That was a balancing patch. It used to be that bishops could only see only 2 squares and could jump over like horses.

If you come from Windows Mint is an excellent starting point. People shit on it because it doesn’t have all the fancy bells and whistles you get with more latest releases, but on the flip side it’s super reliable and as a new user that reliability is worth more than all the bells and whistles.

To toot the anticapitalist horn, antitrust and regulations and anything such is fundamentally in opposition to our economic system. We’re constantly fighting the system, just to get a liveable life. We fought just to get 8 hours a week and some economists in the 19th century and early 20th century imagined we right now would be having 15 hour work weeks. Guess why we don’t do 15 hours a week. Because the economic system, capitalism, benefits more the more we work. Capitalism would love to take us back to 12 hour days 6 days a week. Actually capitalism would want us working every single waking hour and also in our sleep if we could be productive in our sleep.

This is why I’m a socialist, because I don’t see why we maintain a system we need to keep fighting with when we could work on replacing it with a better system that et don’t need to fight with.

But it’s broken and unplayable because the developer/publisher renders it unplayable and that’s where the initiative comes in. The initiative wants to make it so that if the developer/publisher wants to turn off their official services they don’t render the game unplayable.

You’re stating it like it’s somehow objective, but it’s not. Battlefield 3 and 4 have been delisted and it’s a matter of time until EA turns off services and those games are left for dead. Battlefield 4 still averages above 1k players a month. It’s clear that EA won’t see value in keeping the light on and will turn off the services in the near future, but do you think the players will go overnight from “I want to play this game” to “This game is worthless”. Don’t you think the people playing BF4 wouldn’t want to continue playing after EA shuts down the services keeping the game running?

I think it’s pretty obvious that there are two groups who decide if a game has value or not, the company and the customers. Right now after purchasing the game the customers no longer have a say whether a game has value or not. Only the company has a say and if the company says it’s not worth it then the people who bought it just have to suck it up. And that’s the idea behind the initiative, to make it so that the company isn’t the only one who gets to decide how long you get to use the product you’ve purchased.

I think if we expanded the idea of bricking software beyond gaming, if companies could destroy any piece of software they made, you’d also be in favor of this initiative. Imagine if Microsoft could brick Windows 10 when they’ve officially stopped supporting it. Or Nvidia effectively bricking their older cards by stopping official driver support. Would you then also argue that the software has lost value and it’s acceptable behavior?

I usually agree with Thor but on this one I probably couldn’t disagree more. Based on what he says I’d say his mindset is completely opposite to what his initiative wants to do. He essentially said he doesn’t see any value in (live service) games after they’ve reached their end of service and from that perspective I can understand how this movement is pointless or even potentially damaging. But that assumes that the (live service) game loses value after the company stops supporting it and I just don’t think that’s the case.

A lot of games continue live despite the company ending official support for them. If anyone remembers there’s a gem called Wildstar that was shut down in 2018. Despite the game being shut down and even trademark has expiring people are still running the game on private servers. People are putting in sweat and tears to make sure a game is preserved. Imagine how much easier it would be if Carbine or NcSoft had released proper tools for it. Even Vanilla WoW exists because private server did it first and Blizzard wanted to get some of that money.

And another point that Thor made how it’s not about preservation because you can’t preserve a moment in time. I think that’s a completely disingenuous argument because it feeds into FOMO. If you join WoW today you will never experience “the golden age of WoW”. Maybe another game you might be interested in is having a golden age right now, better buy into the hype. You can’t argue against preservation like this because it’s literally impossible to preserve a moment in time except in your memory so you have be at that exact place at that exact time to really experience that thing, that is FOMO at it’s purest form. That argument against preservation is an argument in favor of FOMO.

Thors points come for a belief that live service games don’t need to be preserved after official support has ended, and he views this initiative through that lens. Of course he will have issues with the initiative because he’s opposing the idea at a fundamental level. It’s like asking a racist how to be more tolerant with other races, the answer obviously is that you shouldn’t want to tolerate other races. And just like you would ignore a racist I think you should ignore what Thor has to say on this matter because anything he says is against the idea of preservation.

I think it sucks but I don’t have an issue with it. If Epic is the publisher and they choose to publish only on their own store then that’s their decision. It’s what every publisher, including Valve, does. To me this usually means it’s a game I won’t play and that’s not a problem because I have so many games to play, I won’t miss a handful of games.

However I will buy World of Goo 2 if for no other reason than the fact that I pirated the first game when I was poor.

But you can read the source code and get an understanding of whether it is collecting private information or not. You can theoretically also fork the code and make your own version of Lemmy where you’re ripped out the parts that collect private information. Can you do any of those things with Reddit? Absolutely not. You have no idea what exactly Reddit collects and even if you did you have no control over that collection.

What you’re doing is questioning the privacy aspect without putting in the effort to check if your questioning is valid. Nobody is preventing you from reading the source code. And if you don’t trust anyone else running the instance you can fork Lemmy, make whatever privacy changes you need and host your own instance. That goes beyond the capabilities of the average user but that’s the catch with privacy, if you can’t trust others then you have to learn more to get by without others.

That 7% might not even be people. It could be bots doing HTTP requests and throwing garbage in the user-agent.

So is Twitter but that didn’t stop Twitter from becoming wildly popular. YouTube shorts are just tweets in a video format.

Well yeah, because dedicated DACs have a tangible benefit of better audio. If you want better audio you need to buy a quality DAC and quality cans.

