In last month’s journal club, we talked about ace characters on TV.

Why Video Games Cost So Much to Make | Jason Schreier (video, 17 min) – Schreier is a highly regarded games journalist, and I mean journalist rather than games critic.  He explains why video games are so expensive.  In short, it’s labor costs.  Take the salary of a programmer, multiply by the number of employees and number of years, and it’s a lot of money. Of course, any video game at any price is inherently an incredible deal because video games are great.

I disagree on Schreier about why programmers are so expensive.  The salary of a tech workers is more than enough to live and raise a family in the SF Bay Area.  Like, there are many workers who manage with less.  Even within the games industry, there are lower paid workers than the programmers.  One mustn’t imagine tech workers like we’re subsistence farmers!  Our skills are in demand, and so we are able to take a profit margin on our labor.  Which is what I would wish for all workers.

Why are longtermists so much less focused on human extinction these days? | Effective Altruism Forum – Just looking at EA discussions as an outsider, i.e. gawking.  This author observes that EAs are becoming less focused on the AI alignment problem, and more focused on AI governance.  AI alignment refers to our ability to align AI with human interests (and they’re basically worried about extinction scenarios where we all get turned into paperclips or batteries or whatever).  AI governance refers to the question of how we decide how to use AI for, and who makes that decision.

I’m pleased by the direction of this shift (however small it may be).  I’m always saying, I’m not worried about the AI alignment problem, I’m worried about the billionaire alignment problem.  Assuming that we can get AI to do what tell it to do, the problem is that it’s billionaires who are telling the AI what to do.  Billionaire interests are demonstrably at odds with our own, and what’s worse, there’s no way to correct it with advancements in computer technology.  What we need are advancements in politics, but right now politics are regressing backwards.

is VR finally good now? | camwing (video, 41 min) – VR is doing worse now than it was before, and it’s arguably because of Meta.  Meta made VR headsets that didn’t require any external devices, but they took a big hit to processing power.  So the most popular headset on the market has about the power of a smartphone, and can’t really support the graphics that VR arguably needs.  This created a vicious cycle where game developers need to make games for low end hardware, players don’t want to play that, and then developers don’t want to develop for that.  VR may come back when standalone headsets eventually catch up.

Who-who: John Morales | Life’s a Gas – Bébé Mélange interviewed John Morales, a regular commenter on FTB.  Just some fun if you’ve been around the network for a while.