Well put all around, and in response to your final point, I’m really not sure. I want to say this is the value of public education, but I don’t recall a terribly strong effort to educate people in common sense and media literacy so as to not be manipulated so easily, and end up voting against our own best interests back when I was in the system. Still, I had access to better education than most young people do today.

I think that lackluster regulation of media really is failing us too, since any billionaire can just buy up a large organization and dictate what it will and will not report on, and how it aims to persuade people in out society. All of this requires rooting out apathy and corruption in our governing public servants, and strengthening regulation, and every day I see more of the exact opposite of that. It’s hard to tell what the endpoint is that’s going to force a turn-around, if such a thing even exists beyond a systemic collapse that strips the power to manipulate the systems of governance from the ultra-rich.

Generally that means terrible suffering for all, and I’d much rather see a better path, like, oh I don’t know, massive taxation of enormous and excessive private wealth. Until I see politicians willing to take meaningful actions to resist and confront oligarchy, and a general public developing more self-awareness, I’ll continue to believe that outcome seems like a pipe dream.

One could theorize that the poop particles expelled with the fart are better trapped in the moisture in the air, so as you breathe in the very humid air, and consequently your own poop particles, the sensory elements in your nose and sinus have an easier time detecting them. This is partly owing to how the moisture also makes them more likely to stick to surfaces inside your body as they travel your airways on the journey to your lungs, where your poop particles may end up. Hope this helps.

If the Canadian government were real it would exact punishing fines on the company’s Canadian held assets in response to this. And I don’t mean cost of business fees, I mean hurtful costs, because these giant fucking companies seriously damage Canadian lives when they just rugpull the labour after making massive profits of Canadian operations. There is no justifiable reason to side with Ubisoft or their scumsucking management here.

Boy, that company should probably fire the CEO, what with him forcing it to commit suicide.

Looks much more like a lot than a little, mind you I’d love to measure manually.

He’s talking about a system to eliminate, not support and elevate the poor here, mark my words. Do not give this brain-damaged, broke-dick, eternally divorced Lex Luthor anything but sentencing for crimes against humanity.

Crazy how much money is flooding into something so absurd on its face. You nailed the gambling part especially, looks like they’re not even waiting for the AIs to develop to flood that junk on every available platform and visible surface. There should be laws against it honestly, gambling addiction is absolutely ruinous.

Not in years, I avoid that shit like cancer, I feel physical pain when I’m sitting through ads. Can’t say I’m at all surprised.

Question: What does AI advertise to you if you want nothing and have no money?

“Not trying to defend AI art” The fuck you’re not. Just be honest about it.

My actual answer to this wall of strawmen and thready arguments is that LLMs and generative AI were trained on incomprehensibly large pools of human produced content, much of which is copyrighted, without paying anything for it; Conversely, when people make memes they are manually altering or adding to the original content and it’s an exception when there’s misappropriation becasue it’s socially enforced. AI simply merges data, there is nothing new conceptually or materially being added, just recombination. I’m not saying all memes are good, and I’m also not saying meme people who make that their life aren’t assholes sometimes either.

All of this exercise you’ve taken upon yourself is a poorly executed attempt to distract from the scale of theft AI NEEDS in order to exist, and that’s something Sam Altman, Zuckerberg, and other industry heads have openly acknowledged. If not for copyright violations it simply could not be feasible as a product, and even when there are instances of people stealing memes without attribution, that’s not the standard or a necessity for the practice. This is on top of the other peripheral issues like IMMENSE resource consumption, and destruction of human livelihoods. Even if we grant your false equivalencies with single user offenses regarding meme theft, and I personally do not, these things are not comparable, and the later certainly doesn’t justify or excuse the former.

Honestly, this is lazy and unfunny.

Gearbox, fire your CEO.

everybody knows shiny = real.

I bet there’s modpacks out there that make the game look 100 times better than this remaster.

Goddamn, this is unfathomably based, thank you for sharing.

I mean, I can’t tell if this is sarcasm, but also, yes.

Firstly, that’s just naked projection. Secondly… GOOD.

Sincerely, we need to treat people who can’t or won’t conceptualize ‘enough’ as hoarders with mental illness. He can never use his immense opulence or spend all of what he has, and he can’t be happy with it either. He should be separated from it, given a stipend that will meet all his needs and desires from it while he GOES TO REHAB, and the rest should be reinjected into the economy for social gain, and used to pay for the public programs and systems that made society work to begin with. Mostly because if it never worked he would never have had this opportunity to destroy it for his own pride.

I swear, Microsoft YEARNS to fail. Dunno who is running the show over there but they’re doing a great job of being terrible for their brand.

Absolutely, it’s important to know what you like and want. Hell, lots of people work off vibes and go through phases where certain game types stimulate them, then fall off of those. Like MMOs and online FPS used to be my main thing, now I stick to single player story driven games. I’m not about to go loudly pout about how Stellaris doesn’t work for me and should be changed to appeal specifically to my wants, too busy with other games (and life).

If you’re not able to commit to learning new strategies and using game mechanics to adapt to a game’s difficulty, and experience it as the developers intended, maybe it’s not for you. You can always watch a lore video or let’s play by other gamers to get the story if that’s the goal. This is Dark Souls 2 all over again, and I will personally say as someone who initially hated it, then gave it another chance; When you persist and triumph through grit, the game leaves a lasting impression and sense of accomplishment that you cheat yourself out of with a difficulty slider. That’s my favorite game in the series now, which is a deeply unpopular opinion, unsurprisingly.

This debate pops up every now and then and my opinion remains the same, there are plenty of games that aren’t meant to be a challenge to choose from. Part of games that are built to be a challenge is being able to reflect on how far you grew in the process, and people hate to hear it but ‘git gud’ is a real thing for those who believe things worth doing are hard.