But think about the profits! We need more people to exploit, if there aren't enough people to replace those who demand disgusting things like "actual living wages" with ones that are just happy to get any job at all, where do you think we'll end up?? We'd have to actually value workers, no, human life itself, instead of just pretending to do so while treating them all as replaceable as they are! And, most importantly, this would hurt my bottom line! I need a new yacht this year, ok? You just don't understand how important my wants truly are, ok?? So stop spreading such nonsense!
~ Pretty much every CEO out there, probably
Since I want to write in a bit more detail about my personal LLM/AI journey so far I will just give a Tl;Dr here: I started as a hater for that barely functional piece of junk that dared to call itself AI and slowly started to come around once it became better and more reliable. Now, let's start with the story time.
I still remember when cleverbot was the best way to talk to a computer and it was pretty shit, then suddenly ChatGPT popped up one day. I obv. had to give it a try and I was amazed that we already got that far and it happened basically over night (I know now that at that point the first LLMs existed for quite some time but it took a while for them to blow up and therefore me discovering their existence). At that point, they were pretty inacurate, couldn't even do simple math (which I found really ironic since that is basically the only thing a computer can do and very well too) and was inaccurate most of the time. I always had to double check each output and had to manually fix it pretty much every time, if it even was salvagable in the first place. But usually, I was better and faster at any task I could possibly give it so I became anti AI, started hating on the technogy and mocking people who used it.
Half a year later I finally decided to give it another try and it actually improved. Simple math was correct most of the time, it started to get most facts straight and some tasks like formatting text was either correct or just had some small mistakes I could easily fix myself. That was the turning point for me where I stated using it more often and hating it less.
Now, I actually like AI/LLMs. I use it almost daily for questions about pretty much anything that isn't about recent news (which is still very prone to errors) or about a nieche topic (same issue). The main reason why is because I stongly prefer getting taught new things with the chance to ask follow up questions or to clarify things I didn't underatand. I also use it to do simple tasks for me I don't want to do myself, like formatting texts in specific ways. And I also use image gen whenever I need an image, be it for my profile picture, banners or anything else, since I hate drawing stuff myself, do not have the money to commission stuff from actual artists and noone but AIs want to do it for free.
And as a developer, I of couse use AI coding tools. However, I have to say that I'm not a fan of agentic coding, better known as vibe coding to most non-developers, where you tell the AI what you want and it does all the coding for you. In my experience, the result sucks. Too many unneccesary comments, too many checks that usually just degrade the performance of the software and at some point, shit just starts breaking, the AI can't fix it and the codebase is too messy for me to read into it and fix it myself so I have to start over and do it myself anyway. For small stuff, like a simple script to inject into a website to make a table sortable or a cronjob that deletes every file in a temp folder that is older than a week, I have no issue with letting an AI vibecode that for me, then reading through the result to make sure it actually does what it should before using it. But for larger projects, I just give the AI access to my codebase and then chat with it when I'm stuck, unsure which approach fits best or give it smaller tasks to do for me and always check the output manually, never trust it fully. So after auto-completing words, then lines, then code snippets/chunks, I see coding LLMs as the next step that lets me generate even lager chunks, or even entire files, but with a more cautious approach. And it replaced the rubber duck for debugging.
One thing I almost never do is use AI to generate, enhance or even correct texts I'm writing. Take this comment for example, I bet I've made multiple mistakes and an AI could find better words and write everything way shorter while still getting the important bits right, but for some reason I do prefer to rather keep the human imperfections in it. Only for more.. professional settings, I sometimes rely on AI to do a bettrr job at writing than me, and most of the time, it delivers.
Now, what I am still concerned about is the future of AI. What I haven't mentioned so far is that I never paid for AIs and never will. If they are trained on stolen works where the creators of said works never received any compensation, neither will any AI company see anything from me. But as long as I can use it for free, I will continue doing so. However, I fear that this will soon change, since investor funding will not last forever and looking at the current hardware market and electricity costs, they will need a whole lot of money to keep going. And I'm pretty sure ads won't cut it this time so I'm really curious how this will end: Will the bubble burst and every large AI company will have to downscale massively to survive or will enough people decide to pay to keep them running the way they do right now? Once again, I will enjoy the benefits while they last and run local models once they try to start charging me, or just return to doing everything myself like before, but I will never support them financially.
I'm confused. Are you looking for a fancy text editor (VS Code) or a full IDE (Most Jetbrains Products, the actual Visual Studio's)?
Either way, for a fancy text editor, there's VS Codium. Just VS Code without MS bs like telemetry and stuff. Works really well, I switched as soon as I heared about it and never looked back.
