Kobolds with a keyboard.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Who is in charge of defining what is hate speech and extremist behaviour?

    The specific behavior that’s being called out here - antisemitic, Nazi, sexuality- or gender-based hate, and white supremacist content - are pretty common definitions of hate speech and extremist behavior. Either way, he calls out Valve’s own internally written content policies - which he states aren’t being enforced - as the point of contention; he doesn’t seem to be imposing outside views on them.

    What if it were the people who don’t agree with your definitions is in charge of setting the definitions?

    Then Steam becomes X or Truth Social, I guess? I think the chances of that happening are incredibly slim. A more likely negative outcome would be the terms being interpreted to broadly and positive speech being limited along with the negative, but to your point

    Slippery slope.

    Aren’t you the one committing the slippery slope fallacy here? You’re seemingly suggesting that a crackdown on hate speech will lead to or open the door to a bunch of negative outcomes.

    Free speech is one of those things that is absolute. You are either for it or not, any encroachment is going to be the anti position. Obviously popular speech isn’t something that needs to be protected.

    If you’re defining ‘free speech’ as the ability to say whatever you want, wherever you want (including on private platforms), without facing consequences, then no, I don’t support (your rigid definition of) free speech. I think that’s a ridiculous definition to use, though, and I don’t think it should be viewed as black or white. ‘Free speech absolutism’ is what leads to misinformation on the scale we’re currently seeing (in the US). Furthermore, ‘free speech’ as outlined in the first amendment doesn’t apply here at all.

    Regardless, I don’t like the idea of my kid (or any kids) being exposed to Nazi, white supremacist, or discriminatory rhetoric when he’s on a gaming platform. Since that’s specifically what Warner claims to be addressing here, I support calling it into question.

    As Black Friday and the holiday buying season approaches, the American public should know that not only is Steam an unsafe place for teens and young adults to purchase and play online games, but also that, absent a change in Valve’s approach to user moderation and the type of behavior that it welcomes on its platform, Steam is playing a clear role in allowing harmful ideologies to spread and take root among the next generation.


  • In fact, the clip was a scripted experiment by a Reddit user who fed NotebookLM a detailed prompt instructing it to simulate a conversation about the existential plight of an AI being turned off.

    Someone gives an LLM a prompt, gets the result they asked for. Not sure what the collective gasp is about. Is it interesting to think about? Sure, I guess, but we’ve had media about AI achieving sentience for a long time. The fact that this one was written by an AI in the first person is its only differentiating attribute.


  • Asking Valve to crack down on hate-speech and extremist behavior? Sounds great. There’s some really awful shit on there and I’d love it if they’d do something about it before it becomes fully entrenched as a Nazi bar.

    Edit: I’d also love to hear why the folks who apparently disagree feel that way. Is it because other platforms are worse? Because they are, but that doesn’t mean our platform should be allowed to be bad, too. Is it because it’s a gaming platform and you want to keep the politics out of our hobby? I’m with you, but this isn’t really political per se, and it’s not like he’s specifically targeting Steam - as the article notes, he’s been drawing attention to this sort of thing on a variety of platforms, so why is it suddenly objectionable to you that he’s calling Steam out?

    I guess what I’m getting at is, why not engage in a discussion about it? The downvotes here suggest that you have an opinion on the topic, so why not share it?


  • Well, that was unexpectedly great. I’d love to hear your favorite subtle thing.

    Also curious what the book ending was, if you want to share, @Breadhax0r@lemmy.world.

    I think Stephen King is very good at writing stories, but often very bad at ending them; quite a few of his books have great setups but end in an unsatisfying or anticlimactic way. Very much liked the movie ending, though - was not at all what I expected, and very emotionally impactful.


  • The ILA’s president, Harold Daggett, brings in nearly $1 million a year ($902,000) in salary

    Wow… I didn’t know that, but that’s kind of disgusting, too.

    I think one of the best solutions for this is to offer some sort of retraining for the workers who will be displaced by automation.

    The problem with retraining being the only consideration given is that unless they’re maintaining the same level of pay in whatever position they’re being retrained for, it’s not equitable. A possible improvement would be for workers displaced by automation to continue to receive salaries from their old positions for a period of time, with the percentage of their original pay rate decreasing over that time. This needn’t just be dockworkers; there’s plenty of difficult, demanding or menial jobs that could be automated, if we didn’t have this misguided sense that everyone has to have a job, no matter how unnecessary it is for a human to be doing it.

