Those particular offers aren't equivalent - Netflix is only paying $83B for just the Warner part of WBD, while Paramount is paying $108B, but for the entire company, and significantly devaluing Discovery in their bid, which is unacceptable to both the Warner board and shareholders, hence why Netflix's bid keeps prevailing.
Democrats have stated that they intend to cause problems for any Paramount/WBD merger and may even act to dismantle it if they return to power (which at this rate is increasingly likely, considering the bloodbath that'll happen in the midterms and Trump having no heir apparent who can feasibly win an election), so that's something, at least.
Also, Paramount might not even get CNN. According to recent reporting (which I can't find the link to right now), WBD is looking to sell off Discovery to a particular investment manager who is known for deftly handling debt-leveraged assets, and Zazlav is basically offloading all of WBD's debt onto Discovery (which is why Paramount is devaluing the Discovery part in its bid for the whole company, whereas Zazlav wants to sell off Discovery for a lot more than Paramount is offering).
I never thought I'd see a positive version of malicious compliance these days, but this is absolutely perfect.
Trying to kill the story five minutes before it goes live was inevitably going to cause it to leak. And now if it goes up at all, any chances will be scrutinized and turned into an even greater controversy. I love it.
However, generative AI isn't even useful for concept art, at least in most cases. This article brings up the perspective of actual concept artists, and they all say generated "artwork" only makes their jobs harder. Part of it is due to warped expectations from clients (for example, the vast majority of concept art is relatively basic rather than big fancy renders but clients expect the latter), but in general the consensus is that these generative models lack originality, require concept artists to figure out where the "inspirations" for each generation came from (which only adds to their workload), and takes out the "discovery" part of exploring concepts that is vital to creating new and interesting ones.
Generating placeholder assets? We've already seen how that can cause problems, since they can be potentially "good enough" for studios to accidentally forget to replace, and later cause controversy when players notice them. We've already seen this happen with Expedition 33 and The Alters.
Coding? "Coding assistants" more often than not tend to spit out poor-quality output that programmers need to fix anyway.
And production-level content is right out. People will notice, and it's never as good as actual human artistry.
I've only found one "productive" use for generative AI in game development that doesn't just add more work for people in the long run - generating placeholder voice lines, assuming you put them all in a "placeholder" folder that you ensure is completely deleted by the end of production, with all references to said placeholders replaced with actual production voice lines. And even then that's not exactly new, it's just a fancier version of using text to speech.
Generative AI is mostly just popular in the c-suite rather than with actual developers or gamers. A Quantic Foundry poll shows that 85% of gamers have a negative perception of generative AI, with 62% saying they had a "very negative" attitude towards it. "This technology simply isn’t going away" is one thing, but who will use it seriously when developers hate using it and gamers hate seeing the output?
Paramount only has a higher offer at first glance, but they're bidding for all of WBD, whereas Netflix just wants the Warner portion (the studios and such) not the Discovery part (the cable stuff). Splitting the company up is something Zazlav massively prefers, since he and the shareholders will get more money out of it, and Paramount by their own admission are greatly undervaluing Discovery compared to what WBD thinks it's worth, which won't go down with the shareholders. It's a large part of why Paramount's bid is being consistently rejected, and any attempt at a hostile takeover is a long shot at best.
You can see how things are going by how cool Netflix and WBD are playing this while Paramount/Ellison are making desperate plays and throwing tantrums about the whole process.
For what it's worth, this hostile takeover attempt is basically dead in the water unless WBD's shareholders are especially stupid. Netflix only wants the studio part of WBD, with Discovery being spun off into its own thing which can be sold off separately, which would net said shareholders much more than what Paramount is offering for the whole thing.
But Ellison wants all of it, not just Discovery, but Netflix doesn't want the cable side, so they have a better offer unless the shareholders are really undervaluing the Discovery side, which I doubt. It also doesn't help that splitting up WBD into seperate entities for more buyout profit was Zazlav's plan from the start (but Paramount was aggressively pushing to buy out the whole thing) and apparently he really hates Ellison and doesn't like that there's Saudi money involved.
The fact that the link in the article is indeed a valid, working dedicated site for hosting "pirated" copies of these games and it hasn't been taken down in nearly a decade says a lot about how much the potential "rightsholders" genuinely do not give a damn about this series.
Feels like copyright law should have stipulations for cases like this, especially considering how long terms are right now - corporations shouldn't be sitting on copyrights doing absolutely nothing with them like dragon hoards.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention this - Trump is still trying to cover up the Epstein Files despite his attorney general saying they were "on [her] desk" and despite having made it a campaign promise because the DOJ discovered how much he was implicated in the sexual abuse and trafficking of children. That alone should make any president wildly unfit for office.
