I think it’s perfectly capable of being used to make a compelling game, but Starfield seems to be a game for which the strengths of the engine AND the strengths of the writers and designers at Bethesda are completely mismatched.

The problem, as I’m sure you know, is that a home server is not fit for purpose for the vast majority of people. Managing that is a fun project for some, but a complete non starter for most.

Personally, it’s the implausibility of 2 that makes all of this seem like no big deal to me. In fact, I think federating openly with Threads might signal to Threads users that they can use alternatives and not lose access to whomever they follow on Threads, thus growing the user-base of other federated instances.

I think people who are going to use Threads for Meta-specific features are likely going to use Threads anyway, and if any of those features are genuinely good (i.e. not simply Instagram and Facebook tie-ins) they will be replicated by the various open Fediverse projects which already differ from one another in terms of features.

The moderation issue is entirely different and there are some instances that have an understanding with their users about protecting them from seeing any objectionable content or behavior as defined by whatever culture they have. Defederating from such a large group of people makes sense, perhaps even preemptively, no different from when they defederate existing large instances now.

I’m not personally in favor of preemptively blocking threads on my instance and I don’t find the EEE argument at all convincing in this case. But other instances doing that is no problem at all, it’s fine!

that’s impressive stuff, logic bomb.

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Stochastic Parrot

For what it’s worth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot

The term was first used in the paper “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜” by Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell (using the pseudonym “Shmargaret Shmitchell”). The paper covered the risks of very large language models, regarding their environmental and financial costs, inscrutability leading to unknown dangerous biases, the inability of the models to understand the concepts underlying what they learn, and the potential for using them to deceive people. The paper and subsequent events resulted in Gebru and Mitchell losing their jobs at Google, and a subsequent protest by Google employees.

I don’t think anything was wrong with Sekiro. Maybe because it’s not online?

I heard they were all child murderers! 😱

I remember reading that quote before the game launched. Weird.

Well I could have, but simply chose not to.

This game was actually never coin-op. I think the designers may have been similarly motivated though- you can make a game last a lot longer if it’s extremely difficult to beat.

The MS-DOS version of this game was actually not winnable without cheats because the jumping physics changed and they didn’t update the level layouts for that.

Yeah, and it also happens to get me access to the tool that was able to summarize this video without watching it. But most people would probably choose the $5 tier, I think.

tl;dw

• Cory Doctorow coins the term “enshittification” to describe how platforms start out benefiting users but eventually abuse users and business customers to extract all value.

• Facebook started by prioritizing user privacy over ads but now prioritizes profits over all else.

• Network effects are a double-edged sword - they lock users in but also make platforms vulnerable if users leave en masse.

• Low switching costs due to universality and interoperability allow competitors to reverse engineer platforms and plug in competing services.

• Mandatory interoperability and limiting data control can curb platform power by distributing control to users and smaller companies.

• Recent antitrust actions aim to roll back decades of lax merger policy that let platforms consolidate power.

• Breakups will take a long time so interoperability is a faster way to restore competition.

• Laws should limit abusive behavior rather than rely on platforms to self-regulate.

• Federated open services fail gracefully and encourage migration to better platforms.

• Political will is growing but change will be gradual - focus should be on harm reduction in the near term.

I’ve been loving Kagi, but I have no particular need for their browser.

ETA: Oh, I see it’s only for iOS and macOS anyway. Maybe that ecosystem needed it, but I wouldn’t know.

You keep posting this article but it explains clearly why it’s not a big deal.

“Islamo-fascist?” Is this 2002?

And that basically confirms that it’s a remaining problem with admin accounts taking remote mod actions. l suppose in the mean time I’ll try to have an admin at lemmy.ml give my @bilb@lemmy.ml account moderator status as a workaround. The other original moderator who could do it isn’t very active.

I couldn’t find an open bug ticket for this on Github, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. I’ll take another look and report it if I still can’t find anything.

It really does seem like an inevitable outcome of the status quo. I think it’s silly to pretend otherwise.