Yeah. I don’t know what the % breakdown is, but I get the sense that while the general community is inherently anti-corporate/anti-commodification, there are some that view this in the left wing sense of communities supporting each other and some who view this more of as a consumption/voting with your wallet individualized choice. They recognize that some or even all corporations are bad, but think opting out of those structures without directly challenging them is all that they need.

But like I said, idk what the actual distribution of these views are. It’s just the sense I get from seeing some of the comments.

Agreed that it’s something I need to overcome. But I still think collective action is the only way forward. Half our problems stem from everyone acting as individuals divorced from community.

Admittedly not much anymore. It’s hard organizing people in the face of systemic opposition under the best of circumstances, but I’m also incredibly unhealthy. Socially awkward and anxious is only the tip of the iceberg of the personal problems I have that make it hard for me to engage in real life activism anymore. I’ve tried, but it’s not really something I can do at the moment. I can barely do anything at the moment for that matter.

That said, there is some small value in trying to convince others to think about these problems and develop class consciousness. I’m not claiming it’s much and it’s stressful/depressing knowing I’m not doing more, but at least I’m not trying to get people to stick their heads in the sand. I’m not actively making things worse.

Part of the problem is the atomization of society. We’ve have vanishingly few truly public spaces to build the kind of connections with people necessary to form shared political causes. People spend most of their lives either:

• In their private homes, suspicious of anyone who tries to interact with them there.

• In private workplaces where management surveils employees and tries to stop organized activity.

• In private businesses where you are only welcome as individual consumers.

• Online on platforms that are privately owned and designed to manipulate behavior and social interactions towards interacting with more advertising. Controversy is only allowed to the extent that it gets more eyeballs on ads and doesn’t upset advertisers.

Back when I was more involved in electoral politics, I found it extraordinarily difficult to reach out to people to organize them, either because they were in spaces where political campaigning wasn’t allowed or because they have become distrustful of strangers.

It’s suffocating any kind of broader public consciousness and I don’t really know what to do about it.

I am tired of living in a world with all of these problems. Whether or not I have the luxury to ignore them is besides the point.

No. But not because AI isn’t gonna get better, but because hype is an ever moving goal post. Nobody gets excited about what’s already possible. Hype lives on vague promises of some amazing future that is right around the corner we promise. Then by the time it becomes apparent that a lot of the claims were nonsense and the actual developments were steadier and less dramatic, they’ve already moved onto new wild claims.

Trying to refund it, although pretty low chance since it’s well past the window. But that’s part of what makes it so bullshit to bring this in long after that window closed. I’d have refunded the game on the spot if it actually required the account creation from the get go. I refunded Red Dead 2 after it turned out to require a Rock Star account. Fortunately that was apparent on start up so I just quit and refunded.

Anyone got a recommendation for an open source alternative to discord? Basically just need voice, text, and screen sharing for a group of friends of like, 5-6 at most on at any time.

Even if I gotta pay to host a server, I’d rather do that than pay discord extortion money to avoid ads while still getting my data stolen.

• Slay the Spire: I don’t just think it’s the best deck building roguelike, I think it’s the quintessential deck building roguelike. It’s such a complete exploration of the design space of the genre in terms of the options it gives the player to build their deck and the challenges it puts those decks up against. Not that there aren’t any other fun games in this genre, but they all still feel like STS, but worse and with a gimmick that doesn’t add much.

-Will edit with more in a bit.

For me, I just recognize that AI, or any technology isn’t the problem. It’s context it exists in, who gets to use it, and how.

We shouldn’t have to choose between automating boring or dangerous jobs and letting people live dignified lives free from the fear of poverty. We shouldn’t have to choose between having AIs that can generate all sorts of interesting media quickly (even if a lot of it isn’t that good yet, it can still serve its purposes, like say, quickly mocking up an idea to see if it’s worth going forward with it.) and ruining the livelihoods of the real artists that made it possible. We also shouldn’t have to deal wit the mountain of garbage that will be created and shoved in our faces by corporations that don’t understand what the limitations of the technology are.

These are all capitalism problems. We should probably do something about that instead of asking dumb questions like if AI can really make “art” or if it’s copyright infringement.

It strikes me as a mostly non-technical problem. As a method of interfacing with computers/games it just doesn’t offer anything that useful and runs into a lot of practical problems that won’t magically get better with faster processors or smarter software.

