I played a long while ago and a string of similar incidents eventually made me leave.

I came back ~6months ago, and it was more chill, but still not great.

I will say that if you’re in a group of 3 or more non-toxic people, you almost never get toxic players. Not only because you’ve only got 2 chances to roll low rather than 4, but also because they’re more aware that probably won’t get anywhere.

Free to play with microtransactions is just the way to go for games that can be monetized in that manner. The lower barrier to entry means far more downloads and the piecemeal monetization means that players will frequently end up paying more than $60 alongside the larger player base.

The most they’ll have to pay is 20 cents. And that’s only with the 200,000th to 210,000th download for developers who are using the free version of Unity (provided that the developer is also making more then $200k/yr in revenue). After that, the developer will probably get Unity Pro and the download fees will start up at $1 million/yr in revenue and more than 1 million downloads. At that point, I don’t think that the 15 cents to 0.1 cents that will be charged will hurt too badly.

And Beehaw doesn’t have a huge amount of activity, so the prioritization provided by a Reddit-style ranking system is less useful. I think going to a typical forum/messageboard system just makes sense.

Even if the CEO of Wells Fargo loses your money, you will still get at least $250,000 of it back (assuming you had deposited that much) via the FDIC.

The FDIC will honor their obligations because to do otherwise would be to risk a massive bank run, of the sort that started the Great Depression. This wouldn’t just screw you over, it would screw over the ultra-wealthy too, and we can’t have that.

At the end of the day, someone can just not take your mattress money and you might be out of luck. Your mattress can burn down and all that money is gone, which is far more likely than Wells Fargo taking your money and then the FDIC not giving you anything.

Dwarf Fortress (before the Steam edition.) There was no in-game tutorial. I found a 2 hour long fanmade tutorial on Youtube, and even after that I had to learn a lot of stuff from the wiki.

At 16x, you will get 72MB/s read speed. My SSD has a 560MB/s read speed. Because of this discrepancy, loading a game from a blu-ray disc will take roughly 7.7 times longer. A 20 second loading screen becomes a 2.5 minute loading screen. This alone justifies the cost of keeping it on my SSD. Especially because if I want to remove it I don’t lose permanent access to the game, I can download it again in a couple hours.

True, I wrote this from a US law perspective, where that kind of behavior is expressly protected. US law is also written specifically to protect things like search engines and aggregators to prevent services like Google from getting sued for their blurbs, but it’s likely also a defense for AI.

Regardless of if it should be illegal or not, I feel that AI training and use is currently legal under current US law. And as a US company, dragging OpenAI to UK courts and extracting payment from them would be difficult for all but the most monied artists.

Unfortunately, copyright protection doesn’t extend that far. AI training is almost certainly fair use if it is copying at all. Styles and the like cannot be copyrighted, so even if an AI creates a work in the style of someone else, it is extremely unlikely that the output would be so similar as to be in violation of copyright. Though I do feel that it is unethical to intentionally try to reproduce someone’s style, especially if you’re doing it for commercial gain. But that is not illegal unless you try to say that you are that artist.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/how-we-think-about-copyright-and-ai-art-0

So at the bare minimum, a mechanism needs to be provided for retroactively removing works that would have been opted out of commercial usage if the option had been available and the rights holders had been informed about the commercial intentions of the project.

If you do this, you limit access to AI tools exclusively to big companies. They already employ enough artists to create a useful AI generator, they’ll simply add that the artist agrees for their work to be used in training to the employment contract. After a while, the only people who have access to reasonably good AI is are those major corporations, and they’ll leverage that to depress wages and control employees.

The WGA’s idea that the direct output of an AI is uncopyrightable doesn’t distort things so heavily in favor of Disney and Hasbro. It’s also more legally actionable. You don’t name Microsoft Word as the editor of a novel because you used spell check even if it corrected the spelling and grammar of every word. Naturally you don’t name generative AI as an author or creator.

Though the above argument only really applies when you have strong unions willing to fight for workers, and with how gutted they are in the US, I don’t think that will be the standard.

