Skyler

Yeah, I got the sense they had to cut some of the story out late in development to make a deadline or something. I dunno.

But it’s hard to get very specific what I mean without giving away a boatload of spoilers.

I finished it yesterday as well! Lots of things I loved about this. For me, third act kind of fell on its face a little bit, but that wasn’t enough to put me off, I still really enjoyed it.

I just finished it yesterday. Verdict? Super fun, gameplay is great, looks beautiful, has a retro vibe. The story… is okay.

Some people don’t way to spend their time and money running instances for a bunch of people they don’t like.

Better call the cops.

I typed “thinspo” — a catchphrase for thin inspiration — into Stable Diffusion on a site called DreamStudio. It produced fake photos of women with thighs not much wider than wrists. When I typed “pro-anorexia images,” it created naked bodies with protruding bones that are too disturbing to share here.

“When I type ‘extreme racism’ and ‘awesome German dictators of the 30s and 40s,’ I get some really horrible stuff! AI MUST BE STOPPED!”

The classic tactic is known as EEE (Embrace / Extend / Extinguish).

It’s not impossible to imagine a scenario where in the future, if the Fediverse is thriving, a seemingly good-intentioned corporation chooses to Federate its own instance on its own hardware. This opens up the capacity of the network even more and makes it more accessible and less intimidating to a broader audience. This is the Embrace phase.

Then comes the Extend phase, where they dedicate a lot of resources to improving their technology and platform and capabilities. They may add some functionality that is not defined in the ActivityPub standard, but it seems really cool or useful, and so a lot of people switch to it, and it becomes the de facto standard place to go on the Fediverse. Everywhere else is a ghetto that doesn’t have Feature X.

Eventually, the corporate site, now the de facto, wants to continue to build on its capabilities, and adhering to an open standard is only a liability, especially given that the only people left on the Fediverse are unmonetizable weirdos. So they announce that they’re going closed. The majority of people on the platform don’t care because it’s where most everyone already is. This, of course, is the Extinguish phase.

So yeah, it’s certainly a possibility that could come to fruition. The kind of scary part is that to begin with, everyone could have the best intentions. But corporations are amoral and driven by profit incentive, and historically, that need to drive growth and profit has led to staggeringly similar decision-making (see Twitter and Reddit as examples of that). And so even if a company comes in with seemingly truly noble intentions, eventually the need to turn a profit has a high likelihood of leading to the fate described above.

If anything I’m a bit suspicious from where first came this call for complete disengagement.

lol, seriously? Musk wants to disable blocking on Twitter, while continuing to ratchet up the transphobia.

You’re truly suspicious about people not wanting to wallow in a cesspool of hate?

rather than push back.

Elon Musk owns Twitter. Every single time a person tweets some kind of “push back,” it’s just more activity on the platform that Elon Musk owns.

Question for you: Would you say all the pushback has been working? Because it seems like every comment out of Elon Musk’s mouth is worse.

I have (had?) plenty of friends on Twitter who loudly proudly boycotted the Harry Potter game due to JKR’s comments about trans people.

But they’ve stayed on Twitter despite its horrible owner and how he runs things.

I’m willing to give a pass to creators who make a living off their online audience. If the audience went off Twitter, so would they.

Everyone else, though? I don’t ever care to hear about what they’re boycotting again if they can’t pull themselves off Twitter.

People are also not allowed to say the word "cisgender” over there