Glad this was identified and fixed. I mostly use ChatGPT for learning by checking my assumptions and it was very unhelpful to always be told my statements were incredibly insightful and so great when I want it to challenge them.
Ah yes, toy makers, the true problem of our world. 30 years ago I'm sure you'd be complaining about "addicted" spending on keeping up with the most popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys. It's not evil to make things kids want and make money off it. If you don't want your kids to buy things, that's on you and its a problem from time immemorial, not a new issue with video games.
These people are implementing Skinner boxes[1] for children.
There are literally "engagement" engineers actively doing A/B tests on children to see what makes them more addicted or gets them to spend more money or time on their platform.
There are humans literally doing experiments on children to figure out what stimulus results in more addicted behavior.
Who cares? My kids asked me for skins for years. As the one who owned a credit card and would be the one needed to pay for it I laughed them out of the room.
Maybe parents should learn to parent and tell their kids no.
My kid now older and with a job now tells me how he remembers when he used to ask for skins and I would say no damn way. He also says now that he makes his own money and buys things himself there is no way he would spend his own money on clothing for a video game while his own shoes are falling apart. It’s a waste of money and he said it not me.
So parents need to parent. Typically kids until older have no readily access to money so if a parent acts like one they can tell the kid to forget it.
Me and many of my friends were children when Fortnite came out. We still play, and we now have full time jobs. When fun new skins or dances come out, it’s not uncommon for us to get them.
They’re fun and entertaining. I hardly feel addicted or preyed on moreso than when I buy any other entertainment product.
It's fashion, to an extent. Do you only have a single outfit? Would you even if it was always the right weather for them, and was always clean? Kids often spend a lot of time in these environments, which makes them want variety of expression there.
It's not an issue from time immemorial. it's an issue from the late 19th century, if not post WWII. the child consumer class did not before that. Toys hardly existed before that. Even an adult consume class with disposable income had hardly existed. Kids spending hours every day zonked out at screens is a distinctly new phenomenon on top of that
Not sure I follow. The letter is about clothes (not toys)... He talks about people (himself, others) having low single digits outfits (one set, two sets), not sure how this makes him a post industrial capitalism consumer. In 1800 BC, life expectancy was probably 25 and people worked from ages like 6 onwards. This guy was definitely not a commoner, and he only had one set of clothes, and wanted two good sets. I'm not saying that's good and that out kids are spoiled and should be happy with two sets of clothes, I just have no idea what you're trying to say.
I think the persistence of advertising is an issue overall. I think we are worse off today now that you get bombarded with targeted ads and there's usually a seamless buy now button displayed within them.
Preying on whales is exploiting psychological issues. New technology certainly does exist today to aid in this exploitation that didn't exist 30 yrs ago.
Well said. Streaming services are finally getting the kinds of commercial content we did in the 80s and 90s. It's refreshing as I feel those years were the golden era of toys. Many toys of the era didn't even have commercials but we still wanted them. X-Men toys for example. If I was a kid, I'd of loved to have seen weekly commercials of the newest line up of X-Men toys.
With the caveat that shows still have a massive amount product placement within them and ad-free streaming services cost more than double the price of ad-supported, meaning that the poor are far more likely to be viewing ads anyway.
I love me some Gabby’s Dollhouse but the show is literally about a toy dollhouse that you can go buy.
I feel like you're being disingenuous with your choice of franchise. 30 years ago there were much worse toys. There were capsule machines that randomized what toy your quarter would give you. There were toys that you could buy random assortments at the toy store (M.U.S.C.L.E was one if I remember correctly). You could buy trading cards too. It's not that kids are marketed to (which is arguably its own problem), it's that the randomization is really not good for creatures that utilize associative memories (not sure if other intelligence avenues will be as susceptible to near misses, but likely it's a feature of intelligence in general to be stupid about randomness). And this has only been ratcheted up in the last 30 years.
What you may be missing, if you don't have kids, is just how insidious modern arcades are. They really opened my eyes in a lot of ways to the problem in general, since I just avoid a lot of the other modern invasive gambling mechanics. Most of the games are now just thinly veiled gambling machines. There are a few classics, like pacman still, and they eat quarters, but they are not programmed to randomly modify the game itself. Claw machines these days all have their claw strength randomized and is unknowable value that changes from play to play. And almost all the games I see at kids venues have some similar mechanic.
