circuitfarmer

The right has tried to censor video games for years.

I’m old enough to remember Doom being blamed for Columbine.

The US had plenty of chances to avert this.

Don’t sell weapons to terrorists.

Translation: Arnold is too old even with de-aging, so the suits have agreed.

Shareholders demand ever increasing return. There is only one way any of this goes, and we are witnessing a total systematic collapse. It is a mathematical certainty.

You cannot squeeze blood from a stone.

What a cop-out.

Bethesda didn’t have trouble making games when they cared about making games. Now, they care about making money. Yes, devs should get paid for their work. But design decisions based on anything other than making a good game poison the well.

This is why small devs are absolutely killing it with indie games on PC at the moment. AAA titles fail over and over again, because they’re designed for C-suite pockets first and gamers second.

It’s certainly possible. I do get ads that don’t seem relevant for me pretty regularly. But this last time I’m referencing: one of the first ads I saw that night was for our discussion topic.

I’m not disagreeing with you, so I’ll just mention it’s safe to say: whether it is digital fingerprinting or mic listening, the surveillance level is absolutely off the charts.

They’re not listening to your microphone, at least not while your phone is in your pocket or whatever, because they don’t need to.

I don’t deny that fingerprinting is powerful. But, I also have started to wear a tinfoil hat on the “mic always listening” issue. I have experienced (several times) ads for random things that I have only discussed – never searched for or had other interaction with in any way.

It wouldn’t be in my fingerprint, so the only other possibility is that others with a similar fingerprint to me had already searched for the same thing. Frankly, from an Occam’s Razor perspective, I just find it far less likely that we have such a hive mentality that everyone with similar digital fingerprints ends up having the same “random” discussions. At that point, “they’re always listening to your mic” seems downright practical.

This is one effect of a general lack of real consequences for corporations and those that run them.

The company has already determined their likely fine after being caught doing something egregious. The profit from being early to market is significant, and so long as it is considerably higher than the likely fine, they go for it. The expected real earnings are the difference between the profit and the fine. It’s all made worse since so often the fine is absolutely nothing compared to the profit, since the numbers these companies are dealing with are so damn big.

This is why you won’t see real change until we stop slapping corporations with fines and start slapping executives with jail time. That is literally the only way to break the cycle.

And the really shocking thing is how easy that was to normalize.

Talk about random thing at dinner, phone in pocket.

Post dinner, hit up Insta and boom, ad for random thing… and at that point, some people go “heh” and keep scrolling. Some likely think it’s “the algorithm” being magical and just using other context cues to guess that they would have mentioned it at dinner. Many have realized that, in fact, the devices you pay for and subscribe to are actively spying on you. Constantly.

And yet, the number of people who have opted out of using these devices and services is relatively minimum. There is a good reason for that: many of these services are so ubiquitous, they look and feel like utilities. And in some cases, they effectively are, as it can be impossible to use another service without a smartphone.

Hell, I can’t even pay my damn rent without using some stupid app.

Spin on a spin at this point.

Now for extra fun: consider how different the attacks would be if Kamala Harris were a male candidate, with all other factors as close as possible (age, race, background, etc.)

You wouldn’t be hearing about how he “slept his way” to the top. You wouldn’t be hearing about how his “handlers” had to feed him information because he isn’t capable of debating on his own without prompting. You’d still be hearing a bunch of bullshit, to be sure, but it would be different bullshit.

The next time someone on the right tries to deflect or muddy the water with “bUt caN You eVeN giVe a sPecIfic eXampLe AboUt hOw tHe RePubLican party / MAGA / Trump Is seXiSt?”, all you must do is point to the kinds of lies they naturally fell into about Kamala Harris.

What those higher up in the party think of women, and what the rest have chosen to align themselves to, is on full display.

In conclusion, the results support the hypothesis that fecal knives are usually shitty knives

– the paper, probably

Good thing he gutted Twitter’s content moderation teams in the name of “free speech”, eh?

If I had a dollar for every time a billionaire loses more money than I could ever dream of because their hubris got in the way or they misunderstood a concept or were just plain dumb – well, I guess I’d be a billionaire too.

The US has a problem of representation. Specifically and especially since the Citizens United decision, corporate interests can easily flow money towards politicians to make them do just about anything they want. This exacerbated an existing problem with the corporate tax rate and has now brought it into laughably low territory.

That’s all an oversimplification of course, but it’s not that Americans haven’t “figured it out”. It is far more complicated than that.

I think it is a kind of spectacle that just doesn’t exist anymore. For example, going to a Marvel movie for the effects is sort of like watching a video game. When everything is pure CGI, it loses the appeal (for me).

But Titanic was right at the cusp of that. There is CGI, but there’s also bigatures and miniature work and practical effects, etc etc etc. In many ways it is James Cameron at his peak.

But totally agree that the plot is pretty corny and it could have been much better as a more historically-focused film which didn’t spend most of the time on a relatively generic love story.

That’s fair. But it’s worth watching even just for the effects and set work.

That plus a massive amount of inherent isolationism plus an extreme birth shortage and an already very aged population.

The writing is on the wall in many ways unless major, unprecedented changes were to be made. Japan in a hundred years will be unrecognizable without them.

I can see it now. Years into the future, a weird Republican coalition in Congress: “But his bag toss!” “Where’s Tim’s real score?”

As the country burns.

I don’t see YT being replaced in that sense any time soon. Federated text and image content is really still in infancy, and video hosting at the size of YT is a tremendously more complex feat, requiring, at the absolute minimum: a metric crapton of bandwidth and storage.

For me, I just use invidious and similar for the foreseeable future, or peertube when there are things on it.

At the very least, not being signed in to YT and having only a local watch history and subscriptions (=not on a YT or Google account) does starve the algorithm a bit.

Titanic is actually worth a watch though. Whereas for Minecraft, I found even the teaser to be a challenge.