Perhaps foolishly, I got rid of most of my older systems 20 years ago, so the oldest one I have left is my Sega Genesis.

If they raise the prices in those countries they would make less money because volume of subscribers would go down enough for total income to decrease.

If they lowered the price in the US, they would make less money because the subscribers they would gain would not be enough to offset the reduced income from each.

That’s it, it has nothing to do with operating costs or fairness, it’s just a question of what price point they believe will make them the most money in a given market.

Odd to me is Her Majesty’s instead of His, considering Charles is now King.

Do these places just retain the gender of the ruling monarch at the time of their construction?

Yup, exactly. The only regulation I’d be in favor of for AI is this: if it was trained on data which can be accessed by or was posted by the public, it must be freely available, such that if anything in the training data was posted online in a way anyone can see, then then I have free access to tge AI too.

Basically any other regulation, even if the companies whine publicly, is actually one that benefits them by raising the barrier of entry and making it more expensive for small actors to create AI tools.

They’ve gotten smart enough to use reverse psychology on this kind of thing.

This very much feels like “Only please, Brer Fox, please don’t throw me into the briar patch.”

I did years ago when Google started censoring my search results even with safe search off.

Unfortunately Bing is doing it too now and I can’t find a search engine that isn’t, though I would love to learn about one that isn’t.

I think abolishing intellectual property would hurt capitalism more than it would benefit it. Already it is strongly in favor of the rich and the big corporations. Getting rid of those limitations even without abolishing capitalism first, would, I think, be more to everyone’s benefit than detriment.

Yes, as long as people keep focusing on fighting the technology instead of fighting capitalism, this is true.

So we can fight the technology and definitely lose, only to see our efforts subverted to further entrench capitalism and subjugate us harder (hint: regulation on this kind of thing disproportionately affects individuals while corporations carve out exceptions for themselves because ‘it helps the economy’)…

Or we can embrace the technology and try to use it to fight capitalism, at which point there’s at least a chance we might win, since the technology really does have the potential to overcome capitalism if and only if we can spread it far enough and fast enough that it can’t be controlled or contained to serve only the rich and powerful.

I bet some people flashed that one and such too, but I could find no indication that it was shut down because of that.

It feels like society has backslid tremendously on some freedoms in the past 15 years, particularly where it comes to prudishness.

These days we even have otherwise progressive people jumping on the prude bandwagon along with hyper religious controlling anti feminists and it just makes for such strange bedfellows.

I mean, that’s a fair criticism in a way. If Bill lets you taste the chicken at that point, it’s reasonable to comment on what he let you taste. If he didn’t think it was ready enough to get your opinion on, he shouldn’t have let you taste it at all.

If it is solved it will definitely be through technology of some sort. While I agree it will not be one brilliant scientist, technology will be the solution.

That technology may come in the form of a way to produce more energy without fucking up the climate, and the engineering and logistical capacity to roll out the change at a breakneck pace.

It may come in the form of simply developing a way to control the global climate directly.

It might come in the form of some technology to control the behavior of humans so that we can actually respond appropriately.

Or it might come in the form of the singularity, when self improving machines grow so far beyond us so fast that they can just do what is needed whether we like it or not.

But one way or another I guarantee that if it’s solved, it’ll largely be a technological solution, because getting humanity to just…stop using energy at our current rate…is just not going to happen.

Yeah, these projects done by one or two people could be better with a larger team, but it’s definitely not a matter of hiring a big pile of people suddenly.

The ideal size is probably a couple dozen people, but scaling up to even that will take months since the one person currently in charge has to do a lot. And it’ll almost fully pause work on the project for a while.

Cause if there’s one person, they’ve got to find all the candidates, do all the hiring, then bring people up to speed.

The real problem is if the person who made it doesn’t have the skills to manage even a small group of people.

I don’t understand the complaints about the expansions for these games. Ok, there’s a lot of them? But they’re generally good. And if you don’t want them, just…stop updating and stay on whatever version you liked?

And unlike most, they make it easy to play an older version. Did I like a particular patch better and hate all that’s come since then? Easy to roll back to it. What do people want…for them to not put out expansions?

Yeah, since we’ve designed our world for humans, the best general purpose robots will have a human shape in order to function effectively in the same areas.

Metroid is an interesting example. In some of the games she definitely counts as having no personality or character, but overall in the series she’s been given a story and characterization with personality. Zelda games are in a similar boat; Link shows little personality in most of them but does have an established overall story and personality.

In cases like those two I’ll consider them, but the lack of personality in game is a point against them regardless of the gender involved and honestly that’s discouraged me from playing many games like that (including both those series) for a long while.

Way I see it, modern games have no excuse not to either let me create my own character or give the predefined character a strong personality that shows throughout the entire game.

When the protagonist’s character, personality, and story is significant, then that’s fine. If I’m playing a game like that I’m not playing a generic character that could be either and therefore should absolutely be a choice.

I’m fine playing a game like the Witcher, Red Dead 2, etc, cause those are the stories of that guy.

Where I won’t play is games that give you a generic protagonist with little to no personality but restrict you to male only, or even I suppose female only, although this is incredibly rare and I haven’t run across it myself.

That’s awesome. I have played Deus Ex, since I give old games that leeway, whereas there’s absolutely no excuse for new ones, but it might be enjoyable to give it another run with that mod, so thanks!

Nice to hear. I just don’t play games that don’t have female character options, unless the character actually matters and has a personality that is a major part of the game, like say, Geralt. I leave old games some leeway, but nice to hear they’re fixing that in this old one, means I’ll probably give it a try just based on that alone.

They could turn that into a running theme, like how every Elder Scrolls protagonist is a prisoner to start with…

But Divinity already has a long history and so does Baldur’s Gate so…ehh, doesn’t fit in quite as well. Maybe with a new IP they make it a tradition for.

More like 1997, or even 1983, when the UK handed them back to China, or the earlier date, when they decided to prevent them from having British citizenship.

If everyone in Hong Kong had the right to emigrate to any British territory, China would have to be a lot lighter touched there, or there might be a mass exodus.