Now when it comes to a full blown IDE, I don't think there is anything comparable, especially when you look at features vs cost. Free, or even FOSS solutions, won't even come close to Jetbrains products and I never bothered looking for enterprise solutions since I can't afford them anyway. Depending on your language requirements and OS choice there's Visual Studio of course and even Community used to be pretty good, but I haven't used that one since my switch to Linux so I can't tell how it perfoms nowadays.
Now if I'm wrong, my information is outdated or I may not know about some software that is actually really neat, please correct me.
When you use the site for the first time and search something where AI overview is available, it shows a toggle for how often you want to see it, with "sometimes" as middle ground being the default. Without showing that a feature exists, it's hard to decide if you want to use it or not. And since peoples opinion about it seems pretty spit, I think that is pretty valid.
Or would you rather have a cookie-popup like choice box pop up every time you use the service without cookies enabled asking you for your preference? Because that would annoy me very much.
Great in theory until companies start charging 80% of the product price for a single spare part so you'd rather buy a new product than try to repair your existing one.
If you are talking about the smaller, seperate news window, you can disable that in the settings. My switch (1) also has a news feed but you can decide for yourself which news channel you want to subscribe too, or none at all. For GOG, there is no ad free version of the installer, you'd have to use third party tools or maybe powershell/cmd (I never tried the latter).
I'm amazed that noone here is complaining about the fact that the offline installer for the product you paid for contains ads. Yes, offline ads that do not track you and only for other games on their plattform, but still ads. Not the worst thing in the world, I know, but still annoying.
I recently switched from regular Firefox to Ironfox. So far, I didn't notice anything different, which is probably a good thing because that means everything still works as expected.
Almost all of my Nintendo games are physical. If I had a Playstation or an XBOX I'd go for physical copies as well. Why? Collector and resell value, also you can't just disable my physical game, you'd have to come by and physically take it away from me.
On PC, I care less about it. If Steam shuts down tomorrow, I download everything today and unlock it via Goldberg or just pirate it on demand. On console, I either can't do that at all or it is quite challenging to do so (with some exceptions).
Reminder that Kernel Level Anticheat is still rather easy to circumvent and only raises the bar of entry a tiny bit to prevent some of the most basic attacks. But cheaters who really want to cheat and have no issues with spending some money and/or time can't be stopped by it. Never, ever trust the client.
If you can bear with the AI voiceover (imo it's not that bad, you can hear that it's AI, but it could be more omnoxious), I can highly recommend this video if you haven't seen it yet: https://youtube.com/watch?v=RwzIq04vd0M
A "voluntary code" os completely useless. No one stopped them from caring without a code in place and keeping games alive hurts profits in the long term so no one will do that voluntarily.
IMO due paid reviews and companies being too scared of getting sued for defamation or similar reasons I also do not trust "professional" reviews any more and stopped reading them. But while less professional and more subjective, I almost always read user reviews on plattforms that allow them like Steam on PC or the Play Store on mobile. At least you can tell if there are some issues that most people seem to hate and then you can judge for yourself if that is a dealbreaker to you or if you're gonna gice it a shot anyway.
Way better than any review is a free demo for an actual hands-on experience. Or I also often look for some gameplay on YouTube, especially if there is no demo available.
I've updated my original post with a testimony proving my point. For this case, I can only guess that it is the same case as with Mindustry: Because they have not been made aware that they are getting a worse deal.
Cause yes valve does prevent you from selling your game on other platforms at a cheaper rate, so long as you are doing so via steam key or when valve servers will be the source of distribution.
This is false. Even if I put the game up on my own server, letting you download a zip directly from there, cutting valve fully out of the picture service-wise too, I am still not allowed to sell it cheaper on my site then on steam.
Edit: Based on the score of my comment it looks like I need to provide some more evidence to back this up, I thought this was already common knowledge.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bwajZMNAof74mSNRMcTAVlF8m0fplHkA/view
This is just an excerpt of the full testimony, I don't know if the full file or an unredacted version exists anywhere else, feel free to share if you found one.
The first part is about steam keys, but it starts to get more interesting from page 16 of the pdf onward, so feel free to skip to there. TLDR: According to the testimony, valve does not actively check for price parity, but if they become aware that a game is sold cheaper elsewhere, they contact the publisher asking for the reason for the price difference and may threaten to reduce promotion of the game on steam or straight up remove if from steam if they do not match the price.
I have not found any of the E-Mails that were mentioned during the testimony, but it seems this happened more than just a few times for something "That is not our typical process.".
