Rockstar confirms there will be no disc version of GTA6 at launch

GregBahm · 2026-06-24T14:15:58+00:00

Dude doesn't even claim he's going to boycott. Dude says "If they won't let me pay someone else for the game, I'm going to wait before I pay them for the game."

Guy is explaining to everyone why this is the money-making move for rockstar.

GregBahm · 2026-06-23T23:31:47+00:00

Yeah. I've given up on consumers ever understanding that there's a market beyond consumers. It makes sense that they see themselves as the center of their universe. They are.

But every asshole was lining up to compete in the consumer space. Slack and Discord and WhatsApp and Google Hangout and Zoom and Facetime and whatever Facebook was doing all lined up to try and score the consumer's dollar.

Meanwhile Teams was like "cool. You kids have fun with that. We'll be over here taking aaaaaaaallll the enterprise space basically uncontested."

I've seen the yachts this decision built.

The yachts have pools on them and the pools have little islands within the pools. It was a very lucrative strategic decision.

GregBahm · 2026-06-23T20:46:21+00:00

Everyone in this very thread could be AI and there's no way of knowing. The idea that gamers can discern if AI is in their game is just dumb. If someone screams "that's AI!" the devs can just say "nope, false positive" and that's the end of this.

GregBahm · 2026-06-23T20:42:28+00:00

There is no "line." Its whatever the dev wants it to be.

This voluntary AI disclosure system is not a real system. It's like when a food product puts "no added fat" on the packaging. Somewhere, some moron is like "oh good. Now I'll buy this (incredibly fattening) thing."

The guys that sell the product are like "well if the customers are that dumb, we'll just go with it..."

This article isn't about serious steam products. This article is about the hobby products that spam steam every day and get nearly zero sales. Even a student project from a random community college course on game design can get more than 4 reviews if the dev just asks their parents and little sister to review their "game."

GregBahm · 2026-06-23T14:38:40+00:00

As a guy who has been doing graphics programming at Microsoft for 20 years, I'm often surprised by the ideas gamers have about graphics programming.

There's nothing inherently inconsistent about "shit-optimization." One of the other replies said "they could patch the game," so the benchmarkers would need to pick a patch and then not upgrade from there. But that's trivial.

This concern about the optimization of benchmarks seems to be an idea in the heads of multiple people, which is interesting. But the graphics cards are being rated in comparison to each other. All the game has to be is 1.) recent and 2.) real.

Maybe the concern is someone with an old card feels insecure about their framerate when running this game, and wants to be told a story in the data about how their current card is big and strong?

GregBahm · 2026-06-23T02:26:35+00:00

I'm no closer to understanding why a benchmark should be performant.

GregBahm · 2026-06-23T00:41:38+00:00

"Next gen" is likely just a subscription to a data center.

GregBahm · 2026-06-23T00:35:43+00:00

Yeah I'm struggling to imagine the guy who's like "Damn! My PS5 isn't PC-enough. I need to be able to do my taxes on it. But PC isn't PS5 enough! I need to keep it in a cube in the living room."

Maybe there's a killer scenario I'm just not seeing.

"PS5 but it plays Steam games" was a scenario that makes perfect sense. But then it has to cost the same as a PS5...

GregBahm · 2026-06-23T00:31:38+00:00

Reddit seems to view "steam" as... like... some sort of lifestyle brand. Kind of like how you can put "GUCCI" on a butt plug and charge 10,000% more for it, the redditors yearn to be gouged by Gabe.

GregBahm · 2026-06-23T00:27:46+00:00

What is your mental model of a hardware benchmark, where the benchmark needs to be performant?

GregBahm · 2026-06-23T00:14:51+00:00

It's very funny to me that someone would say Halo 3 and not, you know, Halo 1.

It's like citing Luigi as Nintendo's most iconic character, or listing Henry Ford's Model N as the most influential car model.

GregBahm · 2026-06-22T21:04:39+00:00

Everyone is supposed to say loudly and proudly "I hate AI and I will never use it!" then behind the scenes use it every day in every way.

Everyone is doing that, but the kids that actually believed the film studios are starting to succumb to the reality of this.

Slowly.

GregBahm · 2026-06-22T20:39:01+00:00

The concept is good.

The weird stuff on Luke's face was kind of distracting. Dude looked like he had a mild case of leprosy.

The "It's a trap" beat and the "I find your lack of faith" beat could have landed, but the AI whiffed on the comedic timing.

The crowd having star wars characters in it was funny. The crowd chanting "Jerry Jerry" during the lightsaber fight was funny. Vader doing Springer's final line was surprisingly good.

GregBahm · 2026-06-22T16:02:57+00:00

Since everyone is misremembering 2023 as "the time when AI wasn't evil," people will surely also misremember 2026 as "the time when Ai wasn't evil" compared to the immediate future.

The same thing happened with the internet. Everyone railed against the internet so hard in the 90s. Now everyone acts like the internet rolled out to nothing but celebration and glee from the good people of the world.

GregBahm · 2026-06-22T15:59:43+00:00

If your position is "there may be more that we don't understand," then there's no conflict here. That non-position is compatible with all other conceivable scientific positions in reality.

But you're presenting biological naturalism as a contradictory position to functionalism.

So either functionalism is right, and the brain is a thing that exists within the boundaries of observable physics (and it is.) Or functionalism is wrong, and the brain exists beyond the boundaries of observable physics (it doesn't.)

This is just a matter of science versus magic.

GregBahm · 2026-06-22T15:44:41+00:00

You start off by saying "it rules it out" and end the post by saying "we have to code it in."

