Light Start: Twitter wants you to touch grass, Steam vs. AI, Final Fantasy’s too hot to handle and AC IV: Black Flag 2

Twitter’s ‘rate limit’ is somebody’s worst nightmare

For the first time ever, Twitter has introduced a change designed to keep people off the platform. Yup, you read that right. This is odd since Musk’s Twitter caper (usually) primarily focuses on sucking users into hours-long doom-scrolling sessions. The change – which is only a temporary one according to Musk – involves the addition of a tweet ‘Rate limit’ that defines how many posts users can see on Twitter per day before being told to go outside and touch some grass.

Obviously, Musk isn’t doing this out of some noble quest to save those ‘chronically online’ users from a life of bed sores. According to the eccentric billionaire, Twitter’s rate limit was brought into effect to address “extreme levels” of data scraping and “system manipulation.” We thought it might have something to do with Twitter refusing to pay the bill for Google Cloud, which according to Engadget, had a 30 June renewal date, the day before Musk’s rate limit reign came into effect. Musk wouldn’t… lie, would he?

Still, what’s important is that the rate limit is here, and we can’t be sure for how long. When Musk first announced the change, he said that “Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day” while unverified accounts were given a 600 posts/day rule and new unverified accounts were given 300 posts/day. Since the policy’s introduction, Musk has since increased those limits to 10,000, 1,000, and 500 posts per day respectively.

At the time of writing, Musk hasn’t yet announced just how long the new policy will be in place for. Nor has he given up his dream of being the most annoying shitposter on the site – as is evidenced by this tweet poking fun at his app’s user base.

 

Valve would rather you didn’t use AI-generated assets

It’s not just you, video game developer and publisher Valve is also tired of AI. Not the concept as a whole, specifically, but rather the games on its platform that make use of AI-generated assets, according to an anonymous developer that recently made a post on Reddit which was spotted first by Simon Carless.

Apparently, “Valve is not willing to publish AI-generated content anymore,” said the anonymous developer after their own game was rejected from being published on the Steam store. The developer claims they’ve been trying to get a new game approved for around a month that contained “a few assets that were fairly obviously AI generated,” to which he received the following reply from Valve.

“While we strive to ship most titles submitted to us, we cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all of the necessary rights.” (The entire conversation can be seen on the Reddit post.) Based on its response, it seems Steam’s concerns are more to do with how the AI model in question was trained, and not the assets it generated.

“As the legal ownership of such AI-generated art is unclear, we cannot ship your game while it contains these AI-generated assets, unless you can affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game.”

Although the developer attempted to rectify the art and made changes by hand, Steam refused his second attempt, bleating the same response, causing the developer to believe his project had been flagged (as an AI project), and won’t be leaving its jail for some time, or will be banned entirely. Whether this is Steam’s definitive stance on all AI-related content going forward, remains to be seen.

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Final Fantasy 16 is too hot to handle. Literally.

The critically-acclaimed Final Fantasy XVI is barely a week old, and already some users are reporting that their PS5s are overheating and crashing thanks to the title. We knew the Game of Thrones-like game was taxing, but we’ve never seen a PS5 turn off entirely to avoid damaging its internal hardware. That’s a new one.

One Reddit user explains his issue, which, like others, occurs at the same spot in the game. “I just wanted to share my experience that I just witnessed when playing FFXVI. With the screenshot attached, this is where my PS5 went from quiet to berserk mode with the fan speed and suddenly blacking out in a matter of seconds. The PS5 played three beeps and shut off.”

It’s worth mentioning that the user in question was playing XVI in Graphics mode and HDR enabled, which adds a certain amount of strain to any game, not just FFXVI. Other players have reported their own issues with the game in the same spot, while others have noted that no issues befell their console. It appears that the bug, or whatever it is, is only affecting players who progress through in ‘Graphics mode’.

At the time of writing, Square Enix has yet to respond to the issue and there’s no telling if it will. It’s probably a good idea to switch to ‘Performance mode’ until the issue’s fixed, just to be safe.

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Do we need an Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag remake? It doesn’t matter

If there’s one thing the world can all agree on, it’s that Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is the best one in Ubisoft’s long-standing series. And if there’s one thing we won’t agree on, it’s whether the time is ripe for a remake of the pirate sim, a mere ten years after its release.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t really matter what you think. Kotaku is reporting that a revival of the open-world pirate adventure is in the works. The report indicates that Ubisoft Singapore is heavily involved in its production – one of the teams involved in the original game – and that it’ll pay closer attention to the game’s naval combat. If you ask us, it sounds like Ubisoft might finally have the online pirate sim it’s been dreaming of.

According to two of Kotaku’s sources, the title is still in early development (cough) which… doesn’t tell us much. Still, after Assassin’s Creed III Remastered was released in 2019, remaking the one game that’s all but guaranteed to make money sounds like a very Ubisoft thing to do.

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