pory

Didn't sell out to a company or publisher with shareholder profit motives. Truly independent (not "indie" as slang for low budget) development teams don't follow this pattern unless they sell their IP and studio outright.

This kind of extension is used when your device's output sucks and "cranking it to 140%" is the only way to make it audible (usually mangling the quality). Possibly used by hard-of-hearing users too. Or maybe they're stuck on monitor speakers and "just pay $15 for cheapo cans" isn't an option, and the monitor's OSD controls are clunky and awful (they always are).

I've used "volume booster" features in apps before when listening to badly mixed podcasts/audiobooks, because turning up the system volume on a phone makes other apps too loud. I could see a desktop situation that mirrors this for someone, a setting in FF is faster/easier than the windows volume mixer.

The firefox list is pretty much entirely overly specific youtube tweaks (that you should be using uBlock or a more fully featured Youtube extension for), "games in sidebar", and custom cursors. Bonzi buddy and toolbars, anyone?

Seriously, an NES emulator? As a browser addon? That needs permission to access "your data on all websites"?

TBH if you didn't want hostile people that know the planet better than you manipulating sandworm aggro to kill you, why did you install a Dune survival MMO

That's like, the main form of factional interaction in Dune

I mean, this article was spawned by The Alters, which had a bad machine translation segment (a thing since long before we called it AI) and... Some lorem ipsum in a background texture.

It's already in every game in the background. Do you think paid graphic designers are instructed not to use the AI features built into Photoshop/Illustrator?

In the US and most of the rest of the world, that's what they're doing. In the UK/EU, they're being forced to require age verification.

Do note that while "protect the children from seeing a titty on the internet" is an unwinnable and pointless battle, the outside UK/EU method doesn't do anything to prevent it. I'm against age verification as a process, I want my accounts to be fully pseudonymous whenever possible, but without it there's nothing preventing a horny 15 year old from entering January 1 1990 into the age field or clicking "yes I'm 18" the way everyone's been doing since the Internet moved beyond Usenet. The EU/UK law is acknowledging the ankle-high barrier that "dude just trust me" age-gating applies, and is attempting to introduce some form of actual verification/accountability for sites that display porn. Doing this is, of course, awful for the freedom of information and privacy that can exist in online spaces, but "we gotta protect the children!!!".

As far as Nexus goes, this statement is as close as possible to saying "we are going to be complying with this law as we are forced to, but are committed to doing the absolute bare minimum required of us. UK/EU users will have to use a VPN into any other region to bypass whatever age verification system we're forced to implement."

Whatever they end up doing for age verification in the EU/UK can probably be bypassed by a proxy/VPN, at least.

I didn't buy and don't have the console. But either way, refunds wouldn't "hurt" Nintendo the way they would on a platform like Steam - you can't refund Nintendo digital products, and even if Walmart accepted a return on a Switch 2 with the digital account-based (non-transferable per TOS) Mario Kart redeemed, Nintendo already made their sale by getting the thing on a Wal-Mart shelf in the first place.

It's just silly to see a comment about "keeping" giving Nintendo $80 for mario kart when the people affected by stuff like this... Already gave Nintendo $80/$500 for Mario Kart. The "support" has already been delivered.

The guy who used ai to make some technobabble lipsum for an asset was an artist hired by the company. You can see a huge list of the artists that worked on The Alters in the credits. They all got paid. This artist would take home the same wage for typing "gshsjajfkfksiwn" in that asset, or copy and pasting some numbers that were in a readout from a space telescope, or literally using lorem ipsum. If we're really micromanaging every art shortcut as "potential pay to hire more artists" now, why not start counting how many rock/plant/sky/water textures and models in The Alters (or FF7 Rebirth, or literally any UE5 game) are pre-baked assets included with the UE5 license? Game devs actually use those instead of billable hours / salaried hires.

The translation flub is the only part that mattered here. The Alters was getting a ton of praise and good press for its story, characters, mocap, VA, mechanics, visuals, you name it. Finding out that someone used GPT for some glorified lorem ipsum to paste on a random background object doesn't change the quality one iota. The art team for this game was paid and hired and they did a phenomenal job with the game, but one of those paid artists took a shortcut for some assets. It's not a "the ayy eye is letting corpo CEOs skip out on paying real human artists!!!" situation here.

Do you know what else paid artists / game studios do other than pay a human to create an asset from scratch? They buy models and textures on the Unreal/etc asset store. The same exact boulder model is present in everything from ffviiR to Clair Obscur to Death Stranding, because it comes free with the engine and is "good enough" just like an AI generated rock texture would be.

Ever hire a professional photo editor? They're using generative AI. Every last one of them. They've been doing it for like 15 years ever since Adobe introduced "content-aware fill" algorithms that generate backgrounds to replace random bystanders or objects in a shot. Is the scary robot stealing someone's job and burning the planet there too?

However, using machine translation without even a proofreading pass is hilarious. Using a conversational model for translation is double hilarious. Surely purpose-built translation tools exist and are more efficient than "asking" chatGPT to "translate this line into Brazilian Portuguese".

Anyone who knows how Mario Kart World works well enough to be bothered by this change already gave Nintendo $500 for the game. What are they gonna do? Refund it to Walmart?

A second device on site is still infinitely more resilient than just letting it rock. Most use cases where a backup would help can be covered by an occasional one way sync or scheduled copy to a USB drive. Offsite is for catastrophes like your home burning down or flooding.