But it's not just the arcade. The rise of skinner boxes have become ever more weaponized (for lack of a better term?) in the last 30 years, as data collection has become cheaper and easier. I can't even imagine gacha mechanics in any of the games I played 30 years ago. Like, here, send Nintendo a dollar, and you can get a code for a better sword in Dragon Warrior? I would have mailed that dollar faster than you can imagine (I then would have shared the code, so of course this wouldn't work, but still, I would have sent the dollar). And for what? so they can make the games even harder?
This is a real problem beyond just teaching kids to ignore marketing. I don't have a solution other than trying to shield them until they're old enough that they're less likely to develop real addictions.
In Fortnite, skins are available to buy only sometimes. At a given time, you can buy like, 6-7 of them. If you want something that is not up, well, tough luck, it may never come back.
Isn't this true with collectable toys? My adult friends sure seem to be addicted to purchasing Pokemon cards. They talk about thousands of dollars spent when I am curious about numbers.
I've said this before and I'll say it a hundred times more - choice isn't binary. There isn't no choice and then free choice. There's infinite levels of choice. Some things are very choosy. Like me cutting off my arm right now - very choosy, I get a lot of control in that. Some things are not very choosy. Like a heroine addict deciding to shoot up or not today.
I won't make any claims on the addictiveness of fortnite in particular. However, we should all be aware it is certainly engineered in some ways to capture as much attention and time as possible, and this is intentional. Not unlike in nature to the engineering behind cigarettes, although again no claims on efficacy.
The point being, we really need to be doing analysis further than "well they chose to do it". It's not that simple, and it's really never been that simple. Companies are dedicating billions of dollars on solving this problem. We should, in response, at least try to analyze it deeper than that.
I agree. While I do think the skin issue is a parenting thing and a good time to teach a lesson about advertising and fomo*, there's more too it.
We protect people(arguably not enough) from gambling and alcohol which are basically banking on a portion of the population becoming addicted.(tho I also do not make any claims on the addictiveness of fortnite or say, gacha games)
At what point is the level of manipulation from these companies messing with psychology too much? It's an open secret they are researching how to farm attention. Don't people that are susceptible to this stuff deserve some warnings like booze and slots? I'm all for personal responsibility but we've created lines with other things where people lose control. Idk why this should be treated different.
No idea if anything needs regulated or what exactly needs to change, but as you said, at least more analysis.
To be clear, the definition of "exploit" I'm using in this case is like: "use (a situation or person) in an unfair or selfish way." The point is game companies are exploiting people who can't control themselves.
I don't know what autozone has to do with this particular discussion, but I'm not familiar with their business practices, so I'm not going to venture a guess.
I heard they make whole cartoons to feature a specific toy character and put them in kids happy meals and have limited collectors editions. Will the manipulative horrors of marketing to children ever cease or will we all be coerced into a life time sentence at Disney land by a clever cereal tie in.
That’s the same for the Tomica Blackhawk X3 Transformable Robot. Unless you find it somewhere on ebay second hand, after it leaves store shelves you will never see it again.
They give a lot of characters/vbucks away for free. I have a whole list of skins (including the 3 you mentioned) and have never spent any actual money on fortnite.
I can't deny they've made a crazy amount of money from convincing teenage boys that it's cool to buy outfits and play virtual dress-up. But compared to the must-have items of my youth at least you aren't excluded if you have no money.
Yes it is evil, considering how the advertisements are made in ways that makes it difficult for parents to escape them.
The only way to escape kids TV shows that have advertisements between shows and advertisements within the shows themselves as product placements is to only watch public television (which is generally funded way less and has way fewer programs than commercial television).
Hell, shows like Transfomers have the toys as the stars of the show.
So now all your kids have the peer pressure of all their friends consuming popular media and owning toys and now you have to be the bad guy saying no to literally everything to escape.
You go to any store and the toys and sugary cereals are right here at eye height of your kids with cartoon characters and promises of prizes, toys, and sweepstakes.
So you’re basically between a rock and a hard place, either you are the “weird kid with the weird parents” or you buy into at least some of that consumerism, trying to approach it with some level of moderation.
Yeah capitalism would become irrelevant and/or they are tempting the largest genocide the world has ever known. Yet this goofball is using phrases like market potential as if saying "all labor is a big market" is some kind of insightful thing to say.
