I’m not pretending anything, I never stated that marketing pretends to present products as they factually are. Look selling a product that no one wants is really fricking hard, no matter how much budget you have. So in order for something to sell well, people most have already wanted it. It must solve a problem, increase productivity or just fill the daddy shaped holes in their hearts, but they must want it and they cannot be truly manipulated into buying it unless you flat out lie, which is not really a good model on which to build a long term company on.

All I’m saying is that if marketing convinces people to buy a shiny poop they are in all the freedom to do so. But marketing never had the ability to manipulate people into buying something for which there is no desire. The shiny poop might fulfill some inner desire of the masses, who cares? They wanted it, they got it.

Comparing opioids to a truck or a phone is wild. I guess if opioids was something you could just walk into a store and buy without a prescription you would be somewhat right but that hasn’t been the case in a long time. The situation you describe is more about physical availability than mental availability which I think is more to the point of what we are discussing here but sure I can concede that rugged phones being less visible than the sleeker phones leads to them being purchased less often. But again, Samsung once had a mainline galaxy phone that was rugged and it didn’t do well, so maybe people really don’t want an ugly brick of a phone and want what is more aesthetically pleasant.

Let me put it this way, if you do not trust that people can make good purchase decisions. Why do we allow people to make any decisions at all? Much less participate in things so important like democracy?

Your line of thinking, that of removing completely the responsibility of the individual in a free market dynamic will necessarily take you to one or two conclusions depending on what you value more: we accept that the masses will not necessarily make the best choices available but they are absolutely free to make said choices, or that we should divide society between enlightened and non enlightened and the enlightened will dictate how the non enlightened will live because obviously these monkeys need guidance in order to make good decisions.

I flip flop between one or the other, but I always settle in the former because I can’t guarantee that I won’t be lumped with the monkeys.

Is the marketing department putting a gun to your head to force you to buy anything?

I have worked in marketing, and I have a very good, almost academic understanding of it. One of the fundamental rules of marketing is that you cannot create a desire for a product, you can only create products that satisfy a desire. The big trucks are not there because the corporations forced the people to buy them, they are there because the people wanted to buy them and monkeys that we are as soon as we see many big trucks we also want one. There are small trucks in the market. They don’t sell as well as the big trucks. It’s simple free market dynamics and I really hate this pov because it makes it seem as though the corporations dictate what people want when it has always been the other way around.

The real disconnect is that you as an individual are alienated from the wants of the mass market, and this is all too common in online communities because guess what? People who spend time on discussion boards online do not think like the average person. Thankfully as barriers to entry dissolve even in markets like car manufacturing which used to be huge, we start getting more diversity of products, some of them tailored to niche buyers like yourself. But you cannot ask that these products be supported at the same level as the product that 80% of the people want, you have to live with the tradeoffs.

My critique is not of the content itself but rather it’s presentation, and its over reliance on what I can only call “millennial humor”.

I don’t think it was the lack of open world that put me off from it, as I’ve always preferred hub based games ever since Dragon Age Origins. I think it was just the writing honestly. I don’t like the whole “le soooo epic zany & ttlly rndm” writing that it shares with Borderlands. I don’t find it funny, endearing nor entertaining. It’s just annoying to me and it was everywhere at the time because millennial culture was at its height.

Then go buy the better product, it’s a free market. Whenever Apple is no longer fulfilling the expectations of their customer, they will start to lose market share to their competitors that do. So go ahead, buy that Android tablet.

Have you used a Surface Pro? It’s a terrible tablet and a terrible laptop. Thats what the iPad would be if it ran MacOS. Also the battery life would be horrendous. Maybe as an option or something but if it’s not gonna be used by a significant chunk of usersApple is not going to spend time on it. People online are not representative of the market.

If you like Apple devices you also know they are opinionated. Sure there’s no reason not to allow X or Y thing on it, but if it requires dev time why would Apple invest on something that they do not see as a priority for the device? The iPad is not aimed at developers or engineers it’s aimed at creatives and board room executives. I know many tattoo artists that use it, they have 0 complaints about the device. I know it’s widely used by illustrators as well.

And yea it’s true Android has had all those features for ages, but who gives a fuck like I said? The apps are not there and no one wants an android Tablet because of it. If those features were so good and so better than what the iPad offers people would be ditching their iPads for Android tablets, but that’s not what happens at all.

