wampus

@wampus@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe’s ‘tech sovereignty’ ambitions carry security risks, military warns⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Building on US tech means the US generally has control over whether you can deploy your military assets, and gives a foreign, militaristic/fascist trending power, deep insights into your military operations. Pretending like these risks are not greater than, or at the very least on par with, “its hard to integrate systems/build our own” is silly.

  It’s sorta like Canada’s former liberal leadership hopeful Chrystia Freeland acting like China’s the biggest threat to Canada. While the US administration is actively and openly trying to dismantle Canada using economic warfare, is ignoring former international conventions like those pesky ‘human rights’, and so on. Like there’s this old joke about Canada being in bed with a sleeping elephant given the disproportionate sizes and risk of that elephant rolling over and accidentally squishing you. Except the elephant woke up now, and is actively trying to harm you. Meanwhile idiots like Freeland go on about some Chinese Bear that’s a threat primarily on the other side of the world, ignoring the elephant in the room.

  The USA is a threat. They are actively attacking anyone they feel like. They are actively antagonistic towards their “allies” and neutral nations. Their tech oligarchs actively talk about setting up their own baronies, aka “Freedom cities” in the hollowed out carcasses of what remains of nations. Their state department actively opposes foreign nations pursuing data sovereignty, because the USA doesn’t care about privacy, especially not for non-republicans – they want that data to target “terrorists” (non-republicans) more easily with the use of AI. Their leadership quite literally called all their Generals in to a room last year, said “We expect you to commit war crimes, cause we want the world to fear you” and fired anyone that objected. The USA isn’t just a ‘risk’ of being a threat, they are an active threat undermining western democratic nations. Why anyone would think there’s a greater risk ‘not’ to give these folks more power/control over you, is beyond my understanding. My closest approximate comparison on a day-to-day relatable level would likely be something like an abusive relationship, where the victim rationalizes staying in the relationship because “If I left, they’d outright kill me”. That ain’t healthy, nor a desirable position for a military.

  Like even the Iran / Hormuz stuff, is basically intentional pain inflicted on the EU. Last year, as part of their chat leak during their strikes on yemen – the chat that leaked on whatsapp or whatever – Hegseth, Gabbard and them were complaining about how they felt they were policing the area, even though all the benefit went to Europe in the form of open trade routes. They wanted Europe to be more actively involved. Trumps made clear references of a similar nature, with his regular bravado/crassness, in his recent “we probably shouldn’t even be there” comments.

  The current US administration also has a focus on isolating opponents (which they tend to talk about as ‘containment’ in their ideological writings if I remember right). It’s what underpins things like what they’re doing to democrats in places like Minnesota, and building concentration camps for “illegals” (non-republicans, and non-whites) – they want enemies isolated, cut off from outside aid. Even more, they want those people to suffer, and make noise as they suffer, as it helps to keep other blue states in line and lets them point at the suffering to appease their base. A similar approach underpins much of their international relations, cutting off nations from trade opportunities to weaken “opponents” (non-nuclear / smaller nations) – see Cuba as an easy example currently, or the ongoing attack on international trade norms. Attacking Iran cuts the EUs oil supply (among other trade gaps), exposing a strategic weakness and providing greater opportunities for the US to sow discord amongst EU block members: enter the relaxing of Russian sanctions to further sow animosity, as some EU nations are pressured to resume Russian trade. Trying to distract from his Epstein atrocities is part of the reason Trump may’ve agreed to the plan and rushed the timing a bit, but pretending like it’s the only reason for the current shit going on is naive – there’s a whole fascist administration, full of out and proud Christian white nationalists, backing the actions of Trump, and using his antics to distract from their goals.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe’s ‘tech sovereignty’ ambitions carry security risks, military warns⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Rubio literally sent out a memo in december if I remember right saying to aggressively counter any tech sovereignty pushes, as the trump admin wants access to all foreigner data for AI integration and “national security” of the USA. They want to hold/have access to it, cause they like using it as part of their AI surveillance and snooping regime. Again, if I remember right, that was circulated to embassies and lobby firms etc etc.

  So any news story about how hard it is, is likely a US influence campaign. Using their oligarch control of media to magnify issues, think tanks publishing unprovoked ‘white papers’ that support the US narrative, and on and on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla is exiting consumer space because Self-Driving has hit the same fundamental limits as LLMs⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Eh, Musk’s pivoting a bit towards humanoid robots. Self-driving cars are sorta off the table, and Musk’s car brand in general is not doing well due to his political shenanigans and the tone of US international relations recently.

