Those are two different situations.

There isn’t enough paying for shit that’s gonna make a mod run in an unmodified console. You can find people who have bought every single Pokémon game ever, and they still want to play romhacks and randomizers and such.

There’s something to be said about how willing people are to pay and whether they admit it or why. But sounds more like you don’t want to believe there’s any other reason to do it.

A lot of people resort to emulation simply so they can play mods too.

And yet people still say “if you don’t like ads, pay up” as if getting ads in a subscription is not a matter of time, like it’s happening to streaming.

I’m not extremely against all of copyright because I believe artists should have some protections (though the law sucks at this), but I also believe that once something becomes a decades-old billion-dollar franchise, non-identical imitation should be fair game. Can you imagine what would happen if companies could simply say that they own whole genres?

A dumb oversight but an useful method to identify manufactured artificial manipulation. It’s going to make social media even worse than it already is.

However logical it may or may not be, it’s a reality. Just yesterday we got a stark reminder of how pervasive poor decisions are.

Also, simply “calling out” your boss and HR for making poor decisions is more likely to put them against you than to fix anything.

Frankly feels like this anti-DEI wave is more politically motivated than a matter of results.

We don’t live in a perfect meritocracy where people are judged solely in grounds of their skills, we live in a society that is already prejudiced where a lot of minorities don’t get the chance to prove themselves. There’s studies proving how young white men are favored over any other demographics even when other people have equal or better resumes.

I’m sorry but that makes no sense. However much you may think Linux users are annoying, marketing and word of mouth are what drive popular choices. If nobody ever brings up something, then average folks will never even know it exists.

Just because we don’t usually see backlash it doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. The average player puts up with absolutely rigged games which treat paying for advantages as fairness.

Personally I only see cheating as a problem if it affects people who haven’t agreed to it, but the solution is not preventing all modification. Games are better off for modding and customization. They could cut off modified games from having matchmaking or any input on a global game mode while still allowing players to run their own servers however they want.

I’m also a progression-driven player yet I’m suspicious of a game that introduces anti-cheats alongside microtransactions. When microtransactions are involved, the pace of progression tends to be affected to incentive people to pay, and at that point I’d rather play in a hacked server that has a more reasonable progression.

If it was just about letting the player maintain the pace of progression however is most satisfying, I’m sure there are better ways to do that client-side. But these days game companies are all too happy to equivocate “company controlled” with “fair” or “fun”, and it’s curious that in this framing nothing is unfair as long as they get money.

In-App Purchases are already real-money gaming (and gambling). You can already waste your whole finances on lootbox games chasing a rare reward. The only difference is that you can’t officially redeem them for money, it only features all the downsides of gambling. So… it’s pretty much the same. The division between gambling for fictional items to gambling for money is so small it might as well not be there.

For people who got phones with 5 cameras and decide “this doesn’t trigger my trypophobia badly enough”

If AI companies lose, small artists may have the recourse of seeking compensation for the use and imitation of their art too. Just feeling for them is not enough if they are going to be left to the wolves.

There isn’t a scenario here in which big media companies lose so talking of it like it’s taking a stand against them doesn’t make much sense. What are we fighting for here? That we get to generate pictures of Goofy? The small AI user’s win here seems like such a silly novelty that I can’t see how it justifies just taking for granted that artists will have it much rougher than they already have.

The reality here is that even if AI gets the free pass, large media and tech companies are still primed to profit from them far more than any small user. They will be the one making AI-assisted movies and integrating chat AI into their systems. They don’t lose in either situation.

There are ways to train AI without relying on unauthorized copyrighted data. Even if OpenAI loses, it wouldn’t be the death of the technology. It may be more efficient and effective to train them with that data, but why is “efficiency” enough to justify this overreach?

And is it even wise to be so callous about it? Because it’s not going to stop with artists. This technology has the potential to replace large swaths of service industries. If we don’t think of the human costs now, it will be even harder to make a case for everyone else.

It’s not like all this data was randomly dumped at the AIs. For data sets to serve as good training materials they need contextual information so that the AI can discern patterns and replicate them when prompted.

We see this when you can literally prompt AIs with whose style you want it to emulate. Meaning that the data it was fed had such information.

Midjourney is facing extra backlash from artists after a spreadsheet was leaked containing a list of artist styles their AI was trained on. Meaning they can keep track of it and they trained the AI with those artists’ works deliberately. They simply pretend this is impossible to figure out so that they might not be liable to seek permission and compensate the artists whose works were used.

OpenAI is definitely not the one arguing that they have stole data to train their AIs, and Disney will be fine whether AI requires owning the rights to training materials or not. Small artists, the ones protesting the most against it, will not. They are already seeing jobs and commission opportunities declining due to it.

Being publicly available in some form is not a permission to use and reproduce those works however you feel like. Only the real owner have the right to decide. We on the internet have always been a bit blasé about it, sometimes deservedly, but as we get to a point we are driving away the very same artists that we enjoy and get inspired by, maybe we should be a bit more understanding about their position.

There are some pretty cool games that were ported to mobile by Netflix, like Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon, but if they are going to inject ads and in-app purchases into them (you know, on top of the subscription), they are going to ruin them

I hate how newer phones are designed to act like they are still owned by the manufacturer.

Should we distinguish it though? Why shouldn’t (and didn’t) artists have a say if their art is used to train LLMs? Just like publicly displayed art doesn’t provide a permission to copy it and use it in other unspecified purposes, it would be reasonable that the same would apply to AI training.

I haven’t seen a single phone that has more than one USB-C port, and I would like to listen to stuff while these these phones charge their miniscule batteries.