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.
I moved over to it after the initial Reddit exodus and haven’t really looked elsewhere. It’s not quite a full replacement in terms of content and engagement obviously. It’s good for broader stuff like memes, politics/games/movies/etc in general, but not so much for the specific. There are quite a few games I used to spend a lot of time discussing on their subreddits, but they’re basically ghost towns here for a lot of them.
There are also some more specific community leanings. You’re gonna see a LOT of Star Trek and Linux related stuff.
But overall, I’m happy enough with it knowing it’s a non-privatized space to talk.
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.
This is why there’s that trope where the bad guy gets killed in the process of, or just after, getting redeemed. So the story can have its cake and not have to deal with any of the icky justice afterwards. How jarring would it be to have the bad guy turn around, save the day, and then the heroes still kill them or drag them off to a trial for their crimes? So justice has to be meted out by fate rather than having to complicate our heroes.
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.
It strikes me as a mostly non-technical problem. As a method of interfacing with computers/games it just doesn’t offer anything that useful and runs into a lot of practical problems that won’t magically get better with faster processors or smarter software.
I mean sure. Anything someone is using like currency can be called currency. But we’re talking practical terms here. Things we “collectively agree to value.” My WoW gold might be useful for buying potions, but it’s not generally accepted anywhere outside that narrow context. The fewer people who are willing to accept the currency, the less useful, and arguably less “real” it becomes, in so far as currency is defined by its value to others. I could print “me bucks” that I value at $1B USD, but that doesn’t mean much if nobody will give me a sandwich for it.
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!
In my experience they appear to be until you bring up some issues, then they turn into bloodthirsty monsters.
For example, my my goes completely Ooga booga genocidal when Isreal is brought up.
Or on housing: She won’t even entertain any solutions that don’t let landlords keep exploiting people’s basic need for homes. She gets all “why should they have to give up property? They worked for it! Shouldn’t they be able to make money?” She can’t possibly empathize enough to value the basic needs of most people over the right for people who already own more than they need to profit off of others who have less than they need.
Honestly, I think most of them just don’t like the aesthetic of the Republican Party more than they’re actually opposed to conservative politics.
It’s a pretty low bar they have to get over. And hey, they might be even better since the AI would feel the pain of their failures instead of getting a golden parachute.
Yeah. I usually have my system volume sub 20%. Things like videos, system sounds, voice calls, etc all sound reasonable at that volume. It’s just a lot of games that end up way too loud relatively to that.
Agreed. The funny thing is some games go the other way around but still kind of get it wrong: Games where the options are a part of a launcher, so you don’t actually get to experience your changes as you make them. I guess that’s still better than just throwing you into a loud cutscene on startup though.
But seriously. When the game loads, I want the sound to be set to as low as possible, then just give me a slider that plays a sample sound that I can increase until it’s right.
Every time I open a new game, the volume is set to the absolute max, which is orders of magnitude louder than any other sound on my computer. When I go to change the sound settings, I usually have to put the slider comically low before it gets to an acceptable volume range. At that point fine tuning it becomes kind of difficult.
Seriously, why can’t most games get volume right?
I have all sorts of problems in my personal life. Mental and physical health are terrible. The few friends I have moved to other timezones and have jobs that make it harder and harder for me to even talk with them online much anymore. I’m too depressed and anxious to go out and get a job or meet people. I’m too depressed and unfocused to try to work on the art that interests me.
But the worst of it all is a feeling that even if I fixed all my personal problems, what’s the point when the world is this shitty and keeps getting worse? The planet is rapidly becoming unlivable and we’re never going to do anything about it because the power structure depends on the things that are causing the problem. People have less and less control over our lives as corporations gain more and more power through consolidation and technology.
I’ve heard people say that the world just isn’t suited to accommodate some kinds of people, but I don’t see how it accommodates ANYONE who isn’t rich and powerful. I think most people just do better at suppressing that feeling than me. Is anyone really healthy and happy working some awful job for low pay so they can just barely afford to live in an apartment they don’t own and eat food that’s slowly killing them?
As far as vegetables go, there are some specific ones that bother me then some more general textural annoyances. One of the specific examples that comes up a lot are non-processed tomatoes. Fine with sauces and ketchup and stuff like that, but actual tomatoes smell weird, they ooze, they’ve got seeds, they’re squishy, etc. This has been kind of a big problem because sooooo many sandwiches and things feature tomato as a major part of the flavor of the dish. I could ask them for no tomato, but then usually all that’s left is like lettuce and some other lower flavor ingredients. At that point I might as well just get something else. Just in general if I have to get rid of some ingredients from something I don’t know enough about what to replace them with to still end up with something that’s supposed to taste good together.
More generally, textures that make the food harder to eat, like there being tough/rigid bits, especially if they’ve got long shapes can be a problem. We get this spring mix for salads, and I kinda tolerate it, but the stems on some of the leaves can be really annoying. Green beans, snap peas, etc also have a similar problem, especially when they have those stringy bits. Then there are things that are just unpleasantly squishy. Then there’s some stuff I can kind of tolerate in some dishes, like bell peppers in a fajita, but I’d pick around them if they were in something I had to more actively select bites of like a stir fry.
It can be a bit tough to explain all the little ins and outs of it all. I kinda want to be able to find new varied/healthy things to eat and actually enjoy, but it’s been tough searching for things that don’t run into some random problem like these.
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.
I’m not that familiar with the speedrun community, but no way they do much checking for any runs that aren’t reasonably in contention for a top spot right?
Even then, the true answer is probably “I applied to a bunch of places because I can expect more than half of them not to even give me the courtesy of an email, you’re not special.”
That’s a problem for the poors and whoever is holding the bag after I retire.