  It’s much more beneficial to him and the ultra elite, to develop humanoid robots that can get deployed as a civilian pacification paramilitary force, anywhere in the world, supported by Starlink etc. With enough investment/production, a very small ultra wealthy elite can completely control the world in a very overt, unapologetic and totally unaccountable way.

  Like if a paramilitary robot screws up and shoots some extra protestors, it prolly wouldn’t even make the news, which’d be controlled by similar billionaires with their own robot paramilitary forces. But a self driving car screws up and causes accidents, and you get all these poor people whining at you, with no recourse to just have your robots shoot them silent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is the USA attacking Iran?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I imagine that there’s no real consensus response to what you’ve asked, given that the official reasons are pretty murky. My take, for what it’s worth at least:

  Epstein was likely connected to Israel. From bits and pieces that’ve been reported about timelines and from the email archives, it seems like he sold information to both Israel and Russia – typically blackmail material for use as leverage against people in key positions in politics / business. Many of the later emails relating to Trump, appeared to talk about the dirt Epstein had on Trump, and efforts to potentially sell it to others.

  This blackmail material, combined with the massive amount of money thrown at US gov candidates by things like AIPAC, results in ‘close ties’ between the US Govt and Israeli interests. Basically, to control Americas government, if you can ‘buy’ a majority of the candidates via PAC funding or blackmail material, you can control the overall tone and direction of America’s international politics.

  In terms of ‘why now’ and what they gain…

  So the Epstein files note above is just ‘another nail’ in the common american’s support for Israel – even before those links were made more apparent, public opinion had largely soured due to the brutal treatment of Palestinians. Israel as a state has been increasingly an apartheid regime – mostly in its alignment to far right fascist motifs involving xenophobia. The US right also aligns with this general sentiment – the people currently in the administration, for example, practically all cheer on figures like Jack Posobiec, who romanticizes figures such as Spain’s Franco, a fascist dictator who literally came to power with the backing of Hitler. They maintain this notion that ‘they’ are the sole custodians of civilization, so any atrocity they commit against ‘others’ is justified and right. So timing-wise, it’s definitely best to do this sort of thing with Trump’s administration in power – they’ll be gleeful willing accomplices, no need for much convincing.

  Also entering in to the arena, would be the emergence of powers like China, and the perceived deterioration of the USA’s global influence. Israel as a state, exists because of the USA – Trump likes to say that about Canada, but Canada doesn’t really have a bunch of neighbours (other than the USA) that want Canada dead for having a history of “pre-emptive strikes” and so on. If the USA were to fall into significant decline, Israel’s existence would be in clear jeopardy. In order to survive, Israel likely needed to trigger a conflict before America’s hegemony deteriorated too far – to survive without a ‘singular’ military hegemony’s backing, Israel needs to have the entire power dynamic of the middle east destroyed and remade with them as the defacto/unchallenged ‘power’ of the region.

  Add in to the mix the Tech bro oligarchs, who all want their own baronies – or ‘free cities’ as they like to call them. These folks actively bank roll efforts to destabilize states. Their reasons seem to vary a tiny bit, but the end result/drive is the same: they want to have the ability to control cities/people, without worrying about government controls/oversight/regulations, because “they know best”. So they’re completely in alignment with the other areas in which we’re seeing dramatic increases in authoritarian traits. So there’s practically unlimited money available for any sort of atrocity that can benefit the richest 0.1% at the expense of everyone else.

  Most of what’s above speaks to the conditions that set the stage for the event.

  As for the very specific timing, it’s still highly likely that Trump is just trying to mute the Epstein stuff. What he gains is less coverage of Epstein. He is America’s dictator, so what benefits him, benefits America. That simple.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you had any doubts that Know-Your-Customer laws were evil, here is one very good reason: personal data of 1 BILLION people just leaked.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, but this breach is specifically about KYC, about financial industry stuff. The company that got porked, was the company the banks used for their KYC stuff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨EA invents new microtransaction nightmare as it breaks paywall promise on Skate: rent a playable area for 24 hours or buy a premium pass, bucko⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That poor cat, are you forcing it to play EA games???

  Animal Humane Society operates the primary animal cruelty reporting line in Minnesota: 612-772-9999 or report online at investigations@animalhumanesociety.org.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you had any doubts that Know-Your-Customer laws were evil, here is one very good reason: personal data of 1 BILLION people just leaked.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  KYC is typically a due diligence process tied to regulated financial industry participants – the restaurant example has a much different function. Banks and FIs have much broader retention (and disclosure) obligations.

