Even taking the alleged benefits at face value, and assuming anyone wants it, this still doesn’t make sense. They already promised all their GPUs to AI datacentres. Exactly where are people supposed to get hold of the 5090s required to make this work?

I notice you don’t bother to address any of my other points, and boldly declare the time for talking to be over. I suspect that’s because you can’t.

As long as you don’t have to use it, its fine to charge money.

Look at the state of gatcha games. Yeah, sure, you technically -can- access all the content without paying, but in practice it’s not going to happen in a human lifetime. It isn’t that much of a stretch to picture games that are “technically” humanly possible, but so difficult that most people will resort to the AI. Remember the oldschool quarter-eaters in arcades? Same business model but with more steps. I also wouldn’t put it past MS to offer “incentives” in the game store for titles with AI integration. Also see the comment upthread about enshittification.

And if you really don’t understand the difference between a paid subscription service and a family member, I feel sorry for you.

Yeah this is where it’s going. Putting that AI exec in charge of Xbox really paying off for MicroSlop.

Cheats (and big brothers, to an extent, I guess) are free.

So they’ll sell you the games, then rent you an AI model to play the games for you.

I can just not play games on my own, for free.

I’m not in a tech field now, but I used to be. I jumped ship when everything started moving to ‘cloud based’ because I don’t trust anything I can’t kick when it breaks.

Debian is … fine. It’s the Toyota Corolla of distros. It’s reliable, it’ll likely do what you need it to do. It’s not fun or exciting or packed with the latest tech, it just does its job with minimum fuss.

It’s not even really a game engine. More like a 60 second interactive hallucination.

How many times is this now that they’ve nuked users’ PCs with an update?

Or you could use a fork that strips out the AI shit.

Agent Mode can click around as if it were a human user, with full access to that user’s authentication and browsing history

Yeah, that should be fine.

I guarantee you they’ll still collect marketing data, they just won’t show the resulting targeted ads until you let your subscription lapse.

No, the point of the entire site is to generate revenue. They’ve been pushing subscription based AI to “help” with profile writing for a while. GenAI content is also supposed to be good for juicing engagement numbers to show to advertisers.

I agree with you that it probably won’t work and the whole thing will degenerate into shrimp Jesus and bots replying to bots, but that’s the line of thinking. They don’t give a fuck about the quality of the service.

I recently dug up my vita and installed CFW out of boredom. With the built-in PSP and PSX emulation, decent retroarch support and a fair few source ports, it’s quite a respectable retro handheld these days. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend sourcing one over say, an anbernic unit, but if you already have it, it’s a fairly easy jailbreak and worth the effort IMO.

I like the idea of open world games. In practice it depends entirely on the execution, and amount of free time I have. I enjoyed the hell out of Cyberpunk 2077, but have zero desire to play GTA6 or the latest Ubisoft snoozefest.

AntennaPod. Can allegedly sync via gpodder.net or gpoddersync. Personally never got it to work quite right, but I didn’t try very hard either.

Well it was nice for a while there.

Be cool if they could integrate with gadgetbridge

+1 for Auxio. Been using it nearly a year now, no issues.