Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: apocalyptech

Quoting: JarmerOMG I love this so much because it will destroy discord. YESSSSSS I ragehate discord so much so anything that takes measures to destroy it is the best thing ever.

Heh, while I don't hate Discord with the same fervor as you, I am certainly not a fan. Perhaps this'll end up encouraging more people to start adopting open platforms for online discussion, over corporate-controlled walled gardens! Though through the cynical eye of historical observation, I think it's more likely that the majority will just grumble about it and acquiesce anyway. Alas!

if we can make the best platform for once instead of demanding people to use an inferior product...

im not saying that open source is aways worse, but we tend to enter the party when its already in the middle or over, we need to find an way to fund cool projects and make then more competitive with closed solutions before its too late for then to compete...

As far as I can tell, open source development also tends to be more kind of steady, a long gradual push, punctuated by bursts of activity when some talented energetic person joins and suddenly adds some stuff.

Closed source development tends to be more front-loaded . . . there's a big push at the beginning, lots of money and hustle to get the product out the door, then nothing much, bugfixes if you're lucky, until it's time for the next version, when there will be a big push to find some new features to bolt on. Eventually the product reaches maturity, and will start to get worse as they either add bells and whistles because, or if it's dominant in its field they will start to enshittify it.

So at the beginning, closed products tend to be better. A couple of versions in, open source software starts overtaking, and then after a while is likely to end up better than the closed product just by virtue of not being a product. But it takes time, quite often too long to get any adoption.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

The problem here isn't age verification per se. In theory, that's not such a terrible idea for many things that are online. The problem is that we can't trust any of the people who want to administer it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: whizsenot totally unreasonable is it? meat is at a premium... and i'm sure some people would be better of as hamburger...

*glances hungrily at the neighbors doing outdoor karaoke in the summertime*

"That guy sure looks like plant food to me!"

View this comment - View article - View full comments

So, implicitly . . . the game's objective is to kill your host and die? Is this, like, some kind of billionaire simulation?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: wit_as_a_riddleMy logic remains perfectly consistent:

When the action itself is harmless / consensual / victimless, moral indignation about how someone spends *their own money* on it is often performative (status-signaling, puritanism, etc.).

When the action is harmful (especially criminal and victim-involving), then outrage is justified - and the fact that money changed hands is irrelevant to the moral assessment.

The distinction isn't hard to see unless you're intentionally blurring it. Either you are misreading or you are knowingly misleading.

Again, there is no point in bringing the money in and calling it "hard earned" unless you are trying to valorize the money (and its possessor). When an action is genuinely "harmless / consensual / victimless", one can simply say that nobody should be indignant about it because there is nothing to be indignant about.

As to whether activities involving the use of AI are that sort of activity . . . they're externalities, like a factory that emits pollution. People are being or will be hurt, but it's nobody you know and in the short term you have no real way to find out just who. Now, for factories that emit pollution, some moral censure is reasonable, and may have some impact if much of society can forge a normative consensus that generating such pollution is bad. But probably the impact will be small, since it does not remove the profitability of the externality. It's no substitute for a solid regulatory environment. But does that mean that criticism of people exploiting externalities for profit is pointless? Certainly not. It helps forge societal consensus that can lead to the enactment of appropriate regulation.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: wit_as_a_riddle

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: wit_as_a_riddle

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: wit_as_a_riddleI find the moral indignation over what others do with their own hard earned money to be performative.

That sounds like it makes sense, but it's ludicrous. So, Geoffrey Epstein spent his own hard earned money on sex with underage girls. I am morally indignant about that. Not you, though, that would be "performative".

That sounds like it makes sense, but it's ludicrous! The morally repugnant issue is sex with underage girls, spending money on it or not is irrelevant.

Uh, yeah. Go look at what you said.

Your point was that if people were spending "their own hard earned money" on something, that meant we shouldn't be morally indignant about it. This appeared to be an admonition completely independent of the content of what those people were doing with their "hard earned money". I pointed out the absurdity of this. You have just confirmed it--yes, whether someone spends "their own hard earned money" on something is in fact irrelevant to whether we should feel moral indignation about it. So, your initial statement was ludicrous.

You're still misrepresenting what I actually said, and that's the core issue here.

My original statement:

"I find the moral indignation over what others do with their own hard earned money to be performative."

Nowhere did I say - or even imply - that *spending one's own money makes any action morally acceptable* or immune to criticism. That would be an absurd, blanket claim, and I never made it.

Oh, please. Let's unpack a bit, shall we?

So, first, that implication is certainly there in the basic grammar. Clearly it is the fact that the things done are done by people with their own hard earned money, that makes the indignation performative. If it were not, there would be no point mentioning the money in the first place, but instead the money is the only thing mentioned that characterizes what the people are doing. No doubt the claim wasn't intended to have to handle a reductio ad absurdum, but rather the money was perhaps only intended to be sufficient to wash clean venial sins, but this was certainly on its face a claim that people shouldn't be getting on people's case if what they're doing is spending money.

But on what basis? The core of the statement is that the money is "hard earned". So this is not just any money--it is presumed to be money acquired by working hard, by adhering to the Protestant work ethic. It is virtuous money, and the possessor is virtuous through having acquired it. The current context relates to someone with enough money to own a company, so, considerable wealth. The invocation of the "hard earned" money suggests that the possessors of that much money are, by that fact, our betters. And so, anything they might decide to do with it can be assumed to be above our criticism.

It was an extremely loaded statement, and loaded quite cleverly at that, meant to get people to digest it without quite realizing what they'd swallowed.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: NociferAI is selling like hotcakes

AI* is all over the place, but mostly not because any end-users of anything have bought it. Can you really call that "selling like hotcakes"?

*A term which for purposes of the current discussion I am using to mean the Large Language Model "AI" currently bubbling the economy.

I don't see end users paying (yet), but my company did buy AI access (that's supposedly not using our input for anything). Not the whatever trillions they're spending though of course. But in the millions I guess.

Even I have to admit it is selling--it's not like nobody's buying access to AI (although what most of them are paying doesn't pay for the operating costs of the requests they make), it's just that the actual uptake of customers deliberately choosing to pay, as opposed to having it wedged into their search by Google or whatever, doesn't seem to be all that high.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GustyGhostI'll be the one to say it:

Consider all those who got gassed up on the cyclical $NEW_WINDOWS bad streak who tried out Linux on their gaming computers, only to feel overwhelmed or burned or whatever by the differences (of which newbies will always make mountains out of mole hills) who then promptly return to the familiarity of Windows.

I suspect we'll see another small decrease next month too.

You can say that, but it really seems to be just the usual Simplified Chinese uptick.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: NociferAI is selling like hotcakes

AI* is all over the place, but mostly not because any end-users of anything have bought it. Can you really call that "selling like hotcakes"?

*A term which for purposes of the current discussion I am using to mean the Large Language Model "AI" currently bubbling the economy.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: bekoAlso: This happened with every iteration of the game. A very vocal "fan" group shunning it claiming the last version was peak.

Every.
Single.
Time.

😩

I don't think you can say that this time. Most of the very vocal fan group is probably saying that the one two versions before was peak.

View this comment - View article - View full comments