[zythyx]

I was excited about the future...

I've always been a tech nerd, from my first Gameboy in 1998 when I was 10, to my first PC, then getting all sorts of gadgets and upgrades. Always an early adopter to many things, even social media and AI. I was basically a day 1 adopter of Facebook when it became available worldwide. I was there before Gangnam Style hit the 313 YouTube views limit (I was the 214th watcher)

Tesla was a brand I was fully on board with and planning as my first 'new' car. I loved the idea of self-driving cars (mainly because I hate driving). But then Elon became a menace and I had no interest in what would have been my dream car. It still is, and I would easily buy if Elon didn't have his name attached.

Technology has SO MUCH potential today, more so than in the past. But EVERYTHING these days from MBAs: If it doesn't make money, it gets dropped. It all has a subscription, not a one-off purchase. Every tiny thing has a cost of business involved. Games are no longer about having fun, they're about how much money or activity can I extract from the player (yes, even the indie experience is tainted: buy off Steam and 30% of that purchase goes to the platform for just existing).

The future with AI is ultimately the untimely demise of creativeness. And it will be shoved down our throats, and we will thank them (the ruling class) for it.

[ololobus]

> Games are no longer about having fun, they're about how much money or activity can I extract from the player (yes, even the indie experience is tainted: buy off Steam and 30% of that purchase goes to the platform for just existing).

This is a HUGE overstatement, tbh. Without such big worldwide distributors like Steam, the only option an average indie dev would have is to distribute their game on their website that nobody knows about, so instead of hundreds of 1000s of sold copies they would have just some 1000s

Another non-obvious outcome of Steam is that the pirate scene largely just went away. It so niche that nobody really cares about it for real. It’s just so much easier and safer to buy

So I would say that Steam, Apple and so on have earned their 30%, they really created a huge market everyone can get a share in. Surely it should be regulated to avoid hostile monopoly behavior, but that’s a different story

[palata]

I have always been a tech nerd. Growing up, tech nerds sounded like capable introverts who could create great things.

But for every good thing technology brings, it seems like we create bad things by the thousands. And it seems like capable introverts becoming rich and powerful are actually extremely dangerous.

Most technology is part of the problem. There is no good solution (our lives will just get gradually worse from now on), but the best one involves removing the bad technology and keep only the good part, which is a very small minority of technology today.

We're pretty much screwed, and the only way not to see it is to not look into the biggest problems of our time: energy, climate and mass extinction.