Not sure if I'd go so far as "outlawed" (not really sure how that would be accomplished, at least in our current society), but I otherwise agree, and the discourse about the topic on this site has been genuinely upsetting the hell out of me lately, particularly because of much it truly is downplaying/denying the very real harm it's causing, with some of it honestly coming across as cheering on said harm
So many of my friends and loved ones are artists too, so it's particularly personal for me
I very much agree with what you're saying here and I appreciate you saying it, I especially agree that the technology is fundamentally inseparable from the capitalists that created it, and it would not be able to exist in its current form (or any form that's even remotely as "useful") without the levels of theft that were involved in its creation
And it's not just problematic in the concepts of ethics or "intellectual property" either, but in how the process of scraping the web for content to train their models with is effectively a huge botnet DDoSing the internet, I have friends who have had to spend rather large amounts of time and effort to prevent these scrapers from inadvertently bringing down their websites entirely, and have heard of plenty of other people and organizations with the same problem
I have to assume that at least some of the people here defending its development and usage just plain aren't aware of the externalities that are inherent to the technology, because I don't understand how one can be so positive about it otherwise, because again, the tech largely can't exist without these externalities unless you're either making a fundamentally different technology or working under an economic system that currently doesn't exist
To be honest, a lot of the arguments in general in this thread strike me as being out of touch with the people facing the negative consequences of this technology's adoption, with some people being downright hostile towards anyone with even the slightest criticism of the tech, even if they have a point, I think a lot of this is driven by how there doesn't seem to be very many artists on this site, and how insular this community tends to be (not inherently a bad thing, but means we're not always going to have the full perspective on every topic)
There's other criticisms I can make of the genAI boom (such as how, despite the "gatekeeping" accusations over "tools to make things easier", artists generally approve of helpful tools, but genAI creators are largely working against such tools because they want to make everything generalized enough to replace the humans themselves), but I only have so much energy to spend on detailed comments
Okay? Even if you don't, you should still be against American billionaire Sam Altman directly targeting his critics out of spite, right? Like I get that this site is a lot more pro-AI than most other circles I'm in (even if I highly disagree with most of it), but we should at least make sure that doesn't go so far as defending literal techbro billionaires who are directly going out of their way to harm artists
Though honestly, the base image for this is so minimal that this just ends up looking like a kinda shitty Photoshop filter or something, not something you'd want to use genAI for to begin with
I just wish they actually spent more time on their games
They've pretty clearly been doing that this time, which explains why this game seems a lot less rough than the SV, even if people (cough redditors) pretend it doesn't look/run any better (it very obviously does)
Game Freak doesn't set the deadlines either way, so I don't fault them for the last few games being rushed, though I'm still waiting to play SV until I have hardware that can run it half decently 😩 Game seems pretty good from what I've heard from people who can look past the technical issues
Not sure how this is a surprise, they're just about to replace the Switch so of course there won't be that many major games left for it, they've almost certainly shifted most of their major studios over to the Switch 2 a good while ago by now
Though I mean, they still announced very long-awaited smaller games like a new Rhythm Heaven and Tomodachi Life so I'd say it was still a pretty good Direct (plus some pretty cool third party games)
And honestly? Even if they somehow only have Mario Kart in the Switch 2 Direct, it'll probably still have good release sales because Mario Kart is just that insanely popular lmao
There's absolutely zero chance the Switch 2 is going the way of the Wii U, there are a lot of reasons why that went down the way it did and the Switch/Switch 2 don't really have anything in common with it
City council just voted to buy the police an APC (that they don't have a use for, and if they did it probably wouldn't be good) while at the same time raiding the library reserve funds to keep taxes low
So much frustrating stuff like that going on here lately, and the city subreddit is absolutely unbearable about all of it
City subreddit, Western country: ‘look at this cool park, public transport, building, cute cafe’
Don't know if it's different in western Europe or something, but here in Canada it's "IMMIGRANTS BAD CYCLISTS BAD NATIONALISM GOOD SUPPORT OUR TROOPS AND COPS AND CONSERVATIVE LEADERS"
And also just finding out that apparently people in my city's subreddit are defending the idea of unbanning fracking and uranium mining in our small densely-populated province?? Depressing shit man
Tbh it's really funny how strongly people like this have been hating Trump for being American when these same people would be all over him if he was Canadian, their ideology is identical
...I'm going to hope for their sake that they just worded it wrong, that they didn't choose to watch through the whole thing and that they stopped watching immediately when they realized what was happening, but it's a
user so I'm not sure if I can believe that, especially when they're clearly bragging about choosing to watch everything else lmao
Yes, each airbag vest costs money to produce, that's why you pay for them, and why it's shit that this company is charging an ongoing subscription that actively disables them when you miss a payment, because the vests they've already sent out don't cost them any money to maintain
And yes, each copy of a backported security update doesn't cost meaningful amounts of money, but you're not paying for just a copy of one update, you're paying for an ongoing service that provides constant backports of security updates for loads of packages (and if you're a personal user, as other people mentioned, you don't even have to pay for that!), those backports are not free to maintain, companies charging for extended support that is nothing new, especially when they're long term support distros targeting enterprise
