Alaknar
@Alaknar@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on "Microslop" trends in backlash to Microsoft's AI obsession 15 hours ago:
Mate, have you seen the valuation of companies handling AI or hardware that AI requires?
Shareholders are creaming their pants any time someone says “agentic” or “AI”.
- Comment on Microsoft Office has been renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app” 1 day ago:
It’s so hilarious to see people’s reaction to something that happened two years ago.
- Comment on "Microslop" trends in backlash to Microsoft's AI obsession 1 day ago:
Yeah it was paid time, but I’m much more happy if the systems I care about just run without hiccups.
No such thing exists, especially with legacy corpo software.
Windows is inherently unstable, that’s my point.
As a Windows admin for the past ~20 years - nonsense.
- Comment on "Microslop" trends in backlash to Microsoft's AI obsession 1 day ago:
The fact that your 30year old business software is still running is just the fact that Windows has built in patches for some common programming patterns used at the time and someone having insight enough can enable/disable them (mostly).
… which is exactly my point. What’s yours?
Oh. And of course it’s badly debuggable and frequently goes wrong.
Not so frequently to cause major disruptions.
- Comment on "Microslop" trends in backlash to Microsoft's AI obsession 1 day ago:
Or you can just not introduce extra instability layers and use native Windows. I can’t even fathom the cost of implementation and maintenance of something like that in a company like HCL (200 000 employees, last I checked).
- Comment on "Microslop" trends in backlash to Microsoft's AI obsession 2 days ago:
Linux has excellent legacy support for Linux.
Now run a 1998 obscure Windows vendor custom app. The vendor went out of business 30 years ago.
Not to mention that it would kill the entirety of existing IT automation, the entirety of centralised system management, and lots more.
- Comment on Mom with the real questions 2 days ago:
Nobody wants any of them, they’re old and pretty and also worth exactly zero euros.
You’d be VERY surprised.
- Comment on "Microslop" trends in backlash to Microsoft's AI obsession 2 days ago:
I don’t understand why shareholders keep this guy’s CEO he’s absolutely terrible at his job
What are you talking about? Under this guy’s tenure the MSFT share price skyrocketed. What else would shareholders care about? He’s doing an excellent job, as far as they’re concerned.
- Comment on "Microslop" trends in backlash to Microsoft's AI obsession 2 days ago:
That would never happen. The entire reason why Windows is not as power efficient as MacOS or some Linux distros is the backwards compatibility that it brings. People laugh at the fact that you can still find icons and .dlls from Windows 95 (or, probably, even 3), but that’s exactly one of the reasons why this OS is so massively popular, especially for enterprise users.
- Comment on Wikipeter was the founder of the site in 1993 when he wanted to know more about model trains without having to visit the library 5 days ago:
if I was annoyed enough, I’d do something like hang a picture in the house taking a dig at Wikipedia and then the interview could mention that and now it could be in the article about the house taking a dig at them.
- Comment on EU lawmakers to study ban 'loot boxes' and other addictive features in video games 6 days ago:
Fun fact! These cases, like the bananas, snails, or carrots being classified as fruit, were all being used as examples of “lol, dumb EU bureaucracy”, but were actually examples of brilliant lawmaking.
The curvature of bananas was specifically aimed at making it harder for China to flood the EU market with their bananas, thus saving local production from going bust.
The snails were a similar case to the carrots. The EU has subsidies for jam makers, to make them more competitive with non-EU jam makers. As it turned out, in one region in France, people made jam from carrots, but “jam” was defined in legislature as “a product made from fruits”. Which meant that the EU could spend a lot of time and money on re-writing the original law allowing the subsidies… or just redefine carrots as “fruits” for the specific purpose of that one law. As in: nobody in the EU considers carrots as fruits, it was only and specifically done to allow those French farmers to get subsidies for their jam making.
It’s brilliant and efficient.
- Comment on Bluesky suspending antifascist researchers for sharing publicly available information about literal nazis. 1 week ago:
“This garbage”? You mean stating literal facts of reality?
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 1 week ago:
it’s about trust. Trust is gradually built item by item
But all it takes is one out-of-context quote to drop this accrued trust back to zero?