I tried giving it a chance but it just felt like a bad Fallout 3 with Borderlands writing. Got to like the third planet I think and I dropped it.

I really liked Avowed though, which elicited similar reactions.

It’s gonna be on gamepass, thats the cheap option.

Yeah I guess that’s what they’ll have to prove to win this.

This is the problem with android fans. You’ll say Android does X or Y thing and has been able to do it for years! Apple sucks!

But the reality is that it doesn’t matter because the app ecosystem for Android tablets is abysmal, so who gives a fuck about the capabilities of Android tablets if there’s nothing worth doing on them? Most Android tablet apps are still phone apps. It’s terrible all around.

And I don’t mean this in a platform war way, it’s just that it’s not a straight up comparison as it would be with Phones which are more up to par.

Terrible idea man. Can you imagine Trump being in charge of funding all of the arts? I don’t want any government with that sort of power over creative endeavor.

The current system works. You’re not paying for someone to hit copy paste, you’re paying for access to the idea that is physically embodied in the content if that makes sense. The creator decides whether you pay for that or not, and how much to pay. But many pirates don’t want to pay, don’t want to watch ad; in summary they simply believe that they are entitled to the work of the creative, which to me is absurd and outrageous.

But yeah that’s what I meant about AI training. If there are Shrek images out there that Disney willingly published and I trained an AI on it there should be no issue because it would be no different than me looking at Shrek and then making a drawing of it.

Piracy to me is not the same thing, I’m actually not in favor of piracy, because the way I see it if you want access to a content, and the creator says that you need to pay for that content then you will pay for it. If not then you don’t really want access to it, or you in fact simply did not want to pay for it in which case it’s very similar to stealing. None of the pro piracy arguments convince me, except the ones in which it’s about consuming the content in the format that you want. Ie I buy books from Amazon, but only because I want the writer to get their cut, but I will either remove the DRM off the book or pirate it. So yes if the AI was trained using for example a book whose content is not freely available and ChatGPT simply pirates the content of the book to train their models, then they are in the wrong.

But here’s the thing about my argument regarding AI training data. I never played Warcraft3 nor World of Warcraft! I only saw the cool art that was displayed on GameStop, online and on shirts on hot topic. I never paid Blizzard for access to Arthas, the design of Arthas was publicly accessible to me by virtue of Blizzard trying to promote their game. So I guess what I’m saying is if the content they trained a model is publicly accessible to people without payment, then there’s no reason AI cannot be trained on it.

Easy, ten gajillion dollars. Payable in stock.

Yes I under that, but is Midjourney profiting off these characters? Ie are people paying for these services just so they can create images of these specific characters ? I think that’s the question that needs to be answered here.

I mean you’re not paying piecemeal as you would for an artist to create your commission of Shrek getting railed by Donkey, you pay for the service which in turns creates anything you tell it to.

It’s like I’m still not convinced that training AI with copyrighted material is infringement, because in my mind is not any different than me seeing Arthas when I was kid, thinking he was cool as fuck and then deciding to make my own OC inspired by him. Was I infringing on Blizzard’s copyrighted character for taking inspiration from its design? Was Mike Pondsmith infringing on William Gibson’s copyright when he invented Cyberpunk?

I dunno were I stand on this one. I can see Disneys argument and agree with it on first glance, but at the same time, is the artists doing fan art infringing copyright then?

Samsung used to have rugged mainline Galaxy phones. Guess what? They didn’t sell well so they don’t make them anymore.

Mass market doesn’t want this, is that simple. The people who want it are over represented online. It’s a similar case with people who want small phones, why do you think they don’t make them anymore? Because hardly anyone buys them.

It’s not a compromise, it’s a reflection of the fact that most people don’t care about these durable devices so they don’t sell well and thus they can’t be supported very well or for very long. This is just a reality of the market.

Theres this pervasive mentality in online spaces that completely disregards the consumer’s role in all of the design choices of products. They completely ignore that it is the consumer who signaled they wanted this and continue to signal they want this by buying more of the same. Corporations cannot create desires, they only fulfill them. Consumers have demonstrated they want sleek devices that are easy to operate and last only as long as they are not outclassed by next thing. The alternative of course is coming to the realization that consumers prefer convenience and novelty than durability above anything else but once you realize that you become elitist and that’s a big no no. So it must be the corporations fault!