The layoffs are largely because of the class war going on, they are a part of essentially a broader collective threat to labor from the ruling class, but also I think the video game industry is blatantly trying to do what the movie industry tried to do with AI it is just there isn’t an industry union to fight it. The execs are saying “we can train AI on all the past and present labor of our artists and then just fire the artists!”. They aren’t stupid enough to commit fully to this strategy so soon after the labor strikes in the movie industry, but mark my words this is just testing the waters.

I think they can particularly get away with this because gamers tend to be the kind of people who will scream “skill issue” or naively parrot a talking point at you if you bring up the political consequences of AI being used to consolidate power in the ruling class. As a result there is almost zero actual solidarity between fans and creators in this industry.

Either workers in the video game industry will lose a historic amount of power (and thus benefits, job security, pay etc…) in the next couple of years or there will be a historic amount of labor organizing. Those are the two possibilities. It doesn’t really matter if the AI actually functions as a replacement for the artists for this happen, the narrative not the truth is the important part in undercutting the quality of life of video game industry workers. Once the damage is done companies will say that they maybe oversold the potential of AI to replace artists to their investors but even when they do they will never reverse the cuts they made to their workers. It will just become the new norm.

Even if in the best case for workers, using AI ends up being a frustrating waste of time for video game development, massive video game companies will force their workers to use shitty AI tools as part of their development process in order to jam reality into fitting the narrative they used to justify cutting investment into their workers. That is a small price to pay for the opportunity to fundamentally change the power dynamics between video game industry workers and the owners of the companies.

The fediverse is a direct competitor to everything and anything they do. I don’t think Meta is interested in integrating with the fediverse.

Right and this is really all that even needs to be said. There is nothing meta can do or say that will make this not true and there is no possibility that overtime meta won’t make decisions according to this power relation.

The future fediverse we all day dream about when we are in an optimistic mood is literally a catastrophic fail state for a corporate social media company like meta. We see the plot of a happy uplifting family action movie, meta sees a horrific slasher movie.

People in support of federating with threads keep saying we don’t need to worry about meta trying to extend, embrace and extinguish the fediverse because the software and architecture of the fediverse makes it impervious. In other words, technology will defend us from politics, money and power.

It is a categorical error in logic to think that a technology can solve problems of the type: politics, money or power.

WE have to solve those problems by understanding how history repeats itself and how large corporations fundamentally relate to publicly shared resources irrespective of what the CEOs say or even think themselves. We have to realize you can’t write a computer function that will stop a massive corporation from corrupting a collective human endeavor. Only humans can do that by organizing to collectively reject the membership of the massive corporation from the community around the collective human endeavor. As soon as you let meta in the door, you have lost a very important ideological power struggle over the fediverse’s identity.

To those of you who argue that being against federating with meta/threads is elitist and comes from a desire of not wanting to let “normies” in who will dilute fediverse culture… I don’t want to let massive corporations in precisely because I think it fosters an environment where a diversity of people, specifically minorities, are not made to feel safe or welcome. Most of the cool people worth actually talking to on the fediverse came here because they didn’t feel safe or welcome on a corporate social network owned by a massive corporation.

If your response to that is well but what about all the normies that the massive corporation could rope into the fediverse that the tiny, pathetic fediverse will never reach? I return to my original point. This isn’t a struggle over programs, code, software… it is a struggle of politics, money and power and we have to relate to it that way. To let a massive corporation into the fediverse that basically has the resources of an entire rich nation and think it won’t utterly exploit and derail the future of the fediverse is absurd. If a company is publicly traded on the stockmarket, it is essentially obligated legally to do so in the pursuit of potential profit for its investors. We can’t get the reach a massive corporation could give us without also fundamentally giving up what makes the fediverse a better alternative than corporate social media. It is a deal with the devil no matter what way you spin it.

Very cool

Ok but what if someone figured out where you lived, doxed you and got a mob of angry racists to threaten your family? Maybe it was a joke, but given the amount of extremist angry conservatives these days maybe that threat of violence is real.

