Hey… They have a public contact page that looks like it would be taken somewhat seriously, as it feels legal in nature. I’ll be letting them know that their leadership is engaging in unfair deals shortly. Anyone want to join in?
Speakup@krafton.com Via https://krafton.com/en/speakup
Worst case, we get ignored. Best is that they take notice that the audience they bought isn’t theirs blindly.
Same. Fuck greedy publishers/IP holders. I want to see more Subnautica, but also want to ignore anything krafton touches.
Apropos the setting, I think the high seas is the way to accomplish both, but i fear that will just result in the studio going dark altogether.
Unknown Worlds has done good work, but will probably be yet another casualty of greedy leadership.
I get the thrust of the song, but I have a question for you and/or anyone else who has insight:
I make small aggressions, like OP, where I assume I’m costing a corpo and giving to an artist through it, even if minuscule.
Examples:
Similar to OP, I have a streaming service ‘downloaded’ playlist of songs I like. I tend to leave my PC playing them in shuffle/repeat during my workday. I might have my volume on or off depending on my level of focus, but I can’t see how that “engagement” doesn’t benefit the artist without costing me anything – maybe a smidge more electricity.
Since I saw The Spiffing Brit’s runtime video, I no longer close a youtube tab if I decide I want something else. I mute the tab, set the speed to .25 and ignore it for a while. Costs me electricity, not that much bandwidth, and presumably pays the channel more than usual. Maybe fucks with analytics per-video, but probably not enough to bother the creator, and if it fucks with ‘the algorithm’ and pushes people to channels I already like, then that’s a google problem.
I also have an Epic Games account, where I “buy” every single free game. I assume these have either already paid the developer a fixed fee for supporting development, or are paying based on sales volume. Either way, they presumably paid money to be able to offer these as a loss-leader. Most are games I would not have bought anyway, so I’m not costing the developer a potential sale and I will never buy anything through Epic games, so it should be just a loss. I actually want insight on this one, in case there are devs/publishers here. If this costs you when I buy your free game, there might be others like me who just need to know we’re not helping.
Aside from the fact that my engagement with these platforms could be used as leverage (’ we have X million active users…'), I can’t see any negative to my attacks on them. It’s possible the artists can’t perceive it, but if the corpos love it, they wouldn’t make me pass a CAPTCHA to buy a game.
The question, then, is: Am I hurting the artists, or helping them?
Brother is the other secret, though it seem like maybe even they have turned… the problem with making a solid piece of equipment that will last for a decade is you consume your customer base and can’t show ‘growth’ constantly.
My Brother color laser (model 3170, bought in 2016) doesn’t print the perfect photos, but that’s not what I use it for. I print coloring sheets and camp forms for my kiddos and random forms for adult life. It ran on the original toner carts for around 5 years, with black being replaced first on its own. There’s no inkjet in the world that will have 5 year-old carts work, but laser toner doesn’t dry out.
I’m no longer at my computer where typing is easy. I thank all of you for responding in good faith, and I’ll be reading the various links. Thanks for engaging with me.
I’m now mobile, so my formatting will suffer.
Capitalism = bad. I’m fully behind that, and see it as the root of the problem. What I don’t see is a path forward that doesn’t involve incremental progress, even if not all demographics are served. At least not without violence that will be disrupt even more.
I think this is where we disagree, but I might still be missing something.
You (assorted folks responding to me) want an epoch change where we rise up and take back the power we have. We have it right now, but the price to pay to enforce that is too high for me.
I want a progression where we work towards owning that power. We had it partially when unions were still strong, but it was undermined. In my mind, the solution is education, but I have no power to enact that directly. My ability to influence is limited to my local org and voting.
A green party, socialist party, etc, will never win an election in our current environment. Votes there are literally useless, if not spoiling a candidate that has at least some if your views. The system is rigged, sure, but you can’t flip this table and walk away.
Can we separate this discussion into talking about politics and elections and eliminate Israel/Palestine? I’m a-religious, pro Palestine, pro humanitarian, but having that angle seems to quickly degenerate every conversation into ‘both sides are genocide’ and avoid the’how do we move forward’ question. I think these can be separated, but maybe that is also a place we disagree.
I feel we’re playing different games, or using different terms.
Help me understand.
Firstly. Let’s define words: I’m assuming/using my view of a US-centric Liberal vs Conservative.
Liberal: Democratic party, wants to make life better for the larger segment of the population.
Conservative: Republican party, wants to consolidate power and wealth in the hands of a few.
That’s my personal and biased broad-strokes view of the political landscape.
Conservatives have managed to gather enough popular support that people will vote against their best interest for either perceived economic gain or for ‘hurt the other people more.’
Stepping back even further, what is your end-goal? How do you respect the desires of millions of people without some sort of representation, and if you have such, how do you ensure that the representative aligns with the goals of their constituents?
Sadly, I’m offline for the day, but I’d be happy to continue this conversation.
