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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • One thing that I think is missing from the equation is good video games journalism that covers indie games. Video game journalism has never been doing amazing but it’s practically dead now.

    Tying discovery to the same platform that you consume things on is really bad, because it always gives that distributor way to much power. Similar story with spotify, but journalism about underground music is at least in a slightly better place.


  • The problem is that when everyone is using their right to deny access to their works to make people give them money, and there is only so much money you can reasonably spend on entertainment and so on per month, people end up abstaining from a lot of things they could otherwise have taken part in for no extra cost.

    I think that the things we pirate have a value: music, movies and games have a value because they are cultural products and vulture is important, software like photoshop has a value because it is a useful tool. Putting up barriers to accessing these things means destroying this value. Having a system where the main way to make money of e.g. music is to paywall it has the “destruction” of a lot of value as its outcome. In some ways streaming platforms like spotify are better in this regard but then that means giving the platform a lot of power over music discovery for example. Spotify doesn’t really do a good job of paying its artists either which is its supposed ethical advantage over piracy.


  • I think that a system where we should abstain from things that are basically free to reproduce (i.e. things you can pirate) is dumb. There are many movies that I probably wouldn’t pay money to but that I’ve pirated. The companies that own the rights to the movie don’t lose any sale they would have otherwise made but I get whatever enjoyment I get from watching the movie at least, so it’s a net win.

    When I pay may bills at the end of the month I also put some money towards paying for things that I’ve pirated that I like, usually with a focus on smaller creators. It doesn’t really feel meaningful to pay for a marvel movie for example. It’s not really a perfect system but neither is artificially limiting the access to digital media.



  • even a small amount of change into an LLM it turns out to radically alter the output it returns for huge amounts of seemingly unrelated topics.

    Do you mean that small changes radically change the phrasing of answers, but that it has largely the same “knowledge” of the world? Or do you mean that small changes also radically alter what a llm thinks is true or not? If you think the former is true, then these models should still be the same in regards to what they think is true or not, and if you don’t then you think that llms perception of the world is basically arbitrary and in that case we shouldn’t trust them to tell us what’s true at all.







  • Bluesky has the most twitter like user base of all the twitter clones that I’ve tried, and it’s up to you if that’s a good or bad thing. It’s not all segments of twitter though, there isn’t really any of right wing twitter or crypto twitter for example (a lot of furries on the other hand) which is quite nice actually. It isn’t really active or important enough to get a lot of the big drama or main character moments and there aren’t really any celebs, journalists and politicians posting there. So it’s a bit like twitter without many of the lows but also many of the highs.