The real means to prevent this is unionizing, which is really the answer to most other techbro-hellscape problems too. Just like Hollywood is putting anti-ai clauses in their contracts, so too will tech workers need to. Unfortunately, given that the end goal is to remove the IT workers entirely, this is still only a delay if companies push ahead, since just like scabs, there will always be people willing to sell their fellow workers down the river for their own enrichment.

But we’re not even close to that point; most tech workers think unionizing is a 4-letter word. There’s always a private chat room where folks are lamenting the absolute class-ignorance of their coworkers who are all convinced they’re going to stumble into unicorn stock options soon, despite multiple rounds of layoffs each year now being standard in tech.

The real question is what has to happen to end this horrible capitalist nightmare in general.

independent has always meant the freedom to create whatever you want without input unwanted influence from anyone else.

Yes, and if a publisher is present, you cannot as a consumer ensure this is the case. No publisher actually makes their contracts with dev studios public for review, or allows people to review their internal communication.

No, this distinction prevents publishers from co-opting “indie” as a label, which people support because of that artistic discretion, and hiding it behind their opaque promises of such independence that no one can verify. You cannot trust a dev hasn’t been influenced by a publisher when they’re present, so the only way to ensure that is to not have a publisher present.

I don’t know that movie, but I do know actual indie devs who use e.g. Patreon for funding. It’s not about not having money, it’s about who your money comes from, and whether there can be hidden stipulations on it. With publishers, there always are.

This is great to see, and as long as it’s up to companies whether to do this we need to encourage that behavior… but it also shouldn’t be up to companies’ whims whether to do this or not. It should be legally required for end-of-support devices and software to release whatever source code or changes are necessary to either operate the device/software independent of a server, or run the server ourselves.

Honestly, operating a private streaming site is much safer than pirate VHF/ UHF broadcasts, both in terms of what you’ll get charged with, and how long you’ll remain undetected. VHF and UHF broadcasts are literal homing beacons (and without something to bounce the signal off, very limited in what you’d reach).

Jellyfin on an offshore VPS, with invite-only accounts otoh…

If being depressed made people stop needing food

Show me where you think I said this.

I’ll assume you have no actual rebuttal than, shall I?

Art doesn’t help much if you’re starving to death.

And being well-fed doesn’t help much if you’re contemplating suicide because your life has no joy in it. And art is not the only source of joy, but it is one of them (and one of the most common).

You keep using the word “useful” in a way that suggests you’ve narrowly defined it in your head to exclude art. Life without art quickly results in a whole lot of death. Even the poorest humans throughout history have created music and art, because it’s a fundamental part of human life. Just because art is less critical to immediate survival in most cases than eating doesn’t make it any less necessary than it; shelter being more or less critical than food in a given situation (deadly sub-zero blizzard, more critical. Temperate area with no dangerous weather or predators, less critical) also doesn’t make it more or less necessary, it’s just a varying order of necessity. Being anti-Capitalist is important, but I feel like you’ve written off “professional” art as the domain of Capitalism rather than another victim of it (which food is as well, for that matter).

I mean… You can. You can train and run models yourself. Lots of people and orgs do.

American == Fascistic == “Make America Great Again”/ Manifest Destiny == Settler Colonialist… viewpoints

immoral people existing is not the problem here

True. The profit motive is. People pushing harmful content are doing it because it makes them money, not because they’re twirling their moustaches as they relish their evil deeds. You remove the profit motive, you remove the motivation to harm people for profit.

the difference is that there isn’t an algorithm that acts as a vector for harmful bullshit

The algorithms boost engagement according to 1) what people engage with, and 2) what companies assess to be appealing. Facebook took the lead in having the social media platform own the engagement algorithms, but the companies and people pushing the content can and do also have their own algorithmic targeting. Just as Joe Camel existed before social media and still got to kids (and not just on TV), harmful actors will find and join discords. All that Facebook and Twitter did was handle the targeting for them, but it’s not like the targeting doesn’t exist without the platforms’ assistance.

Said bad actors do not exist in anywhere near the same capacity. Imo the harm of public chat rooms falls under the “parents can handle this” umbrella. Public rooms are still an issue, but from experience being a tween/teen on those platforms, it’s not even close to being as bad.

It wasn’t as bad on those… back when we were teens. It absolutely is now. If anything, you’ll usually find that a lot of the most harmful groups (red-pill/ manosphere, body-image- especially based around inducing EDs- influencers) actually operate their own discords that they steer/ capture kids into. They make contact elsewhere, then get them into a more insular space where they can be more extreme and forceful in pushing their products, out of public view.

If it was the case that it was just individual actors on the platform causing the harm and not the structure of the platforms incentivizing said harm, then we would see more of this type of thing in real life as well.

I’m not saying it’s all individuals, I’m saying the opposite; it’s companies. Just not social media companies. Social media companies are the convenient access vector for the companies actually selling and pushing the harmful products and corollary ideas that drive kids to them.

I struggle to think of a more complete solution to the harm caused by social media to children than just banning them.

