greenskye

I’d be more ok with this if the expensive specialists on board were actually making bank instead of really low wages.

Isn’t Pokemon like… The biggest IP ever? Way bigger than Star wars or marvel or pretty much anything else? Not sure they’re actually hurting. At all.

Brother took me to a casino for my 21st birthday. I did a bit of research, so I only took in $40 and left my atm card at home.

I wanted to play the cool looking slot machines. Brother convinced me that roulette was going to be way more fun. It was a busy night, so it took almost an hour to get a spot at the table. And the minimum bet was $10. Roughly 3 min after finally getting to bet, I’d lost all $40, having not won a single time (even my bets on the colors failed).

It was so utterly disappointing, especially when the next person in our party got to the table and managed to keep their bets going for over an hour and left with a few hundred extra $ that night. Most of the night was me just standing around bored out of my mind.

I’m very thankful for that early experience. Later experiences were better, but also far more tempting. I attribute my ability to resist the temptation largely to how shitty that first night was.

Spouses yes, but only because things are generally in both names. Children no. They’ll try to lie and say it is, but it’s not.

I’m not totally up to date with AI, but are we even capable of running our current AI tech in a fashion similar to humans? My exposure to AI is so l stuff like chatbots, which don’t do anything until a user interacts with them. They aren’t sitting there thinking on their own. They aren’t proactive in any way.

My understanding is that it would be astronomically expensive to run one constantly with constant input. And I’m not aware of any of them even trying to run like that.

Are they doing anything like that?

Currently I’m still able to buy the book and break the DRM, though that option is rapidly closing. I try to buy it elsewhere if possible, but it’s often not.

Piracy is an option, but because the authors are so small, pirated copies can take months to become available, if they ever are. Also, I consider myself very knowledgeable in breaking the encryption for these files. I would be the person putting the upload out there if I was interested in that kind of thing. So if I’m having difficulty breaking the DRM, chances are high that nobody else has either. Or at least we’d be stuck with crappy OCR’d PDF copies instead of proper epubs.

At the end of the day though, as the consumer, exclusive content like this means I participate in the platform or I simply don’t get access to that content. If it were simply a couple of titles, that’s one thing, but it hurts when it’s an entire genre. It’d be like being a fan of metal music, but 90% of all metal music was only on Spotify and nowhere else. It’s horrible that a single company can control an entire genre like this.

I’m happy to leave Amazon, but it sure feels like Kindle Unlimited has a stranglehold on indie publishing. At this point I’m faced with sticking with Amazon or basically finding an entirely new genre to read, as 90% of the titles I like (litrpg) aren’t available outside Amazon due to KUs exclusivity clause.

And also we aren’t (or sometimes are) allowed to express our own displeasure at these actions. Like reacting to speech somehow isn’t covered by freedom of speech.

One could argue easily available pornographic images of fake children increases the market and desire for pornographic images of real children and as such can result in more victims

Not speaking to any realistic images (which, if nothing else, make it harder for real investigations into child abuse to happen), only cartoon drawings and the like, but it’s hard for me to separate this logic from all of the calls about video game violence.

That moves things into ‘pre crime’ territory. “We’re going to jail you for having fake drawn images because we think those will cause you to commit a real crime in the future”. That’s also extremely problematic and has been rightly criticized when it’s used to censor violent games, movies and music.

Yes sorry. My original statement was too vague. I was talking specifically about scenarios where there is no victim and the action was just a drawing/story/etc.

I’m not a free speech absolutist. I think that lacks nuance. There are valid reasons to restrict certain forms of speech. But I do think the concept is core to a healthy democracy and society and should be fiercely protected.

To further clarify it’s specifically around thought crimes in scenarios where there is no victim being harmed.

If I’m distributing copyrighted content, that’s harming the copyright holder.

I don’t actually agree with breaking DRM being illegal either, but at least in that case, doing so is supposedly harming the copyright holder because presumably you might then distribute it, or you didn’t purchase a second copy in the format you wanted or whatever. There’s a ‘victim’ that’s being harmed.

