The difference is that if a TOS needs to be changed to support shitty behavior, it changes. That is often a canary in the coal mine as it were and people STILL cite google removing “Do no evil” and so forth. Same with the Unity debacle where a few people noticed things had been rewritten… and nobody listened until it became a massive kerfluffle.

Because yes. Admins can do (and see) whatever they want. Welcome to message boards. And I do think having a written TOS is a good step forward (even if this TOS is probably objectively bad for a lot of reasons). It provides a contract of sorts.

But also: I would very much say that NOT providing provisions for discrimination based on ethnicity/sexuality/gender/religion/whatever is a pretty big red flag almost to the level of “I don’t see color”. Because yes, it is not in and of itself support for bigotry (even if many will view it as such). It is an indication of not understanding the problems that others are facing and not realizing how important it is to call that out.

Like, there is a reason that “Wheaton’s Rule” is not actually something you can run a community on. And this has been demonstrated time and time again over the decades.

Pretty much. Writing vague nonsense without even using vetted examples as a basis. And then spending more time trolling people than addressing concerns. And this follows on mysteriously wiping out entire mod teams because of a decision that a dark grey area is “illegal” (rather than just “a good way to get sued”) while actively not addressing the mods openly discussion said wipings. Or the flip flopping on whether to allow the piracy communities because apparently cranky users beat potential indentured servitude to nintendo.

Gonna be honest. I did not expect to re-live the 00s message board cycle in 2023. And probably need to start looking for a new home instance since we can already see the chuds coming out of the woodwork because they feel empowered.

… just in case we really ARE back in the 00s. Cliffy B. Cliffy B. Cliffy B.

“Just trust me bro” is never a good model.

Because maybe the current admins are all great people who will do right. But we don’t know if all future admins will be. And if we get a “rules lawyer” coming down on a complaint that some community is being horrifically racist as “Well, it isn’t against the rules…”

But also? The world is an increasingly shitty place. Twitter is run by a straight up white supremacist. Having this kind of verbiage goes a long way toward indicating if a place can even possibly be a “safe space” as it were.

But also: If the idea is that we should just trust the admins: Why have any rules at all?

While I generally agree (and that applies to almost all “an LLM can’t do that” discussions):

Head counts are not going to remain the same. Well, it might in writing, but there is a reason the WGA went on strike.

If you can apply effective filters/transforms to a base texture, you can now do the same work that would have taken you weeks in a day or two. If you aren’t “wasting time” writing unit tests or making utility functions, you no longer need junior developers to punt the Charlie Work to. And so forth.

In some fields? Being able to do more with less means you do a LOT more.

But, generally speaking, that means you need fewer people and you pay fewer people.

This is one of many many reasons that we need to have been exploring UBI decades ago. Because we are increasingly going to see a decrease in employment as technology is more and more able to “get the job done”. And unlike with farm work and factory work… there isn’t really anything on the horizon for all the “creative” workers to do.

I know this is mostly posturing at this point but:

“AI” has been in big budget games for decades. Hell, the big deal with Oblivion was that they had magic technology to procedurally place trees according to various heuristics. And I think that also added a resource management system to NPCs so that we could DB Apple them?

Same with coding and art and sound and so forth.

• All that cool magic wand and fancy ass filter shit in photoshop? Those are increasingly “AI” tools that will analyze the image and extrapolate what should or should not be “behind” something and so forth.
• Coding? if you AREN’T using a tool to generate stubs and even tests at this point then you are wasting your own time.
• Audio? Again, the same “AI” filters already exist. Same with tools to detect pauses or to split up dialogue and so forth.

The reality is just using it effectively. Oblivion was boring as hell because the entire overworld was empty and lifeless. Same with BOTW. Whereas Ubi, for all their actual gameplay flaws, are spectacular at adding POIs and “events” in strategic locations so that you find something while you are hiking across a forest to get to an objective.

Same with art and even CGI. You aren’t going to get a good outcome if you ask dall-e to make your art for you. But you are going to get good results if you start with a solid base and then procedurally add rust or spatter to it. You aren’t going to get a good result if you have your actors on a studio lit stage talking to nothing (Hi Prequel Trilogy). You are if you add lighting relative to the scene (The Volume) and use placeholders they can act off of.

