So... basically, Musk turned up at a studio and threatened the devs with a gun (which antique or not, could have been loaded and functional - shooting with antique guns is a thing) to make them put him in the game?

I know there's a massive cultural difference around guns between the UK and the US, but I'm genuinely struggling to see how "a man has turned up to our studio with a gun because he wants us to put him in our game" doesn't warrant a call to the police.

It is true that removing and demonetising Nazi content wouldn't make the problem of Nazis go away. It would just be moved to dark corners of the internet where the majority of people would never find it, and its presence on dodgy-looking websites combined with its absence on major platforms would contribute to a general sense that being a Nazi isn't something that's accepted in wider society. Even without entirely making the problem go away, the problem is substantially reduced when it isn't normalised.

It's always helpful to remember that it's not how someone treats their equals that tells you who they are. It's how they treat those who are weaker than them. Bragging about how he loves punching down is like bragging about being a bully: Chappelle might think it makes him look cool, but it simply makes him look pathetic.

Yeah, good luck enforcing that contract in any country that has a legal concept of "automatically unfair contract terms".

Wouldn't moving Windows into the cloud basically make computers non-functional without internet? Because I can see a few problems with that, particularly for those in rural areas or who are travelling a lot.

I've hesitated to switch over to Linux in recent years, primarily due to concerns about compatibility with software and games, but I'd rather have to find new art software than pay a subscription for an operating system that I can't even use offline.

Funny how the CEOs never have to "just get through" being laid off...

I read the article. Apparently it only really works with hard water - that's water with a high concentration of calcium carbonate. At high temperatures, the calcium carbonate becomes a solid, trapping the microplastics inside it, which is then removed from the water with a regular filter.

I wish I could upvote this more than once.

What people always seem to miss is that a human doesn't need billions of examples to be able to produce something that's kind of "eh, close enough". Artists don't look at billions of paintings. They look at a few, but do so deeply, absorbing not just the most likely distribution of brushstrokes, but why the painting looks the way it does. For a basis of comparison, I did an art and design course last year and looked at about 300 artworks in total (course requirement was 50-100). The research component on my design-related degree course is one page a week per module (so basically one example from the field the module is about, plus some analysis). The real bulk of the work humans do isn't looking at billions of examples: it's looking at a few, and then practicing the skill and developing a process that allows them to convey the thing they're trying to express.

If the AI models were really doing exactly the same thing humans do, the models could be trained without any copyright infringement at all, because all of the public domain and creative commons content, plus maybe licencing a little more, would be more than enough.

'Is money a birthright now?'

If it's not, then logically a 100% inheritance tax must be imposed. After all, nobody is entitled to money just for being born, right?

Kind of depressing that the answer to not being replaced by AI is "learn to use it and spend your day fixing its fuckups", like that's somehow a meaningful way to live for someone who previously had an actual creative job.

We should really get rid of the term "pro-life", because the people with those beliefs are not pro-life. They're pro-birth. They don't care what happens to the children or the mothers after the birth has happened.

The technology acts as a motion sensor that detects faces, so the machine knows when to activate the purchasing interface

This sounds like an excuse to me. I'm a university student in the UK. Our vending machines use a very effective means of letting the machine know we're ready to buy something without using any facial recognition software at all. What we do, right, is press the letter and number buttons that match up to what we want to buy. The machine says how much money the item costs, and then we tap our bank/credit cards to the contactless card reader, just like we would in any other shop. Then the machine dispenses the item.

It's really, really clever how they've invented this way for us to purchase afternoon snacks to help us cope with how annoying our classmates are, and we don't even have to have our faces scanned! Truly the kind of innovative technology you'd expect to find in a university.

What matters isn't whether any of this has been done before, and more authentically, and well enough to be built upon—what matters is that this particular rich man-child hasn't done it yet, from scratch, for himself and for his own dream of being The Most Special Boy.

The whole piece was a good read, but this quote stands out to me, because it literally summarises every single thing Elon Musk is involved with.

The whole premise that trans healthcare isn't "deeply rooted in our nation’s history and tradition" would seem to apply to an awful lot of modern healthcare. Florida should also decide that, say, hair transplants, penis pumps, and Viagra are not constitutional. Funny how modern healthcare is fine when it's something old, rich, white men want to have, but not when it's something trans people need.