The point is to promise something trendy, not absolutely impossible (but astronomically expensive), a McGuffin, that you can use as an excuse to raise infinite capital.
Everyone keeps ignoring supply and demand when talking about the impacts of AI. Let's just assume it really gets so good you can do this and it doesn't suck.
Yes the costs will get so low that there will be almost no barrier to making content but if there is no barrier to making content, the ROI will be massive, and so everyone will be doing it, you can more or less have the exact movie you want in your head on demand, and even if you want a bespoke movie from an artist with great taste and a point of view there will be 10,000 of them every year.
This is what Instagram and YouTube did and we got MrBeast and Kylie Jenner making billions of dollars. The cost of creating content is tapping record on your phone and the traditional "quality" as defined by visuals doesn't matter (see Quibi). Viral videos are selfies recorded in the bedroom.
When you lower the barrier to entry things get more heterogeneous, not less. So you have bigger outcomes, not smaller, because the playing field expands. TikTok's inside was built on surfacing the 1 good video from a pool of 10s of millions. The platforms that surface the best content will be even more important.
It's a little disheartening, I think, for people to think that the only reason they can't be creative is money, time, or technical skill, but in reality, it's just that they aren't that creative.
So yes, everyone can create content in a world of AI, but not everyone is a good content creator/director/artist (or has the vision), same as it is now.
Meanwhile the cost of his videos is insanely high. The "insane" price money is the smallest part of it. He has insane sets he uses for only one or a small number of videos, he has a giant staff, high quality gear and many of his videos include either challenges going on over very long timespans or involving a high number of participants, making the logistics, recording and editing of those videos challenging and time intensive. Most TV shows could only dream of doing what he does.
He started out simple, pointing a phone camera at himself counting really high, but his current channel is not a great example of a low barrier to entry. He explicitly sets himself apart by doing what other youtube creators or TV shows simply can't do
You may not like them, as another poster said, it's all subjective.
That doesn't mean they aren't incredibly good at what they do and that millions (billions) of people have tried to do what they have and failed.
One of the reasons it's "common denominator crap" is because the blob of the internet has 100s of millions of videos copying MrBeast and the Jenner/Kardasians created an entire generation of people that wanted to be influencers. Most of the copies are Slop.
Once they are intrenched they can continue to produce "crap" as you call it because they have distribution, the copies don't work because they aren't novel, which makes people feel like it doesn't take talent and is the algorithms fault, until the next person to be "creative" gets distribution and the cycle repeats.
There is just a lot less creativity than people imagine. It's not a right that we all have as humans; it's rare. 8.2 billion people on earth, 365 days in a year, 3 trillion shots on goal, and only a few hundred novel discoveries, art creations, companies, and ideas come from it.
Will the AI itself never be a good content creator/director/artist?
People are always out there tying to convince others that AI is better than humans at X. How close is it to being better than humans at being a content creator itself? Or how long before that threshold is crossed?
It will always be subjective. There will always be holdouts who will denounce any AI work as "bad" simply because it was created by AI.
Even when AI is objectively better and dominates in blind ratings tests, there will still be a strong market for "authentic" media.
For instance we already have factories that churn out wares that are cheaper, stronger, better looking, and longer lasting than "hand made", yet people still seek out malformed $60 coffee mugs from the local artistan section in country shops.
I think the other angle is a deeper question of why are you reading/viewing/listening to any particular piece?
For some content, say summer blockbusters the answer may just be that it is moderately entertaining way to spend some time. I expect AI may well be able to do reasonably well in this category, although what we find entertaining may well shift if the supply/demand curve shifts drastically enough. In other words, people may still pay to see a new action film even if it hasn't anything particularly new to say.
Then there is the more cerebral kind of art. Where there is an actual message that someone is trying to communicate to us. It's a form of argument, but not purely logical, but also aesthetical. I'm completely unconvinced that present day AI architectures will ever have something to say, purely because they lack agency, and so there isn't anyone there saying it to us.
Finally, there is the art that is entirely spiritual or internal. The whole point of that kind is the author baring their soul to us. Why on earth would anyone want a soulless machine barring their non-existent soul?
No single piece of content grossed 100m though. It just allowed for more low investment content at a higher rate, while the popularity of the site pushed them to celebrity status.
And one of those 10,000 will have a multimillion marketing budget and people are talking about it online and remixing it into memes and it will make a lot more money than the second-most popular movie, even though there's no discernable quality difference.
