Maybe there isn’t one.
This is what I’m talking about: people think monopoly = bad, so if I say Valve has a monopoly, I must want them burned to the ground. Nah. They’re mostly fine. Having only one good option is precarious, but it is still a good option. For now.
But they’re still a monopoly. We should say so, because it’s true, and important. It shapes the entire PC gaming market.
None of that is what defines a monopoly.
There’s only one store that matters. They have unthreatened supermajority marketshare. Customers go there by default - sometimes exclusively. Developers can sell there, or they’re basically fucked.
What you’re concerned about are anti-competitive practices. But some businesses don’t need those, to lack any relevant competition. It can just happen. They didn’t do anything wrong. They’re still monopolies.
Alan Wake 2 didn’t make its money back for a year despite being a huge game on the second-biggest service.
Steam doesn’t care about other stores because other stores do not matter. They can let other stores sell Steam keys, and it still doesn’t threaten their untouchable market share.
And if his yacht sinks, we’re boned.
While many accuse Valve of monopolising the PC gaming market, others argue that Steam’s dominance is simply the result of doing things right.
These assertions do not contradict. I cannot overstress that.
This whole article is ‘Valve’s monopoly is fine because they did things right.’
Having one good store is not, in itself, a problem. But it does mean we’re one fuckup away from having no good stores.
Saying it’s a monopoly doesn’t mean it needs solving. Anti-competitive behavior is a problem - but being a monopoly doesn’t require that abuse, and you don’t need a monopoly to exercise that abuse.
Yet people get deeply fricking weird about saying it’s a monopoly.
It’s naked taboo. It’s people feeling icky about a word, and actively refusing to engage in rational argument about meaning. When someone has dogmatically internalized that monopoly=bad and Steam=good, the text doesn’t matter. Even pointing out things they just said gets dismissed as some kind of attack against The Good Store.™
We have to start from plain acknowledgement that Steam’s competitors do not matter. They are plentiful and irrelevant. Explaining why they are doesn’t change that they are.
So we’re acknowledging it’s a monopoly? Cool. Defense is still an acknowledgement. I’ve had the weirdest goddamn arguments with people insisting they’d never shop anywhere else, and if games aren’t on there it’s their own fault they’re doomed… but how dare anyone use the m-word! Obviously that can only mean one seller with absolute control, like how Standard Oil owned all 85% of the market.
The bubble continuing ensures the current paradigm soldiers on, meaning hideously expensive projects shove local models into people’s hands for free, because everyone else is doing that.
And once it bursts, there’s gonna be an insulating layer of dipshits repeating “guess it was nothing!” over the next decade of incremental wizardry. For now, tolerating the techbro cult’s grand promises of obvious bullshit means the unwashed masses are interpersonally receptive to cool things happening.
Already the big boys are pivoted toward efficiency instead of raw speed at all costs. The closer they get toward a toaster matching current tech with a model trained for five bucks, the better. I’d love for VCs to burn money on experimentation instead of scale.
Oh, is it open-source on Windows?
This is the real future of neural networks. Trained on supercomputers - runs on a Game Boy. Even in comically large models, the majority of weights are negligible, and local video generation will eventually be taken for granted.
Probably after the crash. Let’s not pretend that’s far off. The big players in this industry have frankly silly expectations. Ballooning these projects to the largest sizes money can buy has been illustrative, but DeepSeek already proved LLMs can be dirt cheap. Video’s more demanding… but what you get out of ten billion weights nowadays is drastically different from a six months ago. A year to date ago, video models barely existed. A year to date from now, the push toward training on less and running on less will presumably be a lot more pressing.
“Just” read documentation, says someone assuming past documentation is accurate, comprehensible, and relevant.
I taught myself QBASIC from the help files. I still found Open Watcom’s documentation frankly terrible, bordering useless. There’s comments in the original Doom source code lamenting how shite the dead-tree books were.
Due to some disagreements—some recent; some tolerated for close to 2 decades—with how collaboration should work, we’ve decided that the best course of action was to fork the project
Okay, that was always allowed!
Programming is the weirdest place for kneejerk opposition to anything labeled AI, because we’ve been trying to automate our jobs for most of a century. Artists will juke from ‘the quality is bad!’ to ‘the quality doesn’t matter!’ the moment their field becomes legitimately vulnerable. Most programmers would love if the robot did the thing we wanted. That’s like 90% of what we’re looking for in the first place. If writing ‘is Linux in dark mode?’ counted as code, we’d gladly use that, instead of doing some arcane low-level bullshit. I say this as someone who has recently read through IBM’s CGA documentation to puzzle out low-level bullshit.
You have to check if it works. But if it works… what is anyone bitching about?
Excellent news. It’s ridiculous that matrix algebra was turned into proprietary software.
The flipside of putting an actor’s face on smut is that you could just as easily put any face on an actor. Cate Blanchett’s characters won’t have to look like one another any more than Grey DeLisle’s characters look like one another. Cast your leads from This Person Does Not Exist. Like if Iron Man had Robert Downey Jr’s acting, but looked like the Avengers video game version.
Stubborn prick misidentified parts of a computer forty years ago, and clung to relevance by never admitting programs don’t need the processor to understand a damn thing. He invented bigotry against robots. His one hit is a thought experiment on par with Descarte saying ‘the dog only acts like it feels pain,’ as he slides the dagger deeper.
A computer could be indistinguishable from a human - it could simulate a real person’s brain scan at a subatomic level - and John Searle would insist it’s no different from Eliza. May we never hear his bullshit touted again.
… you should probably check, before you go selling the what-ifs.
Diffusion is a denoising algorithm. It’s just powerful enough that “noise” can mean, all the parts that don’t look like Shrek eating ramen. Show it a blank page and it’ll squint until it sees that. It’s pretty good at finding Shrek. It’s so-so at finding “eating.” You’re better-off starting from rough approximation, like video of a guy eating ramen. And it probably doesn’t hurt if he’s painted green.
I would be shocked if any diffusion model could do that based on a description. Most can’t overfill a wine glass.
Rendering over someone demonstrating the movement, as video-to-video, is obviously easier than firing up Blender. But: that’s distant from any dream of treating the program like an actress. Each model’s understanding is shallow and opinionated. You cannot rely on text instructions.
The practical magic from video models, for the immediate future, is that your video input can be real half-assed. Two stand-ins can play a whole cast, one interaction at a time. Or a blurry pre-vis in Blender can go straight to a finished shot. At no point will current technologies be more than loose control of a cartoon character, because to these models, everything is a cartoon character. It doesn’t know the difference between an actor and a render. It just knows shinier examples with pinchier proportions move faster.
You can navigate back to it sometimes, if you figure out the last four tangents you went on.
There’s a ‘but the bad things’ buried in the middle, desperately wanting a line break.
I did the same thing initially and tried re-reading it as sass. Especially if “TF2 neglect” was considered positive.