See the trick is to work with computers, not people. People are what fuck everything up. Especially if it’s customers and not coworkers.

Isn’t audible the monopoly on audiobooks? And I thought you can get podcasts from tons of places.

That would be great. The only time I’m ever adjusting the slider is the dimmest 5%. The top 50% of the slider really doesn’t matter to me. It’s annoying trying to hit exactly the right pixel on the low end though

Discord is great as chat program. It should’ve only ever been used for that. It completely sucks as forum replacement. Discord should’ve had very little value to any decent organization.

Every single small game I play has effectively the entirety of their support, community and forums run through discord. Instead of easy to search and discover forums, I have to use crappy infinite chat logs. It sucks.

And you can absolutely trust that tons of executives will definitely not understand this distinction and will use AI even in areas where it’s actively harmful.

Agreed. I keep waffling on my feelings about it. It definitely doesn’t feel like our laws properly handle the scale that LLMs can take advantage of ‘fair use’. It also feels like yet another way to centralize and consolidate wealth, this time not money, but rather art and literary wealth in the hands of a few.

I already see artists that used to get commissions now replaced by endless AI pictures generated via a Lora specifically aping their style. If it was a human copying you, they’d still be limited by the amount they could produce. But an AI can spit out millions of images all in the style you perfected. Which feels wrong.

Google says no, you don’t need one.

Also no golden parachute to pay out

Feasible for a non-profit however

How does an aromantic even get to the point of being pressured into a marriage (at least in a society without arranged marriage)? Why are they dating in the first place? Am I misunderstanding how that works?

You act like these companies don’t already have your identity anyway. Google, Apple, Microsoft. They know exactly who you are. The idea is that those mega corps who already handle identity information are in a better position to be a 3rd party witness to other, less trustworthy websites to say ‘yes this person is an adult’. So you don’t have to give that random website any personal info.

I’d have suggested the government fulfill this role, but people would freak out way more about that.

At the end of the day, ensuring someone else’s kids don’t have access to something said parent doesn’t want them to access…? Not my problem,

It’s absolutely affecting you though. Basically every where online is now ‘family friendly’ because it’s impossible to create adult spaces online. You can’t keep the kids out no matter what you do. And that’s bringing everything down to the lowest common denominator and trying to cram the entire gamut of human interactions down into a single, heavily censored experience. It’s why censorship has gotten completely out of control. Something needs to change or we’ll app be stuck with PG spaces for 10 year olds forever.

Not the environment, the parks. I get those are basically the same thing to us, but not to them.

Which is also a problem because we can’t have adult spaces either. Every time someone tries, they get shut down or all attempts to keep kids out are fruitless. At this point I think everyone would benefit from robust ways of enforcing age limits online.

Personally I think this needs to be at the device level. You can register a device as: child, teen, adult. Every website can query the device age group. The device age is set by a process that verifies ID through a trusted party. Only that party knows your identity, everyone else simply knows your age group. Child and teen devices would be tied to an adult account and only they could override or update the classification (or a valid adult ID works too).

Then it would put liability on the parent for allowing their kids access to adult content. Websites not checking for this info that abuse it can be shut down.

Both sides are twisting words. Pirating truly isn’t stealing, but rather closer to unauthorized use. The word ‘steal’ is used because they want to imply that it’s the same thing as taking a physical thing that can be lost. It engenders a certain feeling that they’re wanting to invoke. Stealing sounds worse than unauthorized use. Doesn’t mean it’s not wrong to do, but it isn’t the sort of wrong that they’re implying.

My introduction was the old Call to Power game. Still waiting for a Civ-like game that has a near-future age of gameplay. That was always the coolest part to me.

Feels like most of the similar games today are either historical/current or purely scifi. I like the transition point. To play out possible ways of advancing forward. How do we get from today to entering the stars? Those were fun scenarios to play out.

There’s a couple of mods for civ that covers this I know, but they’re all abandoned and somewhat buggy these days. Plus this sort of thing works best if the game is balanced around it to begin with.

Things I need a storefront/launcher to provide me:

• Reviews
• Wish list
• Beta/Alternate build installations
• Friend list, chat, game invite functions
• Mod browser
• Refund policy
• Excellent search and discovery tools

Nice to have:

• Forum for guides/support
• Game sharing
• Ability to move game files

If all you want is to launch a game, why keep the ‘launcher’ at all? Games used to just… start. No separate program needed.

Having messed around with these recently. Most of the current models have you use a ‘face fix’ pass. This ensures the details in the face aren’t blurry or messed up, but also tends to make all the faces look samey because they’re being generated and then generated again. Sort of a copy of a copy situation.

Works well for generic characters, but bad for faking real people.

Not familiar with the implementation, so maybe this is incorrect, but does Wendy’s tell you when you’re paying more or less? If not, my primary issue would be transparency. I know to show up for happy hour or lunch and I know what the prices will be.

I don’t want to have to memorize the prices because they quietly bump up everything on the menu by $0.50 at peak meal times everyday for an hour and don’t indicate that anywhere.