  Here, let’s put it slightly differently. I’ll reference Canadian regulations/processes more, as those are the ones I’m most familiar with. If you’re a bank, you’re required to flag suspicious transactions related to the customer – and in order to know when those transactions are suspicious, you need some way of reviewing it within the context of the customer. You may even have an obligation to second guess / question / try and advise the customer ‘not’ to make a transaction, based on knowing your customer.

  The most basic example of that, is where Credit Cards will decline payments / request a call if you try and make a purchase in a totally abnormal location – like you “know your customer” lives in Toronto, but suddenly see them spending money in Mexico? Or if they called you before they took a trip to mexico, that’d also go into a KYC type file to let people know to expect those sorts of charges and let em get processed. That’s tied to KYC.

  The media will often run stories about seniors getting scammed, with the general message being “WHY DIDNT BANKS DO MORE TO PROTECT?”. Well, that’s KYC too. You gotta ‘know’ your senior members, and their spending habits to some extent, to find those outliers. You also need to be familiar with them enough to know whether its “normal” for them to come by and take out cash, and in what quantities and for what purpose, cause seniors will sometimes ‘show up’ with a person pressuring them to take out cash to ‘pay a bill’ (scammms galore!). All part of KYC due diligence.

  Or the somewhat obvious elephant in the room – if you have a “personal” account member, who keeps receiving etransfers to his “jeevacation@gmail.com” account for some reason, you gotta look into it a bit and sort out what all those payments are related to, cause it isn’t a business account. And if you see anything suspicious, it gets reported to the authorities, where, most likely, Trump shits himself and Americans ignore the crimes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨EA invents new microtransaction nightmare as it breaks paywall promise on Skate: rent a playable area for 24 hours or buy a premium pass, bucko⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  idk. I’ve heard we can still consume pussy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras. Anger over ICE connections and privacy violations is fueling the sabotage.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  People want surveillance options. One of the highest/most obvious features required, unsurprisingly, is the ability to see your cameras on your smart phone – which generally means you need a Smartphone App + a centralised server/system connecting the different ends. The alternative being that end users would likely need static IP addresses / Dynamic DNS setups to have a Smartphone app point “directly” to their exposed CCTV ports – which I don’t imagine regular consumers are keen on, likely why basically no such options seem to exist in the retail space (afaik - if there are widely used brands i dont know about, by all means clue me in).

  Options that are fully local/closed/under user control, are almost impossible to find. This isn’t so much a consumer-specific problem, from my perspective, at this point – there aren’t enough options for consumers to choose differently. It’s sorta like how you’re generally ‘stuck’ with US-tethered Smartphones. It’s not so much a ‘choice’ that consumers get to make, as it is that these big businesses have effective monopolies and consumers are stuck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨EA invents new microtransaction nightmare as it breaks paywall promise on Skate: rent a playable area for 24 hours or buy a premium pass, bucko⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  People are still playing EA games after the take over by Saudis/Jared Kushner??? Sorry, I feel no empathy for these gamers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you had any doubts that Know-Your-Customer laws were evil, here is one very good reason: personal data of 1 BILLION people just leaked.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  KYC isn’t evil. It’s literally the operational piece that says stuff like “If someone named Vladimir Putin tries to open a bank account with you, you should know if he’s THAT putin or not, especially as it may get your business in serious trouble related to gov sanctions etc”. The government, quite literally, sends auditors to Banks and Credit Unions every 2-3 years to make sure you do this sort of due diligence.

  The issue with KYC is that it’s farmed out to third parties that focus on scale and cutting costs. It’s in the same general space as something like Credit Scores – Banks/Credit Unions don’t maintain their own credit scores for people so much, as they just buy that score information from Equifax / Transunion etc.

  Really, what I imagine people should be pushing for instead of this piecemeal whining, is something closer to what Estonia has for its citizens. A highly integrated government-based portal that allows citizens to do things like Register a New Small business in 15 minutes, and to see which organisations have access to their gov ID info. From what I understand, citizens basically get given PINs as part of their gov IDs, which they can disclose to banks/businesses, who can subsequently access basic required read-only details about that person via the gov portal. So your bank needs to know who you are? No problem, you let them know your pin when you setup the account – and the banks system is then able to pull just the basic info from your gov account to meet the banks operational needs / regulatory obligations whether you’re there in person or not. And as a citizen, if you want to check your privacy disclosures to third parties, you just log in to the gov site, and see a list of which businesses have access to your data – and I imagine you’d get the option to cancel their access if you wanted to (so when you close an account at a business, you pop in to the gov site and also clip their ongoing access). From what I gather, that sites a one stop shop for all gov stuff, so it’s also where you go for tax stuff, drivers lics, the works. Makes it a LOT simpler for citizens, as you don’t need to sort out what esoteric stupid sub site / domain you need to visit to see if you qualify for a rebate or whatever – so it seems like a big improvement from a user experience side.

