If they don’t spend enough money to differentiate themselves then they risk being drowned in a sea of indie games.

Every year the number and quality of indie games increases. The ferocity of competition makes it extremely hard to get anyone to play your game, let alone survive as a developer. This raises the bar on quality to a ridiculous degree.

Take any AAA game from the 1990s. Today that’s a single person project which can’t even compete with the most basic of indie games out there. To actually make money and support yourself as an indie developer is ridiculously hard!

Hey I’m not blaming students for any of this. I’ve been in the trenches with them this whole time. I’ve witnessed first hand the power of Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and mobile games. It robs them of their ability to focus. Then when they’ve procrastinated long enough they get exasperated from stress and fire up ChatGPT for a way out.

I’ve tried to help a teacher who can’t even get her own son to study. No avail.

I can’t really blame our political leaders for this. They don’t know what they’re doing either. They had no more ability to anticipate the effects of all this stuff than the rest of us.

The only ones who truly anticipated these issues are the folks working in social media. They saw what was happening first hand, through their metrics. They began unplugging their families from technology before anyone else.

I also don’t blame our teachers nor the folks in charge of setting curriculum (also teachers for the most part). I have friends who have worked in education research. They simply do not have the resources to compete with social media psychology researchers (working for big tech) who run A/B tests around the clock on millions of people in order to learn to maximize engagement. What hope does a teacher have when facing a class of 30+ bored, tired, social-addicted, and disillusioned teenagers? Very little.

I think we’re not too far from a huge social media and technology backlash. But before that we’re going to see a lost generation of squandered human capital.

I have been tutoring high school students as a volunteer for nearly a decade. Most of these in early high school (9-10) can’t even write a simple paragraph. How are they going to express critical thinking when they can’t even write very simple things?

I mean we’re talking about kids who are functionally illiterate. The system has failed to teach them this basic skill. Critical thinking about complex and nuanced topics is way beyond that! And the problem is they’re not going to learn the basic skills if they use AI to prevent themselves from doing any work.

By analogy, imagine trying to train people to be Olympians. Before they can perform in their sport they need to train their bodies to build muscle and endurance. Yet they insist on bringing a forklift to the gym because they think what it really want them to do is move weights around, not lift them.

How do you teach a kid to write in this day and age? Do we still want people to express themselves in writing? Or are we cool with them using AI slop to do it?

No they were all over the place. They won a lot of seats but Carney’s Liberals won more.

In Canada I think there are just more left wing voters than right wing. Normally when the Conservatives win it’s because the left wing gets split among multiple left wing parties. This time, people abandoned those other left wing parties and jumped to the Liberals.

Yes but not Calgary or Edmonton, nor Lake Louise, nor Banff, or any of the other mountain resort towns! Plus we keep the full stretch of the trans Canada highway and all the major railways.

Mantacore! You know what to do!

We didn’t oust our far right. They got more votes than they’ve had in decades. They just got them in the wrong places.

We also lost our left wing party whose votes got gobbled up by the centre-left Liberals.

What? No. All our (Canadian) fascists are gonna separate and join the US. Then we’ll be a fascist-free country!

How much of that is tourist country?

As a Canadian I feel bad for this. A lot of Americans in these tourist towns love Canadians and didn’t even vote for Trump!

Or if you’re like me and don’t care about the latest big studio games. I play games by development teams with less than 10 people, tending towards just one person. I have no desire to play any of Nintendo’s newest games.

Good take. That’s the only way I can get any wholesomeness out of the comic. Otherwise it just feels awkward and bad!

Eat two of them right away and save the third one!

Just gonna leave this here!

That’s because AI doesn’t know anything. All they do is make stuff up. This is called bullshitting and lots of people do it, even as a deliberate pastime. There was even a fantastic Star Trek TNG episode where Data learned to do it!

The key to bullshitting is to never look back. Just keep going forward! Constantly constructing sentences from the raw material of thought. Knowledge is something else entirely: justified true belief. It’s not sufficient to merely believe things, we need to have some justification (however flimsy). This means that true knowledge isn’t merely a feature of our brains, it includes a causal relation between ourselves and the world, however distant that may be.

A large language model at best could be said to have a lot of beliefs but zero justification. After all, no one has vetted the gargantuan training sets that go into an LLM to make sure only facts are incorporated into the model. Thus the only indicator of trustworthiness of a fact is that it’s repeated many times and in many different places in the training set. But that’s no help for obscure facts or widespread myths!

A lack of communities. Communal child care works great when you live in a village and you know everyone and most people around you are related to you.

We don’t have that anymore. People live in suburbs where they don’t even want to talk to their neighbours. Their relatives live far away, potentially in other provinces/states or even other countries.

Heck, a lot of people don’t even like their own relatives!

I think you mean simple, not easy. Getting a large group of people to do anything is not easy.

The love for the Nazi flag comes from white identity politics and white nationalism. The confederate types and the Nazi types have begun to rally together. White nationalism is spreading like a wildfire not just in North America but all over Europe.