Doodling a dirty picture of a totally original character doing something obscene harms absolutely no one. No one was abused. No reputation (other than my own) was harmed. If I share that picture with other consenting adults in a safe fashion, again no one was harmed or had anything done to them that they didn’t agree to.

It’s totally ridiculous to outlaw that. It’s punishing someone for having a fantasy or thought that you don’t agree with and ruining their life. And that’s an extremely easy path to expand into other thoughts you don’t like as well. And then we’re back to stuff like sodomy laws and the like.

Totally fair stance to take. I’m 100% on board with extra restrictions and scrutiny over anything that is photo realistic.

To me, those aren’t necessarily victimless crimes, even if the person doesn’t actually exist, because they poison the well with realistic looking fakes. That is actively harmful to others, so is not a victimless crime. Instead it becomes just another form of misinformation.

Making porn of actual people without their consent regardless of age is not a thought crime. For children, that’s obviously fucked up. For adults it’s directly impacting their reputation. It’s not a victimless crime.

But generating images of adults that don’t exist? Or even clearly drawn images that aren’t even realistic? I’ve seen a lot of people (from both sides of the political spectrum) advocate that these should be illegal if the content is what they consider icky.

Like let’s take bestiality for example. Obviously gross and definitely illegal in real life. But should a cartoon drawing of the act really be illegal? No one was abused. No reputation was damaged. No illegal act took place. It was simply someone’s fucked up fantasy. Yet lots of people want to make that into a thought crime.

I’ve always thought that if there isn’t speech out there that makes you feel icky or gross then you don’t really have free speech at all. The way you keep free speech as a right necessarily requires you to sometimes fight for the right of others to say or draw or write stuff that you vehemently disagree with, but recognize as not actually causing harm to a real person.

I get this and I don’t disagree, but I also hate that AI fully brought back thought crimes as a thing.

I don’t have a better approach or idea, but I really don’t like that simply drawing a certain arrangement of lines and colors is now a crime. I’ve also seen a lot of positive sentiment at applying this to other forms of porn as well, ones less universally hated.

Not supporting this use case at all and on balance I think this is the best option we have, but I do think thought crimes as a concept are just as concerning, especially given the current political climate.

As long as you’re not hurting other people or breaking their things, no one cares.

If only this were true. Far too many people seem to care rather a lot about stuff that shouldn’t matter at all to them.

I’m not talking about jobs, just people who do art for fun. Before AI there was still a lot of D&D fan art for example. Tons of people drawing their character or getting a commission done of the party after a long campaign. That kind of thing.

I think AI art has a negative impact on that sort of expression. People who might have tried it instead just generate something instead, never learning they really like to draw. People who would’ve commissioned something now can just generate a pic instead. People who had fun sharing fan art lose their motivation because for every one picture they complete, 1000s of AI images bury their art so it never gets appreciated.

Or where hiring an actual real artists - for example if you were to need dozens of graphics for, say, a TTRPG you’re running.

The only issue with that is that the AI was trained off the art from people who did create art for their TTRPG either paid or as a passion project.

Does that mean that new art effectively stops getting made for these scenarios? That real artists who are inspired to make cool art for their games just disappear or get assumed it was just AI?

I kind of wonder if we just stagnate from here, with very little new art being created that doesn’t come from AI. In 10 years will we still be using the long recycled art from the last human artists? (Not that humans will stop creating art, but less will and they will often be drowned out from the flood of AI output)

Bookmarks bar get actually used (mostly). General bookmarks? Yeah those are never seen again.

I feel like Linux works for hardcore users and extremely casual users, but it doesn’t work that great for medium savvy users.

Like sure if I’m barely using the computer for anything other than a web browser then it’ll work fine.

And if I’m willing to do a whole lot of research I can also make it work for power user setups (at an even better outcome than Windows).

But if I’m just a gamer who’s smart enough to do some modding and run a couple of game servers and maybe some other utilities, but I’m not incredibly tech savvy otherwise? Not a great fit.