Yes and a lot of people cheered. My wife was impressed until I told her what it was actually going to be used for. Like yeah, I’m sure they will also use it to help little girls find lost dogs, but its true purpose is to help law enforcement find brown people.

It’s kind of telling, they can’t get cameras on every street corner like the UK, so they just get homeowners (and some renters, I know they have a clip-on installation method) to supply the cameras AND pay a monthly fee for them! Like why is the government not funding this, since they’ll be using it? Because so many people are just willing to pay.

Worth noting, Apple did it first, with the Find My network. If you say a device you own is missing, your iPhone sends a signal, anonymously, to the Find My network, which includes every connected Apple device. You can’t opt yours out. So once an Apple device finds the “lost” device, it pings the device’s last known location. It never identifies people on the network (or so they say). So if you have Apple stuff, you’re part of this whether you want to be or not. And nothing malicious has ever been proven. But it is kinda sus, and it’s kind of the model Ring seems to be going with.

$13.50 is less than 16 years of age? How does that math work? Is it $2 per year or is there some other formula you’re using?

Age of consent in Nebraska, USA is 16. This is easily Googleable (I used DDG though, which uses Bing on the back end). Here’s the top result: https://www.ageofconsent.net/states/nebraska

P.S. I broke out the calculator to justify your original statement. To get 15.9 as an age (lower than the age of consent in Nebraska, USA), you would have to consider $1.18 to be the value of each year. In other words, if you really did want to compare $13.50 an hour to an age that is lower than the minimum age of consent (I used 15.9), you would have to value each year to be worth $1.18. Or each dollar to be worth 1.18 years. I’m not sure. I’m not great at math. Maybe someone else can explain that better. I tried to make your argument make sense!

(I think you were trying to say that Nebraska’s age of consent is 13, but you didn’t think anybody would go look it up.)

So, setting entirely aside the fact that Grindr caters to gay men (and women?) and I’m straight… this gets a “hell no” on price alone before we even get to the AI.

For $500 a month a dating app better be getting me laid at least 3-4 times a month, and even that’s egregious because it’s not like the other person is getting paid. They aren’t. So in straight dating, you have a vastly greater population of men looking for women. But even if you pay the app $500 a month, the women still have the right to say no. I mean, of course they do. What is the expectation? That you’re buying sex? That’s illegal most places. Now if you’re going to use AI to influence the outcome, to embellish your profile and enhance your features, that’s an attempt to bypass consent through omission or misdirection, which is a violation of trust. So even if I liked AI and saw it as useful, I would consider this a scummy use of it, not related to my feelings about the technology, but strictly due to my own personal integrity.

Of course, one’s personal integrity is a good reason to say “fuck AI,” but in this case, the negative feelings toward AI are not needed at all. It’s just scummy for more intrinsic reasons. But I think it’s easy for guys to say “well I’ve been having a dry spell, I might sub for one month”… okay but would you want your sister, daughter, niece, female cousin, or female friend to be duped or catfished like that? No, you probably wouldn’t. So don’t fucking do it to another person.

…and, that’s the sound of the other shoe dropping.

I recently learned that Sanderson has an annual convention he hosts, and it’s in Salt Lake City, Utah. I thought, “huh, that’s where the Mormons are from.” So, other shoe dropped.

I still love the first Mistborn trilogy. The Wax & Wayne series was very forgettable IMO. I was gonna read Stormlight after finishing the first trilogy, but now I’m reading a bunch of other stuff. I don’t dislike him though. He writes a lot of books, they’re generally fun, and he’s a nerd, and he encourages other people to write. Even knowing he’s a Mormon, I feel he’s more “one of us” than “one of them” (them, not being Mormons specifically, but that “not us” group that opposes what we do and stand for).

Okay, that’s fair.

Of course, the entirety of Fortnite is to sell the Unreal Engine, and the entirety is free to play. I can see the skins without paying, I just can’t use them without paying. As someone who’s never bought V-bucks for themselves (I have bought Fortnite gift cards for a nephew who plays, for birthdays/Christmases), it’s completely unnecessary if you just wanna shoot stuff in the game for 15-20 minutes or however long the match lasts.

I almost bought the whole lot of K-Pop Demon Hunters stuff, but I really just wanted to be able to play as Rumi (the one with the purple hair). My Animal Crossing villager can cosplay her for free though, and I’d rather play Animal Crossing than Fortnite 99% of the time. They scratch different itches, though.

