Just that I wouldn’t have bought a WiiU if I wasn’t misled to believe there was going to be a WiiU-exclusive Zelda game. It was a bait-and-switch.

It’s surprising to me how many gamers out there believe deep in their bones that Nintendo is complete assholes while being completely blind to how just-as-evil Microsoft and Sony are in their console dealings.

All three can be (and are) simultaneously evil, if different flavors. Nintendo’s litigious. Microsoft’s got all the bullshit in the OP. And Sony does that thing where they sell you a disk but what’s on the disk doesn’t work and they make you download the whole game after you put the disk in your system.

(Bonus: Nintendo marketed BotW – though not by name – as a WiiU exclusive title before they even released the WiiU; and then they proceeded to dual-release it for WiiU and Switch. I’m still salty about that. Microsoft cut corners, causing the red ring of death thing. And Sony did that thing with the PS3 where they announced they’d support Linux and reneged after selling it to people. And all these examples are just what I know off the top of my head. And I’ve never had any Microsoft or Sony systems except the XBox 360 and PS2, both way after they were EOL.)

The only way I can imagine “preparing” for nuclear war:

Stop. Giving. Them. Ideas.

(Kidding. Kindof.)

I’d be willing to try a President Pit Viper or a King Komodo. Humans in charge certainly hasn’t been working out.

(Ok, a pit viper isn’t a “lizard”, but I couldn’t think of a lizard that starts with “p”, so I went with another sort of reptile.)

I’m really happy with my Pixel 3a. (And I think the Pixel 3a XL is just as well supported by FLOSS ROMs but with a bigger screen.) It mostly checks all the boxes you had in your list, and I think it’s probably the only real option you’re going to find in that price range.

I ran Lineage for a good while, but I’ve switched to Ubuntu Touch more recently. It’s incredibly well supported by both operating systems and just from what I’ve seen, most FLOSS ROMs tend to support it. (One exception I know of is PostmarketOS, which last I heard didn’t support the 3a very well at all.) Being honest, Ubuntu Touch’s app availability is pretty abysmal. Writing apps for Ubuntu Touch seems more accessible than for Android, though (especially now with the bullshit that they’ve pulled with sideloading restrictions.)

One caveat: If you’re looking for 100% FLOSS, probably the 3a isn’t what you want. Even Ubuntu Touch uses a bunch of proprietary driver blobs. But again, the options for fully FLOSS-compatible phones seem pretty pricey.

Oh. Jesus. Yeah, you’re right. -.-

More like:

Cuba capitulating to Trump is no guarantee Trump won’t bomb them or something.

I really hope Democrats are smart enough not to count their chickens before they hatch. Everyone remembers going to bed on election night 2020 2016 expecting to wake up to news that the U.S. would soon have its first female president, right?

“Deserving”, “credit”, “blame”, “justice”, and related concepts are all collective hallucinations. We’re all observers riding around powerless in robotic meat chassis and the part of us that experiences every bad and good thing we’ll ever experience is completely disconnected from the part of us that makes any decisions. There’s no “justice” in making sure someone who committed some atrocity experiences negative consequences. The “justice” system should be focused solely on rehabilitation and protecting people – innocent or otherwise. Governments trying to be in the business of “punishing” people is misguided at best.

How soon until politicians start using this feature to take down shit they actually said in a way that makes it seem (at least to the sufficiently brainwashed) as if they hadn’t said it in the first place?

Are you familiar with “analogue horror”? It’s a genre of (mostly) video horror that uses video and audio filters that make it look as if it’s shot on a 1980s or 1990s video camera (or even a 1980s/1990s home camcorder.) That sort of style evokes a lot of nostalgia in 80s/90s kids.

It obviously doesn’t add fidelity to the image to use such filters that blur, add white noise, and add video artifacts like you might see from a malfunctioning VHS player. It removes fidelity.

But it adds a “quaint” and sometimes surreal feeling to the media, particularly for folks who have been exposed to a fair amount of that medium of video. Or even folks who have only been exposed to retro recreations of elements of that medium.

I’m sure something similar is already happening to the brains of the younger generation. They’re forming connections to AI slop. And some day, I have to imagine elements of AI-generated video content will be used – on purpose – in new media to evoke a sense of quaintness, nostalgia, and otherwise “mid-2020’s-ness”.

I don’t think they’ll exclusively use “GenAI” technologies (stable diffusion, Dall-E, etc) to give media that feeling either. It’s weird to think about now, but they’ll probably be make ways to add AI-slop elements in novel ways that the actual GenAI technologies aren’t capable of. (Again, making a connection with VHS-looking filters, I don’t imagine most people making things like analogue horror content today are using actual VHSs and vintage camcorders.)

So, I can agree with your premise, OP, but only with the slight addendum of “for now”.