Them starting using slopgen reduces that trust. It reduces it enough so I don’t trust what they are saying anymore.
Honestly? This part is confusing me super hard. “They say the truth, my trust goes up. They say the truth again, my trust goes down and I no longer trust what they were saying before” - help me understand that.
I would get it if it was the other way around - “they say they don’t use slopgen, but that’s outed to be a lie, my trust goes down”, right?
because for a company the line going up is way more important that anything else, and honouring words demonstrably doesn’t put the line up
But isn’t it exactly the opposite? They admit to utilising AI tools (which don’t equal “slopgen”), which means they care more about trust and honesty, than the line going up, no?
And this is all extremely confusing to me specifically in the context of what Larian said - yes, they use AI tools, but they don’t use them for the games themselves (like, I don’t know, writing lines, or generating textures), they use them to speed up the menial tasks and give their artists more time to spend on making art. What’s wrong with that?
- Comment on I cannot imagine what lawsuit led to this 2 weeks ago:
“DO NOT DANGEROUS”
That’s pretty good life advice in general.
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 2 weeks ago:
OK, yeah, I get what you mean now.
I don’t agree on a fundamental level, though. Anything and everything could go to shit at any time. You could get killed on a bus stop, your favourite grocery brand might be outed to be using slave labour, Larian could start using AI instead of human work for everything…
With that approach, might as well hide in the woods, disconnect from civilisation and wait for the world to end.
I personally reject that attitude. I think we should support what’s good while it’s good and stop supporting it when it goes bad. And, to me, the way Larian uses AI is not “it went bad already”. Like it or not, the tools exist. They’re everywhere. A single (small-ish) company rejecting its use out of principle is not going to make a dent on that, it won’t even be registered within the margin of error among the billions, if not trillions, of monthly impressions AI companies get from teenagers talking to chat-bots.
And even if it did, it doesn’t matter - AI companies are not making profit anyway. Actually, fewer users is better for them, because they’re actively losing money every time someone uses their product. The whole AI bubble is propped up on the largest circlejerk in history and users are the least important, if not flat out insignificant, aspect of it.
I think there are good ways to use AI. Like Corridor Crew, using it to create things that are just financially completely out of their range. It can allow people to bridge the gap between small and massive productions.
And don’t get me wrong, the fact that it’s originally trained on stolen data is important, but… Kind of irrelevant in this case - and that’s for two reasons:
- Companies like Corridor Crew mostly use AI that they self-train, which means that no stealing happens. We don’t know what Larian does.
- Even if Larian uses publicly available models that are trained on stolen data… fuck me, we should be going after the people who stole the data, not the end users!
Would I prefer if they didn’t use AI at all? Sure! But am I going to start shitting on the entire company just because they do? Hell no! Their products are still made with care and love and humanity at their core. Just listen to interviews from Jennifer English or Neil Newbon - they praise both the VO company and Larian for their amazing approach.
And finally - the “war on Larian” would make much more sense if we also learned that they’re firing concept artists - but they’re doing the opposite - they have open positions for concept artists, character artists, environment artists, etc., etc. They’re currently hiring these people!
So, yeah, it’s just a lot of noise over practically nothing, in my opinion.
- Comment on Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI' 2 weeks ago:
It’s being used in the pre-concept art phase, which is when you grab literally anything to do a very generic “here’s my idea” demonstration. It can be a screenshot from a game you recently played, a cinema poster, a photo of your cat, something you found on DeviantArt or Pinterest, a doodle you made with a pencil, cloth fragment, an interesting rock you found on a stroll, simple render, anything.
But, getting all these takes a lot of time - you have something in your head and now you need to find an image or an item that will more or less represent it. So you spend hours on Google Images trying to refine your search, only so that you can then post it on the ideas board, and for it to be replaced completely by actual concept art.
This is where they’re utilising GenAI. And they’re not even replacing this process entirely, they’re using GenAI on top of everything else - basically, using all the tools available to speed up the process.
And, yes, sure, “it at least informs the concept art”, but that’s kind of the point of that entire phase of development. Concept art doesn’t grow in a void, the designers of the game are not the concept artists.
- Comment on Ulefone Armor 27T Pro - And why I'm not using after 3 months 2 weeks ago:
Ulefone is a tiny Chinese company that employs between 500 and 1000 employees. It’s far, far, far from being a “corporation”.
