skulblaka

It’s a lost identity, is what it is. American conservatives will give you 4 different definitions of what conservatism is supposed to be, and leftists will give you an additional 6 more.

What it’s supposed to be is a political counter to the progressivism of the left. Lefties push progressive rhetoric and the conservatives keep them in check to prevent them from blowing up the economy.

Except, in practice, we haven’t had a conservative leader that actually knows the value of a dollar bill in (at least) over a century, even prior to that it was primarily the political party of “I want to keep slaves and I’m not going to let you stop me”, and in the modern day it’s been entirely co-opted by the Christian Church and its tireless quest to completely enslave every human being on the planet.

Get organized at the local level, create food pantries for affected workers, and pool money together for bills. The fact that we are so divided as a country that a mere thought of a community is seen as “communism.”

… With what food and money? Serious question, I’m not trying to be an ass. If nobody has enough of their own savings, nobody is working because we’re on strike, where are we getting this food and money with which to maintain our community?

I’m open to this idea, but myself and most everyone else in my local community are afraid for their lives and livelihoods. It would take us roughly around 3-6 weeks to become so resource starved that we either die, or return to laboring under probably a worse deal than we left in the first place. Six weeks of no income isn’t even going to make a noticeable dent in the pocketbook of the Starbucks CEO.

Careful what you wish for, that probably isn’t out of the question.

That’s almost literally exactly what RCV is.

Because people are scared. If you don’t show up to work and cite “General strike” or “political protest” as your reason, you won’t have a job when you return for 90% of people.

No job means no food and no home. SNAP/EBT are being cut so you can’t rely on the social safety net to survive. Being homeless means you’re free game to get snatched off the street and shipped to El Salvador in an unmarked van.

The average American is in a vise. Many federal workers now don’t have much left to lose because they aren’t being paid anyway, most everyone else is just trying to survive.

They also have the highest incidence of fire based death of any car of all time, including the Ford Pinto, which was best known for catching fire.

https://www.news.com.au/technology/motoring/on-the-road/fiery-death-trap-most-dangerous-car-killing-its-passengers/news-story/ab364eb2e1ad2b569e367664f08aa705

They’ve been putting AI slop all over official white house correspondence all year, I promise they didn’t need me to give them this idea.

but it would be an incredibly stupid thing to do.

So we can pretty much bank on it definitely happening, got it.

I for one am extremely surprised that we didn’t recieve some obviously bullshit, AI-written “files” that conveniently implicate all of Trump’s opponents while leaving him and his posse out.

Pleasantly surprised, don’t get me wrong, but I fully expected that out of this administration. They’ve already proven time and again that they have zero shame or accountability, this would be right up their alley.

“Nukular” never fails to make me seethe a little bit internally.

Um, there is more than one type of anticompetitive practice? Amazon uses predatory pricing to drive companies out of business, Microsoft uses tying to sell Teams, Google uses self-preferencing for their own services in search results, Facebook acquired Instagram rather than compete with them, etc.

None of which are related to Steam nor has Steam done anything resembling any of these examples to my knowledge.

One of Valve’s favorite anticompetitive cudgels is requiring “most favored nation” clauses in their contracts, prohibiting devs from selling for less on other storefronts (which Amazon also has used).

Valve prohibits people from selling steam keys for less on other storefronts which I think is perfectly reasonable. You can list your game on Steam for $20 and distribute it on Itch for $5 or even free and Steam has zero problem with this, so long as you aren’t distributing steam keys via that storefront. This is to try and prevent a developer from leveraging Steam for advertisement purposes but making all their actual sales off-platform.

Can you describe where Steam has done anything even approaching that, ever?

EA and Activision stores didn’t fail because Steam bought them out and bullied them out of the market, they failed because they were trash products. Steam doesn’t buy “default placement” in anything. They just have a good product that people want to use over alternatives.

Point out a situation in which Steam has acted anti-competitive and I might agree that you have a point, but I can’t think of any situations to call out here.

You can sell your game for different prices on different platforms, you just can’t sell steam keys that way. If you purchase a game on Itch and it gives you a steam key, that’s still a steam purchase and is subject to this restriction. If you purchase a game on Itch and it hands you an installer then you can buy that game at whatever price they want to sell it at.

Failing to make a product that doesn’t suck shit does not make a monopoly for your competitor.

In fact, Steam is de facto not a monopoly because of the very existence of GOG. EA and Activision tried to break in to this arena but failed to provide a product that actually switched people off of steam, because they failed to provide a comparable experience to steam. GOG did, and they’re doing fine.

Not to mention, the true resource cost of an AI comes from training. Sure, it costs about as much processing and power as a video game to prompt a trained AI. I can believe that. However it takes many thousands of times as much power and processing to train one, and we aren’t even close to halfway through training any general-llm model to the point of being actually useful.

I’ve been moving on with my life regarding this since about 2005, but it has failed to move on from me. I’m not sure what’s so funny about going “HUNTER2 HYUCK HYUCK HYUCK” every time you see the word “password” on the internet, but whatever, man, it’s clearly more popular than I am because y’all just can’t stop doing it.

Please leave the stupid reddit jokes back on reddit.

This dead horse was beaten into a very fine paste 10 years ago and it wasn’t funny back then either.

I’ve got a time-traveling kick in the nuts prepared for whoever invented wall-humping for unmarked secrets. I first remember this from Wolfenstein 3D but I’m not sure if it existed before then.