I also used to think it’s dumb because who cares as long as you can hear. But then I built a new PC and I don’t know if it was a faulty mobo or just unlucky setup but the internal DAC started picking up static. So I got an external DAC and what I noticed was that the audio sounded clearer and I could hear things in the sound that I couldn’t hear before. It was magical, it’s like someone added new layers into my favorite songs. I had taken the audio crack.

I pretty quickly gave away my DAC along with my audio technicas because I could feel the urge. I needed another hit. I needed more. I got this knawing itch and I knew I had to get out before the addiction completely took over. Now I live in static because I do not dare to touch the sun again.

Soundblasters may be shit but the hardware they’re supposed to sell is legit, it has a tangible benefit to whomever can tell the difference. But with AI, what is the tangible benefit that you couldn’t get by getting a better GPU?

Beat your meat in the missus?

It seems like you’re agreeing with me on the reasoning why AI art is art, you just refuse to accept AI as art. So let’s try a different way. Who says art has agemcy or intent? Clearly it’s not just “everything made by humans” because if I showed you the toilet paper I used to wipe my ass we can both agree that it’s not art. Neither is the comment I’m writing right now. So there needs to be something more that separates not art and art. The two most common ways would be the intent of the artist and the perceived intent of the viewer.

If it’s what the artist intended the am artist can prompt AI until AI generates the image the artist intended. Since the artist intended the AI generated image to look that way the intent is inherited from the artist.

If it’s what the viewer perceived we can reach the original question I postulated. If an image makes you feel something and you can’t know if it’s made by the artist or by AI, how do you know it’s art or not? If we take by whether you perceive intent of not then you’re attributing intent to art and it doesn’t matter how it was made. If you feel something and after the fact you find out it was AI generated image then it doesn’t invalidate what you felt.

You can come up with whomever to validate intent or agency and I’ll show you how AI wouldn’t play a role in that decision because AI isn’t sentient. It’s a tool like a camera or a paint brush or just chalk. We give the intent by using the tools we have.

there’s something’s highly suspect about someone not understanding the difference between art made by a human being and some output spit out by a dumb pixel mixer. huge red flag imo.

Translation. I can’t argue your point so I’m going to try characters assassination.

if the original Mona Lisa were to be sold for millions of dollars, and then someone reveals that it was not the original Mona Lisa but a replica made last week by some dude… do you think the buyer would just go “eh it looks close enough”? no they would sue the fuck out of the seller and guess what, the painting would not be worth millions anymore. it’s the same painting. the value is changed. ART IS NOT A PRODUCT.

Pretty ironic to say art is not a product and then argue that its monetary value would decrease, which can happen only if you treat art as a product.

Imagine if instead of a physical painting Mona Lisa was a digital file and free on the internet, would people think Mona Lisa is less impressive as an art piece because anyone could own it? I think it’s artistic value wouldn’t decrease, only its value as a product would decrease because everyone could get it for free.

As a thought experiment let’s say an artist takes a photo of a sunset. Then the artist uses AI to generate a sunset and AI happens to generate the exact same photo. The artist then releases one of the two images with the title “this may or may not be made by AI”. Is the released image art or not?

If you say the image isn’t art, what if it’s revealed that it’s the photo the artist took? Does is magically turn into art because it’s not made by AI? If not does it mean when people “make art” it’s not art?

If you say the image is art, what if it’s revealed it’s made by AI? Does it magically stop being art or does it become less artistic after the fact? Where does value go?

The way I see it is that you’re trying to gatekeep art by arbitrarily claiming AI art isn’t real art. I think since we’re the ones assigning a meaning to art, how it is created doesn’t matter. After all if you’re the artist taking the photo isn’t the original art piece just the natural occurrence of the sun setting. Nobody created it, there is no artistic intention there, it simply exists and we consider it art.

Valve didn’t invent lootboxes. The concept has physically existed for decades, they’re called trading card packs or kinder eggs or gashapon. The latter is the inspiration for what became known as lootboxes. The first “lootbox” was actually in the Japanese version of MapleStory in 2004 and it spread in eastern markets (because pay to win is more normalized there) and in mobile games. It wasn’t until 2009 when EA added card packs to FIFA. Hard to say if they were inspired by the lootboxes from the east of the insane football trading card market in the west, or by both. It was only after a year and a half later in 2010 when Valve added loot boxes to TF2. So Valve definitely didn’t invent lootboxes, they weren’t even the first in the west to use them. You could argue that they popularized loot boxes but even there is an argument to be made that Overwatch was a much bigger cultural hit than TF2 or CSGO or EAs FIFA games and normalized lootboxes.

I don’t mind the “Valve is bad” narrative, but at least keep your facts straight. The “strongest DRM” is also BS but others have already somewhat covered that part.

Up there as one of the most dangerous chemical compounds in the world, near 100% fatality rate.

As if to prove my point… All you had to do was tell me the argument I made and all you did was “This is how it’s genocide denial”. It’s exactly what I said you do.

How many times do I have to repeat myself?

I’m going to start from here because this is how you show how disingenuous you are. I straight up said I don’t agree with the genocide deniers and what do you do? You still lump me in with them. Your entire mindset here is “If they don’t agree with me they must be genocide deniers”. Fuck off with that shit.

You don’t even try to understand what I’m saying, all you see is that I don’t agree with you and so you mental gymnastic yourself into believing I’m doing genocide denial. Once again, fuck off with that shit.

Go on man, shut me up. Retell my point back to me.

You can sit on your high horse and talk about how people are cutting off pieces of their soul “for strategy”, but don’t be surprised when genocide continues and you get fascism shoved down your throat.