kibiz0r

Cool. Gonna use it as an excuse to re-open the pier to faciltate another massacre and then shut it down again?

You just gotta believe.

This is where we need something other than copyright law. The problem with generative AI companies isn't that somebody looked at something without permission, or remixed some bits and bytes.

It's that their products are potentially incredibly harmful to society. They would be harmful even if they worked perfectly. But as they stand, they're a wide-open spigot of nonsense, spewing viscous sludge into every single channel of human communication.

I think we can bring out antitrust law against them, and labor unions are also a great tool. Privacy, and a right to your own identity factor in, too. But I think we're also going to need to develop some equivalent of ecological protections when it comes to information.

For a long time, our capacity to dump toxic waste into the environment was minuscule compared to the scale of the natural world. But as we automated more and more, it became clear that the natural world has limits. I think we're headed towards discovering the same thing for the world of information.

Inflatio

Every safety rule is written in blood. A 16-year-old is not old enough to evaluate whether a prospective employer truly understands that concept, and accept the risks if not.

Found a neat quote from the judges in the Sony v Connectix case:

"For this reason, some economic loss by Sony as a result of this competition does not compel a finding of no fair use. Sony understandably seeks control over the market for devices that play games Sony produces or licenses. The copyright law, however, does not confer such a monopoly."

Now, it’s worth noting that Connectix actually produced their own BIOS, so this is not quite the same as the common emulators of today.

But still: The idea that copyright does not confer a monopoly on hardware to play your games would be a very spicy take from a court in 2024.

Not a new problem:

Julia is famous among psychologists because she was able to implant false memories into a group of subjects and convince 70 percent of them that they were guilty of a crime they did not commit, and she did so by using the sort of sloppy interrogation techniques that some police departments have been truly been guilty of using in the past.

https://youarenotsosmart.com/2020/05/19/yanss-179-the-memory-illusion/

Killing brown people. Incredibly skilled at it.

Yeah, that was my point.

Because so much of a (typical) mobile app’s behavior is delegated to first-party APIs, having a huge range of device models in the field doesn’t cause as much of a splintering problem as it would for software that defines more of its own behavior internally, like games tend to do.

Yearly refreshes make a lot more sense for phones, where the OS defines a lot more of the app lifecycle and common features, consumers might be interested in non-performance hardware upgrades like cameras, and things tend to be less spec-sensitive in the first place.

For a gaming device, giving devs an uneven foundation and users a confusing compatibility matrix would spell doom.

Edit: I should probably clarify that I wasn’t saying a yearly refresh for phones is good. Just that the context of Android+iOS is very different from the Steam Deck, and that context makes more frequent refreshes more attractive to consumers and less damaging to developers than it would be if applied to the Steam Deck also.

Edit 2: I also just realized this is not the same story as the one a day or two ago that drew a direct comparison to phones. So I guess I should’ve gone back and commented on that one instead. I just wanted to share cuz I’ve had a lot of meetings about device support and consumer upgrade habits, as a mobile dev and as a game dev, and I don’t think most people would guess quite how different those two worlds are.

😵‍💫✨🤛🎩😤