Agreed, my first thought was about the stats for Twitch streamers where having more than something like 10 concurrent viewers consistently for a 30 day period puts you in the top 15% of streamers on the platform or whatever. I forget the exact numbers, but it’s something crazy like that.
Steam also provides a lot more than just a store front for devs at that price, including customer support, multiplayer servers, anticheat, and forums and other social features.
Epic also launched their store without a shopping cart (you had to buy everything as individual transactions) and put new, unreleased games up for sale at up to 50% off without permission from the devs during their first sales event, amongst other things. Like buying multiplatform games to ensure that they only launched on the Epic store. Nobody liked it when Ubisoft, EA, Blizzard, or Rockstar tried that exclusivity crap with their own launchers/storefronts, and they don’t like that Epic does it either.
Dude is a twat and his opinions unfortunately drive Epic’s policies. People hated Steam when it first launched as well, but Valve as a company has consistently worked to put customer value and rights as a selling point of their products, and people appreciate them for that. Beyond Steam as a sales platform, they’ve been a driving force in other parts of the industry such as VR and Linux gaming.
Not only that, but it also makes reference to multiple attempted genocides against Jews with the dates of other goblin rebellions and item descriptions such as a Jewish religious horn being described as a “goblin war horn used to annoy wizards” that is filled specifically with a non-Kosher type of cheese.
Then there’s also the fact that the lead dev resigned from the project after it came out that he ran a white supremacist YouTube channel, and made a statement about how he “felt at home” with the other people working on the game.
It comes from Nazi propaganda IIRC. Specifically a piece on how to identify a Jew.
I somehow managed to delete my long-winded reply while I was typing it, so I’m gonna try to condense it down into something semi coherent.
In short, it’s not the anonymity that I’m arguing for (though I think there’s a very important debate to be had about the erosion of privacy through removing anonymity on the net), but the strengths of social platforms on the internet that are being abused by bots and AI slop. I think that a blanket ban is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We need to regulate the bad actors somehow and moderate the amount of social media that kids use, but to effectively ban kids from being able to interact with people outside of their local communities is a bad precedent.
The big strength of the internet (and why it’s so important in empowering oppressed groups like the queer community) is in the ability to connect people and rapidly spread information regardless of distance. They want to take over TikTok because it’s been credited as a major platform in dispelling the Israeli funded myths about the genocide of the Palestinians. Protests of college students broke out on campuses all over the US over colleges getting funding from Israel and the production and sale of weaponry. That didn’t just appear out of nowhere, that information was spread through social media in real time. You can’t get that from a book at the local library (you should still support your local library though, they do so much for a community beyond being a source of knowledge). But this rapid spread of information is exactly what makes the AI slop and all the other garbage (ads, misinformation, the list goes on and on) such a problem, because the bad stuff makes money for the big corporations who run the social media platforms we use. But that doesn’t mean we should ban a tool because people use it maliciously or excessively to the point of harm. Nobody is calling for a ban on TV for kids under 16 despite it having a negative effect on our attention span and being filled with channels like Fox News.
Plus, I am always wary of these “protect the children” campaigns because they are often a false flag to actually restrict minorities’ rights - often queer people. You see this most prominently with porn bans, but stuff like this that allows a government/group to better censor information and control the narrative come up time and time again. There was an attempt not long ago to get rid of Massachusetts’ multi-grade standardized test program called the MCAS. Standardized testing has its issues, but the groups pushing for the removal had no plans to replace it with any form of statewide teaching standards or anything, they just wanted to be able to teach kids that evolution is fake and gay kids go to Hell.
Also, I work with teenagers. They can’t read. Every year standardized tests get easier. The average ACT score in Florida is now 18. That’s almost the same as answering at random, and these kids pay for the exam in an effort to go to college.
I hate to tell you this, but I think this is a Florida issue. Florida is one of the worst states in a country that has been fighting against intelligence for decades now. Boomers but proudly illiterate is exactly what those in power - especially people like DeSantis - want. But the same internet that allows this to happen can also be used to give these kids a better chance. I go on YouTube and see videos of people making a fully working jet engine out of a can of Coke or a hobbyist launching a 3d printed rocket that breaks the sound barrier. I see kids learning about orbital mechanics and reentry heating through Kerbal Space Program and simple circuitry through Red Stone Minecraft tutorials. I see trans elders supporting trans kids who may otherwise never make it to adulthood - sometimes even to the point of telling them their legal rights and helping them get out of abusive households. I see up to the minute medical research news coming from furries who worked on the COVID vaccines on Bluesky. I see so much art, music, and support for passion projects that introduce people to interests that they never knew they had. And I would never want to take all that from kids.
I would argue that the internet has died partly as a result of removing anonymity from the internet, not because of it. The massive centralization of the internet into corporate walled gardens where they can control the narrative is what made your criticisms possible. The early internet was a wild west where you could find anything and everything, for better and worse.
