Fantastic article.

I’ve got nothing against cosplay, but these right-wing nut jobs pretending to be Roman conqueror’s just take it too far.

It kinda gets different when you’re talking about a series of actors intermingling in an environment designed by the seller. There are certain expectations for the experience that was sold to you, and another customer disregarding the social contract of what the expected environment is supposed to be like is problematic.

It’s like buying a ticket to go to a theatre. You expect the people around you to also use the product and environment in a way similiar to you. Someone on their phone, screaming at the movie, throwing their feet up on your chair, etc, isn’t okay, and the people who defend their selfishness with “I paid to be here, I can do what I want” deserve to be kicked out. Cheating on an online, competitive game is no different, and I expect such players to be kicked out so the rest of us can have the experience we were promised when we made our purchase.

Does this mean the game in question should have full control over the code you’re running on your machine? I mean absolutely not, no one is strip searching you at the entrance of the theatre, but there need to be some degree of limitations on how individuals interact with the shared environment that consumers are being offered. The theatre doesn’t allow you to take videos, and doesn’t give you access to a copy of the film to clip, or edit to your hearts content, and the notion that the consumer should have such rights seems insane. But taking an online game, editing the files, and then connecting to everyone else’s shared experience and forcing your version on others should be protected, because the code is running on your machine? To be clear, I don’t think you’re seriously suggesting that is the case, but therein lies the problem: there’s a lot of weird nuance when it comes to multiple consumers being provided a digital product like this. How they interact together is inherently a part of the sold product, so giving consumers free reign to do what they want once the product is in their hands doesn’t work the way it does with single player games, end user software, or physical products.

The real problem is the laziness of devs not hosting their own server environments, so I hear you there. But that is, unfortunately, a problem seperate from whether hackers should be held accountable for ruining a product for others.

So, AI that is strictly incapabale of generating new ideas is going to be fed decades of police reports as it’s database, and use that data to discern that makes a good police report?

Surely this won’t replicate decade old systematic problems with racial profiling. I mean, all these police reports are certainly objective, with no hint of bias to be found in the officers writing.

Sick. I’ve had Rollerdrome on my wishlist for a while now, but have never seen a good sale, nor found myself with the free time and desire to play it on the spot to demand a full price purchase. I will gladly pirate and experience this now.

I mean, fuck Take2, I’d rather be able to hand these people money for a good game, but in lieu of being able to do so, I am happy to oblige their request.

Came here to post this as well.

Just watch the first episode or two, and if it doesn’t have you hooked, it’s not your jam anyway.

But it will have you hooked, because it’s the best piece of American television in recent history.

The point of treating companies like people is so no one in those companies can be held accountable. The worst case for them that the intangible “coorporation” did something wrong and now it has to go away, so the entire board moves to a new company under a new name that owns the same properties and has the same practices. Only now they have practice obfuscating their crimes.

What ends lives and careers for people are just a minor inconvinience to coorporations.

I like this. You’re good people.

Infinite growth is referred to as cancer. Your friend is obviously right about one part, we cannot sustain infinite growth, but it’s misguided to think that the only way we can possibly survive to any length as a species is by having more children and increasing our population year over year.

With improving technologies and automations, far less labour is required to achieve the same results. There is no reason we need an infinitely increasing population on our decidedly finite earth just to keep our species afloat. This would take a major restructuring of our social and economic systems to do correctly, otherwise we run the risk of centralized wealth mucking it all up, but the point remains that there’s no necessity to continue reproducing at the rate we have been. This supposed “need” for labour is just capitalist propaganda perpetuating the idea that work is inherently good, all designed to fuel an inherently exploitative economy. Line must go up, otherwise how can the privledged few assure that their net worth continues to grow exponentially?

“Fuck them, I’ve got mine” pro-capitalist mindset in the wild.

Yes and no. For one, many vegetarians and vegans would agree, so on some level, sure, that’s a very defensible opinion. Secondly, North American sensibilities would call it a moral tragedy to sell cat or dog parts, so at some point we have to accept that what is and isn’t okay to kill and consume is a question of cultural bias as opposed to moral truth.

Lastly, you can accept the state of the food chain without holding the belief that those at the top of it are “better” or “worth more”. I don’t eat beef because I am, in some universal truth way, worth more than a cow. I eat beef because I accept that in the chaos of existence, this is where the chips fell. I do not feel a sense of superiority for being able to do so. If you’re going to get really strict about it, I’d define “murder” as the act of killing for the sake of killing, and say that killing for consumption and in some cases survival is different. But even then, I recognize that this is bias. If you want to call murder the act of taking a life, I’ve murdered a lot in my life, and I don’t intend on stopping any time soon. Mosquitos won’t squish themselves.

