reddit [any,they/them]

I don’t think that’s what’s going to actually happen. In the same way that Bluesky is replacing Twitter while Mastodon comparatively languishes, whatever decentralized way of distributing games we might hope for is just going to get beat out by Epic or whatever next launcher shows up, assuming these rules don’t become reified as actual laws. Creators will still just be in a situation of making a game that plays by all these rules, or languishing in obscurity. And that’s assuming Steam even loses its grip, I’m not holding my breath on that. I think it’s much more likely they just keep dutifully enforcing these bans, and the vast majority of people simply don’t know about it or don’t really care unfortunately.

They were trained the same way every model is trained.

Literally the thing I’m saying is bad.

Also, are you seriously advocating for copyrights here?

I’m advocating for my artist friends to not die on the streets.

People who think they can just boycott is out of existence are doing the same thing that libs do when they try to fix problems by voting.

I’m not boycotting it out of existence, I’m arguing against its use because of the harms it causes. If your calculus is that different than mine, there’s simply no point in continuing this discussion

Damn, I can run the models on my laptop? How were they trained? What benefits will they give me?

I’m sorry for being snarky here but frankly speaking LLM output in general is neutral at best, as for what I’m an expert in I have little need of it, and for what I’m not I have little trust of it. And yes, while I can do the matrix math locally now, and get output even less vanishingly useful, it still embodies the fuel and treasure burned to generate it, and it embodies the theft of labor it is backed by. That matrix being handed to me to chew on the spare compute of my laptop - and let’s sidestep the issue of that occurring at scale, as if a thousand people generating a gram of poison is somehow different than one generating a kilogram - was still generated via those expensive processes. It embodies it in the same way my coat embodies the labor and fuel used to make it and ship it to me but at least it keeps me warm.

We can say all we want that the issue is the economic system - we would have no need of copyright, of being concerned about the theft of art and creativity, concerned about the breaking of labor, if only we simply didn’t live under capitalism. And I agree! The issue is we do. And so I’m uninterested in hand waving those concerns in the name of some notion of “technological progress”

Someone with more theory under their belt can probably articulate it better than me, but I think this stems from a conflation of capital and value. Dividends come from capital you provide to hold shares, and then the company pays out some of its profit. If you were buying those shares directly from the company, they would get that capital to use, but of course unless you’re buying an IPO that capital is going to whoever bought the share before you, in that chain back to the company.

But my understanding is value is different - because where did the capital above come from? You were presumably paid it as a wage, which you used to buy the stock. You were paid that wage because you used your labor to generate value, and the value was in surplus to the expenses of the company, generating capital for the company. They paid you some, but not all, of that capital, so that you would keep working.

Bots are a different problem, but you can think of them as embodying the energy used to run them, which eventually leads back to the human labor building the servers and operating the power plants and extracting the fuel. That being said, bots trading capital back and forth like that does not actually produce any value, it’s just changing the ownership of the capital that was already produced previously. They generate relative wealth, but not wholly new capital

Frankly no.

I have said for years and will continue saying, it’s actually just not that useful, especially for the amount of wasted compute (which embodies electricity and water, in turn embodying fossil fuels and exploitative extraction, in turn embodying pollution and greenhouse gases, etc.). In order for a cryptocurrency to have meaningful privacy and resilience guarantees, it must be proof-of-work (proof-of-stake is horseshit, just a way for the wealthy to control the ledger again). In order for it to be widely used, that work must be performed at scale, leading back to the previous concern of wasted compute. If you relax the privacy and “decentralization” features to relax that compute - what exactly are we left with? A currency that behaves like any other except it is not state-backed and you don’t have to install venmo or zelle or whatever new start-up forms to facilitate moving money from one place to another without being taxed.

And I have not even bothered itemizing how those privacy and decentralization “features” are, frankly, worthless. Every transaction taking place inside a computer is traceable with enough time and energy. Some might require nation-state level resources to do that tracing, but the fact remains. If this is to be used for some grand “free” future, a dual financial system where the hand of the state is stayed, it fails at that purpose. In terms of preventing fraud, preventing abuse - these systems are also made by humans. All of the math in the world cannot stop someone being handed a $100 bill and being told to leave a backdoor in some validation algorithm. All the cryptographic guarantees do not stop someone slapping the wrong label on a box. Do not let the techbros convince you that math somehow fixes these human interactions - do not let them convince you that economic relations are not, in fact, social relations.

Cryptocurrency invents a world that does not exist, and prescribes a solution to the problems of that world.