Not sure if I’d go so far as “outlawed” (not really sure how that would be accomplished, at least in our current society), but I otherwise agree, and the discourse about the topic on this site has been genuinely upsetting the hell out of me lately, particularly because of much it truly is downplaying/denying the very real harm it’s causing, with some of it honestly coming across as cheering on said harm

So many of my friends and loved ones are artists too, so it’s particularly personal for me

I very much agree with what you’re saying here and I appreciate you saying it, I especially agree that the technology is fundamentally inseparable from the capitalists that created it, and it would not be able to exist in its current form (or any form that’s even remotely as “useful”) without the levels of theft that were involved in its creation

And it’s not just problematic in the concepts of ethics or “intellectual property” either, but in how the process of scraping the web for content to train their models with is effectively a huge botnet DDoSing the internet, I have friends who have had to spend rather large amounts of time and effort to prevent these scrapers from inadvertently bringing down their websites entirely, and have heard of plenty of other people and organizations with the same problem

I have to assume that at least some of the people here defending its development and usage just plain aren’t aware of the externalities that are inherent to the technology, because I don’t understand how one can be so positive about it otherwise, because again, the tech largely can’t exist without these externalities unless you’re either making a fundamentally different technology or working under an economic system that currently doesn’t exist

To be honest, a lot of the arguments in general in this thread strike me as being out of touch with the people facing the negative consequences of this technology’s adoption, with some people being downright hostile towards anyone with even the slightest criticism of the tech, even if they have a point, I think a lot of this is driven by how there doesn’t seem to be very many artists on this site, and how insular this community tends to be (not inherently a bad thing, but means we’re not always going to have the full perspective on every topic)

There’s other criticisms I can make of the genAI boom (such as how, despite the “gatekeeping” accusations over “tools to make things easier”, artists generally approve of helpful tools, but genAI creators are largely working against such tools because they want to make everything generalized enough to replace the humans themselves), but I only have so much energy to spend on detailed comments

0.01% of the lithium 😏

Currently playing through Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Final Fantasy VII (original, not Remake), having a great time with both

Okay? Even if you don’t, you should still be against American billionaire Sam Altman directly targeting his critics out of spite, right? Like I get that this site is a lot more pro-AI than most other circles I’m in (even if I highly disagree with most of it), but we should at least make sure that doesn’t go so far as defending literal techbro billionaires who are directly going out of their way to harm artists

Relevant article: Stop Sharing The Ghibli AI Slop, What Is Wrong With You

Though honestly, the base image for this is so minimal that this just ends up looking like a kinda shitty Photoshop filter or something, not something you’d want to use genAI for to begin with

I just wish they actually spent more time on their games

They’ve pretty clearly been doing that this time, which explains why this game seems a lot less rough than the SV, even if people (cough redditors) pretend it doesn’t look/run any better (it very obviously does)

Game Freak doesn’t set the deadlines either way, so I don’t fault them for the last few games being rushed, though I’m still waiting to play SV until I have hardware that can run it half decently 😩 Game seems pretty good from what I’ve heard from people who can look past the technical issues

Not sure how this is a surprise, they’re just about to replace the Switch so of course there won’t be that many major games left for it, they’ve almost certainly shifted most of their major studios over to the Switch 2 a good while ago by now

Though I mean, they still announced very long-awaited smaller games like a new Rhythm Heaven and Tomodachi Life so I’d say it was still a pretty good Direct (plus some pretty cool third party games)

And honestly? Even if they somehow only have Mario Kart in the Switch 2 Direct, it’ll probably still have good release sales because Mario Kart is just that insanely popular lmao

There’s absolutely zero chance the Switch 2 is going the way of the Wii U, there are a lot of reasons why that went down the way it did and the Switch/Switch 2 don’t really have anything in common with it

City council just voted to buy the police an APC (that they don’t have a use for, and if they did it probably wouldn’t be good) while at the same time raiding the library reserve funds to keep taxes low

So much frustrating stuff like that going on here lately, and the city subreddit is absolutely unbearable about all of it

City subreddit, Western country: ‘look at this cool park, public transport, building, cute cafe’

Don’t know if it’s different in western Europe or something, but here in Canada it’s “IMMIGRANTS BAD CYCLISTS BAD NATIONALISM GOOD SUPPORT OUR TROOPS AND COPS AND CONSERVATIVE LEADERS”

And also just finding out that apparently people in my city’s subreddit are defending the idea of unbanning fracking and uranium mining in our small densely-populated province?? Depressing shit man