Oh, so your idea of course-correction is electing a thin-skinned mad, stupid king whose health is failing and is becoming increasingly senile, changes his mind based on who last talked to him, is driving the American economy off a cliff (while putting inflation in the "too hard" basket and basically making it worse), completely ignoring the courts whenever it suits him, and has turned ICE and the FBI into his personal gestapo. Oh, and right now he's considering a $10 billion bailout of farmers who got fucked over by his trade policies and the only people trying to prevent ordinary Americans' healthcare costs from skyrocketing are the Democrats (hence the shutdown).
Gee, how's that working out for you? Or are you just so happy to see people of color and non cis people getting fucked over that you don't care that you're getting fucked by the uber-rich?
Side-note, but against an oppressor it has to be accepted that you have to readily reserve self-defense as a fallback option, if not the only option available. Despite popular history depicting him as a pacifist, Martin Luther King Jr. embraced the right of black Americans to arm themselves against white oppressors, his methods were not spotless and pure (he has been severely whitewashed over time), armed black resistance was just as crucial to the civil rights movement as the peaceful marches if not moreso, and if you need to push back, push back.
"This Non-Violent Stuff Will Get You Killed" by Charles E. Cobb Jr. and "We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement" by Akinyele Omowale Umoja, amongst other books, should be required reading for folks who really want to understand the civil rights movement and how it involved decades of armed resistance. Also, "we've been duped" by lil bill.
I have two things to say about Kirk's death - I agree that killing him doesn't help anyone nor was it the right way to deal with his hateful, bigoted rhetoric.
On the other hand, he was killed via the exact sort of political violence he advocated for, and was probably shot by an alt-right lunatic because of something utterly inane. Play stupid games, reap what you sow, etc. etc. RIP in piss bozo, and I hope he burns in hell.
For what it's worth, it's not like Ross Scott is an expert in campaigning either - hell, he explicitly said in one of his recent videos that he thinks he's the wrong person to head a campaign like this, but he's the only one that stepped up at the right time, due to being passionate on the issue. He's expecting to end his involvement entirely once all options are exhausted.
I'm just happy that the alarm that the EU petition might fail supercharged it instead.
And this means that ICE will continue to be this terrible long after Trump leaves office (assuming, of course, he decides to respect this particular law). Once the money becomes part of an agency’s budget, it takes a concerted effort to roll back the expected annual funding. And from what we’ve seen of the federal government pretty much since its inception, funding only gets cut if it scores political points. Since ICE is part of the DHS and the DHS is still pretending it gives a single shit about homeland security, all it will take for ICE to remain the largest US law enforcement agency is periodic assertions about its national security-related efforts, even if those efforts are just regular-ass racism the agency pretends makes this country safer.
I wouldn't bet on that with certainty. Zohran Mamdani's NYC mayoral primary win is already emboldening Democrats annoyed with the party establishment (between Schumer and Jeffries being unable to meet the moment and multiple Dem congresspeople dying due to cancer and old age which only made it easier for the GOP to pass this bill, the party establishment is very on the nose recently), I can imagine a full-fledged Democrat "tea party" movement occurring and ousting a lot of incumbents, especially in safe seats. And this particular insurgency would be particularly hostile to ICE and would be loudly clamoring to defund it.
A fight over ICE's funding could easily happen as soon as 2027, depending on the outcome of the midterms (which is likely to be a blue wave in any case, which would easily hand Congress to the Democrats due to the GOP holding it by a tiny margin). I would be very surprised if this amount of ICE funding survives the midterms.
I think you perhaps may be a little too optimistic about Sam Altman, his competence and his intentions. The man is a grifter first and foremost, the Orb alone should've demonstrated that, and I'm not sure even he believes OpenAI is capable of making any big advances in machine learning tech anytime soon, even if he tries desperately to hype up fans and investors.
But first and foremost, he's most interested in squeezing as much cash from the "AI" bubble as possible before it bursts. I am still yet to be convinced it isn't a bubble, frankly, even if it's more useful than crypto and has genuine applications in certain areas.
Hilariously, there's probably gonna be a fight over both of these state regulation bans. MTG has stated she didn't know the budget bill had a ban on AI regulation and unless it gets removed she'd vote against the bill if it comes back to the House (which it likely will, a bunch of Senate Republicans really don't like the bill as it is) because states rights.
There's gonna be some shit-slinging between the House GOP and the Senate GOP because of irreconcilable differences and I'm gonna be eating popcorn all the while.
I still remain severely unconvinced that "generative AI" isn't going to hit some kind of wall within a year or two. There's not enough data and power and even increasing that apparently has diminishing returns, and even distilled models have major issues.
