Biden literally circumvented congress twice to give Israel more weapons, using an unusual method that is not standard practice. He did not have to do this. No matter what comes out of his mouth, his actions put the lie to it.

I do agree the Republicans would probably be even worse, while simultaneously dropping the much needed Ukraine aid too. But Biden ain’t tapping any breaks.

Raccoons have hands. Close enough!

They do have a lot more soft power over the government than many give them credit for though, plus some (so far) unused actual power that they only don’t use by tradition (which these days is more clearly a bad idea to rely on than ever). Plus all there’s all that money that goes into the pageantry of it (royal weddings, etc).

I feel like it’s be one thing to let them keep their royal titles, but they shouldn’t be enmeshed with the state in any actual way imo.

You do realize that lemmy contains very many users, many of whom disagree on any number of things. You are randomly assigning the opinions of lemmy’s pirate users to a random commenter without evidence that they actually hold those opinions, because it’d be convenient for you if they’re contradicting themself in any way (though the degree to which that would be a contradiction is also arguable). It’s just a way of constructing a strawman instead of engaging with your interlocutor’s actual words.

Also, part of the problem is that these LLMs very often do directly copy and spit out articles and random forum posts and etc word-for-word verbatim, or it’ll do something that’s the equivalent of a plagiarist who swaps a few words around in a sad attempt to not get caught. It becomes especially likely depending on how specific the search is, like if you look for a niche topic hardly anyone has written extensively on or for the solution to an esoteric problem that maybe just one person on a forum somewhere found an answer to. It also typically does not even give credit or link to its sources.

Plus, copyright law, if it exists, must apply to everyone, including major coporations. That’s a separate issue than whether or not copyright law needs reform (it obviously does). If you wanna abolish copyright, fine, ok, get it abolished through the government. But while copyright law is still the law, I’m not ozk with giving magacorps a pass to break it legally, especially when they’re more than happy to sue random, harmless individuals for violating their own copyrights. They want the law not to apply to them because they’re rich.

The argument they’re making is just ridiculous on its face when you compare it to other crimes. If AI should be allowed to violate copyright because otherwise it can’t exist as it is, then anyone should be able to violate copyright because otherwise their cool projects won’t be able to exist. And I should be able to rob a bank because otherwise I won’t have all that money. You should be able to commit murder because otherwise your annoying coworker will keep bugging you. She should be able to walk out of a store with an iPhone without paying for it because otherwise she won’t have an iPhone. Etc. It’s an argument that says the criminal’s motivations are legal justification for the crime. “You should let me legally do the thing because otherwise I can’t do the thing” is just not a convincing argument in my book.

It does tell you that it’s been changed, though. You can typically still go and play the original game. And it enables the people affected by -isms to enjoy it when sometimes said -isms would pull them out of it for them otherwise.

And it’s not like the original intent was for people to be distracted by what would have, to the developers, have likely seemed a small or unquestioned detail. We can never truly approach a game the way its original audience did anyway because culture changes so much, and a large part the experience you have with art is what you bring to it. Thus why graphical updates can make the game look like you remember it, even though it now looks much prettier. I think these sorts of updates can be similar to that.

Granted, it’s harder to access the original game because of hardware. But even so, a lot of original intent is always lost in the process of making a remaster. I’d argue “for modern audience” updates tend to be less of a departure than changes in visual design (the different lighting in the various Myst remasters that changes the mood, the extra foliage in Shadow of the Colossus remasters) or mechanics updates (the ability to control Resident Evil like a regular game instead of via tank controls).

Edit: I think my ideal scenario would be if remasters include “modern audience” updates of all kinds, to make the game as enjoyable for new players as possible, but also that the originals be made more easily available such as by legalizing or sanctioning emulation for old games.

Or they’re working class or buried in medical bills and can’t afford to be spending money on things like search engines that have a free alternative, even if it is worse.

I’m not actually convinced the alternatives are any better here, anyway.

I agree it’s murky. Though I’d like to note that when you shift hateful ideologues to dark corners of the internet, that also means making space in the main forums for people who would otherwise be forced out by the aforementioned ideologues - women, trans folks, BIPOC folks, anyone who would like to discuss xyz topic but not at the cost of the distress that results from sharing a space with hateful actors.

When the worst of the internet is given free reign to run rampant, it has a tendency to take over the space entirely with hate speech because everything and everyone else leaves instead of putting up with abuse, and those who do stay get stuck having the same, rock bottom level conversations (e.g. those in which the targets of the hate are asked to justify their existence or presence or right to have opinions repeatedly) over and over with people who aren’t really interested in intellectual discussions or solving actual problems or making art that isn’t about hatred.

