Ryantific_theory @ Ryantific_theory @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

That's how the capitalists getcha. Back in granddads day, they just made sure you lost enough fingers in the machinery to keep from counting. Nowadays they gotta keep you too busy to realize they stole two hours instead of one.

Yeah, I remember back when depressive humor was funny because it was sad. Then, a few things happened in the last decade and now it's funny because it's true.

While true, sitting around watching Netflix has the advantage that it takes none of the nonexistent energy remaining after a full day of work + chores + you only get two hours before bed.

Yeah, next thing you know they'll be sliding offers to the most liked people's profiles offering the chance to become compensated daters if they go out with VIP profiles, no pressure to do anything sexual though, because that'd be illegal.

Honestly, this 500$ a month thing is just sad, because it'll definitely work (financially), and Tinder will do some shenanigans with the algorithm to make it seem a little worth it, and it'll just definitely not be worth it to the people paying 500$ a month.

Aren't AI generated images pretty obvious to detect from noise analysis? I know there's no effective detection for AI generated text, and not that there won't be projects to train AI to generate perfectly realistic images, but it'll be a while before it does fingers right, let alone invisible pixel artifacts.

As a counterpoint, won't the prevalence of AI generated CSAM collapse the organized abuse groups, since they rely on the funding from pedos? If genuine abuse material is swamped out by AI generated imagery, that would effectively collapse an entire dark web market. Not that it would end abuse, but it would at least undercut the financial motive, which is progress.

That's pretty good for 2023.

That's alright, I was just a little unsure about the mixed tone. As far as public funding goes, I'd much rather NASA funding go to SpaceX than Boeing, especially since unlike the cost plus development contracts that Boeing and Lockheed-Martin have gotten as the United Launch Alliance, SpaceX's payments are almost mostly contracted purchases. That package you linked pays for specific flights to the ISS, as well as paying for a propulsive lunar lander as part of Artemis Project.

I mean, I hate Elon as much as the next guy, but none of this money is going to him. Compared to pouring money into the telecoms or aerospace companies owned by less vocal billionaires, and then watching them go back for seconds without doing anything, I'd much rather see something productive come of public funding.

As an aside, Starlink has never received public funding, so this really isn't the project to complain about that. It was tentatively approved for 900 million to be awarded after delivering gigabit speeds to 99.7% of rural America, but the money would only have been awarded after completion, and the funding was pulled a month after Viasat (another satellite internet company) pressured the FCC, a decision that the FCC Commissioner publicly declaimed, which was kinda funny.

The really annoying part of this is the author says:

“The crucial finding is that the number of violent video games you’re exposed to has an influence on your verbal aggression and hostility,”

Only to go on and say:

“It’s very important to stress that our findings are not causal,”

More than that, the study doesn't even measure their "exposure" to violent games, it requests their three favorite games and then checks their PEGI rating.

Whew. Okay, so reading the actual research article here, and, this article is kind of trash. First off, the study group was recruited from ads posted on Reddit and Discord, notably from r/samplesize, r/narcissism and r/truegaming and Cluster B Circus, r/NPD Official and NPD Recovery 2.0 respectively. One is a place for polls, one is a gaming subreddit, and the rest are all communities for people with narcissism. So they're skewing their sample population explicitly towards how people with narcissism that play violent games respond. Which, I think was the original intent of the study, and they bolted on the additional conclusions for a spicier publication, since the only way these numbers are meaningful is with a control group of people with NPD (narcissistic personality disorder) that do not play violent games, and even then, it only provides a correlation between people with NPD who play violent video games and increased verbal aggression (one of which was arguing if people disagree with you).

I'm beginning to feel regret for putting way too much effort into a comment, because this is a long ass article, but further in, the study states that respondents had "healthy" levels of narcissism, which goes unremarked despite their primary sample sourcing being targeted at narcissism instead of a population of gamers. I'm calling it a wrap here, but essentially this is a remarkably unreliable study to write that headline off of.

Part of it is the very mechanics of gaming, they're all built on a core of goals, rules, challenge, and interaction. When telling a story, the four basic forms of conflict are man against man, man against nature, man against self, and man against society. Violence is an easy vehicle for three of those conflicts, and especially lends itself to active gameplay loops. Mind you, I'm referring to violence as acting to cause injury, because there are a lot of games that are built around fighting with zero gore or death.

