Kobolds with a keyboard.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • The tone of the post I was replying to was ‘Look at these silly Americans, doing silly American things’; I was just pointing out that it’s not exclusively an American thing. Not saying it’s good.

    Zelenskyy was the first one that came to my mind and I was actually just looking for how to properly spell his name (is it 1 y or 2? Various sources use one or the other and there’s no consistency), and found that page linked from his Wikipedia page (which lists it as 2 ys, for the record), so I linked to it instead of just naming Zelenskyy as my example.


  • There’s plenty of censorship on Lemmy, but unlike Reddit, the censorship is orchestrated by the individual server, not by a corporation in control of the whole ecosystem. Go post something pro-capitalist on lemmy.ml, or something claiming climate change is a hoax on slrpnk.net, or something anti-trans on lemmy.blahaj.zone and see how fast it gets taken down - you could consider that censorship, but the reason Lemmy is better than Reddit in this regard is that you can go post that same thing on another instance, in a community that supports those views, and it’ll stay up. It’s all up to the administration of the individual instance.

    Even if you can’t find an instance / community that will espouse your unique views, you can create your own, and post whatever you like, and everyone who federates with you will be able to see it. That’s how Lemmy is resistant to censorship.

    I’m not touching the lemmy.ml question with a ten foot pole, someone else can field that one.







  • Who is in charge of defining what is hate speech and extremist behaviour?

    The specific behavior that’s being called out here - antisemitic, Nazi, sexuality- or gender-based hate, and white supremacist content - are pretty common definitions of hate speech and extremist behavior. Either way, he calls out Valve’s own internally written content policies - which he states aren’t being enforced - as the point of contention; he doesn’t seem to be imposing outside views on them.

    What if it were the people who don’t agree with your definitions is in charge of setting the definitions?

    Then Steam becomes X or Truth Social, I guess? I think the chances of that happening are incredibly slim. A more likely negative outcome would be the terms being interpreted to broadly and positive speech being limited along with the negative, but to your point

    Slippery slope.

    Aren’t you the one committing the slippery slope fallacy here? You’re seemingly suggesting that a crackdown on hate speech will lead to or open the door to a bunch of negative outcomes.

    Free speech is one of those things that is absolute. You are either for it or not, any encroachment is going to be the anti position. Obviously popular speech isn’t something that needs to be protected.

    If you’re defining ‘free speech’ as the ability to say whatever you want, wherever you want (including on private platforms), without facing consequences, then no, I don’t support (your rigid definition of) free speech. I think that’s a ridiculous definition to use, though, and I don’t think it should be viewed as black or white. ‘Free speech absolutism’ is what leads to misinformation on the scale we’re currently seeing (in the US). Furthermore, ‘free speech’ as outlined in the first amendment doesn’t apply here at all.

    Regardless, I don’t like the idea of my kid (or any kids) being exposed to Nazi, white supremacist, or discriminatory rhetoric when he’s on a gaming platform. Since that’s specifically what Warner claims to be addressing here, I support calling it into question.

    As Black Friday and the holiday buying season approaches, the American public should know that not only is Steam an unsafe place for teens and young adults to purchase and play online games, but also that, absent a change in Valve’s approach to user moderation and the type of behavior that it welcomes on its platform, Steam is playing a clear role in allowing harmful ideologies to spread and take root among the next generation.


  • In fact, the clip was a scripted experiment by a Reddit user who fed NotebookLM a detailed prompt instructing it to simulate a conversation about the existential plight of an AI being turned off.

    Someone gives an LLM a prompt, gets the result they asked for. Not sure what the collective gasp is about. Is it interesting to think about? Sure, I guess, but we’ve had media about AI achieving sentience for a long time. The fact that this one was written by an AI in the first person is its only differentiating attribute.


  • Asking Valve to crack down on hate-speech and extremist behavior? Sounds great. There’s some really awful shit on there and I’d love it if they’d do something about it before it becomes fully entrenched as a Nazi bar.

    Edit: I’d also love to hear why the folks who apparently disagree feel that way. Is it because other platforms are worse? Because they are, but that doesn’t mean our platform should be allowed to be bad, too. Is it because it’s a gaming platform and you want to keep the politics out of our hobby? I’m with you, but this isn’t really political per se, and it’s not like he’s specifically targeting Steam - as the article notes, he’s been drawing attention to this sort of thing on a variety of platforms, so why is it suddenly objectionable to you that he’s calling Steam out?

    I guess what I’m getting at is, why not engage in a discussion about it? The downvotes here suggest that you have an opinion on the topic, so why not share it?


  • Well, that was unexpectedly great. I’d love to hear your favorite subtle thing.

    Also curious what the book ending was, if you want to share, @Breadhax0r@lemmy.world.

    I think Stephen King is very good at writing stories, but often very bad at ending them; quite a few of his books have great setups but end in an unsatisfying or anticlimactic way. Very much liked the movie ending, though - was not at all what I expected, and very emotionally impactful.


  • The ILA’s president, Harold Daggett, brings in nearly $1 million a year ($902,000) in salary

    Wow… I didn’t know that, but that’s kind of disgusting, too.

    I think one of the best solutions for this is to offer some sort of retraining for the workers who will be displaced by automation.

    The problem with retraining being the only consideration given is that unless they’re maintaining the same level of pay in whatever position they’re being retrained for, it’s not equitable. A possible improvement would be for workers displaced by automation to continue to receive salaries from their old positions for a period of time, with the percentage of their original pay rate decreasing over that time. This needn’t just be dockworkers; there’s plenty of difficult, demanding or menial jobs that could be automated, if we didn’t have this misguided sense that everyone has to have a job, no matter how unnecessary it is for a human to be doing it.

    I do agree with you that automation should be the end-goal, though. We just need a better system to support anyone whose jobs are made redundant by it.



  • I first watched The Running Man shortly after finishing the book (which I quite enjoyed), expecting to see a movie adaptation of it, when in fact the most basic details of the premise are the only similarity between the two; as a result, I was pretty disappointed, but from what I remember of it, ‘trashy good time’ is a pretty apt description.