1000% this. Without giving away too much information, I work(ed) for a cloud provider (not one of the big ones, there are a surprising number of smaller ones in the field you’ve probably never heard of before). I quit this week to take a position in local government with some quaint, on-prem setup.

1. We were always understaffed for what we promised. Two guys per shift and if one of us took vacation; oops, lol. No extra coverage, just deal.
2. Everyone was super smart but we didn’t have time to work the tickets. Between crashes, outages, maintenance, and horrendous tickets that took way too much work to dig into, there was just never enough time. If you had a serious problem that took lengthy troubleshooting, good luck!
3. We over-promised on support we could provide, often taking tickets that were outside of infrastructure scope (guest OS shit, you broke your own server, what do you want me to do about it?) and working them anyway to please the customer or forwarding them directly to one of our vendors and chaining their support until they caught wise and often pushed back.
4. AI is going to ruin Support. To be clear, there will always be support and escalation engineers who have to work real problems outside the scope of AI. However without naming names, there’s a big push (it’ll be everyone before too long, mark it) for FREE tier support to only chat with AI bots. If you need to talk to a real human being, you gotta start dishing out that enterprise cash.

Mix all that together and then put the remaining pressure on the human aspect still holding things up and there’s a collapse coming. Once businesses get so big they’re no longer “obligated” to provide support, they’ll start charging you for it. This has always been a thing of course, anyone who’s worked enterprise agreements knows that. But in classic corpo values, they’re closing the gap. Pay more for support, get less in return. They’ll keep turning that dial until something breaks catastrophically, that’s capitalism baby.

Disappointing, but somehow inevitable.

"This will enable us to release the vast majority of games that use it. "

So it sounds like the floodgates are opening and now it’ll be up to the users to sort out the flood of BS. None of this is truly surprising, while I’m not cynical enough to suggest their temporary stance was a quick way to score some easy points with the anti-AI crowd, we all kind of have to acknowledge that this technology is coming and Steam is too big to be left behind by it. It stands to reason.

I also understand the reasoning for splitting pre/live-generated AI content, but it’s all going to go in the same dumpster for me regardless.

I certainly think it’s possible to use pre-generated AI content in an ethical and reasonable way when you’re committed to having it reach a strong enough stylistic and artistic vision with editors and artists doing sufficient passes over it. The thing is, the people already developing in that way would continue to do so because of their own standards, they won’t be affected by this decision. The people wanting to use generative AI to pump out quick cash grabs are the ones that will latch onto it, I can’t think of any other base this really appeals to.

So it could possibly be construed to “Microsoft’s Dirty Operating System”, yeah?

Almost as bad as the “Enable new feature? / Not now” options

No, NOT not now; never. Never.

I keep seeing people make this argument and I think we all need to realize that different people use social media in different ways.

I moved to Bluesky as well. It’s where my friends went, it’s where the artists and authors I follow went, it’s where some of the bigger names I care to keep up with went.

Feels a little gross, I’m not gonna defend Bluesky or anything, but there are more reasons for the choice.

You’re getting downvoted by cryptobros, but you are absolutely correct, there is no good use for block chain and never will be

It’s a fully public database among trustless parties. To the first point, there’s no reason any database can’t be made public if so desired. To the second point, for the block chain to have any meaning or value beyond itself, some authority eventually needs to interpret its contents. That authority might as well hold the database or, in trustless cases, a third party trustee. Nothing about it makes sense at a very base level, you don’t even need to explain the tech because it just doesn’t hold up logically.

In response to a perfectly valid question about dumbass plan I just came up with:

“we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it”

There is a very meaningful difference between humane, highly regulated animal testing and what Musk is doing. Compounding this is the feeling that Musk’s high profile is what’s letting him get away with this in the first place. He wants to slap his name and face on everything for the credit when it’s good, be gets to be the lightning rod when it’s not.

Awful system, they’re always giving me much less than I expect.

There are no legitimate uses, full stop.

As others have pointed out, it’s just a fully public database. Its use case is among trustless parties, and that’s why it fails. At some point, somebody is going to want to take action off the data and that’s going to involve a trusted party enforcing it. Sooo … just have the trusted party host the data (and make it public if you really care). And if all the parties are truly that trustless, 1) why are they dealing with either and 2) get a third party trustee to broker your deals

No.

If I’m sitting on the couch and I want sushi, I can open up a website, pick exactly what I want, even maybe make a few substitutions for me specificity, and get it delivered right to my house, but that doesn’t mean I made sushi. I just HAVE sushi.

Anyone who has ever actually supported a real artist and commissioned work understands that they don’t own the copyright, unless extra agreements have been made to transfer it. It still belongs to the original artist.

And as stated, AI can’t own that. So no one does. Who would want to? It’s garbled, derivative work and anyone with access to the same prompt and models could generate it themselves, which is why I find the prompt guarding so hilarious. It’s all so blatantly dumb and transparent.

Is it actually finding new stuff, though? Or just refining classification methods to better identify what we already had lying around?

I’m right there with you.

Microsoft (and honestly a lot of mainstream software) has been slowly evolving over the years from providing robust, full-featured products that allow you build your own workflows to shipping things with an inherent “paradigm” or “ideology” on how they should be used. Mostly (unsurprisingly) to the ends of data collection, ad serving, and profit driving. Gross, gross, gross.

I’ve heard this is often a tactic of theirs, especially if they’re being recorded by a body cam or such. Just simply declaring loudly that they smell alcohol or suspect drugs sets it on the record so now it’s your word against the cop’s. If it ever ends up as evidence or in courts, it now appears as if there was probable cause for everything that follows and it’s only your word to say the record straight (good luck!)