That is indeed a recent development. I might have known it if I didn’t say people who prey on children should face stricter jail sentences and get banned from a site that supports people who prey on children, and thus lost access to the MacGaming subreddit, where I’m sure they posted about EGS coming back to Mac.

Logging in, it’s interesting to see that so many games I own are supported on Mac. I started playing Dredge on Xbox Game Pass but never bought it. That might be fun on the computer. And it might run on mine. (Nobody buys a Mac for gaming. I’m a gamer who prefers a Mac computer to one that runs Windows… so I have an Xbox. Long story as to why I don’t have a PlayStation.)

However, Fortnite is not (yet?) available for Mac. Maybe if they brought EGS to Mac, they’ll bring Fortnite back. I’m not a big Fortnite player… another long story that is beside the point.

I think they misspelled “whine”.

That, or they’re saying Proton isn’t Valve’s work alone and that it’s heavily based on WINE. I’m not sure if that’s true, but it’s another way to read that comment.

Shoddy article buries the lede: Epic isn’t suing Valve. UK residents are. Epic is just rooting for them because Epic makes a product (Epic Game Store) that competes with a product by Valve (Steam). Epic is not behind the lawsuit. They are just cheering for their competitor to be taken down a peg.

Literally nothing whatsoever stops Epic from releasing their Epic Game Store app on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android as these are open platforms that allow anybody to release an app (or app store) and offer it to their customers. However, Epic Game Store only actually exists on Windows, and it’s on iOS in the EU. Everywhere else, they’re keeping it from consumers out of pure spite in order to leverage the courts in their favour.

All of this started because Epic chose to defy Apple and the rules they agreed to in order to get Fortnite onto the iPhone’s App Store, in that they could not use an alternative payment provider to sell “V-bucks,” the in-game currency Fortnite uses. V-bucks cost Epic nothing to make as a virtual currency. Fortnite itself has expenses, but Fortnite is also a tech demo for the Unreal Engine. It exists, on a business level, to sell the capabilities of Epic’s in-house physics engine, the Unreal Engine. A bit hypocritically, Epic takes a cut of games sold that use the Unreal Engine. It is not free. Fortnite players use the V-bucks to buy skins and other cosmetic experiences in the game. And Epic, tired of giving Apple a 30% cut of something that costs them nothing to produce, thereby giving each company 100% profit, added an option to pay Epic directly, either less money to get the same amount of V-bucks, or the same amount of money to get more V-bucks (I don’t recall and it’s not what matters). Apple suspended the Fortnite game until Epic fixed it. Epic refused to, so the app was de-listed, and the developer account was banned.

Epic then pulled out of the Mac ecosystem as well, which had absolutely nothing to do with any of this. Macs do have an App Store that looks like the one on iPhone, but just like the Windows Store in Windows, it’s not required to install apps on a Mac. Most Mac users get their apps from the web, same as Windows users do. Like the Windows Store, the Mac App Store is just a convenience (both of them handle updates very well, for example). Not offering Fortnite and/or the Epic Game Store on the Mac has always been a choice Epic made, not any limitation imposed by Apple.

Epic is not just Fortnite, though. They made the Gears of War games for Xbox back in the day. Fortnite itself is actually a mashup of several games. The original Fortnite was a paid survival crafting game. I’m not sure it exists anymore, or if the freemium multiplayer Fortnite swallowed it up entirely. Like in Fortnite’s main mode, you could build, but you could build freely (safely) during the day, and mobs would attack at night. Fortnite also contains elements of Unreal Tournament, Epic’s prior multiplayer online shooter that last received a release in 2004; Rockband, the music game developed by Harmonix (which also created Guitar Hero), which is now called Fortnite Festival), and other acquisitions. Epic also made Unreal, a single-player game that Unreal Tournament was based on. They likely released a few other games I can’t recall. But since Unreal and Unreal Tournament, they’ve also licensed the Unreal Engine to other developers, and it’s been used in numerous games, including the original Deus Ex.

There’s a lot of Japanese stuff on nyaa. They even have a lossless audio section. Lossy is usually 128k or 320k mp3. I do lossy myself, but I encode to m4a low-complexity 192k (the highest option it has). So I grab lossless and encode to my settings, then use mp3tag for perfect metadata control (free for you Windows guys; $30 on Mac). Then it’s a unique file. Can still be sonically identified, but so can the tracks you legit ripped from CD, so that doesn’t matter.

Also collect Japanese music, mostly j-rock.

