Expedition 33 is freakishly good and it’s actually more of a AA budget at est $30mil.

Still, I think it’s easy to forget AAA’s successes next to the overall shitty syesten. Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate 3, Tears of the Kingdom, Spider-Man 2, Doom Eternal, Horizon Forbidden West, God of War Ragnarok, Ghost of Tsushima, Diablo 4, Armored Core 6 are all AAA with solid launches in the last 5 years as far as I remember, and arguably with distinct soul.

These days, probably Expedition 33, but there lots of others every year. Probably moreso than 15 years ago by raw numbers.

People over focus on AAA budget games, but there are several indie and AA budget games that are comparable or even surpass production quality of AAA games 15 years ago.

AAA budget these days should really be called like S-tier budget. In 2010 and earlier, the top end of budgets were like $50-100 million ($70-140 million after inflation) including marketing. Budgets started ballooning after that and hese days, top end budgets are more like $500-700 million)

You know, we restrict and ban certain drugs like fentanyl and heroin respectively because their addiction potential is so high and can cause a lot of harm at the population level.

Sure people have individual responsibility, but it’s also unrealistic to expect most people to resist an entire social and structural environments geared around certain behaviours, like drinking alcohol or smoking back in the day. Not everyone has the same has the same ironclad will and perfect emotionless reasoning as you, especially youth–remember they used to have smoking ads aimed at kids? And now it’s vaping.

While a lot of things I can easily resist, like narcotics and alcohol, I still get influenced by certain types of ads to try things, get addicted to certain games, and eat way too much junk food. For a lot of things, you can’t know it’s going to be a problem for you until it’s a problem. Plenty of people buy a few loot boxes here and there and don’t develop a gambling addiction. That doesn’t mean gambling addiction isn’t a risk and problem to take seriously and address at the systemic level, not just leave it to the individual.

I suspect survivability bias plays into it, as I imagine an empathetic and self-reflective anti-war film in the is more likely than a straight “US are the villains” film to be funded and see financial, and therefore popular, success in the US. It makes sense why domestic industries will tend to tell domestic-facing stories. I’d say the size of the US film industry means you actually get more diversity in war films compared to ones you see in places like Japan or Germany.

https://anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/haterdom/2025/08/26/i-am-an-ai-hater.html This article has been going around lately and it’s a great summation of strong anti-AI arguments in context of their dominant form as tools made by billionaires for billionaire goals.

I think the debate around reducing complex tasks into simple and ignorant ones (pressing a button) is worthwhile, but not the most urgent one. Most car owners used to know basics of how engines worked in order to do basic repairs. Now they’re more complex and most people don’t know what a piston or timing belt is, you just take it into the shop. And really, does the parent with a reliable econobox for getting from A to B really need to know? Same thing with PCs. But there’s still a healthy proportion of people who are into these things and preserve and innovate the knowledge.

The standards of necessary life skills also change over time. Baking bread, food preservation, fire starting & wood handling, penmanship, paper map navigation, phone etiquette, etc… these used to be basic life skills. For a good 1-2 generations, installing software from physical media and manual updates, configuring email clients, and keyword searching has been the norm. Now those skills are becoming less relevant.

This isn’t an argument for AI, it’s more reflecting on the fear around losing skills and what really matters. The argument around critical thinking and creativity are more pressing to me. But it’s also not a new argument. Similar arguments have been made around new media in the past, around novels, radio, TV, videogames, and most recently Gen-Z’s post-covid social media-fueled not-so-social ways of being. Of course the context and speed of AI re: big data is novel, but the themes are the same. It’s a scary inflection point with massively disruptive implications for how humans do and do not interact with each other and express themselves.

If I may make an argument for faith in humanity, it is true that humans are deeply lazy and refuse to change until it’s too late. Humans are also deeply curious, creative, and are constantly inventing new ways to interact 😸💩😝. While I think we have to be vigilant about fostering critical thinking and creativity. We are also in a period of great upheaval, oppression, and hardship. Tragically, it is also during such times that humans create the greatest art and think the most critically.

Fuck AI and all that for the ethical implications, but the comment is dumb because they are placing their contempt on people who may lack certain skills rather than on IP theft, environmental waste, or exploitation.

People literally hire other people to tasks all the time because they can’t, don’t have time, or it’s not their role. We literally have robots to wash and dry our asses for us. Replace AI with service or employee in the comment and it reads as ignorant. Replace AI with assistive technology and it gets really mean.

TL;DR The problem isn’t that people need help with tasks, it’s with the ethics of how the help is created. The comment misses this distinction.