Adding on to that: Sometimes these indie devs, who made a cool thing as a passion project and get rewarded with life-changing money via sales, then go on to continually update the thing since they can now devote time to passion. Thinking Minecraft, Terraria, Vampire Survivors, Stardew Valley as my personal “I have sunk hundreds of hours into this title” games. That $3 game might have good bones and just need time to flesh it out.

Also the communities will rally around devs that don’t use predatory pricing and cash-grabs. I know I’m not the only one who bought more copies of some of these games (or their OSTs, donation DLCs, Patreon, etc) to gift or even just as a thank-you when something updated and gave me more content or more polished experience.

My game list were so popular it was almost cliche, but we can’t really predict what the next great thing will be until it’s there and pricing your new best-seller at $3 means you get exposure and good will.

I still need to play that one. I played Reverie a few years ago and that was an amazing game that is still in my top recommendations.

Unrelated to StarCraft, but this triggered a memory from my childhood that I had to go research to figure out what the hell it was, so I thought I’d share.

I got to play StarCraft at a friends house, never owned it until I had a job and bought my own copy of SC2, my version of ‘StarCraft at home’ was “Battle Realms” if I got the game right. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHP3xUZ6ifc&t=2793s

I’m pretty sure the Lotus Clan had some corrupting/stealing mechanic that I abused, where I could take over enemy buildings and make my own version of their units. I remember turtling against the CPU players as being incredibly satisfying when I swept over them with their own units.

Might just be every RTS game where you can abuse economy in general when facing CPU players, but rolling across the map is always fun.

I think you missed my point.

• We conflate Privacy with Anonymity. I have no expectation of privacy in public, but this is another nail in the coffin for anonymity ; and I used to have an expectation of anonymity.

–

When I grew up, I could roam the local mall without an expectation that I was being recorded in perpetuity. My movements were recorded, sure, but stored for only as long as needed to prevent shoplifting or other criminal activity. I was anonymous unless there was a reason to look into my actions.

This is a not a new thing and I doubt you ever complained about being caught on countless CCTVs before.

CCTV is <100 years old and I’m rapidly approaching half that. CCTV was a shoplifting deterrent when I was a youth. Now it’s a weapon and it’s no longer CC.

Modern cloud-based video storage is no longer owned and operated by a single business or person. It’s all Amazon or Microslop or Meta and they will happily sell access to law enforcement or palantir or probably anyone who asks with a large enough check.

Anonymity is the ability to be a nobody. In the 90’s, we could expect that we were nobodies unless we did something worth noting. Recordings of us were ephemeral and irrelevant; overwritten next week.

Now they will be forever, and machine learning, face recognition, and processing power to correlate multiple data sources means that things you do today can be used against you in 30 years. I hope you can see that.

It’s not really the glasses themselves that worries me, it’s the rest of the tech stack. The glasses just add new vectors to the problem.

You have hot chicken. Alabama has mosquitos and humidity. I would move to Tennessee first.

The real issue in my mind is privacy and autonomy. I want to be able to walk around without the expectation that I’m recorded. I’m male and don’t have the same the impact from the creep-factor, and absolutely get it, but the implications are larger than dudes looking at women.

Big difference from a “I am in public and can be recorded” to a “I am in public and I should expect to be recorded”. Another big step to "that recording is on a mega-corp server and can be viewed, reviewed, used as training data, cross-referenced, and otherwise processed without my consent because the person recording me consented; I really think this is the the crux, as I can have a tacit approval to be recorded by walking to a store, but I haven’t given any approval for my likeness, my position, my emotions, etc to be recorded by walking down a street. A TV show using unsuspecting public will get people to sign waivers granting limited rights to their footage afterwards, or blur faces – or did – before retaining and publishing.

I walk into a grocery store and I can expect that they have a CCTV (note the CLOSED CIRCUIT part) system to be able to review what happened in the case of a robbery or whatever. The tech of my childhood meant that the store had a stack of VHS tapes, or maybe DVD/HD/SSD that rotated and could hold (lets way exaggerate) a decade of footage. A decade after I left the store, there was no record I was there – maybe a receipt if I used a card, but I don’t actually know the PCI retention requirements. With cheap storage and 3rd-party cloud-hosted camera systems, the business no longer owns the records of my presence, and has only a data retention ‘agreement’ with the provider. I didn’t agree to my footage being used for any purpose other than the one implicit for safety/loss-prevention by visiting the store. Any use beyond that should be unreasonable search and seizure, but it’s not being done by the government, so isn’t illegal or something I could sue over.

