My personal favourite is as long as it says “hidden” they won’t know you’re stealing from them while you three feet away.
The worst I ever saw was in Starfield. I had to hack a computer. Instead of waiting for him to leave his office I just knelt down behind his computer monitor until he couldn’t apparently see me…or remember I was just there…or hear me.
That lazy shit is so egregious in 2026. I’ve played mid-quality AA games with better NPCs (Greedfall and Elex come to mind)
Pretty bold words from a guy who looks like the Downs Syndrome gene just narrowly missed him by less than the width of a chromosome…
Red Letter Media
Holy shit. I thought i’d be the only one too say RLM.
I’ll generally fall asleep to old random episodes of best of the worst for some odd reason.
Firing?
Out of a cannon?
Into the sun?
Pretty please?
You just are getting the fruits of those advancements due to politics.
I’m not entirely sure what you are meaning with that. So forgive me if I’m misunderstanding you. But the fruits of those advancements (loss of privacy, destruction of the environment, etc…) are not political (or at least they shouldn’t be). They are very real and very dangerous consequences of an economic system that demands continuous growth for the benefit of shareholders.
Think of it this way. In project management we learn about stakeholders. When making corporate decisions, a stakeholder is defined as “any person, entiry, or thing that will be affected by that decision, good or bad”. If a company decides that they are going to cut health benefits, who is going to be affected by that decision. The employees, negatively. The shareholders, positively. The consumer, potentially positively if those savings equate to lower costs for the company’s products.
When techology was new, the decisions that were being made included us the end-user. We were a stakeholder that was considered when facebook/twitter/google would decide to add a feature, or remove a feature, or whatever. Around the same time that advertising revenue overtook subscription models and premium services as the way for these tech companies to make money, WE stopped being stakeholders. Any tech advance after that, stopped being about us and started being about profit extraction. If we didn’t like the change, well fuck us…we were now just the product because the advertisers were the ones paying the bills.
Just because on the rare occasion, these corporations happen to put out a product that has potential to improve things, doesn’t make it better, because WE, the users were never asked whether we wanted it, or whether or not we were willing to accept that tradeoffs that came along with it.
It’s like building a new sweat-shop in India in order to put out a new style of running shoe without bothering to do any market research to figure out if your customer base actually wants it or not. Because we, the customer base don’t fucking matter anymore.
This is the opportunity for 2K to revive their hockey franchise and do something amazing with it. The market (and the ea hate) is ripe for it.
2K isn’t a spectacular company either (hello microtransactions). But I’m just saying this is their opportunity if they were smart enough to take it.
The only reason people think this is way is because they didn’t live through analog tech, for them it is retro or nostalgia and they romanticize it because when they do use it, there are no downsides.
Yeah…no…sorry. But you’re deluded.
I’m exactly that generation that you speak of. I grew up Analog, came of age in my early twenties with the first popularization of the internet, and am now getting old while the internet enshitifies.
You are correct that early tech is better than analog, most definitely. Those early days of just about everything (internet, smartphones, computer gaming, etc…) were amazing and I loved them. It was new and exciting. We built the fucking internet with our bulletin boards, and myspace pages, and blogs and forums.
What you are referring to; what we’re living in now, is NOT that. We’ve gone past the phase where technology was legitimately better than Analog and we are well into the phase where the technology doesn’t work for us anymore. It works for the billionaires
Somewhere in the mid 2010’s, we stopped being the reason technology keeps progressing, and we became the product that the internet was selling to companies (our data, our tracking, our metrics).
Would I dearly love to go back to an early to late 2000’s version of the internet and tech in general, maybe all the way up to 2012. Absolutely. But if that’s not possible, than yes…Analog is definitely better than what we have now, even if it does take a bit more time.
Convenience is only convenience if you don’t have to sell your soul to get it. Maybe you’ll figure that out when you’re a big boy.
If the great AI companies tank (I can only hope) and the services they provide - whatever those may be - faill, how much is it going to affect companies?
It depends on how far along all this bullshit is when the fall comes.
Right now, the companies that are selling AI to everyone, if it all comes crashing down…fuck em. They released this cancer and they can deal with the consequences (Anthopic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, etc…)
But the companies that fell for it and actually purchased their product, they’ll simply purge the A.I. out of their systems, rehire a bunch of developers, and get on with their lives. And that’s really for the same reason that A.I. will crash in the first place:
it’s not necessary in order to successfully run a business.
It never has been. We’ve all been doing just fine for decades, and we’ll get along just fine again once all the shit-peddlers go belly up.
That comparison is an insult to buggy abominations everywhere, sir!
It’s not a coincidence that that percentage matches unusually well with the number of Americans who can’t read past a sixth grade level…
Imajica by Clive Barker LA Confidential by James Ellroy
A Rockstar version of Starfield/Fallout/Elderscrolls
Bethesda has become so goddamned lazy in their game mechanic design. Its 2026…an NPC should be at least smart enough to know I’m still fucking there if I leave their field of view.
Or whether I’ve already joined and completed their mortal enemies quest line and behave accordingly towards me as a result…
Or even just realising that of your company just got hacked, even if you didn’t witness it, it might have something to do with the stranger that was fucking around in your server room…
Or at least react when I bump into them…
I dearly love Bethesda’s open worlds. I love the settings, the stories etc… There are no games I would rather “live in”, for lack of a better word. But those worlds deserve far far better NPC/faction mechanics
Once a month or so they shovel the cowshit out of the saddledome and tell the rodeo clowns to take a night off.
In the age of DNA, this is most certainly NOT impossible.
Alright, who broke the first two rules!?
“likely”
I do not think that word means what you think it means…