The main uses for AI in game development aren’t generating things on the fly for players anyway, it’s helping artists and coders do their work faster.

Yes but only if it’s actually secure and safe ie. fully open source

One unified interface I’ve been enjoying is Stability Matrix, which lets you conveniently switch between different image generation frontends without having duplicates of the model files.

Text generation: LM Studio seems the most user friendly IMO

Voice transcription: I’ve been using AllTalk TTS, was a little frustrating to set up but works

I’m not sure how you’d tell unless there is some reputable source that claims they saw this search result themselves, or you found it yourself. Making a fake is as easy as inspect element -> edit -> screenshot.

Yeah but it’s funny in a different way; they are giving ignorant and condescending advice because while big cats have impressive hunting abilities, they don’t normally hunt mice.

entertainment where you can laugh at how they put effort into creating an illusion of professionalism but left enough gaps to make it clear it was just an illusion and he’s in way over his head

I liked the time when he tried to use linux and ended up destroying his os by blindly following googled command line instructions

Maybe, but I think it is possible that at some point it could become permanently too late for that. If your every move is tracked, if your thoughts and actions are all anticipated and directed, if automated systems can silence or kill anyone, we can lose all possible agency. If the entities retaining agency find a way to be sustainable and stable, things can stay that way indefinitely. People often seem to think that we’ll always get another chance, and given enough time things may change, but I think it is very likely that we will lose, with finality.

From the article:

By shutting down a studio instead of selling it off or even letting it buy itself out, Microsoft ensures that no studio it has ever owned can become viable competition.

They benefit by killing off art and culture that could replace or take attention away from the art and culture they already control and profit from. They don’t need to profit from it directly.

It’s a good one

Check out Nostr, ActivityPub alternative that does authentication separately from content, works more like that.

I don’t know, but what does that even mean? Does it mean anything beyond a call for engagement, a vague imperative statement reworded as a rhetorical question? I am so sick of being asked for my attention when there’s really very little to be paying attention to, or when my input is not needed or wanted.

For me the problem is that virtually all political content and discussion online is very low information. Generally no one is conveying anything I haven’t already heard many times, it’s mostly remixing slogans and truisms and finding different ways of expressing the same simplified opinion. Questioning that stuff or asking for nuance to be addressed gets met with aggression. The more I’m exposed to it the more I feel like my brain is rotting, definitely does not feel like I’m learning things.

Relevant Snowden quote:

Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say

I pay for vpn service anonymously even though I probably don’t need to, as my main use is torrenting. I can see a remote possibility that vpn payment records at some point end up being used against pirates, even just as some kind of risk factor flagging, in the same vein as what you are saying: “If someone is paying for a vpn, surely they’re doing something bad?” In countries that really want to crack down on speech and human rights, vpns get banned outright to varying success, and if you can’t pay anonymously in that situation you’re pretty screwed, this hurts those people.

In general I think everyone should be trying for some level of actual privacy online as a matter of principle, just because of how everyone being fully tracked and observed puts way too much power in the hands of those watching.

The current administration and its agencies have clear contempt for any sort of crypto privacy they have shown in a variety of ways. The Tornado Cash sanction and criminal charges, recent Bitcoin mixer criminal charges, the proposed rule putting a “Primary Money Laundering Concern” black mark on people seeking crypto privacy in virtually any way… if it’s possible to still purchase online services privately after this, I’m sure they will go on to take further measures to try to close the “loophole”. They don’t want anyone doing things without being able to monitor them.

if somehow the population of pirates increases, that will lead to maybe tighter controls on piracy or a more global crackdown of piracy

Yes, I think most people accept that this is how it would likely work. And it actually is the case that many pirates do not agree with what I am saying, and see this as something to be avoided by keeping piracy niche, and would like to preserve their own access that way, and use this reasoning to argue against greater accessibility. But it’s kind of like voting; any action you can take as an individual affecting the broader society is unlikely to make much difference in determining outcomes that affect you personally. It’s possible to mistakenly imagine that they do, it’s possible to not be thinking about it at all, and it’s possible to have different ideas about what you would like to affect; for instance a person wanting to keep piracy niche might have some idea of a group identity of more technically literate and connected insiders like themselves, and want to act to protect the interests of maintaining media access for that group.

To me, this subjectivity of goals and the relative absence of direct personal consequences make these choices very unlike a game of prisoner’s dilemma, in which you can expect the consequences of your choices to be unambiguous, tangible, and personally experienced. Instead of working out an optimization problem for clearly defined personal interests that are the same for all actors, the task is one of empathy and imagination - what can the world look like, what should it look like, who do we care about and what do we want for them? How do different visions of the world weigh against each other?

We definitely don’t want more people to pirate

Many of us do. Why would we seed torrents, donate to crackers and repackers, offer useful advice etc. if we did not? Personally I would prefer for everyone to stop paying money for software and media entirely, and for the industries that produce those things to collapse, and the legal structures protecting them to be dismantled, because I think we would create better stuff without financial incentives. Not everyone is operating under your idea of a rational perspective here.

That makes a lot of sense. Seems like the way taxes are set up is creating perverse incentives here.

Growth is more valuable than dividends

Shouldn’t that depend on the dollar amounts? Why would $X of dividends be worse than $X of stock growth? And if growth just isn’t in the cards anymore, it would be in reality a worse bet as the companies pour resources into a black hole of false hope and self sabotage seeking something that isn’t actually going to happen.

you get a lot of publicly traded companies that are in the industry that have to show their investors growth—because why else does somebody own a share of someone’s stock if it’s not going to grow?

I thought the way it was supposed to work was, a company starts out investing in its growth and during this period shareholders get gains from the price of the stock going up, and then when it has maxed out just switch to shoveling the profits into dividends instead? If the industry has stopped growing, I don’t see why there isn’t a path to acknowledging that to investors, what am I missing?

I have no idea because I use browser tools to hide the element that shows vote scores. If people don’t like what I have to say and want me to know about it they can take the time to write a response.