The big issue I have with this is that it isolates queer kids from any sense of community. Trans kids can’t avoid permanent damage from the wrong puberty if they don’t have access to the knowledge that they could be taking puberty blockers. Without access to that community, I didn’t even learn that trans people existed and I could put a word to that existential distress until I was in college.
To go even further, in Japan they have a breed of chicken so clean that it’s eaten as sushi. Here in the US, undercooked chicken or unwashed eggs are a salmonella risk - as is pretty much any other food due to contamination. There was a massive recall on lettuce a few years ago across the country for salmonella contamination.
There are some exceptions to this. Blahaj blocks downvotes, for example. You can downvote a post on Blahaj, but people (like me) with accounts on Blahaj cannot downvote nor can they see downvotes. I’m sure there are other instances doing similar things, as it sounds like Lemmy has a robust set of instance settings/options.
No, but women are MUCH more likely to have their symptoms dismissed as psychosomatic compared to men. Odds are good if you’re a woman that at least once in your life you will have to justify and defend your right to get proper treatment for a medical issue to a medical practitioner.
There’s no guarantee that it will tell you the truth. It could tell you to use Elmer’s glue to keep the cheese from falling off your pizza. The AI doesn’t “know” or “understand,” it just does as its training set informed it to. It’s just a very complex predictive text that you can give commands to.
I came in here to say the same thing. It was pointed out that the USSR did this when Republicans first started with that nonsense, and it was my first thought upon seeing this post.
You have time to build a PC but don’t have time to solder the boards yourself? Doubt.
One thing to note is that the next Xbox will very likely be more expensive than the Steam Machine, regardless of what Valve actually prices it at. This is because the Microsoft CEO is demanding that Xbox make a 30% profit, which means that they can’t sell the consoles at a loss anymore.
One thing to note is that the GPU that Valve is using is apparently a custom one that was created for a cancelled Microsoft project or something, and so Valve is probably getting a better deal on it than we ever could because they’re the only ones buying it off the manufacturer.
But regardless, anybody who is willing to build their own PC is not the target market for Valve. The target market is the other 80% of Steam users and potentially console players. A coworker of mine was just talking the other day about a friend of theirs who is replacing their PS4 because Sony is shutting down the PS4 servers, and they were telling them to wait and get the Steam Machine and get out from under Sony’s thumb.
It’s not really about the porn in the first place (for advertisers it is - they hate sex unless it’s selling their product). The porn is merely an avenue to attack another minority group. In this case, LGBTQ people. Make everything about them sexual in some way, and then ban them from life for sexual deviancy.
Evangelical right-wing states have a huge contingent of politicians who compete with one another to be the toughest on “child sex trafficking” and other Epstein-tangential topics. So, in the GOP primary, you get a lot of promises about how you’re going to round up all the pedos and put them to the sword or whatever. And this inevitably manifests as “please insert your dick into this pepper grinder to access the pornography” laws, as a sort-of practical compromise.
I’d say rather than a compromise, the “protect the children!” porn bans are an excuse to go after LGBTQ content by marking any and all content related to them as explicit and demonizing them as pedophiles going after children. They don’t care who it hurts along the way.
Ironically, one of the defining features of the techno-cultists in Warhammer 40k is that they changed the acronym to mean “Abominable Intelligence” and not a single machine runs on anything more advanced than a calculator.
Isn’t it an opt-in by default program that pays artists commission fees for using their art? Or am I thinking of a different company.
Whichever one I’m thinking of, the Gen AI was for website templates, and that’s about all I can remember other than reading about it and thinking “this is how it should be - gen AI to spit out hundreds of templates for buttons on websites that nobody wants to make.”
https://invisiblepeople.tv/how-tourism-negatively-impacts-homelessness/
https://assets.moravian.edu/static/soar/proposals/2017/Keshodkar_LaBare_Proposal.pdf
https://www.flasprings.com/blog/drug-and-alcohol-addiction-in-tourism-hotspots/
https://wewantrelief.com/the-nexus-between-cape-cod-tourism-and-substance-abuse/
https://www.gdrc.org/uem/eco-tour/envi/one.html
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9389488/
https://www.uni.lu/en/news/the-dark-side-of-tourism/
https://mize.tech/blog/the-true-impact-of-the-tourism-industry-on-the-environment/
Just some examples I pulled up in some quick searches. One specific to Cape Cod that I know of that’s not mentioned here is the damage to fragile beach environments due to trampling delicate beach grasses by tourists who either don’t know any better or don’t care. The beach grass there is easily killed by walking on it, which not only destroys the environment that many creatures depend on, but also leads to rapid destabilisation and erosion and full on loss of the beaches within a handful of years (5 to 10 at most). It’s such an issue that there are constant beach patrols of environmental officers across more than a hundred miles of beaches every summer.
Yeah, but it’s not a 1 to 1 comparison like people like to make it out to be. Valve takes a higher percentage but offers more for that higher price.