Neither Linux nor Lemmy are a multi-billion dollar company.

If the advertisements were the product, then the exchange would be give ad, receive money. The advertisers are both giving the ad and the money to Meta. The thing the advertisers receive for giving the money are the potential customers. Meta is exchanging money for users. You are the product.

Meta’s entire model is categorizing the users so effectively and giving the advertisers the tools to target the users who are most likely to spend money once they see the ad. The advertisers pay Meta for access to users as well as the data about all of the different ways that groups of users are categorized. Then the advertiser can make a new ad or new product that will appeal to either a wider audience, an audience that is willing to pay a far larger amount of money than something costs to produce, or both.

The users and their data are the product of nearly every profitable business that provides something free to users. It’s up to you to decide how you feel about that. Maybe you see an ad for something and think “That’s exactly what I’ve been looking for!” and happily pay for it. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

You’re so right. I also just realized that I forgot One Vision as well.

Totally agree, that’s how I was first introduced to it.

I love Queen, but (with the exception of Somebody To Love) I feel like you’ve picked out the worst and most overplayed Queen songs. If you’re open to seeing why folks like them so much, I’d suggest the following (in my order of preference):

• Under Pressure
• I Want To Break Free
• Radio Gaga
• Stone Cold Crazy
• Killer Queen
• Crazy Little Thing Called Love
• You’re My Best Friend
• Don’t Stop Me Now
• Who Wants To Live Forever

There’s a pretty good mix in there. Some are more operatic than others. Some go pretty hard.

As someone who doesn’t use TikTok and was under the impression that it was a young person’s game, I did not expect the “trend” involving a notoriously phallic vegetable to be a recipe.

The Witcher and Cyberpunk I’ll give you, but Mass Effect definitely fades to black before getting to actual sex, the other two are mods. I wasn’t saying sex in games doesn’t exist, but if we’ve gotta go back several decades for a handful examples, that doesn’t feel like something that’s “common.”

Accurate, but one series does not make something common.

Sex scenes are common in modern games - and are often made by filming human actors who are then digitised into game characters.

Is “common” referring to cringey low budget Steam games? I don’t think I’ve seen any sort of on screen simulated sex in a game, ever. Granted I tend to only play well publicized indie games and larger releases. But how common is this? Am I out of the loop?

TL;DR: mine is $660/month for health, $42/month for dental

Most folks in the US aren’t aware of how much they pay for health insurance. I live in California, where law requires full time employees (>30 hrs a week, >130 hrs month) be provided some amount of health insurance. The type of coverage varies not just from job to job, but also within the same job the employee must often choose their own plan from several company selected options at varying price tiers and types/amount of coverage. Usually the employee only sees the amount of the monthly cost that THEY are responsible for, which is then automatically removed from their paycheck. What most folks are unaware of is that the employer is also paying some of the cost (which is the part that the law makes them do). The part that makes it extra frustrating to deal with an already broken and overly expensive system, is that the rate paid by employers is negotiated in bulk with the insurance providers. Larger employers (national corporations with hundreds of thousands of employees) are paying much less than an individual or small employer would. This is the one of the largest reasons becoming unemployed is so dangerous in the US. In addition to not having income for food or housing, people often forego health insurance due to the expense. If you lose (or leave) your job you’re eligible to keep your current insurance plan for 18-36 months with COBRA (Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, which is such a ridiculous backronym that I had to google it just now). This is often the only time people realize the true cost of their insurance as the entirety of it is then passed on to them directly (at the employer negotiated rate) and it shows up as a new monthly bill.

I recently left my employer to start my own business and discovered that my true cost of insurance is ~$700/month ($660 Health/$42 Dental). Keep in mind, this doesn’t mean that I have zero medical bills should I actually visit a doctor or hospital. This is pretty good health insurance, but I still have to pay $5,000 out pocket (annually) before it kicks in at the full coverage amount. Since I had ear surgery earlier in the year and hit that limit, and wanted to be able to continue seeing the same doctors I had for already scheduled follow ups, I decided to keep the same insurance. That $5,000 isn’t the only expense that landed on my shoulders, there’s a bunch of rules that I honestly don’t fully understand and I’ve probably ended up paying somewhere between $7,500-$10,000 for the surgery I had (in addition to the monthly premium).

The main reason I keep paying insurance (in addition to the fact that you’ll now be charged a penalty on your taxes if you go uninsured for a month), is my fear that you mentioned in the original post. Having a car hit me while I’m walking down the street and ending up with a $50,000 visit to the emergency room is a very real possibility without health insurance. California recently limited ambulance rides to a maximum cost of $1,200, so that’s… good?

As a game developer that has curated my mutual list of fellow developers, I’m saddened by the state of Twitter and genuinely have no alternative. A few folks have left for Threads, Mastodon, and BlueSky, but no community has coalesced on one platform. I would love to leave, but the fact is that if we want to communicate in a similar medium, we have to go where the people are. Right now, the people are still on Twitter.

