Well, great. So looking at 2008 for the most recent model, I suppose that means government bailouts or subsidies using taxpayer money to save the companies and thereby prevent a complete collapse of markets?

I suspect very creative firms of accountants and CFOs are working hard right this moment to identify the next step in the shell game. So I suspect some creative refinance could avoid that outcome. But I definitely hope you’re right.

I’d recommend to dystopia a bit harder - if this type of CaaS happens, I expect you won’t get to lay a finger on any real local computing hardware. I think you’d have a computing equivalent of a Raspberry Pi which is DRM-locked to a specific service provider’s cloud computing services, and a remote desktop or streaming GPU service.

I hope so, but there’s a way that bubble doesn’t burst even if we’re right that AI never delivers competent/competitive quality: that monopolies simultaneously integrate AI into their products and the entire world simply gets worse, while consumers pay extra for those very AI features they don’t want and which produce an inferior product.

On Android, you can get ZXTune, an app that directly browses and plays online demo scene chiptune databases like scene.org. It’s really great.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.zxtune

Unfortunately it looks like it hasn’t been updated in ~2-3 months.

Thank you, that’s exactly what I was looking for. More than *10K entries, by the look of it…

FYI, the most relevant information to avoiding your phone showing up in ICE’s rented databases is how they are getting the location data:

The material does not say how Penlink obtains the smartphone location data in the first place. But surveillance companies and data brokers broadly gather it in two different ways. The first is from small bundles of code included in ordinary apps called software development kits, or SDKs. SDK owners then pay the app developers, who might make things like weather or prayer apps, for their users’ location data. The second is through real-time bidding, or RTB. This is where companies in the online advertising industry place near instantaneous bids to get their advert in front of a certain demographic. A side effect is that companies can obtain data about peoples’ individual devices, including their GPS coordinates. Spy firms have sourced this sort of RTB information from hugely popular smartphone apps.

This includes a link to a prior 404 story that may have a list of apps, but it’s paywalled and none of the archive sites seem to have it indexed: https://www.404media.co/candy-crush-tinder-myfitnesspal-see-the-thousands-of-apps-hijacked-to-spy-on-your-location/

[15 Tech CEOs standing on the spent bodies of millions of workers, the CEOs’ heads just reaching above the clouds of dystopian grime and smog to see the shining sun on the horizon]: I don’t know what you’re talking about, the future is beautiful!

Super obvious AI signals:

• buttons and their colors make no sense and aren’t correlated to a real PS3 controller.
• there’s nine status lights and literally status lights on the disk drive.
• the text is spelled “PLAYSTA.TION”.

Yes, I’m aware AI can do “pixel art.” No, this doesn’t invalidate the specific examples and logic from my prior posts. I’ve been discussing this is good faith, but you are not, you’re just reiterating and increasing the volume and insults. Have a nice day.

Buddy, I’m not defending AI, and you making some conspiratorial allegation about my motivation is just weirdly aggressive. You and other people don’t seem to understand what happens with typical generational lossy compression and resizing. Randomly resize and save any image to jpeg 12 times, and see if you don’t see similar artifact noise patterns. That’s a technical literacy thing and not your fault, but the overconfidence here is. The exact thing you’ve marked above is very typical artifacting that occurs for non-AI reasons.

I also know enough to say that I can’t be 100% positive it was or wasn’t AI at some point in the chain. But I can confidently say nobody has identified credible evidence it is AI compared to a multi-generational lossy resize by a lazy designer (and no, posting a screenshot with a vague circle and “that’s obviously AI” is not great evidence - these are not twelve fingers or mush pseudo text, this is pixel level inconsistency).

The things you and others are pointing out here are very explainable without AI, and AI likely would not be reliable enough to create some of the details you see which survived the lossy compression.

Sorry…Again, what should I be taking from this?

What is “ChatGPT font”? ChatGPT and its image tool are distillation models that do not have fonts. They produce images based on per-pixel relational distillation, they are guessing what pixels should be next to each other and do not use fonts. Current models do produce text that can be indistinguishable from fonts, but there is no single “ChatGPT font.” If there is a generic font appearing here, that doesn’t tell us anything new.