It will basically be like the rise of indie games. Every now and again you get something like Among Us which is low quality but good enough to be enjoyable and with the right combination of luck and timing it becomes insanely popular.
Unless something radically changes, we're quite far from creating movies on demand. Most AI video generators cost ~$1-10 per minute. And generally it takes many attempts to generate a few seconds of anything that's not completely trash.
Another issue is quality. Most of these AI generators output quite blurry 720p. If you want proper 4K output, we're at least a couple of doublings away.
I think we will have some decent AI-generated animations next year, because 2D cartoons are relatively easy to upscale.
A lot of people can't actually say what kind of movie they want, until they see it. And even if there are 100,000 releases every year in every genre, virality will probably still exist where even if random, one of those movies is going to get more popular than the rest and then everyone will "need" to see it.
That was the story with CGI too, that there would be overwhelming supply that drives prices and value toward zero.
And yet Marvel exists.
Turns out in a world of infinite supply, value comes from story, character, branding, marketing and celebrity. Those factors in combination have very limited supply and people still pay up.
I don't see any reason why AI-gen video is any different.
It's still quite difficult and extremely time consuming to create a visual effect. And the technique to film actors and blend them is additionally quite difficult. If you get to the point one person can make a movie, yes you will be limited by your own creativity, but the number of people who can do that is still a lot greater than the number of people who can do that, and manage a 200 million dollar budget production and get an end product that meets their vision.
This. Having a super highly grossing movie makes no sense (maybe first one will just because people wanna see it for the novelty of it). The potential would be niche content that might even end up with movies tailored just to one person.
AI will level the playing field for creation but not for distribution. The AI movie created by someone who's already Hollywood or social media famous will get more attention than a nobody.
Most of us have no idea what movies we want. The most delightful films are a total surprise (other than the drones who watch every Marvel film of course).
It will be like YouTube. Distribution will be hard and most of it will be slop but every now and then you’ll discover something so good and so creative and it couldn’t have possibly existed before that it makes the whole experience worth it. The best creative works are led by one person and I’m excited to see what people can come up with.
Solar is nowhere near hitting limits that will require storage to continue growth. Like it could double several more times globally and not require storage to still make sense to roll out more.
But, storage is already growing at a pace similar to solar because it's cheaper than the alternatives.
The bulk of storage on the grid is just pumped hydro, everything else is literally a drop in the bucket. Some people like to make the argument that battery storage can grow enough to become relevant but that's just speculation, it hasn't happened so far.
It's still not clear how this is supposed to work for heating load.
Covering the incremental evening demand peak is one thing. Converting fuel oil and natural gas-based heating to electric and then covering the nighttime winter heating load in northern latitudes is something else entirely.
Between better insulation[0], and north-south grid connections[1], I'm not sure this is a huge issue.
Yes, there are going to be places like Nuorgam in Finland where a population of 200 may turn out to be non-economical to put on the same suitably upgraded HVDC grid as everyone else, but they're also not getting e.g. a dedicated nuclear reactor any time soon.
Yes, that does still leave oil and gas in such places. Or would, if the oil and gas remained economical to supply internationally when the majority of users worldwide stop using it. Biofuels (e.g. wood in a fireplace) is still a thing, even if not fantastic for either health or environment. I have no idea if we're going to see other long-term chemistry-based solutions, people keep talking about ammonia but it's too far out of my knowledge to argue for or against.
[0] I'm 52° north and for the last 6 months was wearing T-shirts indoors for an average of 17 kWh per day (for everything: heating, hot water, appliances, tech) even though there were a few times I accidentally left a huge window open for hours. It's very well insulated and has a heat pump.
[1] Longer days closer to the equator. North tip of Lapland has 52 days without sunrise in winter[2], but it's just a question of "how much money and what's the cheaper alternative" for a grid connection that ultimately ends up in the Sahara where the winter solstice day length is 10 hours[3].
It's not clear how north-south grid connections are supposed to address this. You can create a long-distance transmission line from New York to Florida, but it's winter in Florida at the same time as it's winter in New York. Can you create a long distance transmission line from New York to Brazil? Even if you could in theory, probably not in practice, and even regardless of the technical factors nobody is going to want that kind of cross-border dependency for something as important as heating.
> You can create a long-distance transmission line from New York to Florida, but it's winter in Florida at the same time as it's winter in New York.
