• 15 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • On a movie set, the director has a huge amount of authority. It’s been baked into the culture for about a hundred years that the director is one step below God. A studio treats films as investments, but they also hire a director and (mostly) get out of the way. Sure, producers do meddle, but it’s nowhere close to the same amount as with games – and all the meddling is still pointed at the director, not the crew. I think this limits the damage that can be done.

    Also, the film industry has strong unions. Most of the abuses in game dev simply aren’t allowed. I suspect that the horrible culture of game dev can cause developers to stop caring, which bleeds through to the final product, and that won’t happen to the same extent for movies.





  • If you imagine it like making a bet, nobody’s going to take a bet with you where they pay you when it pops, but there’s no time after which you pay them – because they’d never get any money out of that bet. Buying stock is different because it’s a thing you can own, but you can’t invest in the idea of something failing, because there isn’t any business which will take your money and make something more likely to fail.

    You could buy every stock except AI-related stocks, which I believe is functionally equivalent to buying an index fund and shorting AI stocks based on the percentage of AI stocks in the index fund. You could also think about what businesses would do well (or less poorly) in the case of an AI-instigated crash, and then buy those.




  • I just want to take a moment to enjoy that the Canada Post thing is one of our country’s big political conversations. There’s a problem, and people have different solutions. Some of the solutions rely on false information or bad reasoning. Some of them are well-reasoned, but have different priorities to each other. The government will have to make a decision, and some will praise it, and some will criticize it, and it will make some peoples’ lives better, and some peoples’ lives worse.

    But nobody’s using the Canada Post situation as a vehicle to hurt people they hate. People don’t seem to be moving in lockstep based on ideology and propaganda. Nobody’s been called a fascist over it because nobody’s been being a fascist over it. This is what politics should be like. It’s refreshing.


  • There’s two barriers to that. Banks don’t want to reverse transactions without a court order, because they would then be very embarrassed and also get sued if the transaction turned out to be legitimate. So they can reverse transactions, but only after the court orders it.

    The other thing is that scammers know that. This is why they often demand payment via Western Union, gift cards, etc. They also often use “money mules”: other scam victims who take the money and then send it to the scammer’s account, taking a cut. The scammer periodically closes accounts and opens new ones, so if their assets get frozen they don’t lose too much. (The money mule scam victims are sometimes just being conned into helping the scammer, but sometimes they end up getting scammed themselves, such as by being sent bad checks. They can’t go to the police because they’re guilty of a crime.)










  • I think both of these positions are important for coercing Sony. If everyone who was upset left permanently and kept their bad reviews, Sony would have no incentive to backtrack their next boneheaded decision. But it’s also true that if everyone jumps back in as if nothing happens, they have no incentive to avoid excessive greed in the future.

    Most of the players will come back, and so Sony will be rewarded for compliance. But some players will be permanently alienated, and those permanently lost profits will be a reminder of what happens when you try to screw your players over.