For the PS1, I don’t understand what you are referring to. The blurriness and uneven lines happen from compression artifacting and/or resizing to a non-divisible fractional resolution. You can get the same effect now if you go into Photoshop, create a 32x32 pixel image, resize to nearest-neighbor 10x, then set an arbitrary similar but non-divisible resolution with a different resampler (e.g., 56x56 bicubic), and save as JPG at <40 quality. That’s extreme, but you get aliased artifacting, interpolated stepping, and so on.

If you’re taking some other features as evidence of AI, let me know.

There are a lot of oil-related reasons his handlers have convinced him to do it. But I’m surprised nobody has said yet that Trump’s motivation - apart from his handlers and donors - is doing it is to take focus off of the Epstein files. With the new evidence that Trump sent underage girls to Epstein, it seems very likely we’ll find out Trump was actively part of organized trafficking.

Trump is not a smart person, but he knows what works. Whenever things aren’t going his way, he will escalate and distract, delay reckoning until everyone has moved on.

Sorry again, I know I responded below and not trying to just argue for no reason, but pointing out these different things you’re identifying that actually strongly suggest these aren’t AI, or aren’t indicators of AI or not either way.

For example, Switch asymmetry. This is how Switch directional and gamepad buttons look. It should be asymmetrical, and AI probably wouldn’t get that right like it is in the graphic. You can even see the color-distorted remainder of the “-” and “+” symbols above them, blurred to hell from terrible resizing.

Things like proportions and whether controllers are depicted are just choices either a human or an AI could make.

Ok - Yes, Adobe does have insidiously integrated AI tools. But again, nothing you point to here is strongly indicative of AI, and again, just consistent with sloppy & lazy resizing (which you could just as likely see pre-2020, before AI). Adobe also has a very extensive stock library which may be where these came from.

There are some really hard to spot AI generated materials possible now, but the sloppy inconsistency here is - conversely - an indicator that they don’t care much what we do or don’t notice so wouldn’t be spending the time to generate something with all of the consistent details (see list above). Instead, the consistent details suggest human-created versions based on the real systems.

Sorry, none of this is a clear indicator of AI. The “latent noise” you refer to is perfectly consistent with compression and resizing artifacting and noise. Proportions are often off when making “chibi” icon-sized consoles, but notably, they are consistently or coherently off. Other features are strongly suggestive it isn’t AI. For example:

• All of the controllers have consistent layouts, including the correct number and orientation of buttons, player indicators, etc (e.g., the Wii controllers).
• Consistent diagonal step effects, even if blurred from poor resizing (see the PS4).
• Consistent text for all system indicators that is legible without AI artifacting, even if blurred from poor resizing.
• The fact that the 360 and PS3 (didn’t notice initially) are not even pixel art suggests they just grabbed random icons from the web, not ran them through AI generators.

Which is AI-generated? It looks to me like real pixel art (except the 360) very lazily resized in a non-nearest-neighbor fractional scale and anti-aliased to mush.

I do feel like even if they skipped Clair Obscur because of recent controversies, the author should have addressed it. I think it’s certainly deserving of being in the list, so saying nothing kinda seems contrarian at best.

I’m not an expert by any means and find this a little confusing too. The three possibilities seem like:

1. The business needed a cash influx and because CD Projekt and Michał Kiciński still seem to believe in GOG’s mission, “purchasing it” was a way of injecting money while setting a ceiling on risk for CD Projekt versus simply keeping it on the balance sheet and spending more on it.

2. They truly think that separate businesses will operate more efficiently and that the missions weren’t aligned enough to be in the same org structure. This seems possible but no way to really know.

3. They want to make GOG more appealing to developers who may not trust it if it’s tied so closely to CD Projekt. This seems unlikely, since Epic, Valve, etc all have self-published games by the platform owners on their storefronts.

Or some combination of the three… The timing seems to be to do it by end of calendar year to make a clean break on the books, at least.

Ultimately it took ProPublica to pull back the curtain on a computed market where an algorithm was telling landlords how much to charge tenants for a majority of the market. And even then, I don’t think it’s stopped.

This is exactly my point. The ability for companies to gouge consumers is exacerbated by algorithms, sure. But they have power because the regulatory rules are either in their favor or not.

Even exposing it as you note didn’t change it. Likewise individual consumers don’t have the ability to change it. It’s a red herring and false solution to say “AI can fix it.”