Given that your immediate solution was to regulate kids instead of regulating companies, I don’t think you’re going to be interested in my solutions.

despite how harmful it is for society as a whole, and especially children

If you don’t understand that the motivation is to target kids with ads and influencer content designed to push products, you’re not going to solve anything. Kids have to have spaces to communicate with each other in order to develop healthy socialization skills. Locking them in a proverbial box is not healthy, and guess what, we killed off 99% of third spaces that welcome kids.

If social media is banned for under 16’s, then children would have to communicate with normal chat apps.

I feel like you are envisioning “chat apps” to mean “text-only”, but chat apps have been multimedia/ multi-modal, and multi-user (i.e. not 1:1 messaging) for a long time now, and can be just as easily infiltrated by the same actors targeting kids on social media.

at some point some systemic problems are better served by systemic solutions

This is not a solution, this is a band-aid that doesn’t attack the root cause whatsoever.

You can.

You just don’t want to either a) put in the legwork to do so, or b) be the ‘bad guy’ to your kids for doing it, so instead you just want the government to do it for you.

What’s stopping you from setting up pihole or configuring your home router to block social media sites at home, or turning on parental controls on their phones and blocking the sites and apps?

I just started using Trilium on my homelab. It’s got a lot more than just markdown, but also supports markdown.

That is dope as shit. I love both Ace Combat (Shattered Skies especially! Woooo!) and Macross, this is such a cool simpit.

edit: took a look at the WIP pics on Hackaday, very cool to see the process and materials.

Absolutely badass!

Yeah, it’s very well written and ‘easy to read’. I’ve seen his posts a couple of times on HackerNews, but I don’t think I ever read a long form blog post of his before. This was really good (even if I think a little naive).

Capitalism gonna Capitalism.

We are watching one of the greatest wastes of money in history, all as people are told that there “just isn’t the money” to build things like housing, or provide Americans with universal healthcare, or better schools, or create the means for the average person to accumulate wealth.

This could have been written about the War on Terror.

I can find no analyst commentary on Meta making sixteen billion dollars on fraud, because it doesn’t matter to them, because this is the Rot Economy, and all that matters is number go up.

I’m not sure why he thinks morality is a factor in market movement. You’ll not find the stock market negatively reacting to money being spent on genocide in the Middle East or murders in the Caribbean, or to Palantir expanding into a mass-surveillance apparatus either.

Analysts that do not sing the same tune as everybody else are marginalized, mocked and aggressively policed… By not being skeptical or critical you are going to lead regular people into the jaws of another collapse.

Yes, market collapses are actually loved by large wealth holders, because unless the entire currency itself collapses, the people with the most currency are the ones best-positioned to benefit from the collapse. Investors will ride the economy off a cliff so they can salvage the scrap at the bottom. Sam Altman literally opined about ‘redefining’ the social contract when AI collapses the economy in his White House presser.

Analysts have, on some level, become the fractional marketing team for the stocks they’re investing in.

Because major news, analysis firms, and banks are all owned by the oligarchy, and no one is being punished for using that power to manipulate the market. They know that if they’re a big firm and they say, “this stock is amazing!” it will go up, and since they own that stock, they get richer.

When it happens, I promise I won’t be too insufferable, but I will be calling for accountability for anybody who boosted AI 2027, who sat in front of Sam Altman or Dario Amodei and refused to ask real questions, and for anyone who collected anything resembling “detailed notes” about me or any other AI skeptic.

It’s sad to me that Ed lived through 2008 and still thinks there will be accountability in this system. At some point you have to accept that the purpose of a system is what the system does. Our system cyclically collapses, economically, in order to enrich billionaires. It happened during the DotCom bubble, it happened in 2008, and it happened during COVID, and that’s just in my short lifespan.

I realize I’m pearl-clutching over the amoral status of capitalism and the stock market

I really don’t think you are. You haven’t even begun to reach the bare minimum level of disdain and disgust-inducing realism one should have about capitalism, nevermind anything being remotely close to pearl-clutching.

As someone who is not anti-tool just because big companies and capitalism are misusing said tool (that’s a ‘big companies’ and ‘capitalism’ issue that applies to far more than LLMs), this seems like a non-starter for any business use of the platform.

Enterprise tools definitely have an expectation of 1) not having ads placed in them, and 2) not having their users tracked for third-party data sale, not because they love their employees, but because they’re scared one could infer proprietary business information via user metadata correlation. No company wants their new product to be “blown” early because their devs’ internet activity was aggregated and the product inferred, or worse to have a competitor get the jump on them because of it. Most companies begrudgingly accept use of e.g. Google, but corporate policies will absolutely limit the kind of information you can put in a Google search. ChatGPT is just by its nature much more likely to end up getting proprietary data put in (because it’s a ‘conversation’).

The “promise” that OpenAI will only use said data to target ads is laughable, even if OpenAI believes it.

I guess for me I’d feel like I’ve read about all these cool events in HD2, and they’re gone and done and I can’t replay them, because they were live events only.

Compare that to something like Mabinogi (which is still an MMO, but doesn’t follow the same live-service philosophy), where you can start as a first-time player today, and still play through every campaign/ storyline since its ~2003 release (and there are a LOT of them).