I wasn't exactly freaking out about the Quake "demo" either, I mean, it runs at a comically low framerate and the environment changes completely just by turning around. There are fundamental issues with it that I can't see anyone fixing anytime soon.
Not even an hour after this article was posted and Trump and Bukele are laughing at the idea of bringing Abrego back and calling him a terrorist with no evidence to support it.
The Supreme Court gave Trump a relatively easy layup and he's still ignoring it, purely because he can't ever admit he made a mistake.
Those particular offers aren't equivalent - Netflix is only paying $83B for just the Warner part of WBD, while Paramount is paying $108B, but for the entire company, and significantly devaluing Discovery in their bid, which is unacceptable to both the Warner board and shareholders, hence why Netflix's bid keeps prevailing.
Democrats have stated that they intend to cause problems for any Paramount/WBD merger and may even act to dismantle it if they return to power (which at this rate is increasingly likely, considering the bloodbath that'll happen in the midterms and Trump having no heir apparent who can feasibly win an election), so that's something, at least. Also, Paramount might not even get CNN. According to recent reporting (which I can't find the link to right now), WBD is looking to sell off Discovery to a particular investment manager who is known for deftly handling debt-leveraged assets, and Zazlav is basically offloading all of WBD's debt onto Discovery (which is why Paramount is devaluing the Discovery part in its bid for the whole company, whereas Zazlav wants to sell off Discovery for a lot more than Paramount is offering).
I never thought I'd see a positive version of malicious compliance these days, but this is absolutely perfect. Trying to kill the story five minutes before it goes live was inevitably going to cause it to leak. And now if it goes up at all, any chances will be scrutinized and turned into an even greater controversy. I love it.
However, generative AI isn't even useful for concept art, at least in most cases. This article brings up the perspective of actual concept artists, and they all say generated "artwork" only makes their jobs harder. Part of it is due to warped expectations from clients (for example, the vast majority of concept art is relatively basic rather than big fancy renders but clients expect the latter), but in general the consensus is that these generative models lack originality, require concept artists to figure out where the "inspirations" for each generation came from (which only adds to their workload), and takes out the "discovery" part of exploring concepts that is vital to creating new and interesting ones. Generating placeholder assets? We've already seen how that can cause problems, since they can be potentially "good enough" for studios to accidentally forget to replace, and later cause controversy when players notice them. We've already seen this happen with Expedition 33 and The Alters. Coding? "Coding assistants" more often than not tend to spit out poor-quality output that programmers need to fix anyway. And production-level content is right out. People will notice, and it's never as good as actual human artistry. I've only found one "productive" use for generative AI in game development that doesn't just add more work for people in the long run - generating placeholder voice lines, assuming you put them all in a "placeholder" folder that you ensure is completely deleted by the end of production, with all references to said placeholders replaced with actual production voice lines. And even then that's not exactly new, it's just a fancier version of using text to speech. Generative AI is mostly just popular in the c-suite rather than with actual developers or gamers. A Quantic Foundry poll shows that 85% of gamers have a negative perception of generative AI, with 62% saying they had a "very negative" attitude towards it. "This technology simply isn’t going away" is one thing, but who will use it seriously when developers hate using it and gamers hate seeing the output?
Paramount only has a higher offer at first glance, but they're bidding for all of WBD, whereas Netflix just wants the Warner portion (the studios and such) not the Discovery part (the cable stuff). Splitting the company up is something Zazlav massively prefers, since he and the shareholders will get more money out of it, and Paramount by their own admission are greatly undervaluing Discovery compared to what WBD thinks it's worth, which won't go down with the shareholders. It's a large part of why Paramount's bid is being consistently rejected, and any attempt at a hostile takeover is a long shot at best. You can see how things are going by how cool Netflix and WBD are playing this while Paramount/Ellison are making desperate plays and throwing tantrums about the whole process.
For what it's worth, this hostile takeover attempt is basically dead in the water unless WBD's shareholders are especially stupid. Netflix only wants the studio part of WBD, with Discovery being spun off into its own thing which can be sold off separately, which would net said shareholders much more than what Paramount is offering for the whole thing. But Ellison wants all of it, not just Discovery, but Netflix doesn't want the cable side, so they have a better offer unless the shareholders are really undervaluing the Discovery side, which I doubt. It also doesn't help that splitting up WBD into seperate entities for more buyout profit was Zazlav's plan from the start (but Paramount was aggressively pushing to buy out the whole thing) and apparently he really hates Ellison and doesn't like that there's Saudi money involved.