  ALL THAT SAID, that shift would put more onus on the consumer in some ways, as they’d need to log in to a gov site etc – like it’s bad enough trying to explain MFA to old people, imagine trying to make this shift! You’d also need a government that was willing to actually do stuff for the people – I think Estonia only went that way, as an attempt to shield themselves from massive attacks from Russia. They want their gov fully functioning in the cloud, including elections etc, so that even if they end up like Ukraine, they can still “function” remotely. Consumers are a big issue for anything security related too, as practically no one changes banks / FIs based on security – it’s almost entirely rate oriented for mortgage holders. Tell a consumer they can get a 0.2% better rate by going with the bank that doesn’t fuss security, they’ll take it. Try and market your bank/FI as being more security conscious, it won’t generally draw in new members based on that alone.

  Like, again using Canada as an example, we’ve had a year of the US antagonizing us and threatening economic ruin / annexation. Lots of Canadians are keen not to buy American products as a result. Almost all of Canadas banks/CUs use US partners/outsourcing within their stack: places like Vancity Credit Union, for example, are using Intellect Design’s product for their online banking, which is a partner owned by an India parent company (with little/no presence in Canada), which hosts its stuff on Microsoft’s cloud. Most Credit Unions in the country are likely going to go the same way in the next couple years – even though it’s a huge security risk, and highly likely that both India and the USA will gain access to all your data, let alone sketchy third party’s like India’s fraud centers. There are a couple Credit Unions in Canada that actually maintain stuff (almost entirely) in Canada. But that’s not enough to entice people to use those organisations, so they’re all dying out / merging as a result of a lack of members (and regulatory overreach / decrees).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you had any doubts that Know-Your-Customer laws were evil, here is one very good reason: personal data of 1 BILLION people just leaked.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Tax records are required to be kept for 7 years in North America (generally, as far as I know - def in Canada). So you order something online from a business, they have a business need to keep your data on hand for 7 years in case an auditor / tax person comes asking about it. Be that someone auditing the business, or someone auditing a customer. That’s a requirement from the government.

  I’ve seen customers ask for tax stuff going back up to 20 years from a business. In those cases, if there’s demand for data going back that far for whatever reason, the business can internally say “We have a business reason to retain data longer” because people ask for it – there’s demand. So they can justify to auditors/legal sorts retaining that information indefinitely, based on user demands/requests.

  In some cases when I’ve seen those ancient requests, it’s also tied to legal disputes from customers – eg. Trying to prove in a divorce that such and such was bought by party A in 2005 for X amount. In some cases, there’re class actions that go outside the 7 year window, and require data from further back to sort out – for example there’s a case in Canada currently where a financial lender is paying back ~$2000 per person that took a loan from them from 2016-2021 (so ~10 years of personal data needs to’ve been kept, to verify early claimants). Part of needing to keep data so long, is that the court cases are often so drawn out that the 7 year window would make some crime/wrong-doing much more difficult to prosecute due to a lack of evidence. I know of one class action lawsuit in the Financial Industry that’s been ongoing since the 90s, and still isn’t fully resolved – most of the potential class action recipients are deceased at this point, and the only people profiting are lawyers, but still. Lawyers are a part of the problem, and a reason why data is often being held longer and longer. Honestly, Lawyers are also terrible at securing their data --they tend to rely on paper-controls to prevent their unsecured data from getting used, rather than actual hardening. Like there was a guy who spent a few years in Colombia or something, his personal laptop being used for all sorts of nefarious stuff, and when he came back to Canada and the border people took his laptop, it was totally unencrypted/unsecured. They guy just argued it was his “legal work” laptop and everything on it is confidential and can’t be used in court.

  Idk. I think your approach is overly simplistic for the issue. There’s a lot of “stuff” related to corporate data retention policies and methods, and I don’t really see much nuance in what you’re proposing. Hell, if they only kept your data till you got your item, youd NEVER be allowed to get a refund, cause they’d have no record of you purchasing the item.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China’s dancing robots: how worried should we be?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, both China and the US tech billionaires are feverishly working towards having a personal army of unthinking killing machines that they can deploy unilaterally to a region to massacre a population without any of that annoying “soldiers refusing to kill children”, or “people back home objecting to risking soldier’s lives” shit.

