The OP is absolutely not talking about making Candy Crush. They ARE talking about making art. Both can exist in the same world and be successful. The existence of and success of reality TV doesn’t negate the art of filmmaking and the enjoyment of watching a movie. Same with games.
OP is invalidating the blog with the reasoning of detail, art, taste, etc is necessary for a good game.
I am saying that a small subset of people care about this given what people choose to play in practice. It's currently much, much easier to not care about these things and focus on the cognitive aspects to capture player attention, and the human cognitive incentives are not stacked in favor of OPs view.
> I am saying that a small subset of people care about this given what people choose to play in practice.
1. Candy Crush is one of the highest grossing games of all time, but if you look at the other top 20 highest grossing games, the vast majority are nothing like it.
2. Janky crush wouldn’t have been the success it was without massive attention to detail and polish.
Also there is a huge effort to optimise the game for retention, LTV and UA arbitrage.
These are not the fun details but they are details none the less and whilst LLMs will probably be more useful here the insights that drive their actions are the taste humans provide.
And the folks productizing this are actively working against noticing its power by making it cutesy. It's a good product choice IFF it matches the capabilities, and it absolutely positively does not.
We should start with the assumption that humans are valuable and deserve to live with dignity. Any philosophy that doesn’t have that at its center is broken.
We should, but to date anyone that wanted to be treated as though they were valuable and deserved dignity needed some way to apply pressure to ensure that.
I'm not optimistic that this will change in the future -- but, I am watching automation erode the amount of pressure that humans can apply.
Yes but same should have been true of animals and humans as a whole did not afford dignity or value to animals. Maybe we will get a taste of our own medicine this time.
Depends on who you ask. Some people might put it at opposable thumbs. Others might ask how many legs one has. Or language, or ability to count (crows can count up to 30). Memory (elephants have memories that go back over a decade).
Comparing the two like this is interesting but there are fundamental differences. The US today could not delete tech companies, or the people who run them, the way China can its industries—and, crucially, the people who run them. The US’s version is personalist and would not survive even changing to another person other than Trump, not even going as far a a political party shift, which is possible in America.
We made it up. We made all this up. We do it for an outcome.
Intellectual property exists as a concept to foster the creation of more intellectual property. That is not the case for all private property, because I cannot copy your land or your car infinitely. That’s why IP rights expire at some point, or have fair use that doesn’t harm the IP rights holder, something other forms of property don’t have. Saying that they are equivalent is not foolish—I think that’s a bit extreme—but it doesn’t recognize that they have fundamental differences, and the laws around them have different intended outcomes.
I think AI training falls most likely in the fair use category of intellectual property: there is some societal benefit* that requires no actual harm** to the IP holder, therefore it’s a good trade-off for society if we poke a hole in the social construct of property to get that benefit.
*Let’s put aside the question of whether AI is good for society or private ownership of AI models is good for society. Important questions but separate from the theory. IF IT IS GOOD, it follows the above. If it is not good, then of course it does not.
**Also not a fully settled question. Again, an important debate to have and the tradeoffs here matter. If the harms are small enough, the societal benefit could be worth it. Both notes have to be true for this to be worthy of “fair use”.
> Intellectual property exists as a concept to foster the creation of more intellectual property.
The idea of IP as an economic tool to foster creation comes out of the UK and subsequently the US. In mainland Europe, IP comes out of the French Revolution and the idea that copyright is like a "moral right" that you intrinsically deserve for putting in the effort to create something. This viewpoint has de facto won out because as global commerce and global culture has become more and more widespread, everybody has standardized on the longest durations (the standard has long been "life + 50 years" in Europe) so one country doesn't have to worry about freeing up its works for "exploitation" by another country.
> the idea that copyright is like a "moral right" that you intrinsically deserve for putting in the effort to create something
Nope. "[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
The ends is promoting progress. The means for that is prescribed by a limited monopoly as an incentive to those ends.
This is going to blow your mind, but people created music, literature, art long before intellectual property laws existed. IP laws are nothing but rent seeking.
Yes, and we lived in a world of guilds, Orders and secrets which kept their knowledge tightly within themselves.
Music and art was created by patronage. Entire periods o where the art that mattered was made by the powers that moved the world.
For my whole life the goal was to move away from that era, not to see it recreated.
Also, this is a debate that English speakers can enjoy on a website for an US based accelerator. Most of humanity doesn’t even have the standing to be heard in this conversation.
> That is not the case for all private property, because I cannot copy your land or your car infinitely.
All property is fundamentally about exclusion and control to allow for private exploitation. That common bit of rhetoric about copying misses that point. The reason private property exists is not because land (for instance) can't be copied.
> Saying that they are equivalent is not foolish—I think that’s a bit extreme—but it doesn’t recognize that they have fundamental differences, and the laws around them have different intended outcomes.
You should note that you misread me: I didn't say they were identical in every respect, I said their "reality" is the same. They're both made up social constructs. One isn't more fundamental than the other.
> The reason private property exists is not because land (for instance) can't be copied.
Both things can be true at the same time. Land being economically scarce necessarily means that whatever use is thrusted onto it will produce private exclusion. Today, we give this relationship of private exclusion the name of "property" or "private property", but that doesn't mean you have to formally recognized private ownership in law to suffer its effects - socialists regimes stand as a testament to that. Thus...
> They're both made up social constructs. One isn't more fundamental than the other.
The first sentence is reductive, while the second is innacurate, if not outright wrong. Physical property is primarily predicated on real scarcity, while intellectual property is purely predicated on social control, which, when analyzed more closely, lays claims (even if partially) of ownership over other resources, including peoples' bodies and mind. It's fair to say that one is more fundamental than the other.
Because the person found it fun is a valid reason. It’s kinda cool!
I’m pretty sure Apple will do this in macOS 28, and there are some details to improve (guessing from the animation, haven’t installed it). But, people can and should do things just for fun.
I have mad respect for people who can actually throw away a shit ton of financial security for themselves and their families for something they believe in. It’s rare for a reason. Everyone has a price.
If you can get financial security without selling your soul, fewer people would do that, across every industry where selling your soul for security is possible.
I feel people who sell their souls to be in finance or work as corporate attorneys for bad companies deserve criticism, but people who sell their souls to work for an enterprise they themselves believe is at the very least going to destroy civilization absolutely are pathetic and evil.
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