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9 mo. ago

  • You're understanding of "gig work" is comically outdated. You sound naive or trollish. "Jobs for teens" like fast food work, grocery clerking, and working at movie theaters have always been taken by people who need "real jobs" and not just teens looking for extra money. So you're wrong that these careers exclusively for kids to get pocket money ever existed, certainly not in living memory.

    Secondly, OP isn't talking about working the carwash for the summer. He's talking about Uber and AirBNB. Maybe you heard of them? Over the last decade, they've caused massive disruption of the hotel and taxi industries by allowing thousands of unlicensed and unregulated "micro entrepreneurs" 🤮 to create a new economy of pay-per-task workers who end up owning all the physical assets (which rapidly deprecate in value) but none of the infrastructure or investments (which do not, or do so on much different schedules).

    Houses being bought up for short term rentals has contributed to the housing crisis. Its caused economic harm to inner cities. It's a looking part of the polycrisis destroying the practical economy and the planet's livability. But yeah man, the real problem is lazy people just don't want real adult jobs, give me a fucking break.

  • I read this one late last year and immediately started planning the most elaborate campaign I've ever considered. Haha, it drives you a little crazy just reading it, really amazing stuff. Hope I get it to the table someday!

  • Similar to vampires, every dwarven ship has an enormous boulder occupying a conspicuous place in the quarters. Sleeping near this "home stone" is necessary to prevent dwarves from going sea crazy.

  • Rich people always threaten this and never do it, because it's a John Galt problem. Rich people need poor people to trickle money to for services and goods. If they all move to "Rich Asshole Island" where there's no laws or taxes, they quickly discover there's also no workers.

    Fuck all of them, I dare every millionaire to leave NYC. They almost certainly cannot. All their wealth is actually tied up in business and assets. In NYC. They could sell them, but to whom? All the rich are fleeing right? If the city or collectives of workers buy them, thats more socialism and proof the rich aren't necessary.

    So no, they won't leave. They'll whine and cry and then fund police and paramilitaries and lobbiest to try and force their view. They'll spend millions propping up friendly candidates like Coumo and running smear campaigns.

    In other words, they'll do what they've historically always done when threatened.

  • I agree with the analysis of the east coast, and will add that the South ("Silicon Bayou" is such a sad joke) is in basically the same place.

    But I don't think the West coast actually has all those advantages either, not anymore. What passes for "innovation" is all some variation on crypto, ai, or "being the Uber of $NICHE." Throw in some buzzwords like IoT, quantum, blockchain, or "smart" and you're all set to race with the other founders to get a piece of that sweet sweet VC dollar.

    The financiers have taken over everything and are going to drive the economy off a cliff so they can scavenge and sell the parts. They've taken over film, gaming, tech, all traditional media, journalism, and they're using the banner of "privatization" to finish off healthcare, education, postal services, and anything else they can convince idiots to sell them. The bankers are winning.

  • SE/SO has been on the decline for a long time now. They pivoted to find more ways to monetize the answers and started enshittifying, trying to appeal to business clients and money-people instead of the users and developers who built the knowledgebase. It was good when it felt like a community helping each other, it fell off when it felt like a company milking you to build out their monetized wiki.

    At this point, from their perspective, the biggest fuck up was not locking down SE from scrapers and building their own AI. It is in every way the same situation that Reddit is in, just with a more focused and higher quality data set (and fewer, arguably "higher quality," users).

  • I don't necessarily think the MM is intentionality going against AI, they're just following what drives engagement and the mainstream tide is turning against AI (again, AI winter 3.0, here we go).

    However, I did see that "AI causes delusions" article in the NYT together with the very hilarious conflict of interest notice: "The NYT is currently suing OpenAI for copyright infringement."

    So who knows? It is entirely in the MM's interests to both write about AI (hot topic, much engagement) and also to make the AI companies look incompetent, reckless, and dangerous because that bolsters their cases against them.

  • For those who needed some news catching up also:

    https://www.ign.com/articles/take-two-shutters-kerbal-space-program-2-studio-amid-layoffs

    The publisher, Take Two, laid off the entire staff of KSP2. This pissed off many fans, who had paid full price for Early Access to an unfinishee game that now didn't have a Dev team.

    https://www.polygon.com/news/475635/private-division-sold/

    Then T2 sold off the studio to this other company. And staffing up for Dev work when none if the original creators are around: 1. Sucks and is miserable work and 2. Almost never works out to produce a quality product.

    So yeah, instead of that debacle, they opted for the Disco Elysium 2 debacle where the publishers steal the IP from the original creators and then fail to ever deliver anything with it. I love this debacle because you get a shitty publisher with a disappointing game AND embittered developers who will probably leave game making or go on to make less involved projects. It's great they can both financially ruin an industry with bad practices while also tearing out the soul of the medium.

  • This is very exciting! But I'm relying on third-party addons for both Android (syncthing-fork from Fdroid, itself a fork of syncthing-android which wasn't being maintained) and windows (syncthing tray). I think my Mac and Linux machines are using standard syncthing, but I'll be waiting a little bit for the rest of the community/ecosystem to catch up!

  • Hmmm... I don't see dbzer0 in the list, I wonder how we escaped? I think we're like the 3rd or 4th biggest instance, and positive leaning on AI. Maybe @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com just has amazing sys admin skills?

  • This is great news! I love these 2 games, especially Hexen! Be a lot easier to play them on steamdeck now!