  And while what was demonstrated likely didnt include much sensory perception/reaction, it still demonstrated a marked improvement over last years models – similar story when you see their more human-looking things with those weird flesh/muscle wraps that’re like straight outta terminator. I’m also not totally sure about the perception stuff myself, as a few times in the performance it looked to me like the robots responded / adjusted to variances in their partners moves – like a kid who did a flip a bit too low over a sword, and the robot adjusts a bit lower at the last second to avoid a collision.

  I don’t think I’ve seen any similar such videos from American companies – like I recall one video from boston dynamics where they had a robot doing a simple obstacle course, and some pre-defined basic acrobatics/dance moves. I haven’t seen anything like what China seems to have available in the (admittedly very high end) consumer market space coming out of western countries lately, though I suppose that could be a marketing bubble/blitz issue.

  In the end it prolly doesn’t matter – whether it’s china or the US tech bros, the tech will be massively abused one way or another. Like based on the speed of advancement, you could imagine them having their automaton armies in production by 2030 easy. Then it’s just ‘whoever has more manufacturing power for killer humanoid robots wins’ (paired with ‘who has control of the production stack for those killer robots’, hence the push to grab more land by many major powers). I wouldn’t even be surprised if the ‘elites’ were explicitly aiming for this to occur, to suddenly and drastically reduce the population of the world thinking itll help buy time related to climate damage. Wipe out people in third world countries (see israel, cuba, looks like iran soon), wipe out the poor, thinking itll lower things like gas emissions etc – cutting programs like USAID also fits with this general goal, as it clearly has a negative impact on life expectancy rates “in target countries”, while also freeing up resources for a global superpower to execute things like land grabs while also cracking down on their own citizens aggressively. The tariffs too, trying to re-shore manufacturing and advanced chip fabs, would almost be a pre-requisite, as deploying a killer robots army somewhere would ‘likely’ cause a backlash and supplier cutoffs, if they’re still originating from more democratic states (or ones without killer robot armies of their own). Starlink’s basically a global network allowing control of robot armies dropped anywhere in the world – if countries can’t block it, they can’t easily interrupt robot control functions.

  Ok a chunk of that ‘may’ be paranoia, but it’s not implausible in my view. So… yeah, yes I think we should all be a bit worried / concerned. Not that I think there’s much we can do about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Homeland Security has reportedly sent out hundreds of subpoenas to identify ICE critics online⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To be fair, the dems also want, and use, authoritarian levers these days. Also, historically, they’ve been very ineffectual when it comes to pushing through progressive items – see the USA as the only advanced economy without public healthcare as an easy example, or them being the only country without basic gun laws.

  Heck, one of the very few legit points Trump made in the one weaksauce debate he had with Biden, was along the lines of “If tariffs are so bad, why’d you guys leave all the tariffs in place from my first term?”. If there’s an election, and if they win, I doubt the dems will really do all that much.

  Idk. To me it’s starting to look increasingly like there are irreconcilable differences between what the majority seem to want, and what a small rich minority wants. There are maga dads shooting their daughters, in maga states, over political shit, and they get let off by their maga jury. You’ve got red state ICE troops deploying to blue state cities explicitly to terrorize the population – those same troops are shooting people in the streets with zero accountability, protected by a group of people who are increasingly looking like ultra rich pedophiles of a very depraved sort. A group of individuals who are basically Americas ruling class, with likely ties between their pedophile island crimes, to Israel and Russia, and the USA’s unquestioning support of the atrocities being committed on the other side of the world.

  It’s really difficult to picture what you’d need to do as a politician, to ‘make this right’ for the people in blue states/cities. If the people demand accountability for all the shit that’s gone on, it’ll enrage the right further. If you don’t hold them accountable, well everyone’s seen the result of not holding Trump accountable for the Jan 6 insurrection – it just gets worse and worse. They’re already at a point where they’re shooting dem civilians in the streets with impunity, and with ‘righteous fury’ automatically labelling these people terrorists/enemies of the states. Even using AI to alter photos of protesters to feed the propaganda machine.

