Once again, I am tapping the sign for people to go watch the two hour video by Shaun on the subject.

The moral of Harry Potter is that the status quo is correct and should never be questioned, and nobody should ever try to change anything.

Harry doesn’t defeat Voldemort or change any of the issues inherent in the bumbling bureaucracy of the wizard world. Voldemort kills himself on a magic technicality, Harry becomes a magic cop and helps to ensure that magic is never used to help the undesirables of society (Muggles), and Hermione is ridiculed for being a girl with blue hair and pronouns who tried to end the chattel slavery system before she “grew up” and became a much more sensible person who realized that the slaves actually want to be oppressed, and it’s for their own good.

You can see Rowling’s morality change practically in real-time as the books go on, from criticizing the system to defending it as she began to benefit from it as her wealth grew. And underneath it all, you can see her discriminatory opinions of people. That was always there. When she wants you to hate a woman, she makes them fat or gives them masculine features. If I have to read the phrase “mannish hands” one more time, I might vomit.

Didn’t it also have something to do with a brand deal? Like the suit got extra funding for the movie by making a deal with Duracell to have their batteries in the movie or something.

Welcome to the hypocritical world of Puritan culture.

Some of the earliest British settlers in the US were so extremist that the Church of England kicked them out after they tried to assassinate the king and replace him with a puppet of their own to force their beliefs on the rest of the country.

It was partly these crazies that started the whole sex and bodies=bad and shameful thing in the US that advertisers still believe in today. And swearing is yet another of those weird things. But sex sells, so it’s okay to imply it as long as it’s selling a product and no other time.

Except it’s even worse than that. Because these companies hired psychologists to tell them exactly how to tweak the levers in people’s brains to get them to pay.

So you have the stupid people, but also the people whose brains are naturally wired to be played like a fiddle by these companies, and then on top of that, you have the new generation of gamers who have simply never known a world where you didn’t pay for skins.

But it’s okay, “because it’s just cosmetics.”

Probably exactly where they got the idea from.

That’s the one. He’s got it as a clip on the YouTube channel, and that got served to me by the almighty algorithm.

Except that shit is designed by literal psychologists to prey upon people with poor fiscal responsibility, like people with ADHD, depression, addiction issues, and kids.

It’s like blaming people for smoking cigarettes after they got addicted from secondhand smoking.

That shit is never going away, and for one simple reason: it’s incredibly profitable. By converting real money into some nebulous fun bucks that doesn’t directly correlate in value, they obfuscate how much money you’re actually spending and make it more likely that you’ll spend more than you intend to. The same reason that casinos have no windows and pump extra oxygen into the air so you feel less tired, all so you don’t realize how long you’ve been in there.

The one and only point that I disagree with you on is your take on mtx. They may not affect you, but everything about them is designed to be psychologically exploitative, and the wealthy whale is largely a myth. The vast majority of money from mtx is made from people with addiction issues and other mental health issues or atypical neurology, like people with depression or ADHD.

Microsoft bought up all those studios and didn’t support them, but that’s business as usual for Microsoft, and the money that they’ll make from mtx like this will more than make up for it. I recently watched a former Blizzard dev who was talking about how a single $15 mount for WoW made more money than StarCraft 2 did.

The big issue I see is that most people largely don’t know about anything beyond the big AAA releases, and as we’ve already established, that’s an exploitative wasteland nowadays. There’s plenty of demand for good games and there always will be, but while the indie scene is the best that’s it’s ever been, the majority of indie companies go under after their first game. It’s still hard out there for them, too. There’s just enough of them popping up and putting out truly great games that they can actually compete with the AAA space.

Well, this is the third time the community has failed to secure the AT mines, so it wouldn’t be in the spirit of the game for them to just give them to us anyway.

It was definitely the other way around. When I first checked the planets, there were around 1.5k divers on the mine planet and it was in the 0.x% range, while the children’s planet was around 54% with close to 60k divers on it.

I think you’re right that they were Apple only for a few years at least.

This is what Tumblr did too after they banned porn. It couldn’t tell the difference between the Sahara Desert and boobs.

Affinity is also on Windows - at least Designer is. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now.

That’s what I was thinking. Deep fakes have existed since photo manipulation was invented, and Adobe hasn’t cared one iota about it before. The only reason I can see for them to care now is if they think they can get in legal trouble for what people create with their products.

That’s what I was thinking. Apart from the porn locked up in the Disney vault, big companies aren’t in the business of making porn. And the companies that do aren’t going to be interested in deep fakes. The people who are using Photoshop to create porn are small fries to Adobe. Deep fake porn has been around as long as photo manipulation has, and Adobe hasn’t cared before.

Bearing that in mind, I don’t think this policy has anything to do with AI deep fakes or porn. I think it’s more likely to be some new revenue source, like farming data for LLM training or something. They could go the Tumblr route and use AI to censor content, but considering Tumblr couldn’t tell the difference between the Sahara Desert and boobs, I think that’s one fuck up with a major company away from being litigation hell. The only reason that I think would make sense for Adobe to do this because of deep fakes is if they believe that governments are going to start holding them liable for the content people make with their products.

What do you mean by “at the corporate/software level”? What corporations are drawing furry porn?

They’re not threatened by its potential. They, like artists, are threatened by management who think that LLMs are good enough today to replace part or all of their staff.

There was a story from earlier this year of a company that owns 12-15 different gaming news outlets who fired about 80% of their writing staff and journalists - replacing 100% of their staff at the majority of the outlets with LLMs and leaving a skeleton crew at the rest.

What you’re seeing isn’t some slant trying to discredit LLMs. It’s the results of management who are using them wrong.

Yet another case of the medical industry not caring one iota about women and women’s ability to identify what is going on with their own bodies. The number of times I’ve heard of doctors dismissing women’s pain and issues makes me want to scream.

My favorite part about that is, if we have to fact-check its answers with a secondary source, why wouldn’t we just skip the AI and go to the other source first?

Not that the people making this stuff nor the people who believe them in blindly trusting its answers think of that, of course.