MudMan

In that it’s mostly a merch ad hidden behind a clickbait title.

So I guess it’s a good test for that sort of “just read the headline” response.

It’s been a rough few days and I think I may be coming around. What hope is there to parse AI misinformation if people can’t parse a Reddit-like link aggregator?

I may be done with this place at this point. It’s just all bad. If not the whole Internet, certainly the whole of social media.

Yeeeeeah, the headline in isolation is a bit misleading and unfortunately this seems in line with some recent Nintendo moves where they go after people who slipped on something adjacent.

I have no idea how things work wherever this guy lives, but over here soliciting remuneration would be the difference between this being a problem or not.

That said, I still hope they lose this and I have so many serious questions about how Reddit wouldn’t be liable if the content is illegal and they didn’t do anything to moderate it. This is a weird one and it’s worth keeping an eye on, although I would imagine Nintendo is hoping the lawsuit itself acts as a deterrent regardless.

Yeah, but… this isn’t that.

You’re literally saying “well, anecdotal impressions say this, so I refute this study that says something else”.

We don’t like that. That’s not a thing we like to do.

And for the record, as these things go, the article linked here is pretty good. I’ve seen more than one worse example of a study being reported in the press today.

They provide a neutral headline that conveys the takeaway of the study, they provide context about companies mentioning AIs on layoffs, they provide a link to the full study and they provide a separate study that yields different, seemingly contradicting results.

I mean, this is as close to best case scenario for reporting on a study as you can get in mainstream press. If nothing else, kudos to The Register. The bar was low but they went for personal best anyway.

Man, the problem with giving up all the wonky fashy social media is that when you’re in an echo chamber all the weird misinformation and emotion-driven politics are coming from inside the house. It’s been a particularly rough day for politically-adjacent but epistemologically depressing posts today.

So the report itself argues there is a need for better data, and it seems fairly level headed, but…

…what’s with people being mad about it?

I say this a lot, but there seems to be a lot of weird anti-hype where people want this AI stuff to work better than it does so it can be worse than it is, and I’m often confused by it. The takeaway here is that most jobs don’t seem to be behaving that differently so far if you look at the labor market in aggregate. Which is… fine? It’s not that unexpected? The AI shills were selling that entire industries would be replaced by AI overnight, and most sensible people didn’t think so or argued that the jobs would get replaced with AI wrangler tasks because this thing wouldn’t completely automate most tasks in ways that weren’t already available.

Which seems to be most of what’s going on. AI art is 100% not production-ready out of the gate, AI text seems to be a bit of a wash in terms of saving time for programmers and even in more obvious industries like customer service we already had a bunch of bots and automation in place.

So what’s all the anger? Did people want this to be worse? Do they just want to vibe with the economy being bad in a way they can pin on something they already don’t like and maybe politics is too heavy now? What’s going on there?

No worries, I appreciate that.

FWIW, I don’t really care about downvotes either way. I am clearly not here to pander, with my “NUANCED POINT IS NUANCED, YOU NAUGHTY, NAUGHTY CHILDREN” persona.

I mean, convenience is a factor.

And while Steam doesn’t typically sign exclusive stuff they are known to use store positioning as a bargaining chip for preferential treatment. You’d think Konami would be above needing that, but who knows.

Anyway, good game, whatever the reason for the delay. Someone who is on the fence about getting it on Steam go get it on GOG instead to make up for them tricking me.

It’s come and gone a couple times. There was a period where a bunch of big games did simultaneous launches, then a big period of drought where a few large publishers withdrew entirely from new releases and recently a few isolated AA and AAA releases started popping back up. I wonder if it’s driven by how much effort they can put into outreach or something like that.

Yeah, it sucks for Silent Hill especially because a) it’s super expensive, at 80 bucks on PC, and b) I was on the fence about getting it at launch and only jumped in a few days ago. I’m just out of the refund window and… hey, I like it so far, but I don’t like it 160 bucks’ worth.

Whoever is screwing with GOG screwed them out of my purchase and I’m starting to think that not buying anything on Steam at all if I can help it may be the way to go.

Boycotts, yes.

“I was on the fence about buying this and I want to sound engaged on the Internet, may still get it later” voting-with-your-wallet nonsense? No.

Alright, this is great, but also people need to start confirming GOG drops before the Steam launch. I check for GOG launches whenever I buy a game, but just this month there’s been a couple of big games that got stealth GOG launches just after their Steam release and it’s been extremely frustrating. I don’t know if it’s a publisher thing to work around pirates waiting for DRM free versions or Steam being dicks about it, but it’s infuriating.

Honestly, even at the time that entire “benefit of the doubt” garbage read like some combination of active collaboration and outright denial. It’s nuts that Trump rode it to a second term, honestly. As late as the week of the election people were having haughty conversations about the lack of ties between Project 2025 and the Trump campaign and those morons still elected them again because Harris was too weak on Israel or whatever.

I mean, I’d normally not assume an entire culture is incapable of parsing reality, but there are still supposed American leftists going “they’re both the same” on this site right now.

Which reminds me I’m trying to cut off American politics from my media menu as much as possible, so maybe it’s time to mute this stuff and move on with my day, because man, what a group of weirdos.