I hate that this is what the mid-2020s is going to be remembered for, but I guess every decade has something to be embarrassed about. NFTs/blockchain/cryptocurrencies, Beanie Babies, The Macarena, gestures broadly at the 80s, etc. But great things have come out of all of those decades as well.

I would donate a kidney to see this done as a serious, gritty film.

“Oh shit, the economy’s tanking!”

“What do we do?”

“I know just the thing.”

dials phone

“Hello, New York Times? We need another criti-hype piece about AI. And this time we need absolutely everybody to invest more in AI, so make it a big one.”

I was at a farmer’s market with my mother, and there was a butcher there called “Raised Right”. We’d never bought from there before, but we looked at the menu and my mother got really excited when she saw they had tongue available. And I’ve got a pretty adventuresome palate, so I was down. We bought the tongue and cooked it up. Ate it with home-made tzatziki and stuff.

Pretty good stuff. A touch bland, maybe, but you’ll never find a more tender meat. And it’s really cheap. I guess just because people are squeamish.

We got tongue from that butcher several more times. It became a pretty regular thing.

Time passed, we got too lazy to get up early to go to the farmer’s market. We got a hankering for tongue again and found one at Walmart of all places.

It was disgusting. Mushy and stringy. Not at all the same as the farmer’s market butcher. We never did a Walmart tongue again.

Probably to be expected. Walmart’s not exactly the place where you would expect to get quality… well anything, really.

You’re not supposed to eat the skin of the tongue either.

It’s often that I find myself thinking “it’s pretty surprising how <insert software package source> hasn’t made headlines for distributing malware yet”.

I guess now I can mark one off my list.

My personal opinion. The “moderation team” isn’t a “team” in any sense of the word. VerbFlow/Proud Cascadian just keeps appointing people mods without any consent or advance notice. And sometimes he disappears for months. I happen to be one of the first mods appointed (which I think is why my name appears so high on the list in the sidebar), but I found out I was a mod by randomly visiting my profile page one day and seeing /c/fuck_ai there. There’s no forum where the mods get together to make/discuss moderation policy decisions or anything. The only rules off of which to make any moderation policy decisions are the sidebar and the pinned threads in /c/fuck_ai written by VerbFlow/Proud Cascadian, and they’re… not exactly precise or comprehensive. It’s hard to even really call them an enumeration of “the rules” in any sense.

All that to say, nothing I’ve said in this thread is the consensus of the moderation team because there is no consensus among the moderation team. If there was a feature to let me remove my moderator badge from comments, I’d utilize it. There is an option to “speak as moderator”, but I think that does… kindof the opposite of what I’d want? (Like it’d make the moderator badge bigger and meaner looking or something. I dunno.)

If I was the sole moderator, or if I was sure the other moderators would agree with this action, I might have considered whether any particular moderation action was warranted in this case, but the moderation situation for /c/fuck_ai is… well, to call it “disorganized” would be to greatly understate. Everybody who does any moderating just kindof goes off of their own judgement in the moment, and again the “rules” (if they can even be called that) are severely lacking as anything to base any decisions off of. There are things that are clearly ban-worthy, obviously. (Obvious blatant spam, CSAM, obvious trolls of various sorts, stuff that’s obviously 100% opposite of the aim of /c/fuck_ai.) But is all pro-AI sentiment disallowed in /c/fuck_ai? Speaking as someone who wants a community where that’s the case, I’d love to say yes, but I didn’t found the community and the one who did seems… relatively tolerant of pro-AI sentiment given some of the pinned posts. And the rest of the mod team doesn’t doesn’t have anywhere to weigh in on that question. So… I mean, I’m not going to be the one to start taking any sort of moderation actions to repel every hint of pro-AI sentiment without some level of assurance that I’d have the backing of the rest of the mods in doing so (even if on some level, I’d really love to just update the sidebar to make pro-AI sentiment expressly against the rules and then subsequently ban/delete all pro-AI sentiment and tell people to go create their own community for that if they want to just so I don’t have to see it here. 'Cuz I don’t. At all. But again, that’s really just… like… my opinion, man.)

I dunno. Maybe the mods who want to be mods (and I’m sure there are plenty of /c/fuck_ai mods who aren’t really interested in modding, because they weren’t asked before they were appointed) should get together and establish some way of establishing some consensus or something. I haven’t really had the bandwidth in general to do anything like that, but I think it’s fair to say it’s sorely needed.

Absent a feature to remove my mod badge on a per-comment basis, though, maybe I should either 1) try to initiate some effort to get the mods all on one page, 2) step down as mod, or 3) not comment in a way that might be interpreted as a statement of the consensus of the mod team. I haven’t thought through which one of those if any I should do.

I think you want /r/aicritihype.