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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • I agree, it’s unfortunately impossible to boycott AI outright. The game you love that didn’t use it for the writing, art or code probably still had plenty of planning meetings where copilot PowerPoint tools were used. A programmer who doesn’t use AI may use something from someone who did. An artist may get a job over another because they used AI for their job application.

    And that’s ignoring everyone that uses it intentionally for projects. I genuinely loathe AI content but it’s not worth boycotting like many other causes.

    In the 19th century, the Jacquard loom became widespread, using punchcards to automate weaving. Belgian workers who lost their jobs from this would protest by throwing their wooden shoes, their sabots into the machines. This act is the origin of the word saboteur. This era of industrialisation was shared by the movement of the romantics. Romanticism existed to contrast industrialisation and enlightenment, to celebrate nature and imagination and individuality. Poets like Lord Byron led wonderfully flawed but human lives, while capturing this feeling in their art, poetry and philosophy.

    But humans although wonderfully flawed, seek convenience. Evolution loves convenience, dopamine loves convenience, capitalism loves convenience. When it’s allure comes from all directions, we cnt fault ourselves for succumbing to it.

    Although their name lives on, the saboteurs couldn’t stop the world seeking convenience. Although Romanticism always existed before it’s heyday, it eventually diminished. From the punchcards of the Jacquard looms, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace (the estranged and father-loathing daughter of Lord Byron) developed the general purpose computer. Technological convenience survived.

    There is a growing opinion that we are living through a new romantic era, this time opposing the digital world, the algorithm and artificial intelligence. I agree with this sentiment. Although I consider myself a socialist, pro workers rights and supporter of radical ideals, I don’t see the new saboteurs winning; I don’t see boycotting AI, or poisoning our art and media with AI confusing language and imagery as a path to victory. Eventually convince always wins. Instead I want to be a romantic, who can celebrate everything human that AI cannot be, without believing that I can exist outside of it’s influence. I can both love human made art, media and content, and consume that which has been touched by AI.

    God knows why I wrote this all I guess it’s just not a conversation I’d ever get to have in real life. There are probably typos in here, I hate to proof-read.






  • I saw an announcement from Sega a couple of months ago saying that they’re looking to return to their MO: Being the punkrock to Nintendo’s mainstream pop. I think this is really the difference between Sega’s Sonic Vs Paramount’s Sonic. Paramount want to make a mainstream Sonic movie and mainstream mean filing off the rough edges.

    I don’t think it’s got anything to do with today’s political landscape as much as the nature of all high budget cinema. Never mistake the film industry as anything but venture capitalism, with art being incidental and anarchic messaging being a facade and only existing for profit. Any for-profit art, particularly a $122 million cost piece of art, is going to only care about the most profitable choices.










  • I built an overkill PC in February 2016, it was rocking a GTX 980ti a little before the 1080 came out, and it was probably the best GPU out there, factory overclocked and water cooled by EVGA. My CPU was an i5-4690k, which was solidly mid range then, but I overclocked it myself from 3.5GHz to 5.3Ghz with no issue, and only stopped there because I was so suspicious of how well it was handling that massive increase. I had 2TB of SSD spaceand like 8TB of regular hard drives and 16GB of ram.

    Because I have never needed to think about space, and so many of my parts were really overpowered for their generation, I have always been hesitant to upgrade. I don’t play the newest games either, I still get max settings on Doom Eternal and Read Dead 2 which I forget are half a decade old. The only game where it’s struggled in low settings is Baldurs Gate 3 unfortunately, which is made me realise it’s ready to upgrade.





  • This is definitely a selfish opinion but people who block adverts or torrent being a small percentage of users can be a good thing.

    If they lose even 5% of their userbase to Firefox over this decision, they’ll find a way to make grand modifications to Google search and YouTube in a manner that stops you blocking ads from alternative browsers, and while I’m happy swapping to an alternative search engine, it’ll definitely becometedious to sidestep Google’s gaze.

    But if it’s 0.1% of people who swap due to this, and Google already don’t care about the small percentage they lose to Firefox then I would rather sit under the radar and not be cracked down on.