And the percentage of homes for sale is quite small compared to the total number of homes. So if investors are buying even a few percent of the homes, that can still be most of the homes that are for sale.

eg wind generator parks take up a lot of space

Though the vast majority of this space can still be used. I live near a wind farm and the area under the turbines still is ranchland. There are cows just chilling under them. The wind company pays farmers for the land in a long term lease agreement: https://www.wri.org/insights/how-wind-turbines-are-providing-safety-net-rural-farmers.

Prosperous Universe is quite different from a typical incremental game, but it scratches the same itch for me. The game is very complex, and other players drive the economy, leading to some price/availability unpredictability that is interesting. Gotta keep your bases fueled, but you also want to wait for prices to rise or fall, and potentially use your ships to trade at other markets.

It’s quite nonlinear in progression and there’s a lot of ways to expand.

Well, the typical way of measuring q does measure the energy it takes to get the boulder up the hill, but not the inefficiency of the machine to get the boulder up there and the ineffency in extracting its energy as it goes back down.

There’s a lot of unsexy research that could make fusion come a whole lot sooner. More efficient powerful lasers, better cooling methods and design for superconducting electromagnetics, more efficient containment methods and more thought on how to extract energy from the plasma efficiently, and then making it cheap enough to build and maintain that we can actually afford to build them.

I’d include grocery shopping in “the process”.

Personally, this was the most exhausting part of cooking for me. My recipes are often complicated and call for a lot of somewhat obscure ingredients. Then the risk of forgetting something or buying the wrong thing is also there. Half the time, by the time I start actually cooking I’m already a little bit tired just because I could not find lime oil or whatever for the life of me.

I’ve started ordering all my ingredients for pickup now. I get a search bar so I’m not walking down isles hoping I’m in the right one, and I can check it against the recipe easily. I can pick it up on my bike ride and it just feels so much better.

You’re right, copyright won’t fix it, copyright will just enable large companies to activate more of their work extract more from the creative space.

But who will benefit the most from AI? The artists seem to be getting screwed right now, and I’m pretty sure that Hasbro and Disney will love to cut costs and lay off artists as soon as this blows over.

Technology is capital, and in a capitalist system, that goes to benefit the holders of that capital. No matter how you cut it, laborers including artists are the ones who will get screwed.

Minecraft. It’s so dang cozy to me.

If you have infinite inventory space, then you need a way to navigate through infinite items. Towards the end of the game, a player could easily have nearly every item in the game. For some games, that would be fine, but for many, that would make the list of items prohibitively long. Filtering and searching would help, but if you’re looking for an item that you forgot the name of, a search doesn’t necessarily do much.

Then there’s balance reasons. Some games use their inventory system to limit the player, making sure they don’t start a level with enough health potions and grenades to cheese every fight.

In survival games, a finite inventory sets the gameplay loop: you go exploring/mining and then return to base, drop off your stuff and head out again. It makes your base valuable, if only because that’s where you keep most of your resources and moving would be hard. It also gives the player a break from one task. I played a Minecraft mod that gave me an effectively infinite inventory. I went mining for so long that it started to feel like an awful slog. Because my mine shafts went on too long, getting back was itself a hassle. When I reverted back to a more typical inventory size, I could feel how a full inventory breaks up the grind and prevents mining from getting out of hand.

Hopefully, it can also be used to prove that someone was not at the scene of a crime, enabling prosecutors to rule out suspects and innocent people to get off.

The person outright rejects defederation as a solution when it IS the solution

It’s the solution in the sense that it removes it from view of users of the mainstream instances. It is not a solution to the overall problem of CSAM and the child abuse that creates such material. There is an argument to be made that is the only responsibility of instance admins, and that past that is the responsibility of law enforcement. This is sensible, but it invites law enforcement to start overtly trawling the Fediverse for offending content, and create an uncomfortable situation for admins and users, as they will go after admins who simply do not have the tools to effectively monitor for CSAM.

Defederation also obviously does not prevent users of the instance from posting CSAM. Admins even unknowingly having CSAM on their instance can easily lead to the admins being prosecuted and the instance taken down. Section 230 does not apply to material illegal on a federal level, and SESTA requires removal of material that violates even state level sex trafficking laws.