But think about the profits! We need more people to exploit, if there aren't enough people to replace those who demand disgusting things like "actual living wages" with ones that are just happy to get any job at all, where do you think we'll end up?? We'd have to actually value workers, no, human life itself, instead of just pretending to do so while treating them all as replaceable as they are! And, most importantly, this would hurt my bottom line! I need a new yacht this year, ok? You just don't understand how important my wants truly are, ok?? So stop spreading such nonsense! ~ Pretty much every CEO out there, probably
Since I want to write in a bit more detail about my personal LLM/AI journey so far I will just give a Tl;Dr here: I started as a hater for that barely functional piece of junk that dared to call itself AI and slowly started to come around once it became better and more reliable. Now, let's start with the story time.
I still remember when cleverbot was the best way to talk to a computer and it was pretty shit, then suddenly ChatGPT popped up one day. I obv. had to give it a try and I was amazed that we already got that far and it happened basically over night (I know now that at that point the first LLMs existed for quite some time but it took a while for them to blow up and therefore me discovering their existence). At that point, they were pretty inacurate, couldn't even do simple math (which I found really ironic since that is basically the only thing a computer can do and very well too) and was inaccurate most of the time. I always had to double check each output and had to manually fix it pretty much every time, if it even was salvagable in the first place. But usually, I was better and faster at any task I could possibly give it so I became anti AI, started hating on the technogy and mocking people who used it.
Half a year later I finally decided to give it another try and it actually improved. Simple math was correct most of the time, it started to get most facts straight and some tasks like formatting text was either correct or just had some small mistakes I could easily fix myself. That was the turning point for me where I stated using it more often and hating it less.
Now, I actually like AI/LLMs. I use it almost daily for questions about pretty much anything that isn't about recent news (which is still very prone to errors) or about a nieche topic (same issue). The main reason why is because I stongly prefer getting taught new things with the chance to ask follow up questions or to clarify things I didn't underatand. I also use it to do simple tasks for me I don't want to do myself, like formatting texts in specific ways. And I also use image gen whenever I need an image, be it for my profile picture, banners or anything else, since I hate drawing stuff myself, do not have the money to commission stuff from actual artists and noone but AIs want to do it for free.
And as a developer, I of couse use AI coding tools. However, I have to say that I'm not a fan of agentic coding, better known as vibe coding to most non-developers, where you tell the AI what you want and it does all the coding for you. In my experience, the result sucks. Too many unneccesary comments, too many checks that usually just degrade the performance of the software and at some point, shit just starts breaking, the AI can't fix it and the codebase is too messy for me to read into it and fix it myself so I have to start over and do it myself anyway. For small stuff, like a simple script to inject into a website to make a table sortable or a cronjob that deletes every file in a temp folder that is older than a week, I have no issue with letting an AI vibecode that for me, then reading through the result to make sure it actually does what it should before using it. But for larger projects, I just give the AI access to my codebase and then chat with it when I'm stuck, unsure which approach fits best or give it smaller tasks to do for me and always check the output manually, never trust it fully. So after auto-completing words, then lines, then code snippets/chunks, I see coding LLMs as the next step that lets me generate even lager chunks, or even entire files, but with a more cautious approach. And it replaced the rubber duck for debugging.
One thing I almost never do is use AI to generate, enhance or even correct texts I'm writing. Take this comment for example, I bet I've made multiple mistakes and an AI could find better words and write everything way shorter while still getting the important bits right, but for some reason I do prefer to rather keep the human imperfections in it. Only for more.. professional settings, I sometimes rely on AI to do a bettrr job at writing than me, and most of the time, it delivers.
Now, what I am still concerned about is the future of AI. What I haven't mentioned so far is that I never paid for AIs and never will. If they are trained on stolen works where the creators of said works never received any compensation, neither will any AI company see anything from me. But as long as I can use it for free, I will continue doing so. However, I fear that this will soon change, since investor funding will not last forever and looking at the current hardware market and electricity costs, they will need a whole lot of money to keep going. And I'm pretty sure ads won't cut it this time so I'm really curious how this will end: Will the bubble burst and every large AI company will have to downscale massively to survive or will enough people decide to pay to keep them running the way they do right now? Once again, I will enjoy the benefits while they last and run local models once they try to start charging me, or just return to doing everything myself like before, but I will never support them financially.
Shame, I would've loved to try it out but since it doesn't run on linux I never could. I bet it would've been great on steam deck too.
I'm confused. Are you looking for a fancy text editor (VS Code) or a full IDE (Most Jetbrains Products, the actual Visual Studio's)?
Either way, for a fancy text editor, there's VS Codium. Just VS Code without MS bs like telemetry and stuff. Works really well, I switched as soon as I heared about it and never looked back.
Now when it comes to a full blown IDE, I don't think there is anything comparable, especially when you look at features vs cost. Free, or even FOSS solutions, won't even come close to Jetbrains products and I never bothered looking for enterprise solutions since I can't afford them anyway. Depending on your language requirements and OS choice there's Visual Studio of course and even Community used to be pretty good, but I haven't used that one since my switch to Linux so I can't tell how it perfoms nowadays.