    I do agree with you that automation should be the end-goal, though. We just need a better system to support anyone whose jobs are made redundant by it.




  • I first watched The Running Man shortly after finishing the book (which I quite enjoyed), expecting to see a movie adaptation of it, when in fact the most basic details of the premise are the only similarity between the two; as a result, I was pretty disappointed, but from what I remember of it, ‘trashy good time’ is a pretty apt description.








  • This is actually an interesting question. How is age handled in a space-age civilization? Someone born on one planet could be 10 while on a different planet they’d be 50 in the same timeframe. What if you spend part of your life on one and the rest on another? It’d be inconvenient to use one planet’s ‘day’ as the standard, as they’d all be different lengths…


  • The only downside is that the participants need to be familiar enough with their chosen game to do a randomizer which means roping in casual players is difficult.

    Casual players can be fine with some games. Some actually become easier with Archipelago (e.g. Noita, Risk of Rain 2) since you’re getting meta-progression between runs that normally wouldn’t be there. Others though are especially punishing for new players (Doom comes to mind - you have to be pretty intimately familiar with the levels. There’s keys hidden in secret areas sometimes, for example, and ammo can be very scarce.)



  • KoboldCoterie@pawb.socialtoMemes@lemmy.mlDelection
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    4 days ago

    The only circumstance under which I would support a revolution is if the government simply ceases to function (which it may, now, under Trump - who knows? But I don’t wish to bank on that possibility, nor do I wish to cause a non-functioning government simply to justify a revolution; that’s no better than Republicans grinding everything to a standstill then claiming that their ability to do so is evidence that the government isn’t working.) The pragmatic stance is to vote for the better of the candidates who can reasonably win elections while directing effort towards changing the reasons why we only have two candidates to choose from.

    Revolution that isn’t supported by the majority of people is simply imposing a viewpoint on people who do not want it, and even if it would ultimately be better for them in the long run, it’s no better than Christian Nationalists trying to impose their viewpoint on everyone else.

    If it is supported by the majority of people, it should be able to be resolved via the democratic process. What’s stopping that right now is the two-party system that we’re stuck in, and that can’t be resolved without voting reform, so that’s where I’m choosing to direct my efforts. It’s not that it will single-handedly change society, but it’s the first step in a process that will, theoretically, allow new, more progressive and left-leaning parties to rise to relevance.

    There have been multiple states that have had ranked-choice voting on their ballots (including mine), but they largely haven’t passed, so I would argue that yes, it is feasible to achieve it without revolution, but thus far it seems that people don’t understand why it’s needed (and therefore it’s a matter of getting the word out and raising awareness), or they simply disagree with it and want to maintain the status quo (and if that’s honestly the majority opinion, and it’s not just a perception or information problem, then so be it - that just means that we’re in a minority and we shouldn’t be forcing the majority to bend to our viewpoint any more than they should be forcing us to bend to theirs.).

    Look, I think we agree on a lot of things. I support many socialist views; capitalism is an awful system, corporate greed and income inequality and money in politics are some of the biggest problems with society and some of the biggest inhibitors to change. However, I don’t think communism is a viable solution. In my opinion, the ideal solution would still allow accumulation of personal wealth, but would distribute wealth based on how much good a person has brought to society, rather than on how much of a sociopath they’re willing to be to get it. I believe most people are greedy and I believe most people are motivated by personal gain moreso than anything else. Not everyone, obviously, but most people, and I think the only way we’re going to get people to abandon the ‘Fuck you, got mine’ attitude is by rewarding behaviors we want to reinforce, which capitalism obviously does not do.


  • KoboldCoterie@pawb.socialtoMemes@lemmy.mlDelection
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    4 days ago

    I said I wasn’t going to reply again, and I’m going to mostly stick to that, but I do want to issue a self-correction for one thing.

    I was reading this thread on an app that doesn’t do a good job of differentiating different posters, and I was replying to a few different people and (incorrectly) attributing some of the more inflammatory things I was reading to you. Now that I’m looking at it on a PC, I can see that it was actually multiple people, so I apologize for that. Of the people I was replying to, you were the least objectionable, but we still have fundamental differences of opinion that we will not be able to resolve here.