And… same with writing. Ask ChatGPT to write your screenplay? It is going to be bad. Use the proper prompts to get the “voice” of a character right or to generate some background dialogue that you won’t even correctly hear because the mics are focused on Meg Ryan faking an orgasm? Suddenly you have a better “product” than everyone else who just tells extras to wing it or putty around. Same with having a Black Scottish Chick sound like she isn’t written by some white dude.

Do you have a link to the EU requiring consent to detect ad blocking?

Most of what I can find is from the late 2010s but specifically says that consent is not required for adblock detection. https://adguard.com/en/blog/eu-defines-its-stance-on-ad-blockers.html

https://iabeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/20160516-IABEU_Guidance_AdBlockerDetection.pdf

But also: I assume consent can be obtained with a mandatory TOS update.

This predates the pandemic.

I have been on both sides of things. I have had to deal with the literally hundreds of applicants that are completely fake CVs or so underqualified that I would be better off grabbing a random kid at a high school job fair.

And the reality is that if I have had to sift through hundreds of bullshit CVs, I am not going to be giving anyone “a chance”. Unless you specifically meet every single requirement AND look amazing on paper, you are in the bin because I already wasted hours of my life doing due diligence on the assholes.

I hate everything about workaday. I hate that it incorrectly parses my CV in new and exciting ways every time AND means I need a new account for every company, if not every opening. But I also understand what happens if you ACTUALLY make it as simple as filling out a template once.

And while the article is complete bullshit (gotta love the mysterious loophole of OPT as though it is some secret…), I do agree with the outcome. If you are a “skilled” worker going into a comparatively niche field, favor the openings that aren’t using workaday. My best interviews have been from using the automated linkedin application system that basically just sends an email. Hell, that is where my current job is from. But that is also because these were jobs in specific subsets of fields and not entry level positions or openings at Google.

If you’re applying, you probably want the job

In the sense that you would like a paycheck? Sure

In the sense that you are remotely qualified for the position or meet any of the requirements? Not necessarily. And I don’t mean “This entry level position needs twenty years of experience”. I mean “Understands that python is a language”

And a lot of those obnoxious timeouts and headaches are related to minimizing the “just apply for everything” impact on an applicant pool.

Neither? Wildlands has some REALLY shitty depictions of South America and Breakpoint is that modern day ubi-Clancy of “Are they ironically spewing right wing propaganda or?”. And Ubi in general is a company with rampant employee abuse of a sexual nature.

That said: Wildlands is the much better game. Breakpoint “feels” better, but it is clear it was designed to be a co-op live game from the start with most of the missions not designed for AI. Whereas Wildlands was very much set up to just have three problematic bearded dudes lean out of a jeep and unload on anything you drive past.

I obviously don’t have a deep insight into FDev’s finances. But they have pretty openly said that Elite is a foundation of the company.

And yet, they have done everything they can to kill that. Cutting back on social media spending to more or less make every single Influencer say the game is dying. Turn updates into a trickle of “You know that thing that was added two years ago? They finally added enemy NPCs around it”. And even actively screw over the people who were dumb enough to buy the ten year pass by not even providing steam keys for the pre-ordered expansion (currently on two of ten or so?) to let people take advantage of Valve’s CDN.

It is genuinely baffling. Other devs are, if anything, focusing too much on keeping the bread and butter live game “live”. Whereas FDev seem to have decided that they can do whatever to E:D and the money will keep flowing… which might be true but…

Also, should be obvious but: Lapsed E:D fan who bought the lifetime pass like an idiot.

Just to elaborate on the community streams more. Most live games have their community managers (sometimes devs) do a weekly or monthly stream where they play the game, talk about what is coming, interact with the playerbase, etc. They are almost all puff pieces, but whatever. FDev reduced the frequency of those (I forget if by half or straight to quarterly) which was IMMEDIATELY fuel for “Frontier is sunsetting Elite”. And it isn’t like they fired the community managers. They just… do less streams.

Honestly? This is actually a “smart” move… given the current husk that twitter is.

The Man Who Used An Emerald Mine To Finance His Hairplugs has made it pretty clear that the goal is to make twitter an Everything site and that people should trust them as an online bank. And the users have made it clear that you can have a frontpage that is nothing but animal abuse, misinformation, and musk posts (kind of redundant but…) and people will still stick around because a celebrity posted a meme.

So get people to pay “less than nothing” to get their payment info into the system to pre-seed future efforts and “offerings”. More or less the same with every instagram account becoming a threads account.