On 21 December, the day is about 77 minutes longer in Miami than in NYC, and panels in Miami aren't going to be covered in snow.
> Can you create a long distance transmission line from New York to Brazil?
Yes. $$$.
Spend enough (production is high enough for this, yes I have checked, it's just how much money you want to spend) and it could be from NYC to Perth Australia.
> Even if you could in theory, probably not in practice, and even regardless of the technical factors nobody is going to want that kind of cross-border dependency for something as important as heating.
Just repurposing that gas used for heating to generating electricity for heat pumps is a big step forward, delivering more heat for less gas and synergises well with wind and batteries which further reduce gas usage.
Gas boilers are now the leading source of NOx pollution in London since they've made so much progress on traffic sources.
Well sure, but if the premise is that we're going to replace everything with solar and batteries, that one's the hard one.
Whereas heat pumps powered by nuclear reactors work pretty well, if you could get the cost of nuclear reactors under control by getting mass production going.
https://thedriven.io/2025/03/25/byd-leads-unstoppable-charge... ("In 2024, 3,100 GWh of fully commissioned battery-cell manufacturing capacity was online, more than 2.5x that of annual demand. This has driven massive demand growth for EVs and stationary energy storage (BESS) systems globally, with China continuing to dominate.")
Global BESS deployments soared 53% in 2024 - https://www.energy-storage.news/global-bess-deployments-soar... - January 14, 2025 ("Storage installations in 2024 beat expectations with 205GWh installed globally, a staggering y-o-y increase of 53%. The grid market has once again been the driver of growth, with more than 160GWh deployed globally, of which 98% was lithium-ion.")
To put that number into perspective: That's about three days of Germany's electricity usage. And we can easily absorb 2-3 days in the electric grid alone.
Oh please don't misunderstand me: We will end up using solar (or wind, which is really just solar with an extra detour), mostly because we have about 4 orders of magnitude more energy available there than we need. I just wanted to put the (admittedly impressive sounding) number of 3,100 GWh annual battery production capacity in perspective.
And to further qualify that: The capacity is increasing rapidly (but we will need it)
It is increasing. At the moment it is slowed because for the longest time we were fine with just hydro, pumped hydro, gas peaker plants and the natural inertia of the power plants' turbines and generators. Now demand is big enough that even lithium-ion is deployed for grid storage, despite lithium-ion being optimized for the opposite use case (light portable power storage). Lots of options that are more optimized for grid storage are in various stages of development, but it takes time for them to be brought to maturity and for operators to gain experience and confidence with them.
It will. And define massively. People overestimate and under-specify these numbers. Mostly this is just economics. The cost of 1kwh of battery is trending towards 50$ for manufacturers and trending down over time. So, installing a few kwh/mwh/gwh of battery is not the end of the world depending on your needs.
Maybe, but significant technological development will still be needed, and it will depend a lot on the number of folks who are comfortable with their car losing range overnight (or policy).
> Storage capacity on the grid will need to massively increase as well for solar to go much further.
Probably not, if your definition of "much further" is an increase from 30% or something.
As a data point, one Australia State uses 70% renewables, average, over a year: https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/industry/hydrogen-and-ren... It's a mixture of wind and solar. Unlike other places that have a high percentage of renewable generation they do not have hydro of any sort.
The renewables have replaced coal and gas generation. They are at 70% because renewables were cheaper than fossil 20 years ago, because they have no coal or gas - it's all imported. The transition was purely driven by cost. The costs were higher than any other state in Australia, so they started earlier.
- “The reality is that you can’t buy a gas turbine for the next four to five years,” David Scaysbrook, the founder and co-head of Quinbrook Infrastructure Investors, one of the world’s biggest energy investors ... “They’re all sold out,” he says. And the price has also soared. “They are nearly four times the cost of what it was two years ago.”
- the rising cost of gas – it is about three times higher than it was a decade ago – has made the business case even more complicated (FYI: Australia is the worlds largest gas exporter - the problem isn't availability).
I went to a showing of Hackers in 35MM in LA last year and the director said they envisioned the hacker scene as the modern Punk music scene where computers were the instruments of creativity, like their guitars. And this is why the movie is actually timeless. It got the actual core identity that makes hackers hackers. Another fun fact is that all of the shots of them navigating through the Gibson was shot practically with glass towers and projectors and putting the camera on a track which is pretty cool.
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