In this post: not realizing that the ideal solution is not a single step away, but rather multiple steps – and they will not be simple to sell to a general populace.
I’ll admit I’m not familiar with the term. ‘Electorialism’ seems to be, according to Wikipedia, a ‘half-way step’ between Authoritarianism and Democracy.
As far as I know, we are still not quite in an Authoritarian state here in the US. We are more likely to be headed in the opposite way from Electorialism; where we are transitioning from what is a democratic process to one where oligarchs have consolidated enough power and influence that they can just say, ‘fuck it, we win.’ In that case, yes, I do want to make a case against Electorialism.
In Electorialism, the dominant party, presumably the authoritarian one, conducts elections that allow their opponents a stage and promises to be free and fair while still controlling the levers of power. What we have seen in the last 8 years is a party, republicans, that are throwing every possible strategy at the wall in the effort to undermine and discredit elections with the end result that if they win, the election will be seen as fair and, if they lose, the election will be seen as unfair.
All concepts of what are optimal democratic processes are going to be just that: concepts. We live in the real world. There are millions of people you have to convince to move to your desired method of representation. I think we agree on the end-goal, I just disagree on how to get there and think we can’t jump from a Trump presidency directly to a worker-owned utopia.
Help me out. What’s our next step?
Mine is to help elect people to local, state and federal offices that want to make life for everyone better.
My comment was removed by the mods… probably because I let my rage show. Though the mod log shows rule 2 instead of rule 1 :P
Here’s a longer and nicer version:
I’m a (US) liberal, and I don’t approve of any of the views described by kittenzrulz123. Lumping half the country into a single bucket is not going to give you a good overview of the myriad ideals we might have individually.
You have a choice. You can look at the political landscape at the moment of the election and choose one of four options:
At this time, our election system really only works for two parties. Any third-party vote is useless, if not counterproductive. If you can’t understand how that math works, let me know and I’ll break it down for you. I’d love to change that, but the process is by using our ability during primaries to put forward more liberal candidates that support election reforms, not by putting our heads in the sand and voting 3rd party hoping that we will make people notice… hint: they will not.
If you don’t like your choices when you go to the voting booth in November, the solution is to get involved in late November and make things better next time. Join a local democratic organization and become part of the solution. Complaining online about how your choices suck is something we can fix if we all jump in. If you’re not doing that, then you are abdicating your responsibility and allowing others to make the choice of who represents us instead. If you choose not to be part of the selection process, the very least you can do is vote for the ‘lesser evil’ and not make things worse.
Side note: the Primary election is the end of that selection process, not the start. Putting your values on the primary ballot is where you should spend your energy if you’re mad at the status quo.
I will admit that I’m angry that we didn’t get a Democratic primary and that Harris was ordained as Biden’s successor without any popular input. The DNC is to blame for that fuck-up. It’s irrefutable, though, that Harris would have been better for Palestine, the US economy, US healthcare, foreign relations, and dozens of other topics than trump is.
Would Claudia de la Cruz have been better? Sure. Her platform looks awesome. Did she have even a chance of winning? no.
As with other responses, I recommend a local model, for a vast number of reasons, including privacy and cost.
Ollama is a front end that lets you run several kinds of models on Windows and Linux. Most will run without a GPU, but the performance will be bad. If your only compute device is a laptop without a GPU, you’re out of luck running things locally with any speed… that said, if you need to process a large file and have time to just let the laptop cook, you can probably still get what you need overnight or over a weekend…
If you really need something faster soon, you can probably buy any cheap($5-800) off-the-shelf gaming pc from your local electronics store like best buy, microcenter, walmart, and get more ‘bang for your buck’ over a longer term running a model locally, assuming this isn’t a one-off need. Aim for >=16GB RAM on the PC itself and >=10GB on the GPU for real-time responses. I have a 10GB RTX 3080 and have success running 8B models on my computer. I’m able to run a 70B model, but it’s a slideshow. The ‘B’ metric here is parameters and context(history). Depending on what your 4k-lines really means (book pages/printed text?, code?) a 7-10B model is probably able to keep it all ‘loaded in memory’ and be able to respond to questions about the file without forgetting parts of it.
From a privacy perspective, I also HIGHLY recommend not using the various online front ends. There’s no guarantee that any info you upload to them stays private and generally their privacy policies have a line like ‘we collect information about your interactions with us including but not limited to user generated content, such as text input and images…’ effectively meaning anything your send them is theirs to keep. If your 4k line file is in any way business related, you shouldn’t send it to a service you don’t operate.
Additionally, as much as I enjoy playing with these tools, I’m an AI skeptic. Ensure you review the response and can sanity check it – AI/LLMs are not actually intelligent and will make shit up.
While I would hate to lose actual trees, I’m medium on the idea of this on it’s own. People need lots of things and space, which causes the removal of trees. If we can replicate some of their functions, such as CO2 absorption with this tech, then that seems good. If upkeep is the same as a tree, I don’t see a downside to the overall concept.