The fact that the link in the article is indeed a valid, working dedicated site for hosting "pirated" copies of these games and it hasn't been taken down in nearly a decade says a lot about how much the potential "rightsholders" genuinely do not give a damn about this series. Feels like copyright law should have stipulations for cases like this, especially considering how long terms are right now - corporations shouldn't be sitting on copyrights doing absolutely nothing with them like dragon hoards.
Okay, so you're antimuslim, antisemite and a fascist. Cool, thanks for signalling that your opinion is worthless, then.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention this - Trump is still trying to cover up the Epstein Files despite his attorney general saying they were "on [her] desk" and despite having made it a campaign promise because the DOJ discovered how much he was implicated in the sexual abuse and trafficking of children. That alone should make any president wildly unfit for office.
Oh, so your idea of course-correction is electing a thin-skinned mad, stupid king whose health is failing and is becoming increasingly senile, changes his mind based on who last talked to him, is driving the American economy off a cliff (while putting inflation in the "too hard" basket and basically making it worse), completely ignoring the courts whenever it suits him, and has turned ICE and the FBI into his personal gestapo. Oh, and right now he's considering a $10 billion bailout of farmers who got fucked over by his trade policies and the only people trying to prevent ordinary Americans' healthcare costs from skyrocketing are the Democrats (hence the shutdown). Gee, how's that working out for you? Or are you just so happy to see people of color and non cis people getting fucked over that you don't care that you're getting fucked by the uber-rich?
Side-note, but against an oppressor it has to be accepted that you have to readily reserve self-defense as a fallback option, if not the only option available. Despite popular history depicting him as a pacifist, Martin Luther King Jr. embraced the right of black Americans to arm themselves against white oppressors, his methods were not spotless and pure (he has been severely whitewashed over time), armed black resistance was just as crucial to the civil rights movement as the peaceful marches if not moreso, and if you need to push back, push back. "This Non-Violent Stuff Will Get You Killed" by Charles E. Cobb Jr. and "We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement" by Akinyele Omowale Umoja, amongst other books, should be required reading for folks who really want to understand the civil rights movement and how it involved decades of armed resistance. Also, "we've been duped" by lil bill.
I have two things to say about Kirk's death - I agree that killing him doesn't help anyone nor was it the right way to deal with his hateful, bigoted rhetoric. On the other hand, he was killed via the exact sort of political violence he advocated for, and was probably shot by an alt-right lunatic because of something utterly inane. Play stupid games, reap what you sow, etc. etc. RIP in piss bozo, and I hope he burns in hell.
As it happens, the DC grand jury assigned to this case did the funniest thing and basically told the DOJ they can get fucked. This says a lot about how hard it's gonna be for them to charge him. If they can't even get a grand jury to indict him, a jury for even a misdemeanor offense wouldn't find him guilty.
For what it's worth, it's not like Ross Scott is an expert in campaigning either - hell, he explicitly said in one of his recent videos that he thinks he's the wrong person to head a campaign like this, but he's the only one that stepped up at the right time, due to being passionate on the issue. He's expecting to end his involvement entirely once all options are exhausted. I'm just happy that the alarm that the EU petition might fail supercharged it instead.
I think you perhaps may be a little too optimistic about Sam Altman, his competence and his intentions. The man is a grifter first and foremost, the Orb alone should've demonstrated that, and I'm not sure even he believes OpenAI is capable of making any big advances in machine learning tech anytime soon, even if he tries desperately to hype up fans and investors. But first and foremost, he's most interested in squeezing as much cash from the "AI" bubble as possible before it bursts. I am still yet to be convinced it isn't a bubble, frankly, even if it's more useful than crypto and has genuine applications in certain areas.
Hilariously, there's probably gonna be a fight over both of these state regulation bans. MTG has stated she didn't know the budget bill had a ban on AI regulation and unless it gets removed she'd vote against the bill if it comes back to the House (which it likely will, a bunch of Senate Republicans really don't like the bill as it is) because states rights. There's gonna be some shit-slinging between the House GOP and the Senate GOP because of irreconcilable differences and I'm gonna be eating popcorn all the while.
I still remain severely unconvinced that "generative AI" isn't going to hit some kind of wall within a year or two. There's not enough data and power and even increasing that apparently has diminishing returns, and even distilled models have major issues. I wasn't exactly freaking out about the Quake "demo" either, I mean, it runs at a comically low framerate and the environment changes completely just by turning around. There are fundamental issues with it that I can't see anyone fixing anytime soon.
Not even an hour after this article was posted and Trump and Bukele are laughing at the idea of bringing Abrego back and calling him a terrorist with no evidence to support it. The Supreme Court gave Trump a relatively easy layup and he's still ignoring it, purely because he can't ever admit he made a mistake.