But yeah, as with anything involving large groups of people, these things get complicated and can be unpredictable.

This is a great game, especially if you’re the type who thinks the beginning hours of a civ game (before you get bogged down in micromanagement and unit orders) are the best hours. It basically gives you that kind of early-game experience over and over, with plenty of variation. It’s so much better paced than most comparable games as a result. I’m surprised it doesn’t get more buzz.

I didn’t get far in it because the characters seemed very bland to me, and the story setup generic, but perhaps that could improve over time? I know some games leverage their length to pull off slow character development well, even if the basic character templates are straightforwardly tropey. But this one didn’t grab me enough at the beginning to justify investing my time in it, personally.

I’m glad it exists for the people who do like it, though!

As people already said, Disco Elysium for sure.

Baldur’s Gate 3 on the lowest/story difficulty.

The old RPG Arcanum. Great steampunk fantasy setting and story. If you play a persuasive character you can avoid combat and skip entire dungeons. The game has some balance issues (magic tree is fine, but the tech tree is underpowered, and early combat encounters are horrible to dela with). Various fan patches and mods are available, including a balance mod, a bugfix patch, and an HD patch. Since it’s an old game I recommend getting it from gog.com, since sometimes they fix up older games a bit to run properly on new systems.

Dragon Age, since you liked Mass Effect. Though, I personally found the combat more annoying in Dragon Age than Mass Effect. Mileage may vary.

The Outer Wilds (different game than Outer Worlds). It’s a sort of an archeology/space adventure game. It’s not strictly speaking an RPG, but if you want a story game it’s top tier. Please do not look anything up about the game and go in as blind as possible, as the feeling of discovery and exploration are the main draw of the game and once you have something spoiled you can’t un-know it. Also, I recommend getting the dlc immediately with the main game, as it’s a huge expansion that fits into the main story perfectly and affects the ending of the main game.

I think it’s moreso that TikTok’s algorithms, whatever that black box may contain, are far better for discoverability than those of all the other platforms.

It’s guided by what each individual viewer wants to see (or hates to see, if they can’t resist interacting with videos they hate), so small media bubbles are created for better or worse, but Tiktok will hand on-the-ground news reported by Palestinians to people who want to see it without those viewers having to look for it or know it’s there to be looked for.

By contrast, if you go to youtube, you might see whatever shows up in the general “popular” tab, or you might enter a search for Palestinian news (which requires you to be actively looking for it in the first place vs just there and able to be shown it) but you’re likely to get mainly clips from major US news channels, with their framing of the situation, and maybe some Israeli ones. Not the heaps of videos by random individuals that you’ll find on TikTok. Even if that type of video is uploaded, youtube won’t recommend it if it’s from a new channel and doesn’t already clock a bazillion views. But TikTok can make a little video from a random person go from zero to everywhere very quickly.

TikTok in general is just better for finding “man on the street”/“what is it like to be there right now” reports from affected individuals. As well as for finding other own-voices type videos by individuals who aren’t media stars or news reporters or the hosts of big youtube channels, but who are the ones most directly in a situation.

Of course there is bias or outright misinformation on the platform too. It is best approached with caution and media literacy, but one need only look at U.S. media’s coverage of the current situation to see that is the case for mainstream news organizations too.

I won’t argue there aren’t some use cases for it, but it was massively oversold for what it actually is. It’s essentially just shared spreadsheets, but almost always described in a way that make it seem inscrutable to most people (further sinking any propect of mass-adoption) and cool to people who want to feel like they’re intelligent and in-the-know about tech. And it was pushed primarily for things it was unsuited for, like replacing regulated banks with FDIC insurance.

I think it has potential niche uses, though. Not every technology has to be widespread or applied to a wide variety of different things.

Tbh I think the same overselling/over-applying is happening to large language models/LLM “AI” now, though at least LLMs legitimately do have a lot of potential use cases. Just not as many as the everything people are trying to apply it to, and not as overpoweringly as many assume.

People keep saying it’s dead to them but the company’s own statements seem a lot more optimistic, imo. I think they’re just refocusing, and dumping a lot of the extraneous “let’s be an everything platform” features the userbase didn’t want anyway. Tumblr isn’t a giant cash so far as I know, but its userbase is sizable and stable, and recently grown since reddit and twitter took a tumble.

