As I said in the next sentence, “it’s highly unlikely, but you know we’re real people here, with real thoughts and ideas.” Lemmy is the only social media I use, period. I don’t contribute to any other social media, so it’s perhaps more likely than you’re thinking, but still, like I said, highly unlikely. Why take the chance?

This comes across as an extremely heavy-handed way of controlling the conversation. I get wanting to keep things civil, but taking a massive world-changing subject completely off the table, a subject that many many many of us clearly want to talk through, is not a reasonable response in my opinion.

Who’s to say some random comment in a random post on the presidential election doesn’t come up with some incredible idea or solution? It’s highly unlikely, but you know we’re real people here, with real thoughts and ideas. You never know where that one good idea will come from, but it definitely won’t be coming from here if you shut down the whole conversation. I understand this is your instance, and you can do what you want with it, but this is a disappointing response to a very live issue.

Having a device that can be used for surveillance is not the same thing as someone actively choosing to report their neighbor.

Been having similar thoughts. We’ll very soon be back in the age of internment camps, reporting on neighbors’ behavior, and minorities looking over their shoulders even more than usual. I am ashamed of us.

Thanks! I was afraid you were going to say that…but it makes sense. Think I’ll go for it. Also means I can wait a while to buy Veilguard while I play Inquisition.

I’ve been needing a new big game to sink my teeth into, but I haven’t played any of the other Dragon Age games. I watched the glowing euro gamer review for Veilguard and it looks amazing to me (the slightly stylized look doesn’t bother me at all). Do you think I’ll enjoy it without much context? I don’t usually buy full-priced, but I make the occasional exception for games I know I’ll play for a while…Baldurs Gate, for example.

This is a good analogy, and is one big reason I won’t trust any AI until the ‘answers’ are guaranteed and verifiable. I’ve worked with people who needed to have every single thing they worked on double-checked for accuracy/quality, and my takeaway is that it’s usually faster to just do it myself. Doing a properly thorough review of someone else’s work, knowing that they historically produce crap, takes just about as long as doing the work myself from scratch. This has been true in every field I’ve worked in, from academia to tech.

I will not be using any of Apple’s impending AI features, they all seem like a dangerous joke to me.

This kind of direct home visit has been happening for years in Muslim regions of China, for different reasons. At least these pregnancy visits (ugh feels gross to even talk about) don’t involve home stays, but any time the state shows up at your door to surveil your family, your human rights have been violated. It’s incredibly invasive and dystopian.

“Muslim families across Xinjiang are now literally eating and sleeping under the watchful eye of the state in their own homes,” said Maya Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch.

In early 2018, Xinjiang authorities extended this “home stay” program. Cadres spend at least five days every two months in the families’ homes. There is no evidence to suggest that families can refuse such visits.

Source

I loved this game! I got like 6 solid months of fun out of it. It took a really long time for the card combat loop to get old for me. I had never played an x-com style game before this (though I loved their meta callouts to x-com), so the mechanics were brand new to me, but it all just made intuitive sense. The card design and animations are top notch, and some of the fights can be super-challenging, but there’s always a way, and there’s nothing quite like the satisfaction of finally finishing a fight after 5 different tries.

Agree on the story and voice acting, it’s all excellent. There are a couple very recognizable voices in there too.

Edit: Magik, Doctor Strange, and Captain Marvel are pretty much an unstoppable combo…

Yeah, I’d be all in if the headsets were small, comfortable, and didn’t necessarily block out the outside world. I think there’s a ton of potential, so I hope development doesn’t completely stall. I wear glasses, and that’s pretty much the maximum amount of hardware I can handle on my face.

Bingo. I spent a few hours playing some zombie killer game/demo with the HTC Vive back in like 2017, and while it was actually a lot of fun, it was super disorienting and I definitely knocked some stuff off my shelves by trying to stand in the middle of the room by myself. Someone also walked in without me hearing, and they got a hearty elbow to the face when I swung around to shoot a zombie behind me.

And ugh the sweat is real. After a few minutes the headset fogged up and started slipping off my face, and since that particular headset had porous foam all over it, the sweat soaked in and became gross immediately. That was the last time I used VR.