They market themselves as approachable and say they have a 24/7 chat available. Sure, it’s probably a bot you’d start talking to, but potentially end up talking to a human.
But, well, you do you. Bought a phone, spent months troubleshooting on your own, and now want to stop using it completely - if you feel good about it, it’s all good.
But I were in your shoes, I’d probably at least see what happens if I contact support.
- Comment on Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI' 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, you clearly have no clue what you’re talking about, but just want to be outraged.
No, that’s not what they’re using it for.
Pre-concept art phase is when you grab literally anything to do a very generic “here’s my idea” demonstration. It can be a screenshot from a game you recently played, a cinema poster, a photo of your cat, something you found on DeviantArt or Pinterest, a doodle you made with a pencil, cloth fragment, an interesting rock you found on a stroll, simple render, anything.
But, getting all these takes a lot of time - you have something in your head and now you need to find an image or an item that will more or less represent it. So you spend hours on Google Images trying to refine your search, only so that you can then post it on the ideas board, and for it to be replaced completely by actual concept art.
This is where they’re utilising GenAI. And they’re not even replacing this process entirely, they’re using GenAI on top of everything else - basically, using all the tools available to speed up the process.
Concept artists then still take over (they have 27 of them and open positions to hire more - right now) and create concept art, which is then turned into assets by appropriate artists (they have a bunch of open positions for artists right now as well).
All this anti-AI panic has blown this so far out of proportion that it’s almost comical.
- Comment on Ulefone Armor 27T Pro - And why I'm not using after 3 months 3 weeks ago:
What did Ulefone say about these issues?
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, I had trouble understanding your point. Could you elaborate?
- Comment on Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI' 3 weeks ago:
They’re not using AI for free assets.
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 3 weeks ago:
Soo… “Larian just said they use AI, but corpos lie” - meaning they don’t use AI?
Because, considering they have active job openings for art and concept positions, we know they’re not replacing people with AI.
- Comment on Denmark wants to ban VPNs to unlock foreign, illegal streams – and experts are worried 3 weeks ago:
I hate journalism so much these days…
Random dude in the parliament: “Let’s all shit our pants.”
“Journalists”: “Denmark wants to shit its pants!!”
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 3 weeks ago:
I feel like replacing low-quality, quick-and-dirty doodles (often by non-artist members of the team) with medium-quality AI is fine and doesn’t pose a threat to the job security of concept artists (as exemplified by Larian currently hiring more concept artists).
If you’re just against any use of GenAI, then I get it - it is controversial due to the way it’s trained, and I’d prefer if they weren’t using it, but at least in terms of “AI replacing humans” it’s a non-issue in this case.
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 3 weeks ago:
It was a slip of the tongue because it was Swen himself posting that on social media, not a PR department.
However, he explained that the entirety of concept art is being made by humans - 27 of them right now, but they’re hiring more.
- Comment on The AI Backlash Is Here: Why Backlash Against Gemini, Sora, ChatGPT Is Spreading in 2025 - Newsweek 3 weeks ago:
What do you mean?? Elon has solved the critical problem of there not being a vaguely hot anime character in Grok users could talk to!
- Comment on Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI' 3 weeks ago:
No, it doesn’t.
Doodles are not concept art. Ideation is not concept art.
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 3 weeks ago:
OK, let’s make this clear: do you think they’re using AI for making concept art?
And drop that LLM bit, it’s just tiring. It’s as old and tiresome as the “MS is paying you” bit.
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 3 weeks ago:
I mean, if you just want to invent and imagine things and then get angry at them, go ahead.
I’m just trying to tell you that Larian isn’t replacing anything or anyone with AI, they’re using it to help with the foundational stage of some processes, which is how it’s supposed to be used. Throw shit at the wall and see what sticks, then work off of that.
Like… It’s hilarious to complain about their use of AI like that in the context of the fact that they currently employ 27 concept artists and are hiring more.
- Comment on Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI' 3 weeks ago:
What he actually said was that they use it in the “ideation” phase of concept art. Basically: throwing shit on the wall and seeing what sticks. After that, the process is taken over by any of their almost 30 concept artists on payroll.