So, basically... "an investigation into whether we lied to customers in order to sell them stuff would have an impact on our business". Well, yeah, that's true. Shockingly, customers don't like being lied to about the quality of the goods they're buying, and hearing that there's enough indication of lying to warrant a full probe into it would make future customers hesitant to buy. While wrongdoing hasn't been proven yet, I can't imagine this probe would be happening "just in case" Tesla lied - there must have been a high volume of complaints from customers who aren't happy. The precedent set by not investigating would be awful. It'd basically say businesses can claim whatever they like about their products, because being caught lying about them would always have the consequence of "material adverse impact on our business".

I can't help but think of a comparison with print newspapers, which undoubtedly is where the idea of funding the internet through ads started. It made a certain sense: newspapers and magazines partially support themselves through adverts, so websites (particularly those with regularly updated content) could also rely on ad revenue.

But the big difference is that with a print newspaper, the customer pays to buy the paper, and the customer also has the choice to not look at the ads. I've got a print newspaper subscription. All the ads are clustered together on a few specific pages, not interspersed amongst the real content, which allows me to just skip right past them.

Ads on the internet, however, have become increasingly insidious over the years, often blocking access to the website's real content. And the more obnoxious they are and the harder they are for people to avoid, the more likely people are to utilise adblockers, because ultimately they want to see ads on the internet about as much as I want to read the adverts page in the newspaper (apart from the personal ads, those are a good giggle). Forcing people to look at content they don't want to look at is always going to end badly.

I'm quite happy for the ad-based internet to die. Websites with good content and good communities don't need revenue from adverts, because they will always have support from the communities they create. Most people aren't averse to donating even a few {currency of choice} to help keep something they love running, especially when they know it's not an extractive, exploitative business model.

It's worth remembering that the Luddites were not against technology. They were against technology that replaced workers, without compensating them for the loss, so the owners of the technology could profit.

I'm inclined to agree. I was definitely an internet addict when I was a teenager, but now as a 40 year old, I'm persistently depressed by how many people my age simply cannot use more than the absolute basics of their phone and computer. Like sure, they can send a text and write in a Word document, but become completely paralysed by anything more complicated than that because they're so terrified they'll break something if they click on the wrong button. Those of us that are used to technology have no fear of pressing buttons to find out what they do.

I feel like there ought to be a sensible middle ground somewhere, where kids can be taught how to use the tools they'll be relying on as adults, without exposing them to all the downsides of the internet and exploitative apps.

Techbros once again surprised at how their technology is used.

The other breaking headlines for today:

Shock discovery that water is wet.

Toddler discovers that fire is hot after touching it.

Bear shits in woods.

Pope revealed to be Catholic.

I mean... those non-compete clauses are legally unenforceable in the UK. They're in contracts all the time, people ignore them all the time and get new jobs elsewhere, and on the rare occasions the previous employer actually tries to sue, the courts chuck it out because banning someone from working in their entire profession, globally, is almost always treated as an automatically unfair contract term that cannot be enforced. The cases where non-competes are upheld are for very specific instances (very high-level employees handling sensitive client data or very new innovations, patents, etc, or alternatively going to work for the direct competitor right across the street), and wouldn't apply to someone who had simply been a team lead for a couple of months. And since Blizzard wanted to treat him as a UK employee for salary purposes, he'd count as a UK employee for legal purposes too.

When the creation is based on such shaky foundations, no wonder the Star Wars fandom turns out to be racist and misogynist.

I'm not convinced of this. There are plenty of creators who are shitty people, but nevertheless ended up with fandoms that are incredibly inclusive. For example, Anne McCaffrey was incredibly homophobic, misogynistic, and classist, and the fandom simply discarded those elements of her books and uses its own interpretation of the worlds she created that are more inclusive. And an awful lot of Harry Potter fans very pointedly reject JK Rowling's transphobia, which is reflected in their interpretation of the Harry Potter universe.

It's not the foundations that determine how racist and misogynistic a fandom is. It's the type of fans. Star Wars has a lot of white male fans, and spaces inhabited by a large proportion of white male fans are more racist and misogynistic regardless of fandom. When you start looking at the fandom spaces with lots of women and LGBT people, you see a lot more inclusivity. You can barely move for LGBT-positive Star Wars fanfiction, a space that is traditionally overwhelmingly female and LGBT.

It does increasingly feel like the EU is the only institution that has any willingness to stand up to big tech.