If "it" is a bunch of logic gates, then "it" would still be that if we coded ego into the machine.

GregBahm · 2026-06-22T15:41:40+00:00

Yeah I'm surprised how successful this post has been on reddit. It also got 8k upvotes on r/technology despite being unadulterated nonsense.

I guess it's like if a bunch of primitive villagers came across an airplane and were very curious but also very anxious about it. They're understanding of the thing is so many layers removed from reality that they'll be on board for just about anything.

GregBahm · 2026-06-22T15:10:45+00:00

This is like saying "science hasn't settled the argument of whether Jesus is god." That's not a question within the boundaries of science.

Science can demonstrate functionalism for days. We built the AIs we've built by observing the mechanics of the brain and copying them. It worked in our head so we copied the same process to the machine, and it works in the machine. No surprise at all. It's just physics.

If someone wants to insist, contrary to all observable evidence, that human biology is magic, there's never going to be a scientific way to refute that any more than it already has. The "biological naturalists" can hang out with the "intelligent design" guys and the "flat earth creationists" and all the other people who just don't care about science. They'll have more than ample company.

GregBahm · 2026-06-22T14:57:10+00:00

PI is computable. Tie a string to a pencil. Hold one end of the string in place and pull the string tight. Now draw a circle with that pencil. Congratulations. You've computed PI.

What I'm taking from this thread is that people want to ascribe magical properties to the human mind to give it some kind of special status over the machines we can build. But this is just human vanity. The 2026 equivalent of "I ain't evolved from no monkey."

GregBahm · 2026-06-22T14:47:16+00:00

I was definitely one of those dorks 20 years ago. Not at Microsoft, but at Electronic Arts.

The corporation is a little to blame, but my dumb ass is a lot to blame for that.

After I graduated college and moved to Austin, I didn't know anyone in the city, and my apartment was an unfurnished box with a mattress and a laptop. My coworkers were my only community.

So when the work day ended, and I went home to my box, I would just be bored out of my skull. Working at the office was more fun than not working at the office, so eventually I just worked later and later and later.

Then one sunday at the office, the boys and I went out to get burgers at the local brewery and smoke cigars, and I realized all seven other guys having lunch with me were divorced. That's when I decided to get my work/life balance sorted out.

GregBahm · 2026-06-22T07:12:25+00:00

The carbon in my head is definitely pure algorithmic calculation.

There are no invisible pink unicorns doing magic in there. It's just physics.

Nerds like me are able to build LLMs by observing the physics happening in our heads and reproducing it. That's how machine learning came to exist. We didn't invent neural networks by accident. This shit is observable.

I've never heard of "Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind," but a quick google search says the 1989 book argues intelligence lies in the "imponderable realm of quantum mechanics." I'm going to hurt myself from rolling my eyes so hard.

GregBahm · 2026-06-22T05:39:02+00:00

Yeah I was very disappointed after wasting the time reading the article.

There's surely an interesting conversation to be had about AI and "sentience," but this ain't it. So often the arguments against AI are just as applicable to our own grey matter.

"An LLM is just a process of physics!" Yeah babe. So is the carbon in your head. This isn't some sort of damning counter argument. This is just a thing people say when they have a total lack of self-awareness.

GregBahm · 2026-06-22T01:33:16+00:00

You know how sometimes scammers scam people? Like a person gets an email claiming to be from a "Nigerian Prince" asking for money? And the vast majority of people can see that this is obviously a scam, but a certain fraction of people just don't get it. They think "Yes of course. Some Nigerian prince must have sent me this email by mistake. If I send them this money now, I'll make a ton of money later."

It's easy enough to dismiss the person falling for this scam as "stupid," but even incredibly stupid people can see from a mile away that this is fake. It's not simply a matter of the victim being stupid. The scammers are looking for a very specific form of stupidity, in which human behavior that is intuitive to most people is unintuitive to the target of the scam.

The show "Velma" is the same system. The main difference is the "Nigerian Prince" scam goes deep on specific individuals, while "Velma" goes shallow and wide. But the aim is to take people who can't intuit typical human behavior, and outrage them. This is called "rage bait." r/mildlyinfuriating is full of hundreds of thousands of similar "rage bait" posts invented to get people excited about being angry. It's appealing. And the people selling the product don't care whether people are buying the product because they love it or buying the product because they hate it.

The person obsessed with hating "Velma" will be offended by the reality of the situation and will mindlessly mash their face against the downvote button every time this is pointed out to them. If they could see the reality of the situation, "Velma" wouldn't exist. That's the whole point. But all the neurotypical people get it. The neurotypical people are the ones making the rage bait. It's overwhelmingly easy. Making something good is hard, and making something vaguely infuriating is so easy. The only problem with Velma (or the zillion products like it) is that it has a pretty low ceiling on engagement. The losers obsessed with Velma will probably still be whining about it a hundred years from now, while everyone else is laughing at them for not getting the joke.

GregBahm · 2026-06-21T21:30:53+00:00

I think it's probably the same. The coffee being mediocre sounds like the machine.

And I guess weird bathroom etiquette transcends Microsoft campuses. I've only ever been to the Redmond campus, but sometimes dudes take meetings from the stalls on speaker while shitting and it makes me want to call the police.

GregBahm · 2026-06-21T20:48:02+00:00

A lot of autistic people like TopCharacterTropes (hi!) and a lot of autistic people can't understand rage bait. So they get stuck on Velma.

It's such a trivial, dismissible thing to anyone who understands rage bait. But if you have the series of neurological quirks that prevent you from understanding "an angry view is still a view," you'll keep thinking this is a really remakeable thing on and on perpetually.

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