This comparison makes no sense, a motorcycle airbag vest doesn't require any effort on the company's part to keep working, but backporting security fixes absolutely does
This isn't a counterpoint though?? That doesn't really have anything to do with SBMM, and if anything seems like it supports its existence because this way you get matched with other players in that kind of situation, instead of being thrown into unbalanced matches against the people who have loads of time to spend practicing
Like, I'm not really sure what this has to do with my comment at all and I'm just really confused
You asked how SBMM is good, so I'm gonna write way too much to answer why I think that
SBMM is important for games with matchmaking because competitive games are generally both more fun and more fair when players are matched with other players around their current skill level, people generally don't like when a game is just rigged from the start and they can't contribute anything because of it
It's pretty bad for people learning and improving too to not have it, because it's a lot harder to learn from a loss if you just get blown out immediately by someone so far above your level, as opposed to someone closer to your skill level where it's easier to tell what they're doing differently compared to you
It's also a weird complaint to say that the game "punishes" you for sub-optimal behavior and playing casually, because what really happens is that you maybe lose a few matches before the game realizes you're playing worse and puts you around that level, meanwhile if you don't have SBMM you will always have a pretty good chance of being matched against someone trying as hard as they can to win and optimizing their gameplay and equipment (this has been a common complaint about Destiny when they have removed SBMM in PvP in multiple instances, because it lead to it being basically impossible to play casually because basically every game is full of pubstompers)
If CoD's implementation doesn't work like I described, then that's a CoD problem, not an SBMM problem, there are loads of games with SBMM where people are generally happy with it (like Splatoon, or most fighting games)
And as far as being casual and "chilling out and having fun" goes, you also have to keep in mind that you don't actually know how seriously your opponents are playing at any given moment, it could very well be the case that they're also not taking it too seriously and just seem like they're "tryhards" because they happen to be a lot better, a problem that's improved by SBMM rather than made worse because you're ideally (as in, in games that do it well, not as sure about CoD) less likely to go against people like that if you're not actually on their level
I'm currently on break from them, I can enjoy them (if they never made me really happy, I wouldn't play them), but they can also be bad for my mental health so for now I've been avoiding playing online, I still play some of the games but just against bots
I'd like to return to them eventually though, I really enjoy the process of learning and improving and adapting that doesn't exist the same way in singleplayer games
Feeling bad because of losing is certainly a big part of it, but I think another big problem often comes down to the mechanics these games have been putting in to cause addiction, like battle passes which are everywhere these days (even Splatoon, which is one of the biggest reasons I've grown to really dislike 3 even though I love this series)
Edit: Though, can't forget that another reason I fell off of Splatoon 3 in particular is because they ruined the rank system in this game, designing it to be grindy and require far more games to make actual progress regardless of skill, and distancing it so far from the skill ratings which are the actual good ranking system, there's a reason so many people switch to X Battles (the mode that directly uses those skill ratings) the moment they hit S+ instead of continuing to waste time grinding
Especially since they now have everyone rank down each season, forcing everyone to grind all over again for no good reason even if their skill hasn't actually changed
Splatoon 2's system was a lot more directly related to the SBMM than one might assume, and it was significantly better for it, you wouldn't be forced to stick around in a rank you couldn't handle and if you were truly too good for your current rank then you could move out of it pretty quickly, the whole "skipping ranks" thing happened if your matchmaking rating was higher than normal for that rank
That's not mentioned in this specific blog post, but that's always been one of Vanilla OS's defining features, it's "apx" package manager to install those various types of packages
It's even using Distrobox actually, but the point is to make it simpler to install packages for those contrainers, with the user not worrying as much about managing the individual containers, and not having to memorize the specific commands for each individual distro's package manager
Basically, like the rest of Vanilla OS, the point isn't that you can't do this stuff elsewhere, it's that it's trying to make it easier to do it
This literally means nothing, it doesn't mean you can just ignore any potential problems with a concept and just try to build it anyway
And even if Hyperloop is possible, it still doesn't make sense to do, because high speed rail already exists and makes a lot more sense, the US should start building that instead
Nice, I've had to quit multiple games because of that, Pokémon Go being the main one I used to play often that I quit a few years ago because of the daily streaks fucking with my brain
Animal Crossing New Horizons was another one where that was a big contributing factor to me quitting, but there's also plenty of other things that were shit about that game lol
Not sure if I'd go so far as "outlawed" (not really sure how that would be accomplished, at least in our current society), but I otherwise agree, and the discourse about the topic on this site has been genuinely upsetting the hell out of me lately, particularly because of much it truly is downplaying/denying the very real harm it's causing, with some of it honestly coming across as cheering on said harm
So many of my friends and loved ones are artists too, so it's particularly personal for me