Very similar situation to Flock/generic-ALPR-esq cameras. The trend used to be that unless you were somehow a person-of-note that you had effective anonymity in public: It took resources to monitor an individual’s movements, facial expressions, actions, etc. It no longer does, and so all this is effectively captured and stored in perpetuity. The real problem is that it’s everywhere. Good luck finding a grocery store that doesn’t have some cloud-provider surveillance. Good luck finding a gas station that doesn’t. Good luck even driving to a specific store that isn’t recording you constantly because you pass several cameras on the way and some are specifically designed to track your movements.

Bringing it home to the current topic of ‘smart’ glasses. I haven’t consented to being recorded by random person walking down the street with Meta’s camera on their face. Meta has no ethical rights to my “content”, regardless of whether the owner of the glasses has agreed to give Meta a license to their video as part of setting up the glasses. Ethical vs Legal, but we can keep pushing back.

I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but this shit is pervasive and won’t stop until we force it.

I think this might be a good ground-roots way to sell the idea of privacy to folks that don’t get it.

Buy a cheap phone case or old phone or something that you can have destroyed by an angry recordee.

Walk around in public, obviously holding your recording device out, it doesn’t need to be on or actually recording, just the visibility.

Have a sticker on it saying “Ask me about privacy” or something, with a plan to point out the less obvious cameras if anyone does.

For bonus points, target some people who aren’t normally aware, like older white men, and help them to understand that it’s uncomfortable to be obviously recorded, but that they don’t notice when they are “surveilled.”

IANAL, I don’t think there’s any risk other than violence from the recipients, but they’re in public after all.

1 person doing this is annoying, 1k people doing this will be notable, 1m will kill public-facing-cloud-storage cameras and their ecosystems. Anyone want to help organize a flash mob to spend a few hours doing this in a city’s downtown?

So I think we’re aligned… or at least I’m coming to your side in my Liberal >> Left journey.

A commenter above said you left off the /s and that it was sometimes hard to tell. I went in defending Left from someone who thought that Hillary would have been significantly different from/better than Obama.

I’m assuming with “I think it would have been a push,” that you were not actually blaming Left (those here, not colloquial US democratic voters in aggregate) for the current problems, but maybe I’m still missing something.

I wrote up further discussion, but it took me too long to collect my thoughts and I think I missed my chance to have a reasonable window.

I did want to still follow up and say thanks for having this conversation with me, and for going into detail.

Strangely enough, I’m still not sure how you feel. I’ve upvoted you because I think this ‘adds to the conversation’ even if I eventually disagree with you.

Demonstrably not…

Your line was “… because Leftists didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in 2008”.

So you would or would not have preferred Clinton in the 2008 general election? Over what? I’m serious. I wasn’t paying attention at that time to know how she compared to Obama. By the time I was really watching, she was leagues better than trump, but back in 2008, I was a simple straight-ticket blue voter – doing my duty, punching my card every two years and feeling like I was helping.

(again my point is aimed at inform. Sell me on your point of view. I don’t think we’re enemies and there is a silent majority who agree on the end goal but maybe not the path.)

How is today’s situation on the shoulders of people who didn’t vote for Hillary in 2008’s Primary?

I know people who have succumbed to not good enough, and let some terrible people win. This is perhaps more pronounced locally, if you start looking, where a handful of votes is the difference between a socialist or liberal winning over a conservative or fascist.

I think this is only happening because capital does what capital does, and it tries to own the narrative. Berating people because the self-appointed leadership failed them is totally not a thing this community is trying to do. right?

One-liners are the absolute worst kind of political speech. I can’t tell if I agree with you or not. Clarify and defend your position*.

Was Clinton a better candidate in 2008 than Obama? Would her winning the primary have led Obama to run against trump in 2016/2020 instead, resulting in multiple terms of Democratic leadership, undermining capitalism? Or would she have lost and we’d have had our republican asshattery years earlier resulting in left-er leadership as the pendulum swung when this AI bullshit arrived.

My point is: if your only contribution is a single statement like “this is their fault”, just shut up. Trite comments don’t inform.

*I’m actually pretty serious here. I’m new to “Left” and would have called myself a Liberal a few years ago on this forum. Tell me why this is my fault.

Ah… see, you two are about a decade too early for the OP issue.