Nice, but we should ALL (UK and beyond) be able to opt out of AI manipulation. Of course, the ideal would be, we’d have to opt in in the first place. And those below the age of majority cannot consent, so that would solve that problem.

Translation: Popular adages equating China with low quality haven’t been true in years (if not decades), everybody knows it, the real “problem” with China is their military/space programmes. As for the US, well, 51st state and all that. Sorry… Brexit was a mistake, the UK should have stayed with the EU. Now they have to kowtow to the US and they shouldn’t have to.

The same way people who make millions ensure I’m able to afford food and housing. They don’t. We don’t. Everyone’s in it for themselves to some extent, because in some situations, nobody’s going to reach out and lift you up if you need it. We’re all just trying to survive.

There are a lot of people who make movies, music, and games who bust their ass and deserve to eat and be sheltered. That’s fine, but those people, just like you and me, have the means of taking care of themselves. You are not ethically or morally obligated to care about a stranger’s welfare, especially if the stranger does not care about yours. It’s fine to be altruistic; I’m not saying it isn’t, but it’s not an ethical imperative either.

Most people buy what they can and share/borrow what they can’t.

If someone working in entertainment goes without a meal because I bought my meal rather than starving to buy a Blu-ray they were in, I’m not their problem. That one sale isn’t going to put a meal on their table. A hundred Blu-ray sales might not even do that.

Weird take, I have two phones and only one has service. The iPhone. My Android phone is older, and it works just fine over WiFi. I’ve disabled cellular in settings. So it’s now functionally a tablet. And before you ask if I have the phone app on my dock, I don’t have a dock. It’s actually being used as an Animal Crossing cosplay prop. It has a NookPhone case, and while it does have a different wallpaper, the apps have Animal Crossing themed icons. So NookMusic is Apple Music, Messaging is Telegram, Passport is my Animal Crossing item/collectible tracking app (which also has links to my island/character), stuff like that. But I mean, you can swipe up and get the app drawer, and see all the apps installed. It even uses the iPhone gesture controls (Samsung offers this natively in the settings), because the NookPhone doesn’t have the Back/Home/Task buttons.

When it’s on, if it can’t find my home WiFi, it hops on my iPhone’s hotspot feature. It has signal most places. (And while it doesn’t have Signal installed, AFAIK, my iPhone does.)

Oh, my bad. I heard about this before, I knew it was 720, but I completely missed the part where it has an attached display not to mention can’t see the picture. /s

Come on now.

I meant in general, like on other devices.

When I heard about it before, they were repurposing old 720p panels.

With how cheap 4K sets are these days, these free TVs are for people who can’t even afford that. I’d say they’re useful as a secondary use for the heat they generate, in that case.

That said, I’d be fine with always on ads if ads and sponsorships never interrupt my content. Like if I’m watching a YouTube video and it’s 4:3, I’m perfectly fine with YouTube filling the sides with ads, as long as they don’t make noise, and as long as I can watch the content uninterrupted. If the video is 16:9 and fills my TV (or monitor), I’m fine propping my iPhone up. They can even use Face ID to pause the content if I look away, as long as I don’t have to look right at the ad (I’ll be watching the content).

Advertising pays for stuff, and if it doesn’t get in the way of stuff, I don’t hate it. They should try working with people rather than straight up exploiting everyone. That just leads to people turning off the ads using a third-party method (e.g. Firefox with uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock). Or I’ll just download the video with jdownloader2.

That’s the idea. So it’s better, maybe? But still AI and not human powered? So I’m wondering where people land.

But on the other hand, like I said, we’re not in the Star Trek timeline where technology uplifts us, we’re in the Terminator timeline where it oppresses and kills us (ChatGPT has pushed people to suicide).

Which could be paid by Valve in this case, especially since no one is expecting the Steam Box thing to be cheap.

Is Isabelle passing this out on Animal Crossing? (Nintendo game where almost all the text looks like AI slop. There’s a fan theory that it takes place many centuries in the future, post-apocalyptic, and they don’t actually know what English (or whatever localised language the Switch is set to) except the shops do have accurately written names. But for the rest? Either they used AI, or they mixed up a bunch of languages (including Arabic, it kinda has the “noodle” effect). Or they just didn’t know.

Why pay for premium anyway? Let alone a family plan. You still get ads. They can be skipped too — SponsorBlock will do it for free. Google could use this but chooses not to.

They want YouTube to be like cable TV. You pay for it. You watch ads. You pay more for premium channels.