Hey, I found a new litmus test of my own! Neat!

It’s just absolutely bonkers that they’re using a gun game to campaign while disallowing gun use. You may as well partner with the NFL and then ban tackling, or host a Monopoly game while banning money.

No one is arguing that they don’t have the legal right.

But they believe they have the moral right, and they do not.

Cool. Now, let’s start getting into whether communism is “extremism” or not, rather than just begging the question.

The current situation is consistent with the “carbon fighting” government that buys an oil pipeline. So, you know…

You are placing your annoyance at other peoples’ grammar above the desire to actually communicate with them, which means you’re just here to masturbate in public.

You get that, right?

The price is still elastic because many people have another streaming service they can drop. But as they all raise prices, they’ll all be whittled down to just one. And then possibly none.

Locking your front door won’t keep someone out who really wants to get in.

Is that stupid, too?

Mastodon is also somewhat hostile towards new users. Significant swaths of it treat this shared public network as a small private chatroom, and get cranky when September stretches on too long.

Depends on what the disagreement is.

Same for almost every book you’ve ever read, every CD you’ve ever listened to, and every movie you’ve ever watched. You owned the leaves of paper the book was printed on, or the plastic disc the music or movie was stamped into, but never the words, the songs, or the movie itself.

We’ve only ever had licenses to consume.

Not just a working test, nodeBB 4 is in beta now. We’re on the threshold

Usenet’s mostly pirated stuff now.

IRC is a shadow of its former self, but if you’re into FOSS it’s still good.

And computers have always allowed for you to write your own software. If you don’t know how to do that, though, it may as well not be an option.

This is is making those alternative stores accessible to the average user:

Google will have to distribute rival third-party app stores within Google Play

Technology chauvinism is unbecoming, and unhelpful, both to others, and to your own understanding of the world around you.

Why advocate for trying to stop climate disaster when you can choose to believe that you can both profit off of it and be the hero that saves humanity from it, both at the same time?

There’s a lot of things that LLMs are really good at, or incredibly useful for, such as ingesting large bodies of text, and then analyzing them based on your ability to create well thought out prompts.

That’s the story people tell at least. The weasel phrase at the end is fun, I guess. Leaves a massive backdoor excuse when it doesn’t actually work.

But in practice, LLMs are falling down even at this job. They seem to have some yse in academic qualitaruve coding, but for summarizing novel or extended bodies of text, they struggle to actually tell people what they want to know.

Most people do not give a shit if text contains a reference to X. And if they do, they can generally just CTRL+F “X”.

See that it’s never going to make money, go public, hand the keys over to someone else, and then try again with a wallet full of cash and a reputation for making billion dollar businesses.

Just to be clear, publishers don’t like reviewers, either. They’re seen as gatekeepers of audiences and people to be managed and bribed, and that means keeping the reviewer market small. They want reviewers to be PR people with a fascade of being impartial, and few enough to count on one hand.

This is also somwthing that’s happening, then, because Nintendo sees a pathway to victory. Not only are their games licensed only for their own hardware, but they can claim the reviews are misleading and invalid because the games aren’t designed to run on the platforms they’re beinf reviewed on.

Like, none of this is Nintendo coming for your emulation catalogue. It’s them coming for people trying to generate an income from their games. And all of the big publishers are going to line up behind them on this, because they also hate anyone who’s making coin using their creation.

That’s capitalism. That’s what it means for something to be capital, and to own it. It’s what owning the means of production is all about.

This is not about the legality of emulation, unfortunately, but about whether people have the rights to publish lets plays without a license.

Many suits in the gaming industry see lets plays as theft. They see people making money using their games and believe lets players should have to pay to license thst content, and that they should have the right to revoke that license if they don’t like what people are saying about or doimg with their games.

I work in the industry, and I know people who work or who have worked at studios owned by every major punlisher in the west. This is a thing they all habe someone of import chomping at the bit for.

It’s just that none of them want to be the one singled out as the first or only one attacking lets plays. Nor to be the one that shoulders the costs of having their position challenged in court.

This can’t be a new thing. This was one of the conditions Nintendo announced when they dropped their stupid “register with us to be allowed to do lets plays” thing.

Oh, and it’s not just Nintendo. All of the big publishers believe they own your videos that use their games. I’ve been involved in discussions with people personally who were trying to figure out how to demand licensing fees from YouTubers.

This is goingnto get worse before it gets better. This has been a traffic jam caused by everyone waiting for somebody to go first. Nintendo is just the one who has volunteered to be the first mover.