This is the book that introduced me to the Chinese Room thought experiment and is the first thing I began to think of when the recent AI trend started to make a splash.

Peter Watts is great and though it’s not related to the topic at hand, I cannot recommend Starfish enough. Dark, haunting, and psychological. (It’s apparently part of a series but I never carried on)

See response ^

Last post and I’m done here, but let me explain the post and my response:

Someone is going to make a long post about how women is being portrayed as sexual objects in games and will absolutely refuse to acknowledge this post.

Poster is implying that someone (leftist, feminist, anyone they don’t agree with) will come in here and complain about how sexual this is. Rather than expressing any genuine sentiment or opinion of their own, they assumed one for someone else, a strawman to bat at. It’s a dogwhistle, an attempt to bait out and rehash old Gamergate shit. I mean, I do have to assume because again, I cannot overstate how lazy and insincere it is to make a post like this that does not express your own opinion and implies someone else’s.

The primary point I was trying to make with the overall post is that it’s not sex or sexuality that is the problem. Didn’t Larian release a mainstream game where you could have sex as a bear? Look, the ORIGINAL Twitter post is the model indicating how proud she is, I think we can very confidently say she does not feel like she’s being treated as a sexual object in this context and most people can see that. OP cannot distinguish the difference between sexuality in videogames and treating women as sexual objects. That’s gross and they need to sit and think on that for a LONG while, preferably before ever talking to a woman again.

EDIT: Just listen to women. If a woman says, “I feel like I’m being objectified”, you stop. If a woman says, “Damn, I look sexy!” you say, “Hell yeah!”

You know, fair enough, you caught me in a “think of the children” argument and I never expected to be the one here. But I stand by my point. And wash my hands of the matter.

Returning to the queer games I mentioned earlier, those are by and large indie games. And quite adult/NSFW. Not strictly by nature of being queer to be clear, simply having LGBTQ+ representation doesn’t make it adult. Just being in that space, those are the themes they choose to explore. Do you see the nuance here?

We’re mammals, we stand at the pinnacle of human technology and evolution, man and woman hand-in-hand shouting, “Boobs! Boobs! Boobs! Boobs! Boobs!” (or butt, whatever, I’ve made my stance known). The boobs and butts belong in specific times/places and when that lines up properly, let us exalt them. But can we at least agree that the time/place is at a bare minimum NOT everywhere all the time?

Bringing up these tired arguments forfeits your place at the table. But even further, these are all mainstream corporate interests regarding Marvel and Disney and property/brand characters. Let it go. Fuck them into a hole in the ground, fill it with cement, and leave the grave unmarked. These arguments exist because we choose to exalt these properties instead, of which there are limited spaces in a roster, dying for “mainstream” representation of everyone’s preferred “thing”. Just go play an indie that suits you. You’ll find weirder ones that hyper focus your own fetishes and fixations to a point where it’s almost terrifying.

So tired of it being 2025 and these posts making it to Lemmy. Have any of you ever actually played some of the queer games out there? I’ve played lesbian games made by women mostly targeting an audience for women that are so spicy they’d set your skin on fire. It’s not the sexuality that’s an issue, it’s a larger cultural conversation about where these things belong, how they’re viewed by the masses, and the impression it creates on children who this is ostensibly for too, I guess? Teens? Still impressionable.

Grow up and go play an h-game in your own privacy and don’t make it everyone else’s problem. And stop laundering your opinion with “someone is going to make a post”. You made the post, you brought the trash into the house, and the (current) 9 upvotes shows you’re giving it space to breath and quite frankly, it reeks.

EDIT: no opinion on post, I don’t care how caked she is. If I were that actress, I’d honestly be proud, too.

I remember we used to house a bunch of balls together, just when they were young and didn’t mind as much. My favorite thing about them was any time you’d touch one and it would panic, they’d all tense up, so you ended up with this snake ball with 5 heads and 5 tails. I love them, they’re adorable.

I was brought up on this harsh truth by my parents just like a lot of people, I assume, but I no longer believe it.

Sure, I believe we all owe it to ourselves and others to put hard work into the system, but there should be an inherent sense of fairness (or call it equality if you will, I don’t want to get bogged down in the tedium of definitions right now). If the system is unfair, we should be working to make it more fair. It’s not satisfactory to simply leave it as it is, broken, and tell everyone else to deal with it when they may not have the resources to do so.

I’m not saying you’re wrong. I say I refuse. I do not believe.

If you’ve got Logitech, check out Piper (which is really just a GUI wrapper for libratbag). After a lot of searching, this ended up being the solution I went with.

EDIT: pulled up the link but then forgot to paste it, sorry! https://github.com/libratbag/piper

KDE is Windows 98, full of fun customizations, but unpolished in odd ways no matter what you do.

