awooo

That's really the thing with Steam in general, from a consumer perspective it's a very good and honest service, it actually adds to the experience of playing games instead of being an annoyance.

A lot of other stores feel like only shells made around popular titles to promote more stuff and lock people into using them. More launchers won't solve the monopoly of Steam, you'll just end up with as many as there are streaming services.

That's not the case for GOG and Itch, but there you don't get the same level of experience.

Hmm I think my main concern would be lack of kernel/firmware updates, running something like postmarketOS could partly solve that and still be nearly as easy to set up (just unlock and flash a prebuilt image)

But firmware is still almost entirely dependent on the vendor, since it's all signed and unpatchable.

Next issue would be lack of connectivity on a lot of phones, which have gone backwards and include USB 2.0 now. WiFi is an option, but less stable, I personally decided to just go 100Mbps and suffer.

As for the battery, it would help a lot if phones were designed to boot without one and they were removable, it all worked well for about half a year until I found out I had a spicy pillow and had to replace it with direct power to the board, which made the whole setup much less elegant and required soldering.

It all comes down to how devices are designed in the end. If someone took the time to make a computer instead of just a phone, and included features that make it useful past its initial life that aren't that popular (display output, microsd, headphone jack), mainlined all the drivers and maintained firmware, that would be a different story.

But that's not a very profitable model, because it's all about reducing waste and thus selling less. A lot needs to change.

Yeah, it's probably worth it to slightly push back against these people irl, because there is a chance that's the signal they need to change, but online they can just copy your responses around and use them to further their crap. They probably love getting attention inside furry spaces like this one.

Best option is to ignore them, or if you must interact, troll around so it's at least fun for you instead of being exhausting.

Not sure myself, I'm trying to get into some IT jobs (not necessarily programming) that aren't anywhere near social media and are more focused on internet infrastructure, but getting any job is hard when you're starting out and I would like to avoid the evil ones at all cost.

But just as there is no ethical consumption in capitalism, there's no consensual work, so the values of wherever you end up working won't align with yourself or the other workers fully, it's just a question of degree.

Not official, but who cares, Xenia is the best!

Assuming you want to follow from Mastodon, you'd have to replace ! with an @ or just paste the link. Though I wouldn't recommend it as you'll get the replies to every post boosted onto your timeline :/

Yeeeh I fucking hate tankies...

They're just like nazis, but they're almost always competent trolls who know how to be annoying.

I feel like this is one of those cases where whatever you do it will end up disadvantaging at least one group. Is there a good solution? I don't know.

Being politically unbiased would mean sometimes being inaccurate, just to represent "both sides", as we seem to have made basic facts about the world into political arguments. This fundamentally goes against the goal of making a chatbot that is truthful and useful (imagine if it declined to answer any question that had any sort of relation to politics).

Also as much as some centrists would want to disagree, centrism is itself a political position, so if ChatGPT scored right in the middle of the Overton window, that would give it the effect of pulling both sides together, it would still be influencing our politics.

And yeah, left wing is very relative here, being a leftist myself I find ChatGPT to be painfully liberal, with a corporate wash added on top of that.

A fursona is a better investment, benefits include:

• cute (even when you deny it)
• everyone loves it
• can be whatever you want, lots of choices
• expression of your inner self
• versatile
• can't really be stolen
• inner emotional support
• increases in personal value as you grow with it
• won't lie to you about making free capitalism coins™

Nice! That works way better than I expected!

I-I want!

It's definitely useful for exploring ideas, I recently used AI-generated images as reference for an artist and it helped me get my thoughts across. I can't wait to see the final result of it!

It's probably also good for adding illustration to text where someone otherwise wouldn't be able to afford it or spend the time, adding detail to your own art and so on.

The worrying thing to me is how fast it can create all sorts of images, and combined with LLMs and other tools even be automated. I could totally see entire feeds being populated by personalized AI art, stories, and music, let's not forget that's largely dictated by algorithms already if someone uses things like Spotify.

So one day it might get extremely difficult to tell if what you're looking at was even created by someone on their own, or if AI had any significant role in it. This would make it impossible for regular artists to compete under the current economic model, which to be fair needs to go, but it will still cause suffering in the meantime. Even beyond capitalism, people want share their work for others to appreciate, and if every channel of communication is flooded it's going to be pretty difficult to get noticed among the noise. If AI can create stunning images it might also depreciate art in the eyes of others, because to get to a very similar result using AI could take a lot less effort if the technology further improves, so they might see it as just a commodity or "pretty picture" and not think about artists at all.