No. But not because AI isn’t gonna get better, but because hype is an ever moving goal post. Nobody gets excited about what’s already possible. Hype lives on vague promises of some amazing future that is right around the corner we promise. Then by the time it becomes apparent that a lot of the claims were nonsense and the actual developments were steadier and less dramatic, they’ve already moved onto new wild claims.
Trying to refund it, although pretty low chance since it’s well past the window. But that’s part of what makes it so bullshit to bring this in long after that window closed. I’d have refunded the game on the spot if it actually required the account creation from the get go. I refunded Red Dead 2 after it turned out to require a Rock Star account. Fortunately that was apparent on start up so I just quit and refunded.
Anyone got a recommendation for an open source alternative to discord? Basically just need voice, text, and screen sharing for a group of friends of like, 5-6 at most on at any time.
Even if I gotta pay to host a server, I’d rather do that than pay discord extortion money to avoid ads while still getting my data stolen.
-Will edit with more in a bit.
For me, I just recognize that AI, or any technology isn’t the problem. It’s context it exists in, who gets to use it, and how.
We shouldn’t have to choose between automating boring or dangerous jobs and letting people live dignified lives free from the fear of poverty. We shouldn’t have to choose between having AIs that can generate all sorts of interesting media quickly (even if a lot of it isn’t that good yet, it can still serve its purposes, like say, quickly mocking up an idea to see if it’s worth going forward with it.) and ruining the livelihoods of the real artists that made it possible. We also shouldn’t have to deal wit the mountain of garbage that will be created and shoved in our faces by corporations that don’t understand what the limitations of the technology are.
These are all capitalism problems. We should probably do something about that instead of asking dumb questions like if AI can really make “art” or if it’s copyright infringement.
But this is actually why crypto isn’t a real currency: we haven’t collectively agreed to value it, or at least not in any way that makes it useful as a medium for exchange. Ironically it can’t possibly become a proper currency while speculators are making its price so volatile. The very act of investing in it is making it worthless.
VR has been a thing for years now and has been getting cheaper over time. I’ve had no interest in using it whatsoever. Clearly the thing that needed to change was for it to get MORE expensive. Thanks Apple! Always giving the customer what they didn’t know they wanted!
$10 million easy. Sure maybe you could get more if you were going back in time and insider trading on everything. But $10m is already enough money to live a comfortable life, especially if you just invest it in something safe. And that way you don’t need to go through school and puberty again.
They don’t even try to be competitive on technology or service though. If they were making a comparable or even superior product and people were sticking with Steam anyway for the network effect I’d agree they’d be justified in doing more to attract customers. But they just want to use their pile of money to buy their way into a market without putting in the work to design and develop a superior product.
Satisfaction that the rich are going to get fucked by climate catastrophe and ecosystem collapse just as much as everyone else. The climate change deniers will starve just like the rest of us.
They will eventually… but in the mean time it definitely doesn’t affect them the same as the rest of us. When some places start becoming unlivable, they can just move to the ones that will last longer. When food and water becomes scarce they’ll hoard what’s left. When the air becomes unhealthy to breathe they’ll have filters. It’s gonna be a long time before they see any actual consequences they can’t buy their way out of.
Just be depressed and try to distract myself. At one point I thought I could change things by getting involved in politics. I very quickly realized how pointless that was. Of course now even my distractions also keep getting ruined. So… idk.
They do the same thing that the horde of shitty streaming services do: Hold content hostage through exclusivity deals so they can gain market share without actually providing a comparable technology or service as their competitor.
Not that this has anything to do with Jan 6th since it was just right wingers throwing a hissy fit, but elections in America don’t work. People aren’t given real alternatives to the establishment through all sorts of structural barriers. The government doesn’t represent people’s interests to any statistically significant degree. When you consider the US’s efforts to coup left wing governments around the world, it’s easy to extrapolate that if we ever were to successfully elect someone who could enact real change, the military/intelligence agencies would step in to stop them.
You don’t need to defend our broken system just to call right wingers fascists. If anything their prominence is an indictment of our system. That our government is more open to people who want to subjugate the majority of the country and violate our supposed constitutional rights than people who represent the majority of the country tells you all you need to know about American “democracy.” And before you say it, no, it’s not because a lot of people want fascism, they’re still in the minority by far, but our electoral process is set up to favor them over more majoritarian interests.