The question of intellect and understanding and the weight of these qualities in the value of a life is a dangerous road to wander down, so I like to keep in perspective that we’re all meaningless specks in the grand scheme of the universe. Otherwise, the questions get even more challenging: to say a truly reprehensible thing, what happens when we replace the human or the animal in question with an exceptionally low functioning human being? Do we now say their life has little value because they can’t contribute to society, they can’t understand the state of their own existence, and in many cases they’re not even capable of verbal communication? Does it become okay to choose to let them die, as in the original question? Are they suddenly fit for consumption as cattle? Or does the responsibility fall on the more capable to protect them?

Appraising and tiering life is an incredibly dangerous road to go down. You can choose any example of historical racism to see just how dangerous it gets. Life is life, and the strange differences between what’s “okay” and what’s not is luck more than anything else. Even as I consume a steak while my dog begs for the scraps, I believe it’s important to keep an understanding of how we got here, else hubris allows us to justify basically any atrocity.

I dislike the belief that human life is worth more than any other animal.

Even if we’re going to argue that, because of intellect or the ability to grasp out own existence or whatever arbitrary philosophical reason we’fe going to come up it, a human life is in general more valuable than that of a cats life, my “worst enemy” would have to be someone so morally corrupt that removing them from the world would make it a better place. This makes is a very pointless question.

A stranger is more of a real discussion. The stranger is enough of an unknown factor that I think I could assume that allowing them to die is likely to have a worse impact on the world, so it makes sense to save them. I certainly wouldn’t be able to say so with enough certainty to fault anyone for disagreeing with me, though.

The Monty Hall problem is not a paradox, and I’m hesitant to call it a conundrum. It has a very simple solution. The “point” of it is that people inherently don’t like that solution because it challenges their instinct to stick with their first choice.

Downloaded a game which Windows Defender flagged as high-threat for containing “Cracked game content” the other day. Why yes, my cracked copy of this game IS cracked, thank you for noticing.

You can be sexual and engage in pornography without objectifying yourself or others.

The better question is why we continue to allow our society to demonize sexuality. Own your sexuality. Fuck the church.

I’ve been saying for a while now that we’re just beyond the world of grindy, random encounters. The early games weren’t fun because of the dozens of zubats we had to deal with. They weren’t even “harder” for these reasons, despite the absurd opinions you’ll stumble across online. Remembering to stock up on repels isn’t really a skill check. Completing the set challenges that you are aware of and planning around then is fun. Having to smash “A” through random encounters and opening the menu to hit a Fresh Water every once in a while is not.

For me, it was pure philosophy. When I came to terms with how totally insignificant I and my world is in the grand scheme of the universe, something as simple as the dog tracking mud across the floor became less then inconsequential.

As an aside:

Meanwhile I’ll get pissed that I didn’t wipe their feet and be mad the entire time I’m cleaning it up.

This reads like someone who takes everything upon themselves and doesn’t cut themselves enough slack. I don’t know you and this is the tiniest snippet of your life experiences, so take my statement with a massive heaping of salt, but give yourself a break. You aren’t super human, you aren’t responsible for everyone and everything, and you will make mistakes. Holding yourself to an impossible standard is a common source of anger and unhappiness.

Subjectively speaking, every person I’ve met who I would describe as “angry” when discussing their personality (I’m a believer that some things are worth being mad about and choosing to be appropriately angry does not make you an angry person) is deeply unhappy with themselves. This is usually because, thanks to a combination of external influences like narcissistic friends/family, they never measure up to their distorted beliefs of how they “should” be. “Should” is a bad word. Thinking in terms of “should” is self-abusive and rarely helpful. “Will” and “next time” are fine. They’re about learning. “Should” is nothing more than a way to internalize the things you’ve done wrong without focusing on how you’ll learn from them.

Anyway, I could be way off, cause man I don’t know you. But, some food for thought, anyway.

Maybe we let professionals decide what tool is best for their field

Hey, really appreciated. Having random potentially uneducated, inexperienced people chime in on what they think I’m doing wrong in my classroom based on the tiniest snippet of information really shouldn’t matter, but it’s disheartening nontheless.

While I take their point, I also wouldn’t walk into a garage and tell someone what they’re doing wrong with a vehicle, or tell a doctor I ran into on the streets that they’re misdiagnosing people based on a comment I overheard. Yet, because I work with children, I get this all the time. So, again, appreciated.

I use it as a brainstorming tool. I haven’t had a single question make it as-is to a student’s worksheet. If the tool can’t even count to 20 successfully, I’m not sure how anyone could trust it to generate meaningful questions for an ELA program.

I regularly use ChatGPT to generate questions for junior high worksheets. You would be surprised how easily it fucks up “generate 20 multiple choice and 10 short answer questions”. Most frequently at about 12-13 multiple choice it gives up and moves on. When I point out its flaw and ask it to finish generating the multiple choice, it continues to find new and unique ways to fuck up coming up with the remaining questions.

I would say it gives me simple count and recall errors in about 60% of my attempts to use it.

On a related note, I’m very glad I pirated Starfield.