Do you think that is ok? What if so many people were hate messaging you that it utterly overwhelmed your ability to even go on your favorite social network? What if you woke up one day and one of those internet users drove by your house and left a note threatening your life on your door?

These aren’t hypothetical questions, this is what awful people do when you don’t curtail hate speech (and actively support it like musk does). There are REAL WORLD violent consequences for it and if you have never felt the fear from being targeted by a mob of irrationally angry strangers that want to hurt you than you just don’t really have any meaningful perspective to talk about “free speech” like you are.

Sure some of the hypotheticals I brought up are also illegal, but there is always a throbbing tumor of bigots spewing hate speech at each other at the heart of this kind of thing that these actions grow out of. These people need to be isolated, shamed and alienated from normal social circles for their behavior or things become dangerous for real human beings. You don’t negotiate with these people, you show them the door when they start spewing hate speech.

gleefully punches block button

Have fun trying to build the future by yourself! I hope some people walk by in the distance that you can yell at so you can get your rocks off once in awhile :)

Not really vibing with calling people retards bruh.

I understand being upset and wanting it all to burn down but this is the best chance we have.

My favorite was when an IDF propaganda guy on a cable news network like CNN or something I can’t remember just casually dropped that the tunnels under a hospital that the IDF points to all the time as proof that Hamas is pure evil were actually built by the IDF at some point.

The news anchor wasn’t trying to be pro-Palestinian but they were so totally confused they couldn’t help but be like…. what?

Everyone advocating for federating with threads keeps making technical arguments for why meta supposedly can’t extend, embrace, extinguish the fediverse as if this was a phenomena of technology. I am sorry, I know you love technology, programming and computers but this has nothing to do with those things.

This process is a phenomena of power and politics, and nothing about the fediverse makes it uniquely impervious to it, if anything a loosely organized federation is UNIQUELY vulnerable to a powerful, organized political actor. Meta can easily distort the entire landscape we are operating in with the amount of money it has at its disposal. Exhibit A: see how Google idly fucks with Firefox by getting it to run around in circles the way you might idly taunt your friends cat with a laser pointer. The only defense we really have is learning from history and a lot of yall seem pretty incapable of that when you stick your fingers in your ears and repeatedly say “lets just wait and see what the face eating leopards do!”.

I can’t actually wrap my head around a military official equating dive bombing to precision guided munitions what a bunch of clowns.

Sure, sending your hulking fighter jet screaming towards the ground and launching a dumb bomb is basically the same as calmly designating a target with a laser from near level flight.

Why does any of this shit matter in the first place? We aren’t talking about blowing up tank divisions or specific highly advanced military targets, we are talking about an absolutely incredible amount of bombs dropped on insurgent fighters nebulously distributed in a civilian population.

It is genocide, no other word for it.

People really really reallllly want to believe there are laws of grammar/language like there are laws of physics and it is honestly kind of hilarious.

The power of language comes from there being no rules or laws, language is just the sum of what people choose to write and say. You can impose patterns on what people tend to write and say, but ultimately it is no different than looking into the night sky and deciding a couple of stars makes the shape of a lion and believing you have determined something fundamental about those stars.

The best I played this year

• Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead with the Sky Islands mod Absolutely best survival game I have ever played by a long mile. There is just so much time and love behind this game.

• Deep Rock Galactic A flawless game

• Halo Infinite multiplayer it is actually good now!

• Battlebit So good to have a battlefield not owned and ruined by EA

I think what you are saying is mostly true but also you do have a choice. If you can’t bring yourself to vote for Biden because of well founded reasons I don’t think it’s fair to judge because of that. All the centrists start screaming and losing their minds that they are going to lose because their candidate sucks and blame it on people who have specific, previously vocalized reasons for not wanting to vote for said candidate.