Absolutely perfect. And part of why I’ve grown to love it.

You know I’m honestly not sure. Mostly good I think?

Sidestepping the issue entirely of the act itself - strictly speaking more about the news cycle around it. I don’t know that it needed much more extensive, exhausting coverage. Just given the nature of the news currently, you gotta admit, surprising right? I’m not even trying to imply any sort of conspiracy about why it wasn’t more popular. I’m just saying, I think news cycle would’ve latched on harder if they could have, but the public gagged and said no thanks, we’re simply not interested, causing them to shift focus.

I’m still absolutely flabbergasted at how quickly we all moved on from Trump literally getting clipped in an attempt on his life.

They tried to muster some outrage and solidarity, but most of us just shrugged and went, “Damn. Oh well, maybe next time.”

This is 100% my cat. She’s an adorable gremlin who I can tell absolutely loves me, but she’s also figured out exactly how long my reach is and will always settle down on a nearby piece of furniture JUST out of touch. Little rascal.

All these “why are people using Bluesky and not Mastodon” topics are starting to give me a headache. You’ve been told and on some level, I have to assume you understand the reasons, but are simply unwilling to address them. When people say, “it’s difficult to use” instead of understanding why they think that way, you just dismissively wave your hands and say, “no it’s not”.

If you want people to use Mastodon, you need to SHOW people the power of federation while HIDING all the rough bits. People want to go to where the friends, writers, artists, scientists, etc. they want to follow are and sign up for an account there. Simple as. In this way, they very much want at least the appearance of centralization. I don’t want to have to get balls deep in an instance’s politics to understand their moderation, who they’re federated with, if they have the funds to operate into the foreseeable future, and how to migrate my data if any of those things goes sideways.

Your initial post and response here describe my position as well.

Simply put, to follow individuals, you have to be where those individuals are. On Lemmy here in looking for topics and discussion, those are much easier to decentralize.

1000% this. Without giving away too much information, I work(ed) for a cloud provider (not one of the big ones, there are a surprising number of smaller ones in the field you’ve probably never heard of before). I quit this week to take a position in local government with some quaint, on-prem setup.

1. We were always understaffed for what we promised. Two guys per shift and if one of us took vacation; oops, lol. No extra coverage, just deal.
2. Everyone was super smart but we didn’t have time to work the tickets. Between crashes, outages, maintenance, and horrendous tickets that took way too much work to dig into, there was just never enough time. If you had a serious problem that took lengthy troubleshooting, good luck!
3. We over-promised on support we could provide, often taking tickets that were outside of infrastructure scope (guest OS shit, you broke your own server, what do you want me to do about it?) and working them anyway to please the customer or forwarding them directly to one of our vendors and chaining their support until they caught wise and often pushed back.
4. AI is going to ruin Support. To be clear, there will always be support and escalation engineers who have to work real problems outside the scope of AI. However without naming names, there’s a big push (it’ll be everyone before too long, mark it) for FREE tier support to only chat with AI bots. If you need to talk to a real human being, you gotta start dishing out that enterprise cash.

Mix all that together and then put the remaining pressure on the human aspect still holding things up and there’s a collapse coming. Once businesses get so big they’re no longer “obligated” to provide support, they’ll start charging you for it. This has always been a thing of course, anyone who’s worked enterprise agreements knows that. But in classic corpo values, they’re closing the gap. Pay more for support, get less in return. They’ll keep turning that dial until something breaks catastrophically, that’s capitalism baby.

Check out https://www.giuspen.net/cherrytree/, lightweight note-taking app with interesting scripting function built in.

Even if that’s not your cup of tea, it has the option to save your notebook to a single sqlite file, so I take that as good enough proof it’ll work for your similar purposes as well.

Other backers include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

WTF, no, this is worse in every way. So instead of being involved with the people and topics I choose, it’s instead left up to an algorithm? Somehow even more opaque than usual because of AI involvement.

This isn’t solving any problem, this is yet another mask to push content in front of people.

So it could possibly be construed to “Microsoft’s Dirty Operating System”, yeah?

The rollout already hit me and passed. I use Chrome at work with uBlock mostly because it’s mandated and I burnt through all the warnings and videos were starting to not play. I thought that was that, I was too lazy to fix it on my work PC but a day later uBlock updated and it hasn’t been an issue since.

Procrastinating wins again, I never took direct action. I don’t want to get too hopeful, but I think even Google is going to have more trouble with this than they anticipate

There is a very meaningful difference between humane, highly regulated animal testing and what Musk is doing. Compounding this is the feeling that Musk’s high profile is what’s letting him get away with this in the first place. He wants to slap his name and face on everything for the credit when it’s good, be gets to be the lightning rod when it’s not.