Ashtear
@Ashtear@piefed.social
- Comment on The best games of 2025, picked by NPR's staff 1 day ago:
Their reviews aren’t frequent. This is more of a “we ask around the org for what everyone liked this year.” It’s a consistently good list year after year.
- Submitted 1 day ago to games@lemmy.world | 10 comments
- Comment on Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence 2 days ago:
Slightly different? Comparing a dead simple plot of employment vs. the performance of the S&P to a DID Poisson regression event study is the coughing baby vs. hydrogen bomb meme.
This Stanford study is just one in a very active field of economic research, so it’s reasonable to be skeptical, but I really hope you don’t think people make decisions based on the kind of thing in that Tiktok video.
- Comment on Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence 2 days ago:
This study controls for the post-COVID hiring spike in three ways: the researchers generated results without including the tech sector, they separated out remote work, and compared trends from 2018-2022 to those after. The hypothesis holds in all cases. The primary regression analysis also included a standard set of controls for hiring trends (such as interest rate fluctuation).
There’s enough here to find a negative correlation between generative AI and entry-level employment.
- Comment on steam vs gog, which game store to buy from? 3 days ago:
In my experience this is the biggest knock against it, and it can be fatal for multiplayer games. I had to wait several days for a patch to get pushed to continue my Baldur’s Gate 3 campaign with a friend because she’d picked it up on Steam. We eventually had her keep Steam offline.
Considering the condition games can be released in lately, it can really suck to wait in general, too.
- Comment on US adults social media usage by platform 6 days ago:
Not sure how you got to that conclusion. The survey prompt was “Please indicate whether or not you ever use the following websites or apps.” 29% responded that they do not use the platform, less than 1% did not respond. That’s 70%.
- Comment on One in four unconcerned by sexual deepfakes created without consent, survey finds 1 week ago:
That’s why I said local models. They aren’t automatically taking outputs and training updates on them.
And yeah, we’ve all already had our likenesses folded in somewhere. That’s the bigger problem here.
- Comment on One in four unconcerned by sexual deepfakes created without consent, survey finds 1 week ago:
Yes, if it was on a locally-hosted generative model, I wouldn’t be bothered if someone did this in my likeness. That wouldn’t be meaningfully different than using Photoshop to fake it ten years ago.
Passing it around to their friends and gods know whom else is still just as reprehensible though.
- Comment on Meet the AI workers who tell their friends and family to stay away from AI 1 week ago:
And the problem with Reddit–especially with certain language communities–is you’ll get a hallucination rate higher than current LLMs because learners can either overestimate their knowledge or sound off just because they want to show off.
I don’t recommend LLM use for beginners at languages but once they get a semester or two (or the equivalent) under their belt, the instant access to an answer that’s right most of the time is invaluable. Just first get to the point where you can start to recognize “maybe that’s not quite right…” first, and check sources. And definitely check in with natives as much as possible.
- Comment on Gaming Pet Peeves 1 week ago:
I’ve noticed this is especially bad in Japanese games for whatever reason.
- Comment on Every new Mass Effect playthrough since the first 2 weeks ago:
I’m in the same boat, want FemShep, always romance Tali. The ME2 LE romance mod is pretty painless. Unfortunately, last I checked, the modder never finished the ME3 LE mod. There’s a way to force it in ME3 by hacking the save file and it’ll still get you there, but it won’t be as seamless.
- Alberto Mielgo defends the Marathon cinematic as "not AI," denies his team touched Bungie’s plagiarized material and calls the art theft incident a genuine mistake that was "blown out of proportion"thegamepost.com ↗Submitted 2 weeks ago to games@lemmy.world | 17 comments
- Comment on GameStop workers say its trade anything day will be a huge mess 2 weeks ago:
Holy hell. I have some bad GameStop trade-in stories, and that’s just from taking in normal trade-ins. I can’t even imagine the clusterfuck this would be. I’d be calling in sick.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
A small AAA production in 2000, maybe. E33’s was only a fraction of a small AAA budget today.
TGA calls it “a game made outside the traditional publisher system,” which fits. I’d agree that we’re looking at wildly different scales of production in the same category, though.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Good showing for E33 but I’m not convinced it’s a shoo-in for GotY. It’s a media-run event and the press adored Hades 2. Plus there’s always the Kojima factor and it would be the first time TGA’s ever given it to a studio’s first game.
