• 67 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2024

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    1. At least on Lemmy, this is definitely what I’ve observed. If you look at any thread that’s full of sturm und drang, it’s usually a tiny handful of accounts that are creating all of it (and then roping other people into their hostility, like a little chain reaction, like Chernobyl.) If you look at the impact, it just looks like everyone’s an asshole, but if you look at the root of the trouble, you realize most people are fine and a tiny minority are noisy and hostile and they can just get everyone else spun up.
    2. I agree, if you’re in NYC right at this moment in history and you can’t see a bigger picture of things worth getting heated up about than White Lotus, you should talk with people in your community more.





  • Yeah. People said 100% the same thing about Hitler. He was a clown, he was the weird guy that came to fundraisers and scarfed all the food because he didn’t have any money, and scared away donors and political allies because he would get in their face yelling about Jews. Until, all of a sudden, his big opponents got sent to the camps or just killed, and it wasn’t funny.

    They’re doing a great job at following the playbook so far. People are upset but no one’s really done that much to stop them, which means it will continue and get worse.



  • Grok responded to X users’ questions about public figures by generating foul and violent rape fantasies, including one targeting progressive activist and policy analyst Will Stancil. (Stancil has indicated he may sue X.)

    When you fine-tune a coding AI on code that has deliberate flaws in it, and then switch it back to having conversations in English, it starts praising Hitler and constructing other deliberately hateful content. It wouldn’t surprise me if fine-tuning Grok to be Nazi also led it to “generalize” some additional things that weren’t intended by the operators.





  • That’s not how it works though.

    I actually agree that registration is silly. It’s trivial to create fake email addresses; all it does is present obstacles and slight privacy implications for legitimate users, while forming an incredibly mild speedbump for malicious users. But, it’s probably not going away, every little tool in the toolbox that can be deployed by overworked volunteer admins against the unending tide of malicious users trying to make their lives more difficult is probably going to get deployed if it is easy to do.






  • Somewhere out there is an article by someone who walked around a games conference and came away from the experience horrified that so much of the content he was seeing was from small indie studios who weren’t in a position to hire wastes of oxygen like himself, and was furiously nail-biting about what this would do to the state of the industry.

    Related news is the authors of Dave the Diver having to explain that they are in no way an independent studio, and they do not deserve the award they just received for “best independent blah blah,” because “indie” has at this point simply become completely synonymous with “original and good.”




  • Yeah, almost to an excessive degree. To me it’s fine, it just means the designer has room to grow in terms of their skill at getting the right balance, but also it’s going to be a little bit of personal taste. This video includes some pretty interesting discussion of the balance between spelling things out, making sure that everyone can notice and enjoy them, versus making things opaque knowing that you’ll leave some people behind but making it that much more special for the people who found them “all by themselves” without any kind of prompting.




  • Yeah. It’s not a perfect game, it has many issues, but it is fun and exciting and it does something very very different, very successfully. I’m reminded of the Zero Punctuation review of Psychonauts basically saying that its number one good point was that it was something genuinely mad and original, in contrast to the sea of imitation that is modern gaming, and for that alone hooray.



  • All I can say is you’re missing out… I can see that it’s a type of game that may not be for everybody, but it is honestly probably the most unusual game I have ever played in my life and I’m enjoying it a lot. I almost did the same as you did, I beat Leshy one time and then continued messing around with it sort of out of curiosity… and then the whole actual fuckin’ game started.

    It just made me pick a file from my hard drive, made me a card based on it, and then told me if I let that card die, it’s going to delete that file. This game is nuts man.