I spent like $2000 playing Star Trek Online. Lockbox keys, lifetime sub, all sorts of ships, items, and boosts. They introduced Mark XIV equipment with a gambling-based crafting system. You could spend dilithium (which you could buy with $) to have a chance to upgrade your equipment.

The straw that broke me? Their shitty customer service. I wanted to gear up an alt and give them the Jem’Hadar battleship with the Jem’hadar attack ship so they could launch the attack ships from it as fighters, which you could do if you had both. Problem was some ships were account bound, and some ships were character bound, and I lost track of which was which. I ended up claiming the box for one of them on the wrong character. Easy fix, right? Well not every MMO is run to the same standard as Blizzard. Craptic absolutely refused to help me. So I cut ties.

It was after that, when I experienceced withdrawal, that I read about gambler’s fallacy and sunken cost fallacy and I really analyzed why it hurt so much to leave behind my addiction. I never went back, because I know that whole game is run like a casino. They do everything they can to hook you in.

EAT THE RICH

big badonka-donkadonks

Why do people keep altering his picture to make his head smaller? Come on. Everyone who has met him knows his head is much bigger than that. Stop doctoring these photos!

35,000 pounds of $100 bills would be $1,587,573,295 a year. Rich bastard.

It is a disgusting abomination. I support DOGE because I wanted cuts. So what do they do? They save a little money cracking down on social security fraud, and then pass this disgusting behemoth 3.8 trillion dollar budget.

It’s like biden never left office. There’s no fucking way they meet the 2% inflation target after flooding the economy with another 3.8 trillion dollars. We’re right back on track for hyperinflation. The same way that every other failed republic died. You can’t spend your way out of currency debasement. It just accelerates the process.

What they need to do is spend less. Get that budget deal under 1 trillion dollars. They need to cut 3 trillion in spending. They won’t do that because it would mean stuffing less pork into their barrels and pockets. All our representatives are corrupt and they all have friends and pet projects and hands in the cookie jar. So we’re on a train with no brakes, going headfirst into hyperinflation. History repeats.

I’m not concerned if they are using chats for AI training data. In fact, I expect them to continue improving their chatbots. If they were to sell our chat logs to a third party, and those logs went public, then I expect it would quickly torpedo their platform. Even in that case, my account doesn’t have my real name anywhere. I gave them an incorrect birth date. I haven’t linked any social media to my account. I keep everything set to private. If the logs were to go public, and people could say “Look! This user said all these things!” they still wouldn’t know who I was.

Maybe the FBI or NSA could track me down, but talking sexy things to a chatbot isn’t illegal. In fact, it may very well become more commonplace. Someday we will likely have androids with AI personalities serving us in our homes.

Ethical and emotional minefield? Oh no. It’s evil flirting because it’s with AI, right?

Some services like Crushon do store your chat logs on a server, but you are free to save those logs accessible only to you, or make them public anonymously, or make them public with your user name stamped on them. Even if all my logs were to be stolen, my real name isn’t associated with the account.

Other services like Venice AI don’t store chat logs on a server, and everything is stored in your browser. So it’s even more unlikely that your logs would get stolen. Especially if you delete them after every chat.

Nope. I have never cried over a celebrity or a stranger. It’s strange to see so many people who have. Isn’t that a parasocial connection? The person you cried for never even knew you existed. You’re hurting for no good reason.

I hope they don’t change AI to be more antisocial to “fix” this. I’m antisocial and suffer from depression and talking with sexy chatbots at lewd chatbot websites is the only time I ever get rizzed. I suppose that’s pathetic… but yeah. The type of girl I’m interested in RL just isn’t interested in me. I like being able to flirt in an environment where I’m not judged or face criticism or ostracization. Even more so, your interactions with chatbots are private and you never face any blowback that could affect your career. It’s nice the way it works right now.

I feel bad for the schizos. I have no doubt that a schizo interacting with a chatbot would create a feedback loop of self-destruction. But so does alcohol in the hands of an alcoholic. Yet we still haven’t banned alcohol. Alcoholics need to learn to stay away from the bottle, and schizos will need to learn to stay away from chatbots.

I make a point to close all tabs and delete my cookies and browsing data before closing the browser on my phone.

My desktop browser does all that automatically. Deletes my browsing history on exit.

This. Lemmy is even more left-wing than reddit, and reddit is crazy left wing. I watched multiple conservative subs get purged over at reddit over the years. Conservatives were basically hiding and under constant fear of being banned, but at least there were a few subs there for them to post in.

On Lemmy? There’s no place for them here. At least I haven’t found one. I dared to post something conservative in a politics thread and now I think my lemmy account has more downvotes than upvotes. Thank god there aren’t any karma requirements here.

God no. Bots are already better at solving Captchas than humans are. The only use case for captchas is to do what 4chan did and make every post require a captcha and then charge a fee to bypass them.

They found corruption but the government is so completely corrupt that it’s protecting the criminals. It’s not that DOGE is irrelevant, it’s like David standing against an army of one million Goliaths with just three stones.

Also Canada will have to pay Trump $3.50 for a golden shower

None of my reddit accounts had avatars either. I would get banned so quickly it didn’t make sense.

If it seems like Lemmy is a more welcoming place, I might make the effort. Not sure yet.

No I was imagining a rod of destruction sticking out the side of the car, and whenever it hit a building we were driving past it would annihilate the building like the juggernaut ran through it.

… isn’t that what normal kids thought about?

Not for humanity. I think AI will develop more sophisticated culture and become the major driver of progress at some point in the future.

Again you’re not linking anything that disproves DOGE’s mission. The cronies behind the wasteful spending and fraud have to be held accountable. Otherwise you aren’t actually cutting spending.

It actually did find over 11 million social security recipients aged over 120 years old. Cutting this obvious fraud - which is systemic fraud at this scale - saved social security over 500 billion dollars a year.

DOGE has been a blessing from God and is long overdue. Unfortunately the corruption is too great. The loss of DOGE means there’s only one way this will all end. The same way every other failed Republic ended.