As a platform, there’s a lot to recommend it, I think. It’s one of those situations where the experience you get out of it depends on how you curate it. So like, you can go down fandom rabbitholes, or webcomic rabbitholes, or you can entirely ignore that and just subscribe to ocean science blogs, or to photography blogs, or so on. There can be drama in some parts, but that can also be entirely avoided in your feed if that’s your preference. I like it a lot better these days than I did like 5-10 years ago.

Also, it’s the type of thing that makes me very worried about the fact that most of the algorithms used in things like police facial recognition software, recidivism calculation software, and suchlike are proprietary black boxes.

There are - guaranteed - biases in those tools, whether in their processors or in the unknown datasets they’re trained on, and neither police nor journalists can actually see the inner workings of the software to know what those biases are, to counterbalance them or to recognize if the software is so biased as to be useless.

Do they not burn? Ever time I’ve thought of trying wooden utensils with a pan I’ve worried I’d burn them, so I’ve always thought they were just for serving or mixing.

I want an alternative to youtube as much as anyone, but I just don’t see how peertube can be viable in a world where child abuse materials and nazi propaganda exist and can be posted there.

I mean, at least as of when I last looked at peertube, it works sort of like torrenting does, yeah? But it doesn’t require you to whitelist the channels or instances you seed. Therefore: random people are going to end up seeding child abuse materials, revenge porn, hate screed videos, and so on, unknowingly and without intending to.

Lemmy already has had issues with child abuse materials because of federation and poor moderation tools. An image will get posted on one instance, then it automatically gets copied to other instances, and even if the original instances delete the image that doesn’t automatically delete it off other instances. Admins have to manually contact other admins, who then each have go in and painstakingly delete it manually, and that’s if all those different admins see and respond to the message. This is a problem that has been growing as lemmy gets bigger and more popular. And this is just with instance hosts - with peertube, you have individuals seeding/contributing to the hosting.

So it seems to me that peertube as it is involves a degree of moral and legal (since people can and have been deemed legally responsible for seeding torrents before) risk that is just not worth it a compared to the privacy-invading but blessedly safe option of youtube.

And even if individuals decided that risk was fine, advertisers absolutely won’t, which makes the platform a no-go for channels that depend on ads rather than patreon or merch for their livelihoods.

I’ll be happy if there’s a reliable way around this problem that doesn’t completely break the mechanism whereby peertube is supposed to work, but as of now I can’t see one.

Privacy isn’t normally my primary concern but with VR I find it to be a bigger deal than I usually would, particularly because the headsets can hypothetically gather data about what you’re looking at exactly (especially once eye tracking becomes more of a thing - then it’ll be exact, and that’s kinda terrifying at that point).

And this is Meta/facebook, so. They’ll 100% do it and say they aren’t.

And you seem to be suggesting that Israel should now invade - which will mean slaughtering and displacing and injuring innocents as well as Hamas members - because Hamas slaughtered innocents. People have and will die for things Hamas did that they had nothing to do with. This is a “Hamas did it, therefore it’s fine or even morally right for Israel to do it” argument.

Which is the sort of revenge-first argument that will inevitably just fuel the same argument going back the other direction, and around we all go again, and innocents keep dying the entire time.

There won’t be any stopping the cycle of violence while the root issues that caused it in the first place - the Nakba displacement and slaughter of Palestinians from their homeland, and Israel’s subsequent apartheid government and occupation - is acknowledged and addressed.

However and whenever it stops, there will be people who did evil who will go free. Just like there were low-level Nazis and people who helped put the Nazis in power who went consequence-free when WWII ended. It’s a legistic impossibility to deliver perfect justice to ever evildoer. If we make that the goal and try anyway, then all we get is more evil-doing, more revenge-seeking, more blood, and no real ultimate justice to show for it.

So, in my opinion, achieving peace, an end to systemic injustices, and compensating victims as much as possible (e.g. making sure the families of those lost on both sides have food, shelter, safety and education), should take predecence far above and beyond making sure everyone who deserves punishment is punished.

Especially since history’s previous examples of invading a country to stamp out a terrorist organization (cough cough Afghanistan…) didn’t exactly work to end the target organization, let alone the terrorism and violence and so on in yhe region as a whole.

I wonder if he’s actually just becoming a career scapegoat, taking the fall + a nice severance package(?) for decisions that were made by groups.

This might be a non-food-bearing shelf, like from one of those rolling plastic drawer sets? I think? It’s hard to tell, admittedly.