I don’t think that’s entirely true. Or at least not in the longer term view of it. YT isn’t just some random store that doesn’t want to deal with an unruly customer. It’s a big tech monopoly platform. Like the other tech giants, their strategy has always hinged on becoming the only game in town. And they predictably use the same tactics monopolies have been using for the past century:
Offer the product at such a low price that you take a loss and use your hoard of money to outlast would-be competitors who don’t have a massive pot of money to burn. In YT/Google terms this is the fact that it’s a free site and up until very recently they’ve done little to nothing about adblocking users despite being one of the biggest tech companies in the world, knowing it is happening, (It was in their chrome extensions search, plus they don’t pay the creators for the no-ad views.) and having the capability to stop it at least for their browser, which a lot of people were already using. Why not go to war with adblockers sooner when their entire business is built on advertising? Because that’s the cost they were willing to bear to turn YT into a monopoly. They could take the hit on not getting ad revenue from some users, but some hypothetical competitor certainly couldn’t.
Make switching hard. A site that’s grown as large as YT has massive network effects. For viewers, that’s where all the videos are. For creators that’s where all the viewers are. For both that’s where there is enough of a community that there are lively discussions in comments. Nobody outside nerds like us is going to some external site they’ve never heard of. If you want to get your stuff out there, you use YT. Then there are things like creator contracts to further discourage switching.
Ad block users aren’t valueless to YT, or at least they weren’t. They were a portion of those viewers and commenters that contributed to YT becoming THE video social media site. They comment, share videos around, maybe even contribute directly to creators to allow them to keep making YT video. You maybe lose a out on a couple cents from the lost ad views for each one of them, but the value of the network effect gained by keeping them around this long far outweighs that loss.
EDIT: Oh and how could I forget: They get data from you. Sure, they can’t directly sell ads for you off that data, but the more data they have in general, the better they are able to make predictions about other similar users, which is valuable.
They’re doing this now because they can. They no longer have meaningful competition to kill off. The few that kinda cross into their market are also massive tech platform monopolies that are currently engaged in the exact same thing. They can’t expand their customer base anymore, so now they’re extracting more money from the captive audience they have.
And it’s not just adblock users they’re increasing the “price” for. YT has added an insane number of ads to their videos and increased the price of YT Premium. If adblockers died tomorrow, they wouldn’t be like “What a relief, now that we’ve gotten rid of the freeloaders, we can finally lower our prices for everyone since they aren’t bearing the burden of the non-payers.” They just get to tighten the screws even further because they would have gained an even more dominant position over their users.
In a fairer world, we’d all pay a reasonable amount for the things we use or move on to an alternative if we’d rather not. But we don’t live in that world. We live in capitalist hell world where everything is a monopoly and the government is so captured by those corporate interests that they basically never enforce even the meager anti-trust laws we do have.
Because he’s right wing? This isn’t that complicated. People only get killed for actually threatening the gravy train. If this were another country the US would have backed the coup. Im still not convinced this will end with anything more serious than Trump getting a vacation in rich people jail.
It feels telling of corporate media that they chose to frame the company under suspicion of fraud complaining about the government investigation ruining their profits as a “warning.” As though they’re experts reporting on their predictions about a natural phenomenon or a policy proposal and not… you know… the criminals crying foul.
I figured it just made sense to lean into it once I realized what it was. I didn’t go FULL murder hobo, but I ended up doing enough to trigger a bunch of special quest stuff unique to the Dark Urge. I still think this was probably better as a 2nd play through, but I was pretty satisfied with all the content the game had to fill the gaps caused by me… suddenly cutting off some quest lines.
I’ve been playing the Cyberpunk DLC and just finished that last night. Aside from some annoying bugs that was pretty fun.
I’m nearing the end of my first BG 3 playthrough that I’ve been streaming with a friend. We decided to go Dark Urge and it’s made this kind of a weird first playthrough. It’s been fun but I think in hindsight it would have been better to have a more normal first run then go back for this. Also, found a kind of funny bug (?) in the vampire boss fight. The boss has some property that says he can’t be moved by physical or magical means. But when I threw that legendary spear that has a knock back AoE, it sent him off the cliff and that was the fight aside from mopping up the ads.
Aside from that I’m always playing TFT occasionally. I climbed higher than I ever did before: 200 LP masters before I hit another funk and started backsliding.
I was playing the new DLC recently and I encountered some brand new bugs that I didn’t see on my first playthrough. Sometimes after completing a quest, the game would just lock me out of certain features like the map, journal, inventory, phone, etc. only way to fix it was to reload.
It’s crazy that this is real. It looks like a comic someone would make to make fun of the idea. Like the fact that they’re watching some guy shoot someone, then the burger commercial comes on and the guy stands up and cheers “McDonalds!” Before sitting back down to watch more of guy shooting other guy.
This is peak “dumb Americans” humor, and they’re using this unironically to describe their business idea.