I mean sure. Anything someone is using like currency can be called currency. But we’re talking practical terms here. Things we “collectively agree to value.” My WoW gold might be useful for buying potions, but it’s not generally accepted anywhere outside that narrow context. The fewer people who are willing to accept the currency, the less useful, and arguably less “real” it becomes, in so far as currency is defined by its value to others. I could print “me bucks” that I value at $1B USD, but that doesn’t mean much if nobody will give me a sandwich for it.

But this is actually why crypto isn’t a real currency: we haven’t collectively agreed to value it, or at least not in any way that makes it useful as a medium for exchange. Ironically it can’t possibly become a proper currency while speculators are making its price so volatile. The very act of investing in it is making it worthless.

VR has been a thing for years now and has been getting cheaper over time. I’ve had no interest in using it whatsoever. Clearly the thing that needed to change was for it to get MORE expensive. Thanks Apple! Always giving the customer what they didn’t know they wanted!

It’s a pretty low bar they have to get over. And hey, they might be even better since the AI would feel the pain of their failures instead of getting a golden parachute.

They don’t even try to be competitive on technology or service though. If they were making a comparable or even superior product and people were sticking with Steam anyway for the network effect I’d agree they’d be justified in doing more to attract customers. But they just want to use their pile of money to buy their way into a market without putting in the work to design and develop a superior product.

They do the same thing that the horde of shitty streaming services do: Hold content hostage through exclusivity deals so they can gain market share without actually providing a comparable technology or service as their competitor.

Removing humans from your side of the war lowers the cost of going to war and allows for even more centralized power. It’s a lot easier to do morally bankrupt acts if you don’t need to convinced a group of human soldiers to do it. Clearly you can anyway a lot of the time, but going for the robots is a lot cheaper/less risky.

It’s pretty obvious why powerful people would want this and why it would be terrible for the rest of us even without worrying about a hypothetical sky net future.

Where do they get the money from?

I don’t think that’s entirely true. Or at least not in the longer term view of it. YT isn’t just some random store that doesn’t want to deal with an unruly customer. It’s a big tech monopoly platform. Like the other tech giants, their strategy has always hinged on becoming the only game in town. And they predictably use the same tactics monopolies have been using for the past century:

1. Offer the product at such a low price that you take a loss and use your hoard of money to outlast would-be competitors who don’t have a massive pot of money to burn. In YT/Google terms this is the fact that it’s a free site and up until very recently they’ve done little to nothing about adblocking users despite being one of the biggest tech companies in the world, knowing it is happening, (It was in their chrome extensions search, plus they don’t pay the creators for the no-ad views.) and having the capability to stop it at least for their browser, which a lot of people were already using. Why not go to war with adblockers sooner when their entire business is built on advertising? Because that’s the cost they were willing to bear to turn YT into a monopoly. They could take the hit on not getting ad revenue from some users, but some hypothetical competitor certainly couldn’t.

2. Make switching hard. A site that’s grown as large as YT has massive network effects. For viewers, that’s where all the videos are. For creators that’s where all the viewers are. For both that’s where there is enough of a community that there are lively discussions in comments. Nobody outside nerds like us is going to some external site they’ve never heard of. If you want to get your stuff out there, you use YT. Then there are things like creator contracts to further discourage switching.

Ad block users aren’t valueless to YT, or at least they weren’t. They were a portion of those viewers and commenters that contributed to YT becoming THE video social media site. They comment, share videos around, maybe even contribute directly to creators to allow them to keep making YT video. You maybe lose a out on a couple cents from the lost ad views for each one of them, but the value of the network effect gained by keeping them around this long far outweighs that loss.

EDIT: Oh and how could I forget: They get data from you. Sure, they can’t directly sell ads for you off that data, but the more data they have in general, the better they are able to make predictions about other similar users, which is valuable.

They’re doing this now because they can. They no longer have meaningful competition to kill off. The few that kinda cross into their market are also massive tech platform monopolies that are currently engaged in the exact same thing. They can’t expand their customer base anymore, so now they’re extracting more money from the captive audience they have.

And it’s not just adblock users they’re increasing the “price” for. YT has added an insane number of ads to their videos and increased the price of YT Premium. If adblockers died tomorrow, they wouldn’t be like “What a relief, now that we’ve gotten rid of the freeloaders, we can finally lower our prices for everyone since they aren’t bearing the burden of the non-payers.” They just get to tighten the screws even further because they would have gained an even more dominant position over their users.

In a fairer world, we’d all pay a reasonable amount for the things we use or move on to an alternative if we’d rather not. But we don’t live in that world. We live in capitalist hell world where everything is a monopoly and the government is so captured by those corporate interests that they basically never enforce even the meager anti-trust laws we do have.