  Really feels like there’s increasingly a chance for a civil war in the usa.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Department of Homeland Security Is Demanding That Google Turn Over Information About Random Critics⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  America isn’t a country of laws anymore. The supreme court rubber stamps anything the administration wants to do, and the administration “declines requests from the judiciary”. You’ve got administration officials that don’t know what Habeas Corpus means, suspending Habeas Corpus. You’ve got a military openly/brazenly committing war crimes on the international scene (blowing up unverified “narco boats”/civilians). You’ve got a paramilitary gestapo-like force quite literally shooting citizens in the streets, your own government aiming to terrorize its people – which’s the whole point of the violent Ice operations targeting blue states.

  But yeah, sure, Google and the big tech bros who have been supporting Trump’s actions throughout all of this will totally draw the line at disclosing data.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Take-Two CEO Responds to Stock Price Drop Following Google Genie Announcement: 'I Think People Are Confusing Tools With Hits' - IGN⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Eh, take it however you want I guess.

  I still find games that I enjoy these days. Two that my friends and I have played through for a while are Valheim and Abiotic Factor. One reason those are more enticing, is that the proc gen on a game like Valheim means you can’t as easily stumble across a post saying “Go here to unlock bear porn scene” or whatever. And while Abiotic is less random, it’s less well known/saturated by marketing shit, so there’s plenty of “wait wtf was that?!” and “oh neat, I can do something new that we hadn’t realised we could do before!” as we play.

  So given that I still find games currently that fall into my preferences from way way back, it’s still something some games are capable of accomplishing. BG3, I’ve basically never made it past Act 1, as I get bored with it and its pseudo predictability and mundane mechanics. Like even the Divinity series from Larian, I found more engaging from the tactical fight POV just because the way they did elemental combo attacks on enemies and interaction with world components far better than in BG3, from my perspective in terms of player engagement – like there’s still ‘traces’ of that stuff in BG3, but its neutered. Plus they were less known games, without a constant stream of marketing shit showing you exactly how to min/max those events.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Quietly Withdraws Under Fire MMO Ashes of Creation From Sale As Fans Wonder Who's Left to Maintain the Servers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed. I’ve seen PE take overs of other software firms, and a big part of those take overs is the human capital / access to a team of skilled professional developers. PE typically doesn’t just ‘fire’ everyone en masse, but rather chops the shop up and resells parts of the org as it scavenges the remains.

  So this smells like something more fraudulent, and connected to SS – especially as there have been notes that the intrepid ‘board’, on paper in filings, was just SS, the CEO. The messaging that came out from their comms director (I think that’s what she was?) yesterday seems to generally support this, in that the Senior Management team was completely in the dark about anything that was going on – they had practically the same notification of events, as everyone else. A board wouldn’t normally do that, as the senior management team would each have a relationship/reporting obligations tied to board meetings (eg. c-level HR managers working out HR policies/budgets, Accountants providing audited monthly financials to the board, etc). I mean, a company that size would likely have an accountant, who would report out the financial state of the org at senior manager meetings – so they’d all see the layoffs coming way in advance, not suddenly get a WARN notice that they aren’t getting paid for the last pay period. The CEO is ‘always’ at board meetings as managements rep, but other SMs show up / attend based on agenda items/topics. Long and short, a shift like this wouldn’t come out of nowhere at that level.

  All that said, the comms director also noted that initially they’d thought it was just going to be 100 developers let go, but a day or two later found out it was everyone – and it sounds like these were all ‘local’ developers, given that she was setting up an in person job fair to try and help x-staff find work. AoC having over 100+ developers at ~100k salaries is an absurd carrying cost that would likely be impossible to make work longer term financially. The sub costs for the player count just wouldn’t support that spend, let alone licensing/server costs where they were already in the red pre-steam release (they had about $800k in hosting debts they were gettin sued for, from what I recall). So I really don’t know what Intrepids business case generally looked like, but based on information available it seems pretty clear that their business model was unrealistic, hence pumpy dumpy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rent is theft⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Have you worked in the industry, or are you basing all this on bullshit and memes you’ve done “self research” on?

  Cause I’ve been adjacent to the CU industry for decades, and your points are just irrelevant. Like your comment about wealthy members is baseless in my view, as the vast majority of CUs I’ve audited have policies that prohibit member wealth concentration – ie. they actually CAP how much money a person can have, and tell that person to take their money elsewhere if they go over that cap. This is done in part because the lending practice at CUs isn’t like that at Banks, they can’t easily leverage things like stock market share sales – it’s risk management at all CUs to have caps, enforced by most regulators. Put slightly differently: If you only have Peter Thiel and his buddies as customers at SVB, and they all pull their money at once, you’re fucked. CUs have been aware of that risk, and mitigating it, for decades. And because the ultra-wealthy can’t have that sort of leverage, they typically don’t tend to use CUs.