Tbh it’s really funny how strongly people like this have been hating Trump for being American when these same people would be all over him if he was Canadian, their ideology is identical

In the same boat, I’m stick here even though I’m miserable here, suburbia is awful on so many levels

I’d like to move to a city some day because I like cities but I’m not sure if I’d ever be able to afford to move away from here

It’s not silly to correct, someone not being in the room right now doesn’t mean it’s suddenly okay to use the wrong pronouns for that person, even if they’re a shitty person it’s still not a good thing to do

Haven’t been playing a whole lot of games lately because sick, but been slowly getting through Yars Rising because it happens to fall exactly within my interests, I feel like the exact target for it lol

It’s a Metroidvania from WayForward whose platforming and shooting is like Mega Man, with loads of hacking minigames that are literally Yars’ Revenge (you know, the old Atari game), playing as a cute girl with funny friends in this Japanese-inspired cyberpunk city full of Atari references (the idea is hilarious I love it) as you investigate a tech company’s shady secret

The soundtrack is a 10/10 and the girl you play as is currently one of my top fictional crushes lol, she talks too much and I never want her to shut up ❤️

It’s such a weird combination of stuff though, and it didn’t exactly get much marketing and was probably relatively low budget, so I get why it’s so overlooked currently despite being a WayForward game, especially with the genre getting so many games lately (probably not helped by Ubisoft putting out a huge budget Prince of Persia one a month earlier)

Also, I’m glad the Switch 2 is finally announced, even Nintendo games often run like total ass on the current one, hopefully this one’s size and being more round will make it at least slightly more comfortable, and hoping Switch 1 games will run more stable on it (even if target resolution/framerate stay the same without patches, I’d like games to at least keep a consistent 30)

Glad we’re finally getting a new Mario Kart too for the first time in 11 years lmao

Agree with all of this, I also have to add that the only reason Elliott and Gretchen were his “former” business partners was because Walt chose to leave the company, purely because he chose to break up with Gretchen over feeling inferior because of her family’s wealth. He made some of the worst decisions of his life because he couldn’t take the hit to his own pride (which, given how he would later go on to treat Skyler, was clearly backed by misogyny), and would blame everyone but himself from that point onward

Honestly, I think that stuff makes it clear that the underlying factors that led him to becoming “Heisenberg” were there loooong before the series started, and it’s not hard to see how the pieces fit together with the early seasons, and with that in mind I find the last season to be a pretty logical conclusion for where the story was headed

His actual behavior didn’t change, he just stopped hiding it and started being honest with himself, and it was very clear that things were heading this way in the previous seasons

Two things to say here, one, the “trains ran on time” line was for Fascist Italy, not Nazi Germany, and two, it was never anything more than propaganda made to make people think that the fascist regime was efficient, when in reality it was quite the opposite, it was horribly corrupt and disorganized

The way that “at least Mussolini made the trains run on time” is still treated as fact by so many people isn’t proof that terrible people do some things right, it’s proof that too many people still fall for literal fascist propaganda

But I suppose it’s fitting, because “Trump is going to take out the cartels!!” is also little more than propaganda to support a US invasion of Mexico

Sweet, we got our new Navy SEALs copypasta updated for 2025! We’re all trembling because of your badassery I’m sure 🤣

They’ve actively played a role in genocides before, they’re absolutely still doing it

It’s really damning though that they even put out the blog post to begin with, because at best they were jumping the gun, at worst they’re too out of touch with vulnerable groups to realize that it had no chance of being a positive change to begin with

Like, even before the Hateful Conduct page got updated, loads of people were calling them out on this, because there was zero chance Facebook was doing this in “good faith”, and it was obvious to anyone like us what Facebook meant by “over-censorship”

This must be the “fixing its over-censorship problem” that the Electronic Frontier Foundation was “applauding” them for yesterday

I play some Magic, mainly just Commander because a local game store has free Commander nights every Thursday and everyone there is fine with proxies, I do miss competitive 1v1 formats but shit’s waaay too expensive

I did meet someone there who does cube draft, but that doesn’t happen often

I’d like to play more KeyForge (I picked up a cheap box of Age of Ascension online last month), but locally it’s completely nonexistent, and I don’t really have friends outside of those Commander nights to play games casually with, also I’m not a huge fan of playing card games online

I’d also like to try some kind of tabletop RPG sometime since I’ve never played them, but that would require having a group of friends I’m comfortable with who would also want to do so, and that’s a no-go right now