As a Brit who is old enough to remember the BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy/mad cow disease) epidemic, this is astonishingly reckless and dangerous. This is how you get prion diseases. And you don't necessarily know you have a build-up of deformed prions until decades later.

Yep! Reddit is still pretty awful in many respects (and I only even bother with it for specific communities for which I haven't found a suitable active equivalent on Lemmy - more frogs and bugs on Lemmy please), but it did get notably less unpleasant when the majority of the truly terrible subs were banned. So it does make a difference.

I feel like "don't let perfect be the enemy of good" is apt when it comes to reactionaries and fascists. Completely eliminating hateful ideologies would be perfect, but limiting their reach is still good, and saying "removing their content doesn't make the problem go away" makes it sound like any effort to limit the harm they do is rendered meaningless because the outcome is merely good rather than perfect.

While it may not necessarily be "superhero fatigue", it could well be correct to say it's "Marvel fatigue". It's not like Disney haven't been pumping out content for the franchise in enormous quantities, to the point that even those who don't really follow the franchise are aware that it's absolutely massive and there's a lot of content you have to consume if you want to actually know what's going on. This is always a problem with big franchises: either you have to consume all of it (which means you get tired of it quicker), or you have to skip some and then be confused later when suddenly there's a character or enemy or event or whatever that you're supposed to know all about, but you don't because you didn't watch that other series/film.

Superheroes aren't my favourite genre, but I like to dabble every now and then, and there are some superhero TV series and films that I have genuinely loved. But frankly at this point I wouldn't even know where to start with Marvel because there's literally too much of it. Keeping up with a franchise shouldn't be a full time job. But Disney is essentially assuming that everybody has time to watch everything it pumps out for its franchises, but somehow simultaneously never go "you know what, I've watched a lot of this lately, I'm in the mood for something else." The more stuff becomes required viewing, the more of the audience you lose due to people just not having enough time.

People could well be experiencing some Marvel fatigue without feeling superhero fatigue, just like I feel a little Star Wars fatigue while still being interested in other sci-fi. Disney want a monopoly on entertainment, but they also don't want to risk spending money on a wide variety of franchises in case some of them make a loss, because the short term losses on a few failed experiments are more important than the long term gains of creating something new that endures. So all they do is recycle the same stuff over and over, oblivious to the fact that audiences won't just keep buying the same stuff over and over. Marvel, Star Wars, remakes of animated films from 30-80 years ago... Disney won't take risks anymore, so they've over-saturated their own market with repetitive products that consumers are losing interest in.

A requirement to leave a game in a "working state when support ends" doesn't mean continuing support (ie, running the server). It means the game should still work when the server is gone, which means either fully offline play, or a means for players to run their own servers. That's the whole point of this campaign, which is taking place across multiple countries.

AI is also going to run into a wall because it needs continual updates with more human-made data, but the supply of all that is going to dry up once the humans who create new content have been driven out of business.

It's almost like AIs have been developed and promoted by people who have no ability to think about anything but their profits for the next 12 months.

People will stop believing a country is in recession when it starts to feel like they can actually afford to do the things they want to do, like live in a home and eat food once in a while. They are incorrect to believe that it's a recession causing their current dire circumstances, but they're entirely correct to believe that something is amiss when they're just barely keeping themselves alive. It appears to be due to Biden's mismanagement only insofar as Biden has opted for largely continuity neoliberalism, which is how things have been mismanaged for the last 40 years or so.

Back in the early 00s (I think), there was a running joke about how the search engine Ask Jeeves had one purpose, and one purpose only: to amend any search to "where can I buy...?" Because no matter what you searched for, it would inevitably prioritise adverts and online shopping.

That's what Google is now.

I also use Ecosia now. It's powered by Bing on the back end, I believe, but the results are consistently better than what I get from Google. And it's like... okay, yes, this is the world we live in now, where Bing is more useful than Google.

I find it faintly amusing that, at least for me, the post directly below this one is "making large language models work for you". Clearly advice that the criminals have taken to heart.

All the admins here have given me plenty of reason to trust that you'll make the right decision for Beehaw, whether that's staying or moving. This is a good place and I'll stick with you no matter what you decide.

Pretty normal wording in scientific papers relating to animals, particularly in studies relating to traits humans share with other animals, like cooperation. It relates to the fact that humans are animals: the difference between humans and other animals is a matter of degrees of capability, rather than a binary presence or absence of a trait.