Having worked (as a designer, not an engineer) on a PS3 launch tile, this post also aligns with my understanding.

I am both frightened (the race to market without considering the near- nor long-term costs to society as a whole neither ethics in many cases) and hopeful about the whole thing.

Same! I’m downright terrified about the impossibility of determining what should be legal/illegal because our politics move at a glacial pace and rarely involve experts in the field. Some bad actors can AND WILL really fuck things up here. I do think that the possibilities are a net positive. If I were in charge, I would pump the brakes until we could better ascertain what the fallout will be.

I have largely had bad experiences with AI assistants (coding, search, and other domains), except maybe helping with finding/generating code samples for libs/packages with poor or missing documentation (though I go to the docs and code first and those results aren’t always correct).

Maybe my current scenario is in some Venn diagram of the perfect situation, but I’ve been having the opposite experience. I’m a game designer changing from about a decade of Unreal (and another decade and a half of various proprietary engines) to learning Unity. I’ve got a pretty clear idea of what I want to do, I’ve just got no clue how to do it. I’ve been using a combination of GPT-4o and co-pilot to figure things out and it’s been great! GPT has been a combination of pair programming and Google replacement. I’ll tell it what I’m trying to do and it not only spits out a code example, but it describes what each section is doing. Occasionally it’ll tackle problems from the wrong end, like yesterday it was placing a UI element and then clamping it to ensure it was drawn on screen instead of figuring out the proper screen space scale first and properly converting world space to that specific space/scale. But if you’re familiar with the methodology and need help with the syntax/structure, it’s kind of amazing. Co-pilot is SO FAST! I’ve got no idea where a property I’m looking for is being stored and that shit auto-completes (almost always) exactly what I’m looking for, purely based on context or comments. Some times it hallucinates properties that don’t exist, but the IDE calls my attention to that pretty quickly and co-pilot usually sets me on the right path.

It’s happening right now with AI. It’s currently in the Usenet phase. A few people understand it and are using it to positively alter their daily lives by improving their ability to gather and filter information, but (ironically) thanks to the internet the vast majority of people are distracted by some niches like generative art or writing book reports. In the next year or two, we’ll start to see mainstream people have AI personal assistants that will have conversations with other AIs. Even without the robotics component, daily life will change. Remember before you could order Amazon same day delivery, or Door Dash a meal? Imagine that level (and better) of tracking and communication for every service you could need, all completely automated. Your sink broke? A perfectly fine plumber can be here in 20 mins, be advised to expect an 80% chance that you’ll see their buttcrack, a 40% chance that they aren’t wearing deodorant, and a 100% chance there will be multiple off-color remarks about the current political situation. Does this bother you? Your AI already knows and an instant deep dive of reviews and social media has found a plumber that may in fact be your soul mate. They’ll be here on Thursday. Your AI queued up a playlist of your mutual favorite songs.

In a slower but possibly as life altering revolution, AR. Apple is starting this with Apple Vision Pro, but this will need to be miniaturized down to a discrete pair of glasses (like Meta Ray-Bans) with 3 pieces of tech that aren’t there yet:

1. Even smaller computers (remember when they were the size of shipping containers?)
2. More efficient batteries
3. A display technology that both adjusts focus depending on the distance your eyes are focusing at while also occluding reality.

I’m confident these will exist in our lifetime, but probably not within the next decade. Once they all come together, the way people experience life will change. Both for the better and worse. If capitalism hasn’t been legislatively reigned in a bit, the ads are going to be insane.

Came here to say this

Having just turned 43, I can tell you that I don’t think I became an adult until my early/mid 30s.

Ah yeah, Pechanga Arena was just “The Sports Arena” in the era before sponsoring venues was a thing. They still to a swap meet in the parking lot of that place every weekend. Random other info about that place, they shot a scene from Almost Famous at one of the freight entrances there.

https://lemmy.world/comment/10562073

Did you get the matching Gravis Gamepad or was it late enough that you had a Microsoft Sidewinder?

At the Scottish Rite Center in Mission Valley? There’s a good chance I was also there that year. My two most prized possessions I acquired there were a 3dfx Voodoo Rush, and a modded PlayStation 1 in a clear plastic housing.

Pasting the same thing I commented last time this was posted:

After reading that entire post, I wish I had used AI to summarize it.

I am not in the equally unserious camp that generative AI does not have the potential to drastically change the world. It clearly does. When I saw the early demos of GPT-2, while I was still at university, I was half-convinced that they were faked somehow. I remember being wrong about that, and that is why I’m no longer as confident that I know what’s going on.

This pull quote feels like it’s antithetical to their entire argument and makes me feel like all they’re doing is whinging about the fact that people who don’t know what they’re talking about have loud voices. Which has always been true and has little to do with AI.