My thought would be that this shows up on top of the buildings instead of at ground level, though… Plant real trees and put these on the roof. The real loss would be if we stop making green spaces because these things meet the need for O2. Green spaces in cities do way more than just clean the air, though, so I’m not sure we’re that dystopian yet.
The photo looks like it doubles as a bench too, so maybe that helps justify its footprint. Make them a mini-light show with varied colors and it can become a functional art installation. How long until it has spikes to prevent someone from taking a nap on it, though?
As much as I understand and support the sentiment, destroying things that are still functional is a very republican action.
Perhaps deface the mugs (sharpie marks generally survive dishwashers and can be reapplied later for new fun mustaches) and turn the shirts into dishrags or washcloths. (especially fun since in languages with gendered nouns, like German for example, a shirt is a neutral gender and a washcloth is masculine, thus making this really transformational.)
You think children are getting undeserved money from the government.
I think children are getting money from the government.
We are not the same. </meme>
Regardless of evidence provenance, children need to be our most sacred class of people, followed by the elderly and disabled. It shouldn’t even be a question about how and why we take care of them, we just fucking should.
Misinformation is real, so I see part of your point, but the people outraged at this are WILDLY different from the people outraged that kids might be getting money they don’t “deserve”. Can we not just be nice to each other? This isn’t actually a zero-sum game.
Every relationship is different, so I can’t speak to your situation and this may not be the root cause. This isn’t specifically for Darkmoon, but for anyone feeling the same way.
I’m male and my wife has a robust social network where I am included in some of their conversations. Most of her female friends are low-key angry at their husbands and resent how much work they (wives) do that goes unnoticed.
Make sure you are helping out in the home: obvious things like cleaning, cooking, dishes, laundry; but also kiddo maintenance like knowing what homework is needed, what they need to wear on Tuesday for spirit day, when the next dentist appointment is (or making it), etc; social maintenance like planning trips to grandparents, finding a babysitter for date night (and planning it), preparing for parties.
Take some of that work off her and she’ll have more energy for you.
I 100% clicked on that link expecting it to be a TVTropes rabbit hole… I’m actually a little disappointed.
Not OP, but this is a principle thing. We should not have to change our behavior to make the computers work for us. They are unthinking, unfeeling tools, despite anyone’s claims around “AI”. They change for us.
That runs into a problem of tech literacy, though. If the companies running the tech we use don’t have incentive to make it work better, you have to know how to do it yourself and that’s generally not trivial. If I were OP, I’d look into self-hosted home automation. There’s some overhead and tinkering required, but the customization and privacy gains are likely worth it.
Side note. Anyone have any knowledge of a Google Home Mini repurpose? I’m more of a software guy, and have no clue if or how I can make the hardware mine. I’ve been slowly removing my reliance on google products lately. I use it mostly as a speaker, though, so worst case is it ends up as e-waste.
I DESPISE AI in fast food restaurants… as well as just about everywhere else… but in fast food it really pisses me off.
I crave salty trash food every once in a while, but when my local Taco Bell greeted me with an obviously AI drive-thru, I just drove away and never came back.
Fast food and retail were the places you went to get your first job with no experience or school necessary. Using AI to ‘take their jobs’ in the pursuit of ‘efficiency’ is just adding velocity to our plunge into dystopia. I mean no disrespect to those working those currently jobs, though, as the ‘were’ in that sentence is carrying a lot and the article is right that the jobs are stressful and relentless, and it angers me that your livelihood is yet again being threatened by corporate greed.
If there were compensating factors, like UBI, free higher education and better worker protections, then sure, let’s let “ai” take over the things that we don’t want to do… but I don’t think we’re going in that direction.
My local one changed the play place into a conference room. That’s where adults have fun… right?
Fully agreed. On the service-provider side, we have ‘safe harbor’ laws: A site isn’t liable for copyrighted user-generated content as long as they have mechanisms to take down items when notified.
Liability-wise: The payment processors should have no fucking insight into what is being sold, only that they handle the transactions. Therefore, they should have no liability, similar to “safe harbor”.
Reputation-wise: I can almost see a history where Visa, for example, used a statement like “we don’t handle transactions for X” as a marketing ploy… but that is way past where we are. There’s no chance of reputational damage to a payment processor for the items for which they handled a payment. Combined with the above, if I say I’m giving $20 to Tim, you give $20 to Tim and take it from me. Done. Not your problem.
As another commenter stated, the payment processor should be a dumb pipe, and anything illegal being sold should be a liability for the seller or buyer. The idea of a moral judgement of the processor is as stupid as a water pipe to your house cutting off the flow if your shower runs too long.
The real problem is the politicians, or lobbyists/influencers, who are sending bribes to each other to gain advantage… but visa doesn’t have a problem handling a venmo transaction for ‘tuition’.
Let me buy horny games until after you block world superpower corruption first. But honestly, don’t even do that. Just handle moving the money when someone send it. That’s your only job.