  You may not like loans / credit. That doesn’t make the process of loans/credit inherently slaveholder/slave, and implying as such is just ridiculously childish. You aren’t going to convince any sane adult with that sort of semantic stupidity.

  Again, the approach of this trope to villianize all landlords, is not that dissimilar to the sorts of things you see coming out of racist shops. Treating any demographic as a monolith is prejudice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rent is theft⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s pointing out situations where the trope/stereotype falls apart. And your response is basically a troll response, so I’ll offer this one reply and then ignore you.

  I likely know more about how small credit unions operate than you do, I also likely have more familiarity with regular “mom and pop” type landlords than you do, given that I’ve worked in the Credit Union industry in the past, and have audited many of those loans. Typically, CU board of directors don’t get paid shit compared to banks, the CEOs typically don’t earn many multiples more than the rank and file employees (unlike banks), their profits generally go back to the membership, though those “profits” are not the target of most of those orgs, as the people they’d be profiting off of are their bosses (in that their Boards are elected from the membership – so you piss off members with fees, they just go on the board and direct you to remove / reduce those fees). So for example, in Canada, CU members generally enjoy no-ding ATM withdrawls from all Credit Union owned machines – there’s a whole campaign about ‘ding free’ banking with CUs. The board of most CUs are often just working class people, with a few specific ‘professional’ types required by regulators to ensure things like accounting oversight.

  People often default to thinking banks are the only option for mortgages. They’re not. Credit Unions provide mortgages to large segments of the population, and they’re cooperative organisations in structure – which is in pretty good alignment with progressive ideals.

  It’s not a bad faith argument to point out stereotyping in these sorts of threads. Just like it isn’t bad faith to point out when a racist post is made about a visible minority.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rent is theft⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  And if the person’s got their mortgage from a Credit Union… then its… all those evil working class credit union members profiting?

  The trope that landlords are all evil, profiteering off of the poor, is an over-simplification / stupid stereo-type. Yes, there are shitty landlords. Yes, there are more corporations involved in renting places these days, and those corps are pretty exploitative. But there are lots of landlords who are just regular locals looking to try and gain some financial security.

  Stereotyping an entire demographic of people based on some negative trait of a particular subset of that demographic is not helpful. It’s not helpful when it’s done to portray racial minorities in a broadly negative way, nor is it helpful when its done to portray landlords in a broadly negative way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rent is theft⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Lotta people chiming in on the profit rates for landlords – and while I admit that there are shitty landlords out there, I think it’s worth considering the ‘standard’ individual-owner landlord situation (which is historically the ‘norm’ for landlord situations). Ie. Someone who’s a bit older, has an ok amount of savings from working, and wants a second income stream from ‘somewhere’ to hedge against layoffs.

  What they typically do, is take out an interest only mortgage with a 30-35 or higher year term. They add in the cost of tax on the property, and any maintenance/condo fees involved, to the cost of paying that interest only mortgage. They use that income to pay off the carrying costs of the property, and hold on to it for a few years assuming that housing prices will always go up – and after 5-10-15 or however many years, they can sell the property for its higher valuation. These deals are often done as Variable mortgages, as they offer lower interest rates, but also expose the landlord to greater risk with interest rate changes (which they pass on to renters).

  And as properties in the area increase in cost, the cost of the above formula also increases, prompting the landlord to increase their profit from ‘carrying’ slightly over the years, assuming it can offset the increasing maintenance costs of the unit.

  I’ve periodically looked at rent prices in my area, and done the above, and they seem pretty much in alignment. It’s one of the likely reasons you’ll often hear jokes/stories about landlords freaking out at tennants because a bank’ll yell at them if they’re late on payments – because yes, the rent is basically paying off the interest part of the mortgage on the unit. It’s also one of the reasons ‘new’ home owners (who are actually living in their homes) will typically initially pay ‘more’ than renters, but over time they pay less in terms of monthly carrying costs (not even looking at the principal pay down - just the fact that they get a rate that doesn’t get ‘readjusted up’ every year to align with increasing house prices).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Take-Two CEO Responds to Stock Price Drop Following Google Genie Announcement: 'I Think People Are Confusing Tools With Hits' - IGN⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, I’m not trying to say there aren’t some gems around. It’s just that the quality options vs the garbage is already at a really bad ratio, and to find something like a ‘quality’ indie game, you gotta sift through a lot of junk. And with marketing blitz’s, and the pervasive use of things like influencers who’ll steer conversations on various social media (including reddit, not sure about lemmy yet but wouldn’t surprise me if it was happening here too)… they’ll hype garbage, or they’ll inundate you with so much marketing stuff that it basically spoils parts of ‘good’ games.