Today I learned Netflix had a game studio.

Your anger is entirely justified, and I share it. This whole licensing issue is a massive problem and shows how little publishers care about their customers. That said, this has always been the case, they’ve just covered their legal bases by updating their TOS.

But to answer your question, there’s no reason to keep using steam, other than it’s one of the easiest ways to legally game. It’s totally your preference if you want to keep supporting their business. There are lots of ways to illegally game, or pay way more for some DRM-free games that you can actually own, but then you’ll be extremely limited in your selection. I’ve invested so much time and money in my steam library, that I’m basically locked in (they count on this, of course). Sure I own a bunch of games on GOG, but they represent a tiny fraction of my overall library.

This is a totally unsatisfying answer, but your only actual recourse, if you want to keep using steam, is to reach out to them and express your displeasure at their updated TOS and its implications. But it’s an industry-wide problem, so I think we’re out of luck until Congress gets involved and changes how digital ownership works.

Exactly. I wish more people had this view of interns. Unpaid ones, at the very least. I worked with a few, and my colleagues would often throw spreadsheets at them and have them do meaningless cleanup work that no one would ever look at. Whenever it was my turn to ‘find work’ for the interns, I would just have them fully shadow me, and do the work I was doing, as I was doing it. Essentially duplicating the work, but with my products being the ones held to final submissions standards. They had some great ideas, which I incorporated into the final versions, and they could see what the role was actually like by doing the work without worrying about messing anything up or bearing any actual responsibility. Interns are supposed to benefit from having the internship. The employer, by accepting the responsibility of having interns, shouldn’t expect to get anything out of it other than the satisfaction of helping someone gain experience. Maybe a future employee, if you treat them well.

Yeah totally, that’s an important distinction. Paid interns are definitely different than unpaid interns, and can legally do essentially the same work as a paid employee.

The way the distinction was explained to me is that an unpaid intern is essentially a student of the company, they are there to learn. They often get university credit for the internship. A paid internship is essentially an entry-level job with the expectation that you might get more on-the-job training than a ‘normal’ employee.

This article doesn’t say if the intern was paid, but it does say the company reported the behavior to the intern’s university, so I’d guess it was unpaid.

I work at a small tech company, by no means big tech. I know it’s common for interns to be treated as employees, but it’s usually in violation of labor law. It’s one of those things that is extremely common, but no less illegal.

The US Department of Labor has a 7 part test to help determine if an intern is classified properly. #6 is particularly relevant to this.

There’s very little detail in the article. I’d be curious to find out exactly what the intern’s responsibilities were, because based on the description in the article it seems like this was a failure of management, not the intern. Interns should never have direct access to production systems. In fact, in most parts of the world (though probably not China, I don’t know) interns are there to learn. They’re not supposed to do work that would otherwise be assigned to a paid employee, because that would make them an employee not an intern. Interns can shadow the paid employee to learn from them on the job, but interns are really not supposed to have any actual responsibilities beyond gaining experience for when they go on the job market.

Blaming the intern seems like a serious shift of responsibility. The fact that the intern was able to do this at all is the fault of management for not supervising their intern.

Think about it this way: remember those upside-down answer keys in the back of your grade school math textbook? Now imagine if those answer keys included just as many incorrect answers as correct ones. How would you know if you were right or wrong without asking your teacher? Until a LLM can guarantee a right answer, and back it up with real citations, it will continue to do more harm than good.

The AI-generated thumbnail really undermines the seriousness of the issue.

This is awesome, we need more rules like this, and Khan is absolutely nailing it. But I’m worried it won’t stick. I think companies have taken our absentmindedness and laziness for granted, and have made tons of money because of it. I don’t think they’ll give that up without a fight, but hopefully they lose. Unless the Supreme Court gets involved, and then we can all but guarantee they’d rule against these consumer protections.

“Too often, businesses make people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement. “The FTC’s rule will end these tricks and traps, saving Americans time and money. Nobody should be stuck paying for a service they no longer want.”

It’s such a basic and obvious consumer protection.