I don’t even know what to say about this mess, but yes: that’s enterprise pricing. It doesn’t need to be that way, but it can be because those are the kind of prices you can charge businesses. And really, just as a pleasant capitalistic side effect of this, is that the lower classes are completely locked off form this technology. It’s not a mystery, it’s not a conspiracy, it’s business. And I hate it.

Of course you’ll still meet individuals with a wide range of beliefs and I don’t think you can boil a complex group down to a simple answer; but yes.

A few years back now it came out that Violent J’s daughter was a furry, and like a good dad he supported her and at least tangentially got into the furry community which is very LGBTQ+. This opened up a really weird friendship between the groups, but from what I understand the Juggalos also have a history of being very anti-fascist which also jived with the progressive furries.

While I haven’t met many myself, I fully accept the alliance. They’re both alternative cultures which can look odd from the outside, but as you pointed out I think they both heavily focus on acceptance, respect, and support. It’s a good unifying thread! Juggalos and furries will show you who they are without shame, I trust and respect that.

This is the book that introduced me to the Chinese Room thought experiment and is the first thing I began to think of when the recent AI trend started to make a splash.

Peter Watts is great and though it’s not related to the topic at hand, I cannot recommend Starfish enough. Dark, haunting, and psychological. (It’s apparently part of a series but I never carried on)

38/M/US

Home is a very complicated question that’s going to mean a lot of different things to people emotionally, so I try not to get too prescriptive about my own definition. I moved away from my rural upbringing as soon as I could and I never really looked back. It was not a place I enjoyed or felt like I belonged either. I kind of lost my sense of home and I can’t say it’s something I really look for anymore. It feels too permanent for me. To me, home is a treasure that must be hard fought, then protected, and can therefore always be lost. I don’t think I want a home anymore.

What I want is a sense of belonging. That seems a lot easier to manage because it’s built out of the values and interests I’ve made for myself. I bring it with me wherever I go. I’m free to change it or grow as I like. I try to match it to the people and places around me to see if I like them and if it works for me and if I’m happy. I moved from the rural town I grew up in to a larger city in my state. Then I moved several thousands of miles across the country and spent most of my 20’s and 30’s here. During that time I’ve moved to several small towns and suburbs around the larger city. I’m thinking of moving again, this time outside the country. I’m still excited by the prospect, and afraid.

I assume a lot of this is probably just some psychological phenomenon that is inducing a fake/unreal fantasy. I assume even if I could move to some other country I might not feel as joyful like when I was a kid and even if I do, at some point it might not feel special anymore and it might not be like I hoped.

So maybe this is just this classic “the grass seems always greener on the other side” thing and in reality it might not be like that.

I do think these things are at least partly true and it’s perceptive of you to point that out, but it shouldn’t discourage you either. It’s a very human thing to want to try. Just set your expectations, I don’t know that you’ll simply find a new home. You’re going to have to bring some of it with you, you’re going to have to make some of it on your own, and you’re going to have to ask for help along the way.

If you haven’t played Sorry We’re Closed yet, it’s a fantastic queer horror survival RPG. Features music from Okumura Music Group, checked them out and this one has been going in my head all week, https://okumuramusicgroup.bandcamp.com/track/basic-human-rights

If you’ve got Logitech, check out Piper (which is really just a GUI wrapper for libratbag). After a lot of searching, this ended up being the solution I went with.

EDIT: pulled up the link but then forgot to paste it, sorry! https://github.com/libratbag/piper

KDE is Windows 98, full of fun customizations, but unpolished in odd ways no matter what you do.

Absolutely perfect. And part of why I’ve grown to love it.

I’m always thinking about how bad humans are when thinking about numbers rationally. Of course we understand what a “billion” is, we know how many 0’s it has and can do basic mathematical operations on it. But how much is it really? One of my favorite analogies for putting it in perspective is seconds.

A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is … 31,688 years.

The analogy already breaks down, because while most people could understand 12 days and a lot of adults can understand 31 years for having lived it (some even twice or more!), 31,688 years is completely incomprehensible again. How many human generations is that? All of recorded human history is only like 5,000 years. It’s utterly, mind-numbingly insane. No trillionaires, ever! No billionaires!!!

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/17/business/elon-musk-richest-person-trillionaire/index.html

This was published on September 17th of this year, after most of the nonsense of Twitter and utter things. He’s still on track, by 2027 no less.

Your initial post and response here describe my position as well.

Simply put, to follow individuals, you have to be where those individuals are. On Lemmy here in looking for topics and discussion, those are much easier to decentralize.

Same on all accounts. Got the original NES Metroid for my birthday when I was a kid and impacted my taste in games forevermore. Of course I’ve played all the Castlevanias as well and Hollow Knight is a masterpiece.

It’s hard to properly compare because I’ve played Super Metroid more times than I honestly remember and have only made it through Dread 1.5x (at best). There are so many cool rooms in Super (and even later games like the Prime series) where I play them and go, “Oh, this is the room with X!” where X is a cool encounter, maybe a friendly/non-hostile creature, or an entertaining set piece. Dread doesn’t really have that, the areas check off zones like flavors of ice cream, the music is not memorable, and creatures are often used across multiple zones, further diluting any uniqueness to the areas.