I don’t have a 2026-model car, since those cost as much as a house nowadays, but they also have a water pump; theirs with a microcontroller. Said pump won’t work unless it’s had it’s special flavor of authentication handled so the computer in the pump (which adds non-negligible cost) can talk to the rest of the car. That’s computer’s only job is to tell the pump it’s authentic and can work.

(I’m simplifying, I’m IT secops, not auto) Used to be there was a literal wire that ran from the turn signal stalk to the actual lightbulb. We replaced that with CAN bus, so the stalk just sends a “we’re turning left” signal that the lights are listening for, like a home network where your computer sends a signal to the printer so you can print a document. In a home network, you might have a real threat vector of an attacker trying to intercept your locally-transmitted data, so there’s a mild use case for encrypting everything to remove that risk.

In my car, there’s no man-in-the-middle danger for someone trying to snoop on my turn-on-wipers signal. Other than aggregate data about how you drive, there’s no data there to leak anyway, it’s all operations. These manufacturers devised a system to ‘protect’ your car network, and are now leveraging it to spy on you (by harvesting your usage data in aggregate – this guy likes to accelerate aggressively and turn without signaling) and also lock out third party parts by ensuring they can’t talk over the local network because they are untrusted by the other parts.

There are documented cases where a car has been ‘hacked’, but those are generally… spoliers… cars with “genuine” parts with software vulnerabilities that don’t need to exists in the first place, and maybe we could spend more time on ensuring the bluetooth stack can’t even see the engine instead of ensuring the water pump must be able to prove it’s legit.

(*Side note, While double checking my knowledge, I found this. It has a reference to MOST, and I can’t imagine the self control needed to not name this ‘Media Oriented Inter-Systems Transport’ instead. I would not have made it.)

I think I’m preaching to the choir here, but back in early 2000s-2010s, we were still in a gilded age of car-can-have-computer-and-do-cool-thing, and now we are in car-must-have-computer-to-fuck-consumer. Same thing is happening in your phone, and soon will be happening in your house. "Sorry it’s so hot in there, the non-samsung AC isn’t compatible with your H0-US-3 model.

Part of the problem is that is really is “we”.

I haven’t dug in, but I have a 401k, a Roth IRA and a HSA. I don’t directly control how those mutual/hedge funds invest, I just get a slice of them. Historically, that’s been a good way to be “diverse”, a funny word in our current political climate, and be protected from one area or company suddenly failing.

With the spacex and incoming google, anthropic and openai stocks coming at us, I cannot imagine that I won’t end up, or already own, a tiny share of these companies. My 401k contribution next month will almost certainly go towards a fractional share of spacex.

I haven’t looked recently, because I’m tired, but I doubt I even have an option to choose a non-techbro fund via my retirement operator, who I have to deal with because they are contracted by my employer.

Sure, I could manage my investments myself, but that takes time, energy and money that I’m already spending on my living. I just get the choices of assorted Vanguard funds, all defined by when I hope to retire! It all depends on how much food costs next month at this point. I couldn’t even find a way to see the specific stocks my fund was currently holding – this data is hidden from us plebeians.

If YOU are certain you haven’t invested in spacex, the only way is if you manage all your stock market exposure, which puts you in a pretty rare place.

For me, I’m probably holding a tiny amount of spacex now and I hate it and I had no choice. The only other choice is to stuff the cash in my mattress, but even that paper will be worthless when this shit hits the fan.

If you owe the bank $1,000, that’s your problem. If you owe investors $1,000B, that’s their problem.

One would think that investors are smart enough to know that this is a shell game. I think what we’re seeing is that they believe they have won the quiet war of capital vs humanity and are no longer afraid of consequences.

We’ve all ‘bought in’ via 401k, HSA plans and other retirement ‘vehicles’ and they think we can’t bite the hand that feeds. Crashing this ‘line-go-up’ would mean we lose “money” too.

And they may be right… but I think we’re rapid approaching a point where that hand no longer feeds, and that hand is quite close to the head. If $1T of this fake money disappeared overnight, the cash in my wallet would become worth a lot more; or we’d switch to trading in bottle caps. The techbros found the infinite money glitch and are printing virtual currency at the cost of real people who will eventually notice and turn on them.

They are even taking away our circuses: My decade-old computer has literally APPRECIATED in value over the last 12 months and the industry that created the products that are being traded right now has completely pivoted away from the consumers that made it. I can’t afford to replace the parts I currently have if they fail.