    Looks like mods are just starting to go up. Hopefully Jimmy (or a fan I guess) uploads his Faithless trilogy for Heretic. It mixes some elements from Hexen in and is one of the better fantasy boomer shooters I've played. Highly recommended when it's available.

  • They been doing the TPB thing on and off line for decades now. Whether there's still creative juice left to squeeze I don't know, but those folks are truly committed to the characters if nothing else.

  • Ugh, this joke doesn't even make sense and why are random words bolded? Load bearing? While laying in a box?

    Wouldn't it have been funnier to make use of the properties of the etch a sketch? Like "Oh no, you didnt erase my shed blue prints did you?!" Or draw attention to the joke of it being mixed with the tools, like "That E-a-S has been handed down by the carpenters of my family for generations" or just any joke that ties back into the comic.

  • The subtle addition of the swastika to the whistle, very nice.

  • Weird how Visa and PayPal didnt cut off payment processing to Google over porn. Weird how Itch.io, a company thats like 1 millionth the size of Alphabet, was able to take down and begin fixing their online store within a day. If only Google had put some of their thousands of "engineers" to work on this problem instead of sending hundreds of lawyers to try and make it go away.

  • Yeah, its been pretty disgusting watching the worst people in the state working overtime to fuck up society. We've been trying to get folks in our friend and activist circles to attend these meetings in person when we can do it. But obviously they schedule them at random times, cancel discussion when too many people are there, don't announce reschedules, and so on. It's scummy, antidemocratic tactics and I'm not sure what we're supposed to do to counter them.

  • Alright, so here's my case for Thief, the Looking Glass Studios game.

    Thief, on its own, is a great game and basically shares the claim to originating a lot of ideas behind stealth in games along with MGS, which came out the same year.

    What many don't know is how incredibly innovative what they were doing with their engine tech was. In another timeline, id software were mildly successful action game makers while LGS became the industry defining mega success. The Dark Engine refines a lot of ideas present in Ultima Underworld and marries them to tech that was decades ahead of its time.

    Check out the opening and closing of this long talk: https://youtu.be/wo84LFzx5nI

    Thief had, probably, the first ECS in gaming. They also had their own rendering technique using "portals" that was a bit slower than id's BSP trees but allowed for insane geometry. They also had an incredible system for events called stimulus-response that was doing things like Breath of the Wild's "chemistry engine" again, decades before it would be rediscovered.

    They weren't just making games, these were really simulations of a limited world with complex interactions. If the rest of the industry had caught onto their good practices, who knows what the landscape would look like today!

  • Doom

    I could write an essay significantly larger than the game itself and it wouldn't be as powerful of an argument as just saying the name with the weight of legacy it commands.

  • You're correct that it's actually a non-issue: trans people are a ridiculously small minority, most Americans who don't live in a city have probably never met a trans person, yet the entire nation has been whipped into frenzied "debate" about fairness in sports, bathroom needs, and other very unserious issues.

    The answers are also very obvious. No trans person has ever dominated a sport, otherwise you'd have heard about this. The actual problem with hormones in sports is rampant steroid abuse, trans issues distract from that. Likewise, just have unisex private bathrooms. Treating humans like indistinguishable cattle is already a problem.

    None of this, however, relates to the issue of Mayor Pete. Politicians don't really "raise issues" from their constituents, not primarily anyway. They raise issues from their donors, and they shape public discourse with what they draw attention to. Buttigieg could support trans people with a word and move on to real issues. He could ignore trans people and call out Republicans for distracting people. He could do so many things, but he chooses to focus on this. It can't be ignored that he's a gay man also. The intent here is to further wedge between LGB and T.

    The ruler class has been working overtime on this for years, because breaking the solidarity of LGBTQ+ people destroys an important progressive bloc held together by shared oppression. If you convince male gays that lesbians and trans people are making too much noise and drawing bad attention, you can split them up and push the whole lot of us back into the closets.

    These issues aren't isolated concerns that operate as pure distractions. They're various fronts in the class war; you can't ignore a flanking maneuver as a "distraction" while the cavalry runs rampant over you.

  • There are other privacy issues with having an indelible marker as to the origin and chain of custody of every digital artifact. And other non-privacy issues.

    So the idea here is that my phone camera attaches a crypro token to the metadata of every photo it takes? (Or worse, embeds it into the image steganographically like printer dots.) Then if I send that photo to a friend in signal, that app attaches a token indicating the transfer? And so on?

    If that's a video of say, police murdering someone, maybe I don't want a perfect trail pointing back to me just to prove I didnt deep fake it. And if that's where we are, then every video of power being abused is going to "be fake" because no sane person would sacrifice their privacy, possibly their life, to "prove" a video isnt AI generated.

    And those in power, the mainstream media say, aren't going to demonstrate the crypto chain of custody on every video they show on the news. They're going to show whatever they want, then say "its legit, trust us!" and most people will.

    These are the fundamental issues with crypto that people actually don't understand: too much of it is actually opt-in, it's unclear to most people what's actually proved or protected, and it doesn't actually address or understsnd where trust, authority, and power actually come from.

  • Games @lemmy.world

    Being Kyle Katarn - Interview with Jason Court

  • Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ @lemmy.dbzer0.com

    Getting Started with Self-Hosting?

  • Technology @lemmy.world

    DeepSeek-R1 on DeepSeek-R1: Self-Analysis through Haiku

  • Deep Rock Galactic @lemmy.world

    Rock and Stone, You Beautiful Dwarves!