The following trait should be added under Sonic: "frees animals from villain who has turned them into robots".

And the following under Musk: "kills animals by implanting robot chips in their brains".

It's definitely good to hear this from time to time. Even though I'm gay and trans, I often feel like I'm "not queer enough" to be part of the community. I do wonder if it's more of a "too old and not extrovert enough" thing, though. Not so much a problem online, but out there in the physical world, I've never met another LGBT+ person who wasn't decades younger than me, many decibels louder than me, or both.

I have mixed feelings here, because on one hand, I actually do see where this guy is coming from. I'm a game design student on a degree course structured around live client briefs and projects for contests (ie, the stuff we make has to work for people outside the university, not just ourselves), and as design lead for the first project of the course, I was fighting with a member of my own team about design decisions throughout the entire project. Dude with zero capacity for empathy spent a considerable amount of energy arguing about how it was a waste of time developing the relationship between the characters in what was explicitly supposed to be a character-driven story. The words "character-driven" were literally in the brief, and right up until the last day he was insisting it was a waste of time focusing on the characters. So I really, really feel the Starfield design lead's frustration on the "stop arguing about shit you know nothing about" front.

On the other hand, I don't feel it's very professional to air this frustration in public. If people don't like Starfield, then they don't like it, and the design lead complaining about it on social media isn't going to change that, nor does it paint Bethesda in a good light. It just makes him look a bit petty, I guess?

I guess it all comes down to whether the product meets expectations. Players are disappointed in Starfield, and even if they don't know why design decisions were made, it doesn't change the fact that the game hasn't achieved what it was meant to achieve. People that spent a lot of money buying it have a right to feel annoyed, and being told "I'm right, you're wrong" by the design lead isn't helpful. And if the project does meet expectations, and it's only a few assholes complaining, then nobody needs to say "I'm right, you're wrong" because the end results speak for themselves. If Starfield had been a massive, widely-loved success, a few armchair devs saying "you should have done X, Y and Z instead" wouldn't be taken seriously.

One of the reasons that I don't spend much time in online communities focused around cetaceans anymore, despite having a lifelong interest in these animals, is the rather zealous and over-the-top idealisation of orcas, especially the Southern Resident population, as being more noble and moral than humans. And, indeed, more noble and moral than other cetaceans - I once had a far too long conversation with someone who is convinced that the Southern Residents are better than all other whales and dolphins because, unlike dolphins, they don't kidnap and murder baby porpoises. So I have to admit to feeling some glee to read that the Southern Residents have been... kidnapping and murdering baby porpoises. Turns out they're not so noble and moral after all.

Orcas are amazing animals, to be sure. They are genuinely intelligent beings, and their capacity to learn new skills is both fascinating and worthy of admiration. But lets admire them for what they are: just as wickedly clever and capable of cruelty as any other animal on the planet, including humans. It does neither us nor them any good to put them up on a pedestal as somehow morally superior to us.

I think the key problem with a lot of the models right now is that they were developed for "research", without the rights holders having the option to opt out when the models were switched to for-profit. The portfolio and gallery websites, from which the bulk of the artwork came from, didn't even have opt out options until a couple of months ago. Artists were therefore considered to have opted in to their work being used commercially because they were never presented with the option to opt out.

So at the bare minimum, a mechanism needs to be provided for retroactively removing works that would have been opted out of commercial usage if the option had been available and the rights holders had been informed about the commercial intentions of the project. I would favour a complete rebuild of the models that only draws from works that are either in the public domain or whose rights holders have explicitly opted in to their work being used for commercial models.

Basically, you can't deny rights' holders an ability to opt out, and then say "hey, it's not our fault that you didn't opt out, now we can use your stuff to profit ourselves".

IANAL, and I get that this varies by country, but at least some of TikTok's users are in the UK, where the courts have very thoroughly established that some contract terms are automatically unreasonable and are completely unenforceable even if someone agrees to them (the biggest example actually being most non-compete clauses in employment contracts!) This would seem to be one such case. This contract term is so blatantly unreasonable that I don't see how a court would uphold it even if the users agreed to it.

Once the Trust Thermocline has been breached, it's very difficult to recover, no matter how sorry you say you are...

They recently refused to remove pro-Nazi content from their site, claiming that doing so doesn't make the problem go away so therefore there's no point in trying.