  Easy example: the thing I liked most about the old BG games, was discovering/exploring etc. That style of gameplay was obliterated for me by how much marketing / comments / noise there was about that game – noise that was basically impossible to avoid if you’re online at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Take-Two CEO Responds to Stock Price Drop Following Google Genie Announcement: 'I Think People Are Confusing Tools With Hits' - IGN⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Eh, the gaming industry generally feels pretty dry/dead these days to me, even with record numbers of games available. There’s just so many crappy half made ‘alpha’ or ‘early access’ things around. The very small number of ‘better’ games are often marketed so heavily that I find them boring and don’t even bother to finish them – like BG3. And a lot of the “triple A” content often trades engaging/fun gameplay for rent-seeking features without regard to actual player enjoyment.

  A new tool from Google won’t fix that. So I guess I’d sort of agree with the take-two guy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would we be seeing these emails involving Epstein if they were all using E2EE email service?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Many ways people implement that E2EE email service, is smoke and mirrors that still puts your data on to foreign servers – and if it touches/remains in a cloud space, even encrypted, I’d say there’s still the opportunity for the leak to occur (encryption algorithms require updates periodically for very good reason!). However, back around the time period this stuff was happening, I imagine that if they’d used a properly setup E2EE service that they controlled, the comms would not have leaked in this volume. Like it used to be common for even smaller/medium sized businesses to maintain their own Email and Blackberry messaging service servers in the 2005-2015 period, which kept comms internal to the company (barring hackers of course).

  If they had that setup properly and with retention periods set for things like backups / old messages and so on, this sort of leak, I imagine, would not have happened.

  IT Operations type roles in companies are less common these days, as most just dump things into the cloud (and options like BB went poof!), but there is a reason that such departments exist, and why some industries place a high premium on things like data retention (and getting rid of data when you legally can, to minimize this very sort of risk). Most of the people involved in these scandals, appear to be incredibly wealthy / business people etc – I mean, Bill Gates should’ve known for sure that this shit was highly leakable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For me personally, yeah, it wouldn’t work. As others noted, it needs to be reciprocal attraction for sex to really feel good / get you that endorphin hit. Based on the number of replies noting it, it seems fair to say that men’s needs aren’t just a matter having an orgasm.

  Prolly better off looking for an asexual guy to partner with.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Update: Clinton says that Trump tried to stick finger in his butt during trash felattio extravaganza. (Read more)⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Clinton ought to just put this rumour to bed, and tweet out: “I did not have sexual relations with that Man”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨She is making a GREAT point⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah, this isn’t a great point at all… even at face value really.

  Put slightly differently, if we’re assuming people sleep around as much as the text implies, if we focus on birth control solely for men, then one ‘failure’/non-controlled man would result in a ton of pregnancies. If the onus is on women, then one ‘failure’/non-controlled woman would result in one pregnancy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Corcoran Group CEO says Gen Z’s housing market struggles mirror what boomers faced 30 years ago: ‘Stop buying Starbucks coffee,’ she advises⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Eh, I wouldn’t say ‘anyone’, but rather ‘most’. There are gen z in tech who made ridiculous salaries for years, salaries that dwarf the salaries of most in older generations. I mean, as an easy example I’m sure Big Balls and the DOGE boys made a killing fucking the government for Elon.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Corcoran Group CEO says Gen Z’s housing market struggles mirror what boomers faced 30 years ago: ‘Stop buying Starbucks coffee,’ she advises⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Eh, read the first little bit of the article, and bailed as soon as she was noted as saying stuff along the lines of “back then it was harder, because there were fewer desirable areas people wanted to live!”.

  In other words, back then you had cheaper options in the other areas, which have since become unaffordable for starter homes. Nowadays you gotta move out to the middle of nowhere, where there’re no jobs.

  So idiot/detached CEO confirmed from my pov, her appearance at least matches her apparent personality.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘My buyer’s guilt is insane. It’s $1,300 on trash’: the adults addicted to blind box toys like Labubus⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  idk, I’d say it’s more of a problem now because people have easier ways to liquidate their wallets for those sorts of trash purchases, without realising it on a physical / rational level at the time. Like when you had to go in to a store to buy those blind-box card games, it took effort to be an addict, so much that it was more a hobby.

  Now, someone’s kid can accidentally wrack up thousands on a credit card online buying lootbox shit.