The other thing is that violence is just very popular. If you stop to really consider it, how much entertainment is free of violence? How many shows and movies are completely nonviolent? How many books don't have a single fight? There are genres that typically avoid violence, but even then you'll still find members of the genre that contain physical conflict. Plenty of romance and dramas that are steeped in fighting and death.

At any rate, not that my perspective's any more valuable than anyone else's but I really haven't seen a demand for violence that's lower that the supply.

Yeah, although I think part of the missing nuance is that people already did that, the difference being that now anyone can, in theory, create what's inside their head, regardless of their actual artistic talent. Now that creation is accessible though, everyone's having another moral panic over what should be acceptable for people to create.

If anything, moving the more disturbing stuff from the real world to the digital seems like an absolute win. But I suppose there will always be the argument, much like video games making people violent, that digital content will become real.

I think it's pretty apparent you don't live in the suburbs or outside of a large city lol. Even then, when I lived in Texas the urban sprawl meant walking anywhere was completely off the table, and biking meant sharing 55 MPH roads. Other states have been better, but the issue of vanishing public spaces has been an issue raised since the 80's (third spaces, if you're interested).

All that said, even being active in community and spending time with friends, should people not be allowed to watch tv in their downtime? Should we ban the mindless internet browsing, Lemmy?

I mean, that genuinely sounds amazing. Though I'll note that paying to go places is still an issue for the youth and the poor. When I was in college, and when I lived in California, there was a similar variety of options, though, driving was a necessity in San Diego.

If you've ever heard of suburban hell though, that's pretty much what I was referring to. There's a small library about a forty minute walk from me, across at least one highway and partially without sidewalks. A ten minute walk to a park that can seat fifteen, there is a scenic bike route, and no buses. And yet it's a vast improvement over what I saw in Texas.

The loss of unregulated, uncapitalized public spaces is a well recognized phenomenon (also termed 'third spaces'), one that grew even more pronounced during Covid.

There are, but they're all entertainment media. Books, television, games, every avenue of entertainment is being steadily hypercapitalized and compartmentalized. Communities aren't failing because people have entertainment, they've fallen apart because the outside world has almost no places left where people can freely gather. You don't meet your neighbors because there aren't any sidewalks, because the parks need to be driven to, because downtown has strip malls instead of boardwalks where people can gather.

I grew up hanging out in the Walmart parking lot because that's the only place we wouldn't be shooed away. Entertainment is what fills the absence of community, not the cause of it.

"People shouldn't consume media" is a hot new take I didn't expect. A call to return to sitting on the porch and aimlessly staring at the neighborhood for hours while sipping on sweet tea and smoking a pipe.

Yeah, I could see the financial value dropping, with businesses less willing to pay as much for harvested data, but I don't see a point in time where they don't attempt harvest every last piece of data on the off chance somebody wants it though. Advertisers paid insane amounts of money for targeted information, but even Google's seen a huge contraction in their advertising revenue.

Doesn't mean they aren't frantically trying to harvest data more aggressively (just recently tried to bake it into the internet itself), just that our data is getting cheaper.

You mean, waiting for news when it gets isekai'd after someone pushes it in front of a train lol.

I think you mean a nice golden parachute to reward them for taking the heat, so they can swap in a new expensive face to implement slightly less unpopular fees.

I don't know if that's quite the right way to frame the complaints. I don't think that having things to entertain you for free is necessarily a human right (even if paywalling all media is a bleak alternative), but I do think people have a right to be charged a reasonable amount for entertainment. There was a long time where you paid 8$ a month and got access to just about every single movie and tv show that had ever been made in the US.

It was wildly profitable for Netflix, who in turn paid licensing fees to all the owners of their content, and customers were happy, it was great. Then all the cable companies started their own streaming services, licensed media was reclaimed as the garden walls went up, and suddenly comprehensive access to media ballooned from 10$ a month to hundreds . The services themselves got worse, ads started getting inserted into paid accounts, and subscription prices steadily rose across the board.

I don't think people are declaring that media should be free, but after Netflix almost killed piracy because most people are willing to pay a reasonable amount for reasonable access, a lot of people are understandably unhappy with the streaming industry going from an affordable revolution to cable 2.0 in a single decade.

cries a lot in capitalism*

Yeah, I'd never liked Hulu because Comcast was behind it, and I will forever hate Comcast, but the enshittification of streaming services is essentially an intended return to the structure of cable packages.