Even people who don’t call themselves gamers will feel this squeeze when their current iphone battery degrades, can’t be easily replaced, and the new model with no actual value-add beyond battery costs $5k because silicon is all tied up in some useless datacenter no one can afford to access. Oh, and you need a phone to respond to a captcha so you can apply for food stamps, a job, or interact with the chatbot that is gatekeeping whatever else you have to do to survive.

I never had a nintendo console beyond the NES until I got a switch as an adult since I ended up on the sega and then playstation. I missed out on many of these games. I know I could emulate them, and have done so for some games, but I never played OoT. I’m mildly hyped for a remaster/remake that uses modern control schemes and hopefully QoL changes.

I haven’t really looked into it, and it won’t be a day-1 purchase, but it’s on my radar.

Solid agree from me. I love the idea of a wealth/asset tax*.

I’m not sure where the line lies, and I haven’t done the math to see where 3x the global 10% lands, but I think that is likely too small and would impact most of the ‘first world’ citizens who aren’t the problem, but a rolling plan to start higher and move down seems sound. If you start at everyone worth >$10Billion, you’ll have better luck selling this idea than if you start with everyone worth >$10k.

If everyone had all the resources they needed, there would likely be little innovation, but that innovation would be from the passionate. But we’ve seen in the past few years that when all the resources are pooled, the owning class stops innovating and moves into hoarding instead and the motive moves to extracting value instead of creating it.

There is a happy middle ground somewhere, where people can be rewarded for work that adds value to society but not be incentivized to hoard it and others can choose to not add to society but still live a satisfying life.

*Your idea is a little nicer than mine, which is that we identify an absurd personal wealth line, like $10B (tied to some economic indicator), and then anyone over that line is executed and their property is returned to society and not inherited. Build in a grace period, so you have like a year to divest if you pass the threshold. That will heavily disincentivize hoarding.

Yeah. That little bullshit disclaimer at the bottom of every AI thing we have to intentionally ignore is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but is probably a really flimsy shield: “AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses,” says Google.

I have actually used gemini intentionally to answer a question, but the question has always been in the form of ‘where do I find info about XYZ’ instead of my real ask, because I can quickly validate that the response to question 1 is a reliable source, where validating an AI hallucination might take multiple times longer to refute than it did to produce.

And some, a vanishingly few but present group, want to make things better. By dismissing the whole party, you disincentivize the people who might vote for the greater good, or at least keeping things the same, because ‘it doesn’t matter’. That lets the ‘steal everything’ party win.

Want better representatives? Help find them and amplify them. This is not a spectator sport where you vote once every 2-4 years. If you don’t like the choices you are offered, change the choices. Even after you’re doing that, vote for the least harm until we get to a point where we’re choosing between a ‘good’ vs ‘better’. We will never reach that point by telling people their votes don’t matter.

I don’t think we’ve quite hit the point where the ballot box is completely rigged, but posts telling people it’s not worth their time to vote against the incredibly obvious corruption will only only accelerate us to that moment.

I don’t know if you’re depressed, disillusioned or a troll.

These kinds of comments are not helpful.

Things will not get better under Republican leadership. That party has been completely compromised by wealth and self-serving assholes who are willing to be sycophantic enough to the right people to get power. There’s tons of data to back this up, where a majority democratic government quietly fixes the shit a republican one broke.

The Democrats, who are also not great leaders, are at least generally aiming to preserve the status quo. While some of us work to improve the Democratic options and get progressives into the system. Look to Mamdani as recent example. Vote blue and be involved in the earlier steps of the prices if you don’t like the options.

Comments like this only make Democratic leaning voters check out because ‘it doesn’t matter’. Which amplifies the Republican vote.

Comments like this caused people to not vote for the [list-of-things-people-didn’t-like-about-her] woman who would not have cut every bit of humanitarian spending (internal or external) and would not have started a maybe-a-war with Iran and would not have put up with all the regulatory bullshit that is tanking our economy.

Comments like this actively make the world worse. Stop.

If you’re angry at the status quo, try helping fix it. Run for office if you can, even a local one like a city or county position, or help support and canvas for people who are running against the existing leaders who have failed us. If you want a grass-roots movement to magically appear, you have to be the fucking roots!

I don’t gamble, I just spend thousands of dollars and several years on an education and hope I will be able to make more in the future and be able to support my family.

Shit. I thought Caprice was her name. Totally didn’t realize it was a title. Probably sunk my chances of that flirting working out …