I don’t think this will make more money than the ad revenue back when twitter was a functional site (and that was already not enough) but… companies don’t want to pump ad money into a site that will post their brand next to a neo-nazi talking about how the latest school shooting was a false flag operation.

I haven’t gotten around to trying Streets yet (lately I just do a few factory runs and that is it), but that map is already pushing the “limits” of Tarkov’s use of Unity and is still new and prone to performance issues. So not surprised there would be problems with sptarkov.

Again, the normal case is not people maintaining their own giant collection of mp3 files. Just like with physical copies of games and movies, most people have decided they want the convenience of not having to manage an mp3 player library.

Same with purchasing. It is great that you want to pay the people who did the creative work. … Does that mean you buy every single album you listen to? Because you ARE going to have to buy a “massive collection” unless you only listen to one or two bands endlessly. Or, more likely, you will do what everyone does and decide “Well, I barely listen to that band and only like one or two of their songs so it it really worth buying?”.

It sucks for the artists who have lost their bandcamp revenue. But it was bound to happen because the model itself is fundamentally incompatible with the modern consumer base.

Godot is pretty heavily documented at this point. I would recommend finding videos from over a month ago (so it isn’t just posturing), but it is consistently a solid “B” engine as it were.

But the real issue hasn’t changed. Because of licensing and ideological reasons, adding in hooks for console development remains a mess. And that is not something that any company (… okay, Rami Ismail/Vlambeer would totally talk about this and burn a few bridges in the process) is going to really talk about because it is a lose lose. It pisses off the platform owners AND will be viewed as “unfair” by the fanboys.

I’ll just add on that BSG are a horrible example when it comes to delivering on “promises” and plans.

If memory serves, the official plan is still to do a steam release when EFT is “out of beta”. But they realized they make a LOT more money if they control the whole store so… Which is likely why they moved away from Steam Audio, continue to use their grossly incompetent anti-cheat solution, etc. Nikita et al will “heavily imply” they are doing stuff and then just ignore it because people keep buying top tier accounts so they can have maximum storage and so forth.

Also: SP Tarkov works REALLY well under Proton. Something about the new gui for the spt-installer needs more dependencies to work again, but the actual game runs great if you can be bothered to manually patch it.

I mean… it is basically the same problem as youtube/video. Audio is orders of magnitude less storage (unless you are a FLAC sicko), but it is also played a lot more. And people generally don’t want to have to plug their zune into their computer to grab mp3s before they go for a drive, so you still need a content delivery service. All of which costs money.

And then you have monetization. Just look around at all the people losing their god damned minds over youtube caring about adblockers. Hell, just look at how every single youtube video gets a bot reply that basically says “Hey, want to dick over this content creator? use this link instead”. And, evil google or not, most creators (who don’t get demonetized because of their content…) will point out that youtube is pretty nice in terms of revenue and that they give a very good cut of the premium ad-free subscribers.

Which gets back to music. Someone will probably pay for Tay-Tay’s latest album because she is the biggest musician on the planet. But Biffy Clyro? They are great to listen to in a mix but are they REALLY worth the 15 bucks for an album? I mean, sure you listen to them every single day but…

These kinds of arguments remind me of when someone (I think it was Snoop?) was ranting about how much they hate spotify and gave what, on paper, sounded like a small number. And if you actually broke down the amount of money per listen they were asking for and then normalized against the cost of an ad on various services, it was actually REALLY expensive.

Are you honestly playing the “It isn’t as smart and special as a human being” in a thread about stack overflow? Where the answer to the vast majority of questions is:

1. An insult about not using search correctly and this being a duplicate
2. Outdated
3. Outright wrong AND argumentative

Also: There is a reason Microsoft bought Github. And you can bet that Atlassian and Gitlab are shopping around for buyers.

I mean, it is mostly his and his collaborators subscribers money. For a good cause but still

Its arguable if that would actually be more effective.

Kevlar is already sufficient for small caliber. And even if the material itself is stronger, you still want it to be thick because the impact of that bullet is going to go somewhere… A few of the “I made a John Wick suit” youtubes have touched on this where the bullet is stopped but the dummy is REALLY dented in that spot.

And if we are talking higher caliber rounds? You pretty much need the metal/ceramic/whatever plate

So there might be small niche cases where this would be better for armor. But I doubt there are many situations where a “naturally made” product by genetically modified animals beats out a chemical process for cost and volume.

… And here I thought there were no new lows that would surprise me