They pretended Insticts was a port, but as I understand it, almost nothing is actually the same. Especially with the feral powers that make instincts what it is

Warcraft 2 is the only one I’ve played.

I wanted to play 3, but first my computer was too old, then it was too new, then blizzard destroyed it.

Far Cry instincts is still the best.

Competition usually isn’t bad. Unfortunately, Apple has a tendency to not only be terribly anti-consumer, but also tends to be a trendsetter. They do shitty things, and other companies learn from their example. Thus, the competition becomes a race to the bottom.

Lying about testing a product in order to get people to buy it so you can get your affiliate revenue sounds like fraud to me. Seems like the kind of thing that should lead to lawsuits and potentially criminal charges. Not that anyone would actually try to do something about this or most other problems facing consumers.

I don’t pay that much attention to the latest gossip or trending scandals. And when I hear that there is a scandal, I refuse to jump on the bandwagon unless I take the time to get a clear understanding of the situation and the context, which takes time I may not have. Sometimes torches and pitchforks are clearly justified, sometimes they aren’t or it’s impossible to know.

If something is a big enough issue that I hear about it, and it turns out that the artist is a confirmed shit head, I’ll avoid giving them money. But generally speaking, it only taints their work if it reveals things you didn’t see there before. Sometimes that thing which can’t be unseen is significant enough to ruin the experience.

Then again, I also have no problem with consuming media that has objectionable elements to it, as long as I know about it going in. I’ve read Lovecraft knowing he was a racist and more, and yeah, it definitely shows (sources of terror: madness, the cold indifference of a harsh universe, immigrants, the working class, and race mixing). But while I’m not a huge fan and don’t actively promote his work, I’m glad I read what I did, and would advise anyone interested in Lovecraft to go ahead and read it, as long as they know what they are getting into.

So, while I can separate art and artist, I don’t know how often I really need to. I can think for myself, I don’t need to have my content sanitized, and I certainly don’t need to purge my library based on nothing more than an association with someone who did something bad at some point.

Gene Roddenberry was often a shitty person, but that doesn’t change the positive impact that Star Trek has had on myself and others. We could throw the whole franchise out, but it would be a terrible loss if we did.

Prime was a reasonable value for me a decade ago. The streaming side was never the main draw but it was a nice added bonus, especially when Netflix started to lose a lot of the content I actually wanted to watch.

Unfortunately, Amazon’s been flooded with worthless trash, and they made the conscious decision to make searching and filtering as useless as possible. It’s actually impressive that they’ve so degraded their service that it’s usually more convenient for me to go shopping locally than to try to navigate the unending mine field on Amazon.

So of course they try to ruin the last thing keeping me subscribed. I’m done, they can fuck off. I’ve got a jellyfin server, I don’t need these assholes.

Unfortunately, I’m sure they’ll make an obscene amount of money with this move, because apparently the world is full of people who will pay good money to bend over and take it.

Oh it’s much worse than that.

Imagine if this worked, and people could just exempt themselves from the law by carrying a card that says “diplomatic immunity” on it. Everyone would do it, you’d be crazy not to, even if you weren’t planning on committing crimes, just to prevent the possibility of a (potentially unjust) arrest or conviction.

And once everyone is above the law, you basically have The Purge, which devolves to more of an Escape From New York kind of vibe, before finally landing in Mad Max territory.

Or, alternatively, we recognize that the card works just as well for the authorities, who can’t be charged with anything for ignoring your diplomatic immunity.

If I buy a product, and the manufacturer remotely disables that product in order to coerce me into buying their goods and services, the people responsible should be charged with fraud, destruction of property, criminal conspiracy, racketeering, and anything else that can stick. It should be treated no less severely than if they hired thugs to smash it with a crowbar.

Yes, you can make a building from pieces that were produced on an assembly line. But the vast majority of construction doesn’t happen that way. And even those require labor to assemble.

My point was that the stationary robot arm you see putting cars together make sense in a factory setting, but that it wouldn’t be so practical on a job site compared to something less specialized and more versatile.

I think it’s going to be interesting to watch machine labor continue to evolve.

Currently we have factories full of dedicated machines which specialize in a limited number of tasks. This makes sense because mass production involves doing a limited variety of jobs in a controlled environment, as part of a process that only rarely changes. A more general purpose robot adds little value.

Where things get interesting is when you leave the factory. New construction shares similarities to factory production. You have a mostly controlled environment, a predictable process, and most variables within a given job can be planned for in advance. But you can’t throw a house or office building on an assembly line and move it past stationary robot arms. Which means that machines need to be light and mobile enough to move around a building throughout the process. And without the assembly line, extreme specialization is less practical. Better to have one machine that handles each stage of construction, as opposed to many machines which are only capable of a single task.

I could see some future prototype robot acting as an assistant, and slowly taking over more and more tasks. As it becomes more refined, its performance becomes more reliable, and we move more and more towards autonomous operation with human oversight.

The greater challenge is leaving the controlled environment of a construction site and into the real world. Going into some hundred year old building and assessing the existing condition, formulating a plan of action, and the executing that plan (adapting to unexpected complications along the way) is so much more complex and demanding. It’s entirely possible for AI to get to the point where it can do that, but it’s going to be a much longer journey.

Still, I could picture a more advanced version of that construction robot following a plumber or electrician and providing assistance while learning as it observes. As these trade bots expand their pool of knowledge and experience, they could gain the ability to recognize similarities to previous issues, and may learn to analyze and propose solutions which can be approved by a human on site. With each successful task, the machines get a little closer to functioning autonomously.

With a complex enough AI, we really could reach a point where the only jobs performed by humans are the ones where we value the human involvement. AI politicians probably aren’t on the agenda, and there will always be a demand for human sex work. So if nothing else, know that there will always be a job out there for those who specialize in fucking the people.

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AI today, or actual AI someday? And do they need to do the job well, or just at all?

I also wonder how many of these people are open to the idea of UBI when brought up in the context of AI replacing the majority of human labor.

I use it to skim through headlines and pick through various sources on each topic. There’s probably a better free news aggregator out there, but I don’t know what it is.

I remember the time that a friend of mine was lying on a bed, looking me in the eye and saying “fuck me” and I somehow missed the hint.

Not since I was a teenager.

Sending a notification that a renewal is coming up? Impossible, will cost a fortune.

Sending mountains of junk mail offering bundles and limited time offers? Clearly much cheaper and easier.

Also, think of the labor costs, retraining the call center staff to not spend hours trying to talk people out of canceling and instead just having them hit a button. Why, that’s got to force a price hike.

The really frustrating part is that cheap generic stuff skyrocketed too. Walmart embraced inflation enthusiastically, and their knockoff mountain dew went from $0.62 to $1.70. Supply chain issues I’m sure…

I used to get that stuff 10 bottles at a time, and it was one of the few things that made it worth going there. Now I just get whatever is on sale at the local employee owned grocery chain. The price difference is negligible, almost everything else is cheaper, and I get to support some place that isn’t evil.

I also expect to work until the day I die.

That would also make sense, it would just be changing the pattern.*

In mine, Lawful is center aligned with one side touching a wall. Chaotic is tilted to touch corners to walls instead of sides. Good is head towards walls and foot towards the interior. Evil is foot towards walls and head towards the interior. And true neutral… is not bound by any of these rules.

* A pattern that would be based on the idea that neutral should be a defined side, one that presents its own rules in each dimension of the chart, rather than merely being the absence of one of the other alignment dichotomies. If this were just about chart making, I would support that as I like things to be orderly, but because this is alignment I stick with what I believe to be the better representation of that system.