Now if I'm wrong, my information is outdated or I may not know about some software that is actually really neat, please correct me.
Greatest piece of ragebait I've ever seen on Lemmy so far, well done. I'll take it personal, therefore, have my downvote.
When you use the site for the first time and search something where AI overview is available, it shows a toggle for how often you want to see it, with "sometimes" as middle ground being the default. Without showing that a feature exists, it's hard to decide if you want to use it or not. And since peoples opinion about it seems pretty spit, I think that is pretty valid.
Or would you rather have a cookie-popup like choice box pop up every time you use the service without cookies enabled asking you for your preference? Because that would annoy me very much.
Great in theory until companies start charging 80% of the product price for a single spare part so you'd rather buy a new product than try to repair your existing one.
Huh? My redlib instance broke maybe once this year because I didn't update it for months. And once I did, it immediately worked again.
If you are talking about the smaller, seperate news window, you can disable that in the settings. My switch (1) also has a news feed but you can decide for yourself which news channel you want to subscribe too, or none at all. For GOG, there is no ad free version of the installer, you'd have to use third party tools or maybe powershell/cmd (I never tried the latter).
I'm amazed that noone here is complaining about the fact that the offline installer for the product you paid for contains ads. Yes, offline ads that do not track you and only for other games on their plattform, but still ads. Not the worst thing in the world, I know, but still annoying.
Palworld has now sold more copies than the original Pokémon Gen 1 (Red, Green, and Blue), which is still the best selling Pokémon generation with 31 Million copies sold.
Redlib is really the last bastion that keeps Reddit usable for me. Once it falls, I will completely quit the plattform.
I recently switched from regular Firefox to Ironfox. So far, I didn't notice anything different, which is probably a good thing because that means everything still works as expected.
Almost all of my Nintendo games are physical. If I had a Playstation or an XBOX I'd go for physical copies as well. Why? Collector and resell value, also you can't just disable my physical game, you'd have to come by and physically take it away from me.
On PC, I care less about it. If Steam shuts down tomorrow, I download everything today and unlock it via Goldberg or just pirate it on demand. On console, I either can't do that at all or it is quite challenging to do so (with some exceptions).
Reminder that Kernel Level Anticheat is still rather easy to circumvent and only raises the bar of entry a tiny bit to prevent some of the most basic attacks. But cheaters who really want to cheat and have no issues with spending some money and/or time can't be stopped by it. Never, ever trust the client.
If you can bear with the AI voiceover (imo it's not that bad, you can hear that it's AI, but it could be more omnoxious), I can highly recommend this video if you haven't seen it yet: https://youtube.com/watch?v=RwzIq04vd0M
A "voluntary code" os completely useless. No one stopped them from caring without a code in place and keeping games alive hurts profits in the long term so no one will do that voluntarily.
IMO due paid reviews and companies being too scared of getting sued for defamation or similar reasons I also do not trust "professional" reviews any more and stopped reading them. But while less professional and more subjective, I almost always read user reviews on plattforms that allow them like Steam on PC or the Play Store on mobile. At least you can tell if there are some issues that most people seem to hate and then you can judge for yourself if that is a dealbreaker to you or if you're gonna gice it a shot anyway.
Way better than any review is a free demo for an actual hands-on experience. Or I also often look for some gameplay on YouTube, especially if there is no demo available.
I've updated my original post with a testimony proving my point. For this case, I can only guess that it is the same case as with Mindustry: Because they have not been made aware that they are getting a worse deal.
I've updated the original comment with a testimony about the topic which also contains an answer for your question:
I guess no one has made them aware yet.
This is false. Even if I put the game up on my own server, letting you download a zip directly from there, cutting valve fully out of the picture service-wise too, I am still not allowed to sell it cheaper on my site then on steam.
Edit: Based on the score of my comment it looks like I need to provide some more evidence to back this up, I thought this was already common knowledge. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bwajZMNAof74mSNRMcTAVlF8m0fplHkA/view This is just an excerpt of the full testimony, I don't know if the full file or an unredacted version exists anywhere else, feel free to share if you found one.
The first part is about steam keys, but it starts to get more interesting from page 16 of the pdf onward, so feel free to skip to there. TLDR: According to the testimony, valve does not actively check for price parity, but if they become aware that a game is sold cheaper elsewhere, they contact the publisher asking for the reason for the price difference and may threaten to reduce promotion of the game on steam or straight up remove if from steam if they do not match the price.
I have not found any of the E-Mails that were mentioned during the testimony, but it seems this happened more than just a few times for something "That is not our typical process.".