You aren’t the problem if you don’t want to vote for Biden because of his unwavering support for genocide. Yes the alternative is worse, but election after election you can’t just keep handing centrists your vote who don’t give a shit about you or your policies (and actively shit on you while loudly posturing that they aren’t like you at all). At some point you have to make the threat of withholding your vote a real one, there are always consequences to that especially for this election but at the same time nothing is really going to change if we keep handing centrist corporate democrats the reigns to power because this time is an emergency too (just like last time).

I recommend voting for Biden for similar reasons you brought up, but I also don’t think there is any shame to deciding you can’t bring yourself to vote for such a trash candidate and want to choose this election so support a third party. Bad timing? Yeah, but it isn’t the voters fault for not wanting to vote for someone that doesn’t represent them?

I have been recommending Farm Together as a co-op game a lot lately because it is so damn simple but so good. The controls are immediately accessible, the game doesn’t give a flying fuck about stressing you out but at the same time there are a lot of systems to discover (making money isn’t trivial in this game) and the crops take realtime to grow so it naturally sets up a simple ritual with your co-op partner to play. There is not really any story to get into, but at the same time this makes it a bit more accessible to someone who isn’t already invested in video games since the gameplay loop is so immediate and unframed by any cutscenes, story setup, long tutorials or forced activities. You pick it up and start playing immediately, you decide completely how to interface with the game whether it be crunching out the numbers to figure out which crop, fish etc… to go for to maximize money, just zoning out watering, planting and harvesting or spending all your time placing cosmetic buildings and props to make your farm look cool. Want to take a break and just watch your partner play? Sure! Walk away for a half an hour if you want, you will probably have a bunch of crops waiting for you to harvest once you come back. The game really doesn’t have an opinion on how you should play it and it is great.

(It looks like a game like farmville, but there is zero manipulative microtransaction crap, just buy the game and play)

If you want more story and thematic framing, you absolutely have to try Stardew Valley, it is a co-op classic for a reason.

Also if you liked the idea of Overcooked but found it too focused on stressful energy that isn’t necessarily fun for everyone than check out PlateUp! YOU design the kitchen in plateup and add various components to it as you progress. It puts a lot more agency in the players hands instead of throwing players through a chaotic theme park ride that overcooked feels like in the harder levels. It also brings strategizing about kitchen design with your co-op partner into the gameplay loop which is great fun. You can also automate some stuff, so players can dig into that if they want to avoid feeling like the game is so focused on stressful action.

Just because it worked doesn’t mean it wasn’t a bad strategy that hurt a lot of people and turned away a lot more…

Yeah this kind of attitude is never a productive strategy unless you want to surround yourself only with assholes. It also demonstrates a complete lack of ability to manage humans and keep your values straight when you become upset and stressed out, which is a massive red flag to hold up as someone running a project.

In general it seems like a lot of people get into computers because they think it is a magic fantasy land where you don’t have to practice people skills and interact with other humans… when like every other industry after a certain seniority in a project it always, always, always comes down to managing humans and human interaction skills. The idea of the tech wizard programmer who can be an asshole because they are a genius at coding is just so tired at this point.

God I miss Unreal Tournament, why can’t we have multiplayer games like this again? Just a silly fun multiplayer shooter with lots of options on how to play and no greedy shit on top.

well we do it is called xonotic and it has the best rocket launcher in any game hands down, it comes out of the quake lineage tho

What a lazy way to dismiss any kind of stakes to discussing history and the consequences of it.

Palestinians are refugees that no one wants. Not even their Islamic brethren in other countries. Israel worked to negotiate many peace deals and even had a work visa program. The apartheid-style sanctions were due to security constraints because the Palestinians kept blowing shit up…Many of the radicalized Palestinians don’t appreciate Western culture and think that it’s an affront of their religion. They want women to have minimal rights. It blows me away that many left-leaning individuals want to help support their backwards culture of misogyny.

You sound like a child describing to their parent why one of their action toys was able to beat up one of their other action toys. You also seem to have very little ability to comprehend how you cannot make blanket generalizations about groups of millions of people, which coincidentally is the root of why the genocide of the Palestinian people is being allowed to happen.