It is absolutely fair to criticise them for the stuff they are actually doing, yes.

That’s why I wrote:

I mean, that’s all really bad. Why do we need the hyperbolic “Google is killing Open Source” framing? The real thing is bad enough and it doesn’t make me show up to argue about it. Plus you could have accurately stated “Google kills anonymous apps, threatening alternate app stores” and that would have been 100% accurate and just as horrifying.

Again, there is no need to slippery slope this crap, because it’s bad now. So why even point out how little you trust Google will do the bad thing they said they are doing for 100% real and imagine a worse thing they’ll do later, even if it’s likely that they will? All it does is invite pedants like me to argue with you, which can then be weaponized by Google to say you’re deliberately misrepresenting the issue.

I know. And I didn’t defend Google’s ownership of your phone.

See how annoying that is?

The second person is rhetorical there. I’m saying whether you believe that in all caps and bold letters is entirely irrelevant to whether the video title is misrepresenting the issue.

I don’t care who you trust, honestly.

I have no patience for slippery slope arguments to justify poor reporting or misinformation.

For what it’s worth, I do think there is a slippery slope and it’s reasonable to expect things to tighten down the line without regulatory intervention.

But that doesn’t matter, because this is bad even if nothing like that happens down the line, and even if Google can’t be trusted the coverage is misrepresenting the issue.

Man, I hate the Internet.

Cool.

So title the video like that and don’t misrepresent it and I’ll be here agreeing with you.

“But I disagree with what Google is doing” is a non sequitur here.

I mean… yeah, but also I’m very well on the record disagreeing with that and calling Trump a fascist since day one. Not that I expect you dig through my online presence to corroborate it.

I’m not American. The presence of fascists in US politics has been a commonly accepted truth in anybody anywhere left of demochristians for half a century. This isn’t “hindsigh”, it’s “I recommend always reading what people say about your country in foreign newspapers”.

And for the record, we got fascists, too. We’re just less shy about calling them that, maybe? Certainly don’t have any delusions about ourselves in terms of being inoculated from fascism at a fundamental level. The idea that Americans would have survived Bush, let alone the overtly fascist Trump without noticing or acknowledging it seems outright bizarre to me, but there you go.

I mean, Stephen Miller isn’t even shy about it. Even if you are the kind of European that would argue Berlusconi wasn’t a fascist and could maaaaaybe entertain Trump is on that same level of “just horny criminal idiot” you surely would have had zero questions after hearing five minutes of Dracula Hitler back in 2016.

What? Everybody thought fascism would come from the inside in the US. Even if you slept through the first Trump term this has been a thing since the 1930s. Surely during the Cold War, and definitely for everybody outside the US itself, but… I mean, were you alive during the whole “war on terror” nonsense?

Had the post-Reagan, post 9-11 US fascists successfully brainwashed even left of centre normies into thinking that was not the case? Were Americans that oblivious?

You guys keep misrepresenting things I disagree with and make me fact check them, then argue with me as if I’m agreeing with them.

Google isn’t killing Open Source Android apps, although it may very well kill F-Droid. Open source devs can definitely still register and provide their apps as a standalone APK.

This does open the door to Google refusing to grant an account to people they don’t like, although they haven’t done that yet, and it should be noted that as they present it once you have a dev account you can just sign as many apps as you want.

The real eff you from Google to F-Droid here is that they are presenting two types of accounts you can use for this: dev accounts, meant to publish on Google Play (although potentially you could just… not do that) and student/personal accounts that are free and they claim are meant for hobbyists. I’ve heard rumbings online about what the dividing line will be between them, so that may be a functional workaround for anybody who doesn’t want to be on Google Play, but I haven’t seen anything specific from Google on it other than “it’s coming”. It does stand out that “I’m an Open Source dev who doesn’t care about Google Play” is not part of the equation here, though, and “I’m F-Droid and I intend to build and verify a TON of apks” is also not accounted for at all.

And of course there now will be a direct paper trail between any signed app and an organization or individual, which is a legal liability issue for a number of app developers. At least on phones. Non-Google certified devices (think Android SBCs and handhelds) should still be able to load unsigned APKs, although those are residual.

I mean, that’s all really bad. Why do we need the hyperbolic “Google is killing Open Source” framing? The real thing is bad enough and it doesn’t make me show up to argue about it. Plus you could have accurately stated “Google kills anonymous apps, threatening alternate app stores” and that would have been 100% accurate and just as horrifying.

It’s a “me” problem in that “I” think the indies vs AAA lines are increasingly inconsistent and nonsensical. “I” also find the concept of “pirating against” to be extremely disingenuous, which is why there is a whole post explaining that after the line you quoted.

Absolutely not the case. See, what’s happening is you went “will somebody think of the 25 year old children”, I said that’s a disingenuous argument and you went “will somebody think of the 25 year old children” again. My not engaging with the disingenuous argument isn’t “light on arguments and refutations”, it’s me refusing to argue the issue on the disingenuous terms you are presenting.

Which is an argument I find pointless in the first place because my point wasn’t about… 25 year old children being seduced by sweet, sweet sports gambling, it was that the Pew survey results were presented in a surprisingly skewed way that is representative of that exact “think of the children” falacy, regardless of the merits of the argument.