Uriel238 [all pronouns]

The first XKCD that comes to mind

Ellision sounds like the kind of guy that wants an unstoppable army of robot swarms.

Representative Jamie Raskin recently brought up the term neo-monarchy.

I only got good at Jetty Boot specifically to unlock the jet boots. And it’s the one mini-game I kinda resent.

Setrik’s soiled loincloth!

We the public have to keep making better ad blockers that better detect ads and prevent them from being displayed (or in some cases, activating their malware payload).

YouTube is trying to either detect ad blockers and deny service, or change the insertion paradigm so that ads cannot be blocked. We cannot let them succeed doing either.

This presents a good demonstration of what we can expect Alphabet / Google / Youtube to do if ever it should win its war on adblockers, or convince people to watch YouTube without vetting. Any time it promises to compromise and make a tolerable user experience, it will ratchet up advertisement plugs until it becomes intolerable.

This is why we can’t relent, ever.

The save the world plot is new.

I appreciated the capitalist / industrialist commentary that this is what Ficsit does: Drop a few pioneers onto a planet and turn it into a giant self-consuming manufacturing plant, like a bacterium infecting a cell, that feeds some remote market with hyper-processed goods.

Oh well. I expect it still to be amazing.

Can confirm Satisfactory_ has eaten 3000+ hours of my life.

I’m curious if the hypertube physics is still the same, since lobbing myself between sites, or into the sky to do surveys or climb tall hills smacks of Portal and_ The Matrix._

I hope it all still works.

The new Bacon Agaric looks nice.

Oh wow, this is such a relief. Yes, I just restarted and was dreading the pinch while transitioning from bio to coal.

It still may mean regular leaf-gathering sweeps just dumping them in the intake bin rather than feeding each generator individually, but even that is an improvement.

Since the publishers are also trying to suppress out-of-print media, abandonware and public domain material (also fair use) and the courts are favoring the publishers over the good of the public, we know it’s no longer about promoting science and useful arts or building a robust public domain.

The companies and courts alike are breaking the social contract, hence the trmporary monopolies enstated by the agencies of the same state are invalid. Piracy is no longer a valid crime since the state licenses are no longer valid.

(They will still enforce the will of the state — ICE does a lot of raids to enforce commercial interests when it’s not massacring refugees— but that doesn’t legitimize the will of the state. It only shows they are willing tyrants glad to use violence to oppress.)

We have nothing to lose but our chains!

It goes from the same idea that if you saw someone else’s art and made your own art, the copyright of the new art would be yours, and not the one who inspired you.

We’ve seen edge cases in the music industry (Ray Parker Jr.‘s Ghostbusters vs. Huey Lewis and the News’ Hip To Be Square I Want a New Drug ) though in most cases in music, artists routinely borrow each other’s elements.

The problem is that AI generative art still requires effort from the programmer (the one who prompted the AI) and went through process of telling it what to do, curating the output, running it back through the AI again to add new elements. If that process is sufficiently long, then it warrants copyright. If that process is insufficiently long, then it challenges the copyrightable merits of artists who make quick art.

In my opinion (removed from the whole AI controversy) is that intellectual property law has been long abused, not by artists and creators but by publishers and studio owners who have used their landlord-esque positions to take control of most art, and then extend their IP rights while denying the public a robust public domain.

And they are the ones that are going to ultimately be hurt by the death of IP laws. Artists will still do art, but for the sake of expression, and then it’s a matter of the rest of society making sure they’re not exhausted by their day-job (which, according to the strikers in Hollywood, they totally are).