It’s best summed up by this screenshot I took of Dread (I added the red outlines around the black space myself to highlight my point). Notice how the foreground has no character or texture and all the detail has been pushed into the background, which is essentially the negative space you traverse through. My eyes don’t really hold on this area, they capture the boundary of the play space and then navigate through it, passing over a lot of the inconsequential stuff in the background. Again, compare to Super.

Also the EMMI stealth sections are so incongruous with the rest of the game you could cleanly slice them out entirely (while redistributing any of the power ups of course) and the game would be the same. In fact I rather hate them because instead of taking my time to explore and soak in the environment, I’m just chased through a very samey looking area.

Oh and finally, it’s a small point and I don’t want to make too much out of it, but like … the game opens with SPOILERS beating her so hard she loses her abilities. That’s weird, right? Kinda oof, IMHO.

Metroid Dread still kinda … bothers me. At the risk of sounding overly contentious, am I the only one who thought it was like a 7/10 action game and a 5/10 Metroidvania?

I won’t go into it all now, but I feel like the difficulty spike is a knock-on from the lack of collectibles. While you can argue about the usefulness of previous collectibles in Metroid games, in Dread they’ve been pared down to Missile Tanks, Energy Tanks, and Power Bomb Tanks. To make discovering those limited things more valuable, they pumped up boss difficulty so you’d either have to come in with a sufficiently high stockpile or perform a counter.

I’m not sure if that’s 100% accurate and I may be generalizing my own experiences too much, but otherwise there’s just not really enough excuse for me to go out of my way and collect all those Missile Tanks unless I’m specifically going for a completionist run. Seeing yet another +5 Missile Tank tucked away somewhere just doesn’t make me go, “Wow, I need to get there!” but increasing the boss difficulty to a point that requires it also makes it feel less optional? Anyone agree?

certified Dread disdainer

1000% this. Without giving away too much information, I work(ed) for a cloud provider (not one of the big ones, there are a surprising number of smaller ones in the field you’ve probably never heard of before). I quit this week to take a position in local government with some quaint, on-prem setup.

1. We were always understaffed for what we promised. Two guys per shift and if one of us took vacation; oops, lol. No extra coverage, just deal.
2. Everyone was super smart but we didn’t have time to work the tickets. Between crashes, outages, maintenance, and horrendous tickets that took way too much work to dig into, there was just never enough time. If you had a serious problem that took lengthy troubleshooting, good luck!
3. We over-promised on support we could provide, often taking tickets that were outside of infrastructure scope (guest OS shit, you broke your own server, what do you want me to do about it?) and working them anyway to please the customer or forwarding them directly to one of our vendors and chaining their support until they caught wise and often pushed back.
4. AI is going to ruin Support. To be clear, there will always be support and escalation engineers who have to work real problems outside the scope of AI. However without naming names, there’s a big push (it’ll be everyone before too long, mark it) for FREE tier support to only chat with AI bots. If you need to talk to a real human being, you gotta start dishing out that enterprise cash.

Mix all that together and then put the remaining pressure on the human aspect still holding things up and there’s a collapse coming. Once businesses get so big they’re no longer “obligated” to provide support, they’ll start charging you for it. This has always been a thing of course, anyone who’s worked enterprise agreements knows that. But in classic corpo values, they’re closing the gap. Pay more for support, get less in return. They’ll keep turning that dial until something breaks catastrophically, that’s capitalism baby.

I know it’s a 45 minute Youtube video, but I love Tom Nicholas and all his stuff is fascinating and worth watching. Check this out as he does a sincere deep dive on it to get an honest answer and it’s pretty enlightening! It’s actually evolved even in the short time since its inception on the internet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmzyGNXxwdo

Check out https://www.giuspen.net/cherrytree/, lightweight note-taking app with interesting scripting function built in.

Even if that’s not your cup of tea, it has the option to save your notebook to a single sqlite file, so I take that as good enough proof it’ll work for your similar purposes as well.

So it could possibly be construed to “Microsoft’s Dirty Operating System”, yeah?

In response to a perfectly valid question about dumbass plan I just came up with:

“we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it”

There is a very meaningful difference between humane, highly regulated animal testing and what Musk is doing. Compounding this is the feeling that Musk’s high profile is what’s letting him get away with this in the first place. He wants to slap his name and face on everything for the credit when it’s good, be gets to be the lightning rod when it’s not.

There are no legitimate uses, full stop.

As others have pointed out, it’s just a fully public database. Its use case is among trustless parties, and that’s why it fails. At some point, somebody is going to want to take action off the data and that’s going to involve a trusted party enforcing it. Sooo … just have the trusted party host the data (and make it public if you really care). And if all the parties are truly that trustless, 1) why are they dealing with either and 2) get a third party trustee to broker your deals

No.

If I’m sitting on the couch and I want sushi, I can open up a website, pick exactly what I want, even maybe make a few substitutions for me specificity, and get it delivered right to my house, but that doesn’t mean I made sushi. I just HAVE sushi.

Anyone who has ever actually supported a real artist and commissioned work understands that they don’t own the copyright, unless extra agreements have been made to transfer it. It still belongs to the original artist.

And as stated, AI can’t own that. So no one does. Who would want to? It’s garbled, derivative work and anyone with access to the same prompt and models could generate it themselves, which is why I find the prompt guarding so hilarious. It’s all so blatantly dumb and transparent.