2 years in and the worst part is how normalized everything with this administration feels. The human race is utterly fucked.

How Brave

I’m lowkey glad Andrew has found his ride. Seemed like accusations were coming out of the woodwork after the Alex Jones interview and Jan 6th. Now though, after he got the Ground News spot, he’s just been running it. Biden Interview, Ireland Trip, expose on Crypto, expose on looksmaxing.

I think we’ll see a lot more of him in the coming years.

“holy shit, I can actually get people to do literally anything.”

And for some, mostly the young, ignorant, and unfortunate, this is true!

Thiel is one of reddits early investors, but that has flown under the radar. Nobody talks about that.

I mean, is he still an investor? I feel like rich folx invest in a lot of things, but the thing they invest in doesn’t necessarily mean they own it, control it, or even that that thing is necessarily bad.

What is bullshit?

You don’t believe there are LLMs posing as citizens online? Or, you don’t believe that governments are trying to use that to push narratives, propaganda to destabilize citizens trust? Or, you don’t believe anyone would be gullible enough to fall for LLM targeted propaganda?

Rather than a trust by default model, we switch to a distrust by default model.

Correct, when anyone with a few thousand to spend can create botnets to mimic and mislead a nations citizens, that’s a problem. When Billionaires can create private datacenters to publish and promote their own propaganda anonymously, that’s a problem. The world is too connected and too illiterate to handle a free, open, anonymous internet safely IMO. It’s being taken advantage of by too many big players with little to no pushback.

Anonymous internet isn’t dead, but no country can saddle it, so for the safety of any Nation, the default needs to be gated in some way shape or form. Otherwise, every Nations citizens is at the mercy at how well any enemy Nation can utilize targeted propaganda in a heavily unregulated medium.

As a Nations Citizen, you either:

1). Handle your own shit - in which case there’s not much Nations can do to keep someone off anonymous, open internet.

2). Rely on your Government to provide and protect you from other Governments trying to destabilize forementioned Government.

The default needs to be #2 for the large majority.

We straight up don’t have better solutions to fight LLMs, botnets and weaponized misinformation on an open anonymous internet.

As a society, our laws, rules, and regulations, have all been worn down to the point were at now. We could have had nice things. If everyone got a decent education, we may have been able to weather the AI storm, but we that just didn’t happen. Everyone in modern society is neck deep in technology. From entertainment to social interactions to news to audio blips to doomscroll - it is prime for propaganda and misinformation, and has been for some time now. There has to be an answer for that. Short-term and long-term with how fast technology has been moving in the past 200 years.

What are the alternatives?

I don’t know - maybe it doesn’t matter if we Hadron Collider ourselves into a blackhole.

This is like, 90% of Lemmy news posts.

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On a sidenote, 3D printers have always felt like: Yo, let’s give plastic waste and plastic contaminants to the common man! In a perfect world we could regulate this kind of thing for the betterment of everyone.

In another 12 years, those will all be ChatGPT replies too!

Big outs to The Bloodhound Gang

Honestly, I thought for sure we would have had a permanent moon base by now. Something minimal but permanent and manned like the Space Station is. How foolish of me.

Americans are just so disconnected. That’s why we don’t see mass antiwar protests at the Whitehouse. The only mass protests we see are organized and planned in advance.

Those points are valid, but do you really think having better UI/UX is going to win them over customers when compared to Steam? Like, Steam is such a behemoth. Hypothetical, but if I was still a kid, and my brother had his whole library on Steam, where do you think I’d end up buying most my games? I think good UI/UX is only half the battle in this kind of competition.

Maybe, but EGS is also the driving force behind Unreal Engine 5, which despite everyone hating it really is a good engine.

Valve doesn’t even lease it’s engine out to other devs. I don’t even know if they’re still developing their game engine.

So I do give props to EGS for pushing game engines forward and making them available.

You’re describing how you would compete in a normal competition, but Steam has already had a decade to lock in it’s following. The competition is/was over.

I say that as a Steam user, there’s absolutely nothing a competitor can do to convince me to start buying / keeping my games on a platform outside Steam. Steam just has it all AND that’s where all my existing games already are. No amount of UI/UX improvements will convince me. No amount of sales will convince me because Steam will have the same game. Better cuts to developers doesn’t bring in repeat customers.

Like, Steam would need to take a nosedive in quality and care and I just don’t see that happening.

The argument here is not that Steam is, in the current flawed legal American sense, a monopoly, but that it is a monopoly in the sense that it has cornered enough of the gaming market that it could do very serious harm.

Note that “they’re not currently doing harm” is not a great counterargument here. When my neighbor buys a bazooka, I won’t be satisfied by “don’t worry I’m not currently using it”.

Absolutely this. I’m glad you were able to convey it in a way people understand.

Steam is a blackhole for PC gaming/gamers from a marketing perspective. They’ve capitalized on so much of the market, that once a person buys a game on Steam they are unlikely to buy the same game and/or even future games from a different but similar platform. It is in a sense, locking the consumer in and so many consumers are locked in. Nobody competed with Steam in the PC gaming market for an eternity and it’s not Steams fault at all.

Even if Steam went to absolute shit in the next 20 odd years they’ve pretty much guaranteed that I’ll be coming back to play all the games I’ve ever bought on there. Even if EGS or GoG improves their interface to compete with Steam, I’ve no reason to buy elsewhere (though do support GoG please).

Now to pose a question: How does a competitor even compete with Steam to capture even a % of the market?

Lemme knock out the obvious: Better UI and stronger community / community tools. I think these are a given. That being said, I do think EGS is going the correct route by investing in games / unique games and locking them into their platform. Everybody like free market and availability, but to compete against the goliath that is Steams marketbase, you gotta be the only place where to get some things. It sucks, but that’s what I can’t think of a better, to the point method for anyone to capture a similar market for growth, but what do you think?

O, how do I do that if I don’t vote?

For just $2,000 USD we can buy extraprivacy.com from GoDaddy and make a killing!