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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • Eh, I’ll take it. Bluesky’s learned some lessons from the past, for what it’s worth. It has more than a few features that make the network lock-in less intense, so while I fully expect it to enshittify, I do think it’ll be less severe of an affair than it was for Twitter.

    What I’m more upset about is Threads. I can’t think of anything redeeming about that place.


  • I can’t say I’m too confident about data that was obtained by methods including 1) Facebook data collection (we trust that now?), 2) machine learning and 3) potentially nebulous, unspecific definitions of various political groups. Still, allow me to indulge in some confirmation bias, if you will:

    This shouldn’t surprise anyone, if you ask me. People are stressed and limited on time. Of course they’ll take shortcuts!

    On places like Bluesky, most articles, videos or news content I’d share would have more to do with how much I trust the person posting or sharing it than with its main body of content. I figure that someone I value has read it, and so I skip it, because reading it would feel like work and I have to deal with enough of that as it is.

    Places like here, I take more caution, but as a direct consequence of that you’ll notice I really don’t post very much at all. Comments, sure, but that’s because those are more my opinion than anything else. I don’t have the bandwidth to put through more effort than I already am.


  • Maybe learn how to use it correctly in its current state

    The slop being talked about in this article was made by OpenAI themselves. You know, the company at the forefront of the genAI/LLM bubble, with billions of dollars of money behind it?

    I don’t know what kind of mythical standard it is that you believe generative AI is capable of, but when even the organization at the forefront of the tech can’t make this shit look good, you can’t exactly claim it’s a skill issue.



  • I’ve always trusted games published by Annapurna to be something exciting, new, and high quality.

    That didn’t make them good either, though. Companies like them and Devolver Digital have had a bad habit of, for lack of a better term, using up developers and throwing them to the curb after. You’ll notice that a lot of stuff they publish get marketed as though Annapurna made them, which ends up hiding the actual developers behind the curtain, thereby robbing them of fans and thus seriously hurting their long-term prospects.




  • Monopolies depend on the government to exist.

    I very much disagree but respect a desire to not get into a debate, so I’ll leave it there.

    I really don’t know what that means

    “Your freedom ends at my face” is a saying used often here to contend with right-wing group’s insistence on “freedom,” often the kind that involves harming others; e.g. free speech absolutism and the “freedom” to spout neo-Nazi rhetoric that advocates for the murder of minorities, or the “freedom” to not get vaccinated and thus worsen a pandemic. A more full version might be “Your freedom to throw a punch ends where my face begins.” The idea is that it is fair to restrict a freedom if it supports the freedom of others — you might not trust governments to determine where those lines lie, and that’s fair, but that’s a separate issue.


  • I don’t know if libertarianism courts a different audience in Brazil, but in the U.S. it has a very rabidly right-wing audience who effectively want to tear down as much government as possible, and who view “your freedom ends at my face” as an insult. It’s the ideology of an extraordinarily unregulated market – a true “free market” – which is a monopolistic and wildly unethical disaster waiting to happen.

    Anarcho-capitalism, which your username references, is all of that, only more. So you might understand why effectively everyone here is going to treat that with extreme suspicion.





  • LukeZaz@beehaw.orgtoGaming@beehaw.orgSecond Wind and Frosts leaving
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    4 months ago

    (Disclaimer: I’m a Phoenix supporter of SWG)

    I’ve followed this drama pretty closely in the last few days, and it’s really not all so damning as others here have found it. I could write up something longer, but I don’t want to get too far into the weeds, so I’ll leave it at a few paragraphs.

    The long and short of it is that the way this video was made and posted, in combination with the general atmosphere of the internet trending towards Huge Drama™, makes this look like more than it actually is. From everything I’ve seen and heard, I’d characterize Nick’s actions as “flawed human making mistakes” — which is to say, perfectly forgivable. He’s since owned up to the more egregious things, such as his comments in the Gameumentary call, and the folks at SWG have reined in his influence recently due to things like his social media troubles. I personally feel like this was a very good call, and will likely be enough to cover the complaints raised.

    It is also worth noting, though, that not all of the accusations are worth much. I really don’t know how $10 in alleged Twitter bucks is even worth mentioning, especially considering the claim later looks to have turned out to be a misunderstanding entirely.

    All in all, while I believe it’s very fair to want to address these things, and it’s also fair to want to do so in a way that Patreon supporters both existing and potential can use said info to make better assessments with regard to their money, the reality is that the method and platform upon which these grievances were aired lead to a far more bitter and unproductive outcome than was necessary. I still respect Frost, and I don’t think he meant for this at all, but it still happened. Such is the nature of the web, sadly.






  • This really doesn’t make Brave look any better though, seeing as it has its own version of “privacy-focused” attention-monetization schemes (Basic Attention Tokens) and its own fair share of controversies. Not to mention being Chromium under the hood and being developed by a company headed by Brandon Eich of all people — a massive homophobe.

    None of which make Firefox impeccable or ever did. But all of which made Brave decidedly worse to me, including after this all happened.



  • The core problem is that there are so many things that can help prevent the problems from arising to begin with that need to be done before policing is even considered. Better healthcare, housing, education, etc. Police are, at best, a last resort solution to desperate cases, and they tend to be hammers looking for nails as a result. It might be possible to do it well, yes, but it’s very hard, and you should really be looking for a less antagonistic solution first.

    To take your idea of “speeding at 100+” as an example: This could be solved by replacing cars with public transport, such that people don’t really have so many opportunities to go 100+ to begin with, or by using traffic calming techniques to make it feel too unsafe for anyone to want to try, or using alternative road layouts to make it significantly harder to pull off at all (e.g. roundabouts). There are many options, almost all of which are better – and less punitive – than the police.

    Also, tangential, but…

    crisis councilors aren’t going to be driving trying to perform a PIT maneuver.

    Of course not; PIT maneuvers would kill people.