how many developers have the Gentoo user base that high on their list of priorities.

Even as someone who is legitimately excited for this game to come out, this reaction is so completely justified. CIG have only themselves to blame for all the skepticism at this point.

Of course, they’re also continuing to make money hand over fist, so I guess they don’t really care…

You’re saying SQ42 will be like Heart of Darkness?

No, I’m not. Let me absolutely clear about that. I’m not saying anything about what SQ42 will be like, because I haven’t played it, and I haven’t had this confirmed by anyone who has.

What I am saying is that those comparisons were brought up by the writers early on in the development. Whether that has any bearing on the finished product remains to be seen.

Take a look at the discussions of Wing Commander 4 elsewhere in this thread if you want a better idea of the kind of stuff Chris Roberts likes to do when he’s not beholden to a publisher. If your only yardstick here is the Wing Commander movie, you’re really not looking at a very helpful data point.

But, again, I’m only talking about hints and intimations. I don’t have hard facts about the game and I’m not claiming to.

I feel like you’re misreading what I wrote if that’s your takeaway.

It’s both! They took all the game structure of a MOBA - the creep waves, the lanes, the towers, the upgrades - and paired that with the movement and gameplay design of a hero shooter.

In practice, I lean more on calling it the latter, because it feels a lot more like a hero shooter in how it plays, despite having so many recognizable MOBA elements.

Where it really breaks the MOBA mold is in the hero design. There aren’t really any fixed roles, and the meta has remained relatively fluid. You don’t have things like a designated jungler, tank, AD carry, any of that sort of thing. Builds are quite flexible and most characters can be built in a number of different ways.

There are so many things to actually criticize CIG for that it seems weird to come up with something like this out of nowhere. When they were last selling SQ42 as a standalone it was $40. Despite all of the entirely justified memes about expensive ships you can still buy the complete Star Citizen game for $45 and unlock all those ships in game. While CIG have zero problem shilling $5000 ship packages to overly eager whales, they’ve always kept their base asking price impressively low.

The adverts are very vanilla, but the conversations with the creators have definitely hinted at a lot more going on. I don’t want to say too much because it’s a) potential spoilers, and b) stuff that has only been hinted at, never confirmed, but their plans for the game definitely seem to be more in a Heart of Darkness kind of direction.

Obviously, wait for reviews, see what they actually end up making as opposed to what they might or might not have planned at any point, but from everything I’ve heard the writers say I don’t think the story is worth writing off just yet.

The actual setting is much more nuanced than what you’re getting from the trailers.

The UEE (the guys you’re signing up with) was, until quite recently, fully the villains of the setting. A fascist dictatorship under the rule of generations of mad emperors. We straight up invaded and genocided other species.

The present day of Star Citizen is exploring what that world looks like after the revolution that restores democracy but ultimately fails to truly address the rot that created that dictatorship in the first place. The “democratic” UEE still has serious problems with alien rights, kowtows to corporate power, and is in a constant internal push-pull over security vs freedom.

Literally one of the main reasons to join the military is to earn full citizenship, a la Starship Troopers.

Chris was forced to make the first three Wing Commander games that way. His original pitch was much darker, explored the idea that the Kilrathi had legitimate reasons to be fighting, and basically ended with you doing war crimes.

Wing Commander 4 was much closer to his original vision, and involves you going rogue against the Earth Navy after learning that the conflict you’re in was started by a false flag operation.

As I mentioned elsewhere, getting an invite is the easiest thing in the world. It’s doing absolutely nothing to filter trolls and griefers.

Hasn’t been a problem for me so far

For those who don’t know, you can play for free if you get an invite, and the Deadlock discord has an entire channel for getting invites. I got one within ten minutes of asking.

The game is superb. Great gameplay, great art direction, great writing. If you like hero shooters you need to give this one a try.

They’ve created separate casual and ranked play options now, so that problem is basically solved.

Rats flee sinking ships.

There’s a lot to be said about how GURPS is clunky - and it is, even when you’re not digging into the insane optional rules - but I think its biggest flaw, by far, was that it had very little appreciation for genre. GURPS was built on the notion that a single system could tell any story, but what that meant in practice was that a single system could tell a story with different trappings. GURPS was set dressing applied to a core system that ultimately imposes certain genre constraints on anything you tried to run with it. This is true of all systems, but GURPS tries to act like it isn’t.

That’s not to say that it’s universally bad. A lot of the settings for it do fit well in the mold it offers. Alpha Centauri is fantastic in GURPS, and it’s a wonderful system for the huge line of historical settings it offers, if you’re looking for a more grounded, simulationist take. But there are also plenty that don’t. Illuminati University is brilliant but has no business being a GURPS setting. That game desperately wants to be PbtA. Ditto Discworld. Star Trek makes no sense; that game probably wants to be running on something like Cortex, the relationship engine would work beautifully with Trek’s tone and themes.

God help you if you actually think the WoD conversions are a good idea. And who in their right mind ever thought it was the right system for Hellboy?

No system can ever be universal, because roleplaying games are stories, not historical re-enactments. That matters.

Very fortunate that they just started offering sign up without a phone number.

That’s basically exactly it. Signal is used in scenarios where data being ephemeral is a benefit. For messaging that needs to be secure and lasting, they have DND email, which is extremely secure and can only be accessed from controlled machines in controlled environments.

No, because that’s a really bad idea.

Look, I get where you’re coming from, but if you already have something that’s the gold standard for secure encrypted messaging, you don’t try to reinvent that. First, it’s money you don’t have to spend, and second, in the process of getting it right you get to discover all the ways they got it wrong. Why introduce that unknown element?

To be clear, the CAF aren’t texting each other fire coordinates. They have secure radios and DND email that’s only accessible on secured devices. That’s where all the secret secret stuff goes. But there’s a lot of stuff that happens day to day that still needs to be secure, but accessible. In Latvia, especially, our soldiers are always being tracked by Russian operatives. You’re literally not allowed to go anywhere alone because you could get black bagged. So if you need to text your unit about drinks plans, that shit needs to be secure. Soldiers need safe ways of communicating without a $20,000 radio set.

Signal works and it works well. One of the biggest mistakes in military procurement is trying to make something new when the tool you need already exists. Especially when that existing tool comes at a low low cost of free.