Yeah I've come to accept that there's an amount of money needed to get comfortable. But when you get there, any surplus will not bring any happiness and might even inspire egoism and jealousy. But there is a line.
This is a good time to ask: I want to use AI on a local server (deepseek maybe, image generators like flux, ...) is there a cheaper alternative to flagship Nvidia cards which can do it?
This is probably the best answer. If everything is truly only running on local network and nothing is exposed with a port through your router, you are very safe.
Most issues get introduced when running a server exposed to the Internet.
That said, on the lowest level, if they want to get you, they will. It's all a risk analysis. And the more interesting you are to adversarial parties, the higher the chances you'll get pursued.
If you're Edward Snowden, 99% your calls and conversations are always on record.
If you're John Doe, truly only your ISP cares when they get a law enforcement request because you really pushed the envelope.
Trending movies are notoriously bad, because movie studios will really try to rake in the revenue.
On the other hand, ripping music from YouTube, no one cares or is able to track it, so risk is very low.
It sounds like you might have missed some parts of my comment.
Wages: yes you can claim everything is affected by the relatively low wages. That includes video games. But if you need to save up because of that, video games will be one of the things you need to skip, because it is a luxury good. And that's sad. That's why this sticks out.
Price dip from 1980: I made a case for why the costs for video games in 1980 were very high, and probably for a variety of reasons. now quite a lot of those reasons disappeared over the next centuries. So the price increases do not correlate with that, and that's why using the prices from 1980 might not be a great comparison.
Complaining about a 20$ increase: because everyone has the absolute right to complain about everything. We are the consumer - judging prices is one of our ultimate rights, because we need to make sure it's worth buying something. Now I don't think it's entitlement given all the things I listed before, but if you wanna call it that, go ahead, although I think trying to understand my perspective would decrease your presumptions about people like me.
We have it objectively better by every metric: and this is precisely where I disagree, respectfully. You do not have to understand why, but I feel like painting crowds of people in broad strokes is always unhelpful for perspective and learning. But I guess in the end you do you, I can't force people to understand someone else and why they're saying what they're saying.
I mean tbf complaining that less people can afford it now because prices have increased but wages haven't is fair. Everything needs to be looked at relative to all the other values. If you wanna go even more in depth I guess you would need to add popularity of games, reputation of a brand or game series, value of the currency, and other factors.
I generally agree with you that prices for video games haven't kept up that well, although I would also point out that due to multiple factors anchoring the video game price at 1980 might not be the best if you want a fitting picture. Games were much more rare baack then, the market was smaller, small production volume meant physical costs per unit increase, there's things like way higher shipping costs to think about because globalization is a more modern phenomenon and a lot more stuff. Imo using the 2000s as an anchor to extrapolate from would be more fitting, as the market was well established at that point and thus prices would appear more stable.
I'm not doing that because I am literally a little gremlin who can't be arsed to put the time in rn but these are my two cents of criticism against your methodology.
There's two big questions that need to be tackled: how do we fit AI into copyright law (I think latest case law suggests there's no copyright with AI generated images), and how do we make sure everyone's personal rights are protected (talking impersonation, blackmail, phishing, etc)?
AI stealing jobs is overblown imo. Tech giants are trying, but turns out it just makes people work a bit faster, it's not a magic wand. Some companies are rehiring and it's a giant shit show. Same goes for AGI, most experts will tell you that AGI will either never happen, it won't happen in the way we think it will, or it will still be more than 30y which means it's not a priority for us rn and it shouldn't be.
To me it feels so much like the industrialization. The issue is not the production or the mekanisms, it's who's using them and how they're used. Nothing changed from before we had AI, there's good and bad uses for it and we ought to really question how this is a clear net negative for us when I don't see it.
There's one thing that deserves more focus, like it always does: military application. We're talking gathering Intel, deducing strategies or digital warfare. It enables people to use it as a propaganda acceleration for example, or like they do in the Mossad as a means to plan war crimes in the form of air strikes on civilians. That said, I think things like this would happen without AI, but we should find ways to make it harder to use AI in this context.
Overall I don't understand why people hate the tool instead of the person holding it and what they're doing with it. AI is like a baseball bat and people are scared you can murder someone with it, while they're running around with knives.
I mean blocking specific countries is stupid anyway. Historically China has been playing games with the EU and the US on a geopolitical level. But: Chinese, European as well as American researchers have been at the core of research on current topics like AI, security, etc. Btw. ironically the scientific landscape is very collaborative and borders on a federated model, it's actually pretty neat how much researchers don't care about country of origin.
What I'm saying is introducing geopolitics into open source development or research is one of the most stupid things to do, because it punishes both your and the other country and only benefits uninvolved third parties. It's literally shooting yourself in the foot.
Yeah I've come to accept that there's an amount of money needed to get comfortable. But when you get there, any surplus will not bring any happiness and might even inspire egoism and jealousy. But there is a line.