I started Avowed, but it didn’t really grab me for some reason. So, I’m re-playing Persona 3 Reload because I never got around to checking out the Episode Aigis content. And, of course, Balatro on and off as my go-to, casual time killer.

This legislation was written to protect American tech bros, pure and simple. OpenAI is screaming about how DeepSeek stole their data, and how China-made AI is a huge security risk. Of course, OpenAI stole the data from us first, and it’s not actually a security risk if you download the model and run it locally on your own hardware, offline. They’re just throwing a fit to protect their massive profits.

But what they fail to understand is: you can’t un-foot the lettuce.

DeepSeek has been on Hugging Face and GitHub for a while now. Plenty of time for independent AI model makers to download the whole dataset, intermingle it with other datasets, and create a hybrid that won’t give you bullshit answers when you ask it about Taiwan or Tiananmen Square. Technically, no longer an AI model developed in China, and just as problematic for OpenAI.

The community will continue to make iterations of this new toy as well, so the next DeepSeek could easily come from Canada, Poland, Korea, India… you get the idea. Hawley’s going to be busy, trying to ban the whole world. Which, in fairness, does seem to be the greater MAGA foreign policy strategy right now.

The point is, bad legislation won’t fix the fact that OpenAI needs to re-think their strategy. We already know that you don’t need to build Skynet to create ChatGPT v6, and they’ve been bullshitting us for a while now.

Looks interesting, but I gotta be honest: when I click on the Steam page and the first thing I see is a cash shop to buy “Epoch Points” for this early access game? That’s an instant turn-off for me. I’m sure it’s not as predatory as what Blizzard did with D4’s monetization, but I don’t want it in my games, period.

Re-Logic (Terraria’s developers) have already gone on record saying, "even if Unity were to recant their policy and statements, the destruction of trust is not so easily repaired.” That’s the stance I think every developer should be taking. Unless you have a Unity game that can be released by the end of the year, all devs need to seriously consider switching engines.

I hadn’t heard about those changes, but that’s quite a relief. I hated traveling to individual ripperdoc clinics to snag all the best upgrades. Especially because the best cyberware for your frontal cortex can only be bought from a VDB ripper in Pacifica, and I didn’t want to give those assholes any of my eddies.

I only have a small amount of experience with generating images using AI models, but I have found this to be true. It’s like making a photocopy of a photocopy. The results can be unintentionally hilarious though.

The base game has improved considerably since launch, though it still lacks some promised content and performance will vary depending on your hardware. I have a PC with a Ryzen 7 and a RTX 2070, which can run the game well enough, but have not tried it on a machine with an AMD video card.

I think the base game might still be on sale and now might be a good time to pick it up for 50% off. Major updates will still be coming to the base game even if you don’t buy Phantom Liberty… including vehicle combat, I believe.

Considering how well the Super Mario movie worked out for Illumination, I’m expecting to hear something about a new movie or short TV series. Maybe more Mario, maybe Legend of Zelda. In any case, there’s no way Nintendo won’t be going hard in that direction now that they see what a gold mine it is.

Andromeda is fine as long as you don’t compare it to the core Mass Effect trilogy. Ryder is no Shepard, and none of your squadmates are as memorable as Garrus, Tali, Mordin and the rest. But take the game as its own thing, and it’s a pretty good time.

Yep, Live Another Life is usually in my list too. I inevitably wind up downloading a mod that breaks the wagon scene, so it’s a life saver.

Yeah, I haven’t branched out too much in the Fediverse and I mostly stick to Beehaw. Thanks for sharing! I guess I can always make a lemmy.world account, or wait for Beehaw to re-federate.

I agree, BioWare does not need to be devoting its resources to SW:TOR at this point. It’s been out for a good, long while and the fact is, MMORPGs are not big money-makers these days. There was a huge wave of them in the wake of WoW’s success but none of them were able to achieve the kind of market success, player base or staying power of WoW. That ship has sailed, and it’s only appropriate to let the BioWare devs get back to doing what they do best.

I don’t have high hopes for the next Dragon Age game, but would love to be pleasantly surprised. They’ve changed directions so many times during the development of that game, so I’m expecting the end result to be a mess. Mass Effect gives me slightly more hope as a possible return to form for BioWare though, if they learn from Andromeda’s missteps and focus on what made the original trilogy (particularly the first two games) great.

It boggles my mind that anyone, outside of the far-right lunatic fringe, is still on that platform. I left months before Elon Musk showed up, because they weren’t doing enough to fight misinformation in 2020, and now it’s an absolute dumpster fire. I can only guess there’s something like the sunk cost fallacy at work here, and that’s why people are reluctant to leave.