- Comment on Is Perplexity the first AI unicorn to fail? 2 weeks ago:
This article didn’t even go into the service disruptions Perplexity has had the past couple of weeks. In short, the best thing Perplexity does is give you access to multiple models at once, but when you try to select one for a specific thread, it will throw an error and (quietly) kick the response to your prompt to a backup.
Perplexity’s calling it a technical issue but it looks more like throttling, especially considering API access to Claude is expensive and that’s the one that is having the most “technical issues.” I would have already gone elsewhere if my sub wasn’t free, and if it continues to be this bad, I might end up going elsewhere anyway.
- Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? 3 weeks ago:
If you’re still playing it, feel free to message me for tips on the Fediverse or on Discord. I love talking TO.
Difficulty definitely starts picking up chapter 4, so you’ll have to start finding creative ways to work within the level cap. Gear crafting is one of them.
- Comment on Game marketing company takes down blog post bragging about how good it is at astroturfing Reddit after Reddit finds the post 3 weeks ago:
A lot of the sports subs’ better content is instant reaction. Harder to fake. The only participation I still have on reddit is a similar community for a large video game. It’s more like a chatroom than a message board. Small wonder I spend way more time talking on Discord than anywhere these days.
- Comment on To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub 3 weeks ago:
Something’s that’s easy to forget is barely half of US households were even online by the 360’s release. Under a third had broadband. Even the Nintendo Power hotline ran until 2010.
I sold thousands of book guides at Gamestop, and the retailers also pushed them because they were higher margin than the games themselves. Yes, back then, the gaming enthusiasts knew GameFAQs was the place for info, but the mass market? The vast majority still got their info from guides and magazines, or word-of-mouth.
It’s like social media adoption. The mass market didn’t jump in until a generation later.
- Comment on To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub 3 weeks ago:
Even just revising my guide for the new Final Fantasy Tactics remaster is way too big a project for me right now. It’s amazing how much work it is.
- Comment on OpenAI moves to allow “mature apps” on its platforms 4 weeks ago:
This is where I’ve been at on it. On top of that, the stuff that’s not directly exploiting human actors (like drawn or animated content) or pushing their boundaries is still coming out of studios that aren’t exactly known for healthy work/life balance. To say nothing of the kind of fetish content that might come out of those places too, which surely takes its own toll on creators.
If we can offload all of that potential trauma onto computers, I’m all for it.
- Comment on US government uses Halo images in a call to 'destroy' immigration, Microsoft declines to comment 4 weeks ago:
Staff shake-up last year. Phil Savage and Tyler Wilde have really stepped it up and let their writers sound off.
Like any of the major sites though, the news side still has its share of articles generated from one-liners sourced from interviews ran elsewhere.
- Comment on Amazon cutting thousands of corporate roles [including video games] 5 weeks ago:
If an Internet infrastructure giant can’t make MMOs work, I don’t see how these smaller MMO projects that keep popping up are going to, either. Greg Street also recently just talked about how his isn’t getting funding.
It’s too bad, I think SpaceCraft looks interesting but I don’t know if it’s going to make to 1.0, much less stick around.
- Comment on More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGC 1 month ago:
I get the feeling the people at Aftermath are just hungry to poke the bear. I imagine it’ll eventually catch up to them, but hey, more power to them for now.
- Comment on More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGC 1 month ago:
Maybe it’s because my experience with it goes well back into the print era, but very little of it is actual fact-finding capital “J” journalism, and even that part has only come on in the industry more recently. I’ve always put the games press in its proper buckets of “previews for access” and then game criticism. Quality for both varies, but I’m rarely disappointed when I stick to a publication I like (until the inevitable EIC churn, anyway).
- Comment on More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGC 1 month ago:
If I had the money I’d definitely do the same, but for now I do RSS instead of link aggregator communities if I’m being serious about it. Takes some curation, but at the very least it’s not being run through a vote algorithm first.
- Comment on Meta is removing its Messenger apps for Windows and macOS 1 month ago:
Ugh, the only thing I hate more than a few people I regularly talk with still using Messenger is having to deal with the desktop client. Now this 🙄
I moved to a web browser but I can’t even get push notifications working.
- Comment on Ludonarrative Harmony: what makes games unique as a medium 1 month ago:
The game does some seriously raw stuff with failed relationships that I still haven’t entirely recovered from. I still strongly recommend it, though.
Lately I’ve been considering a replay as a liberal just to see all the internal commentary on it.