Xiphorang

The old rich guys in charge only care about getting richer and can’t stand to be even mildly inconvenienced or lose so much as a penny. The rank and file think nobody should ever be able to tell them what to do. That’s pretty much it. If people say, “We must do this for the good of the planet,” they’ll do the exact opposite because, “Fuck you! You don’t tell me what to do.”

Also racism. That always turns out to be at the root of even the most unrelated seeming things somehow.

I do not understand why Google has become so ossified. They must know they’re strangling their own business, surely? Do they somehow think they’re irreplaceable? That no one will ever build a better search engine? And the best they can come up with is AI-generated search nonsense? As if that’s going to help.

Stop trying to make maximum profits for minimum effort, fire whatever useless exec is in charge over there, and get someone who actually wants to fix things before someone eats your lunch, Google!

He may very well sincerely believe everything he’s saying, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. Perhaps he’s been lied to, or perhaps he’s just crazy. Who knows?

Yeah, I got that, but this was the particular part I was reacting to:

“He continued, “And applied to AI? That’s a terrifying possibility. Terrifying. Not least because as AI systems go into the defense infrastructure, ultimately they’ll be charged with nuclear weapons and if we allow people to say that that’s a separate entity from the person’s whose wielding, programming, putting AI into use, then we’re doomed.”

Possibly I misread it.

Excuse me, what? I fervently hope nobody is considering letting an “AI” get anywhere near anything nuclear! Despite whoever happens to be in the White House at any particular time, the upper echelons of the US military seem to be generally sane and smart enough to know that allowing glorified predictive text to control city-destroying superweapons is a bad idea.

AIs aren’t anything of the sort. They’re not intelligent at all, and we should stop calling them that. It just gives people weird, unrealistic ideas about their capabilities.

Exactly. To look at the mind-numbing vastness of just our galaxy let alone the hundreds of billions of others and think we’re the only ones is the height of hubris. Are they here zipping around in little silver balls that defy all known laws of physics kidnapping hillbillies and mutilating cattle? No, that’s conspiracy theory nonsense. Maybe the US government is being overzealous in classifying things, but that doesn’t mean it’s aliens, even if some guy with security clearance said, “Yeah, they’re totally real. Trust me, guys.”

Yeah, but we used to call it the information superhighway and the worldwide web. Internet IS the good term. It may well be that fediverse sticks around so long that we all get used to it, but at the moment, eh. I think if someone somewhere suggests a good alternative, we’ll all likely jump on it.

I’m still using Reddit for some stuff, but much less than I was. I have no doubt this will fully replace it at some point just as Mastodon has completely replaced Twitter for me.

Most flavours of metal, hard rock, punk, some blues stuff like SRV and Gary Moore. Basically, if it has loud guitars in it, I’m there.

While you’re correct, it’s just a clunky term. I think some other way to refer to the whole thing will probably come along soon, and in a few years, people will regard saying fediverse the same way we look back on people talking about “surfing the information superhighway” or whatever.

There’s more than that too. Like Pixelfed for images and Funkwhale for music streaming.

Check out this Feditips thread for a bunch of stuff.

Yeah, except machine learning is also another bubble which I expect is going to burst pretty soon, so who knows where things will end up after that.

If you liked Shadowrun Returns, I’d definitely recommend the sequels - Dragonfall and Shadowrun: Hong Kong. That first one was more of a proof of concept kind of thing. It was fun, but it was more about showing the gameplay could work. The other two are a massive improvement in the level of storytelling.

I say sequels, but they’re not actually related story or character wise. They can be played in any order. I’d say Dragonfall has the better story and Hong Kong has the better characters, but they’re both great and well worth your time.

This is what I was coming here to recommend. April is a great character, and the series is really good. The first is very much old-school point & click, with the sometimes highly obscure puzzles that entails, but the story is excellent.

Definitely. Control is an absolutely fantastic game!

The navy uses wired controllers to operate periscopes, not wireless ones, and not for anything mission critical. Although I think I remember reading some military drones are or were at one point using controllers because they’re easy to train people on, but those are unmanned.

I’m sure the community is perfectly fine, but the name is gross and awful. It’s the reason I never went there on Reddit and probably won’t here either, and I don’t imagine I’m the only one. It’s not welcoming at all. It seems normal if you’re used to it, I guess, but having a Nazi reference in your name is not a good look. You’d be better off ditching it now you have the opportunity imo.

The Wire. It really is the greatest TV show ever made like people say it is.

Over on Mastodon, there are relays you can sub to to help populate things. I don’t think there’s any such functionality in this corner of the fediverse yet, but it’s surely only a matter of time.

It got dropped by Syfy after three seasons and picked up again by Amazon for a further three seasons. Bezos was apparently a fan. They didn’t renew it after that, but it ended in a decent place, closing out a lot of the plot lines while leaving the door open for more. There’s some stuff setting up future plot threads that they don’t get to address, but it mostly won’t leave you hanging. It’s well worth finishing.

I won’t spoil anything, but adapting the final trilogy would involve some difficult changes and be very expensive, so I suppose it’s understandable that they didn’t keep it going, as much as that sucks. Maybe one day. There’s comics and a Telltale game coming out, so there’s still life in it yet. And you can always read the books.