I think it’s extra funny that Liefeld very likely traced a photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger for that one.

Because this confuzzled me, note that the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the Digital Services Act (DSA) are two separate things.

The Digital Markets Act is the one which is meant to remove economic barriers by “gatekeepers”. For example the DMA is used to force Google and Apple to open their app stores.

The Digital Services Act is the one that regulates (among other things) moderation, political neutrality and removal of extremist content on social media platforms. That’s the one Thierry Breton oversaw and threatened Elon with.

So while exTwitter’s lawyers may sigh in relief, because they got out of the DMA; the DSA is still looming large.

“Free speech” has always been a right-wing dog whistle. It has nothing to do with anyone’s legal right, it’s a means to claim victimhood and justify attacking others as “defense”.

The benefit of use high-end cameras (like those from Arri) is that they usually have a higher range for ISO (light sensitivity) and aperture, which makes it easier to shoot without setting up lighting for every specific shot. Most people know this from smartphone cameras: Cheap ones struggle in low-light settings while better ones will still be able to produce decent pictures.

They also leave out half of the story: The whole thing already started in October. After months of harassment one of the employees snapped and called their shit out. But they leave that part out, claim they got attacked out of nowhere and play the victims.

It’s a cult. Altman is one of the TESCREAL devotees. He truly believes that he can build the electronic messiah.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

In that regard, you cannot make a manager understand a thing that may detrimental to the profits of the company. Because the profits decide upon the size of the manager’s bonus - even if the profits are entirely fictional, only exist as a plan, a power point presentation or are pure hype for investors. So managers have a vested interest in insisting that they can circumvent regulations/disregard laws/lobby for exemptions/… in order to make more money, no matter what reality looks like.

I am shocked to hear that the company which needlessly and cruelly killed animals with their experiments, did not bother to keep records of the cruelties they committed. SHOCKED!

The week after: Google introduces AI Mail that will receive and automatically respond to all mail. This will happen without the users’ consent or knowledge. In fact, users won’t be able to access their mail anymore at all “for security reasons”.

Yeah, I am in the same boat: I really don’t understand what the outrage is all about. First off, because Mastodon is built on open standards which are 100% intended to be interoperable. Second because everyone can read a Mastodon feed that isn’t private and the same goes for BlueSky accounts. Hell, BlueSky supports RSS for its feeds, so people with an RSS reader can follow BlueSky accounts without the user knowing about it.

Personally I do not trust the people behind BlueSky, but neither do I trust all the admins of Mastodon servers. There are a ton of questionable Mastodon servers out there, operated by people with very dubious motives, if not outright malicious intent.

This is incredibly funny for people who followed this. Everybody and their grandma told the European Commission that there was no way that breaking end-to-end encryption was compatible with the law. Yet they constantly pushed for it anyway and now look at this mess.

I am almost certain that the European Commission will claim that there are still ways to break end-to-end encryption, only to defeated in court yet again. Like they tried with data preservation for law enforcement purposes. They just can’t stop themselves.

The enshittification continues, until morale profit improves.

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Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.

Elon Musk: At long last, I have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel “Don’t create the Torment Nexus”.

Sure, the death of the live service hype plays a role, too, but in my view it is mostly due to the gravy train of cheap money coming to a halt: Lots of companies are scaling back because they had funded themselves with loans while laundering profits through tax havens. Gaming companies are not much different from tech companies and media companies in this regard. Those are also in hot water ATM and fire people in order to stabilize their cash flow.

At the end of the day, gaming companies are going to invest far less in the future. Games such as “Spider-Man 2” and other AAA titles with exorbitant budgets will become rare. This has been a trend for years.

Thus I am rather certain that 2023 was one of the last years where we have seen a strong line-up of high quality, high budget titles alongside indie success stories.

I wonder if 2023 will go down as one of the last good years for gaming (and even that only works if you ignore all the layoffs that already happened).

Piranha Bytes is/was owned by Embracer, that should say everything about its chances of survival.

As far as I understand it, the studios are trying a different angle: They are not suing Reddit this time, but an ISP and want Reddit to provide the data of costumers of that ISP.

Now Elon has lost the crucial support of NFT bros. All five of them!

Because there are lots of people in this thread who paint whales as “rich schmucks” who can afford to spend $48k without thinking twic. This is a myth that lots of the gaming industry itself loves to perpetuate, because it absolves them of taking responsibility for ruining lives.

Research has shown repeatedly that whales are much more likely to be people with mental health problems and/or gambling addicts. That Star Citizen isn’t a freemium game with loot boxes makes it marginally better than - let’s say - Genshin Impact, but offers like the bundle in the article is still predatory.