Funny how the key distinction is that developer-sanctioned private servers are usually for games monetized through a single, up-front purchase of the client rather than a subscription service with which the private server would compete directly. I’m sure that isn’t relevant to the context this argument was used in at all.

If you post hard enough, it stops being a debilitating fear of mind-readers and becomes forward-thinking philosophy instead.

Sadly, I think Epic was always the most serious about making sure that every game made by every studio is part of the same cash shop scheme forever, and the most likely to realize that vision in any practical way. It’s the ultimate dream of all the deskilling, destylization, and asset trading built into their engine since UE4, turning the industry standard for games into interchangeable mush made of interchangeable parts by interchangeable workers.

Is it NFTs, or is it what Epic have been aiming for since the peak of metaverse hype, to get the entire industry dependent on an asset store and account system where Epic takes a cut?

The obsession with utility-maximizing Bayesian agents only gets weirder as time goes on. You couldn’t really get further from the paperclip maximizer concept than an LLM, and yet they still won’t shut up about unaligned goals and hidden utility functions.

A real pre-WWII understanding of autism on display. It’s also honestly profoundly upsetting to me to see people who have had the experience, at least as a child, of having sensory issues and poor communication skills, not be able to relate at least a little to the notion of someone having a violent meltdown over something they can’t coherently explain. Somehow even more pick-me behavior than Hans Aspberger.

There seems to be a misunderstanding in that thread, not that the actual proposal is much better. Clippy isn’t expected to determine the age of the subject of an image, just whether the image contains nudity at all (in practice, usually how much bare white skin is in the image). Then, before your device allows you to take a nude photo of any kind, accept a text from your partner, or view a Renaissance painting online, it has to verify that you have a government-issued cybersex license to turn the filter off. For the children, of course.

Judging by the current state of NSFW filter neural networks, I expect a surge in the popularity of novelty color filters for smartphone cameras, racialized porn categories, and furry art. Online grooming focused on niche enough fetishes will likely be totally unaffected.

Apparently the project got overwhelmed with LLM vulnerability reports, so the last person in the world who actually cared enough to keep maintaining it gave up and gave in to the spop himself.

The tantalizingly close rat forcefem universe

In retrospect, the idea that creating a globally accepted alternative to the dollar would come with zero consequences to the system of global free trade it props up might just be the funniest bit of half-baked cryptobro ideology.

Yeah, it’s only once the photons in front of it could already have gotten there, so it’s like photons from the tail end of the pulse are catching up to the front as it emerges, even though they haven’t even entered the cloud yet.

I think it comes free with a deeply embedded belief in the coming thousand year space reich- sorry, millenarian kingdom of heaven- sorry, era of cosmic endowment after infinite growth and Progress inevitably consume all available resources on earth. If growth is infinite, then eventually we’ll need to put everything in space, so we may as well solve all the annoying little problems of practicality ahead of time to get a head start on manifest destiny. There are many roads to get there, but it’s all but unavoidable once you start sincerely believing in exponential curves.

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Ah yes, vibe-coding gold. I’m kind of afraid to stick my head into their other repos to see what other horrors await, but given their strategy of implementing a social overlay by hard-forking a bunch of separate open-source engines and running them through a CLI tool, I’m sure there’s worse in store. Somehow.

EDIT: actually, this has been sinking in for the last few hours. what the fuck.

Very little relation to capital-L Libertarians. Libertarian socialism is broadly socialism that seeks to replace the state with smaller-scale social structures and direct democracy that can satisfy everyone’s needs equitably without the threat of violence or enforcement of property rights. Libertarianism is meant to protect capitalism from the state; libertarian socialism is meant to protect people from both the state and capitalism. I don’t want to get into the details of leftist ideological micro-labels, but generally confusing anarchists with anarcho-capitalists is the quickest way to piss off both.

The playful and wise goblinbot…

Not even two spines, there’s some almost impressive Escheresque fuckery going on with how the page of the book he’s writing in is actually the cover of another? Good to know people “care” about children with disabilities enough to spend extra money on worse textbooks just for them, but not enough to actually read them, I guess.

He was all over TV the other day, joining the crowds to attend the ridiculous Nakba day propaganda ceremony. I have no doubts he’s been in just fine health lately, and if anything he’s been playing up how unwell he is to get out of court dates over and over again for months. The other big reason for his recent disappearance from public view is the likelihood of his beach house getting another knock on the door from a Shahed, maybe luckier this time.

Yeah, it’s upsetting how much I’ve ended up thinking back to the crap arms race for how casual a plot detail it is, and how much more apt that descriptor is for LLMs than most other sci-fi conceptualizations of AI.

At this point, especially with Fall, I think he just has a tendency to pick up and run with whatever cool idea techbros are into at the moment without any real regard for how seriously people take it as a belief, resulting in a bunch of conveniently packaged, reader-gratifying ideological vignettes for said techbros to latch onto as a coherent vision and complete the cycle. I don’t think he ever meant to genuinely promote the metaverse or digital money laundering or acausal brain hell or space eugenics, but he seems chronically incapable of mounting a systemic critique of any of his subjects in a style that demands a good guy crypto billionaire, likably clueless cultist, or badass geneticist to outsmart the Islamic terrorists, alien special forces, and conniving cosmonauts and save the day.

I do still find it somewhat concerning how many of his plots come down to “80% of everyone are mindless sheeple enthralled by a higher power,” though.