Khotetsu

joined 2 years ago
[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 3 points 2 years ago

People are disagreeing with you, but as somebody from one of the most liberal states in the US, Massachusetts, it's very much the same thing here - the cities are as progressive as it gets, but you don't have to drive too far before you start seeing the Trump flags and Bible thumpers in their lifted pickups. It's very easy to fall into that lifestyle if you've never been more than 50 kilometers from the house you were born in and never seen somebody with a different skin color from yours. And it doesn't matter if that house is among fields, forests, or coastline.

[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 0 points 2 years ago

New Hampshire/backwoods Maine.

New England does not consent to being considered a part of the same country as the Bible Belt/Florida.

Jokes aside, New Hampshire is known as "The South of the North" for its very..."conservative" political stances.

[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 4 points 2 years ago

Made in Abyss vibes, 10/10. A great worldbuilding aesthetic of a city of would-be adventurers hanging on the edge of the ruins they want to but can't explore.

[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Reminds me of how something like 60% of video games only exist as emulators, because companies never bothered to preserve them in any form. There was even a remake of a game in the past few years that still had the Skidrow logo in it, because the devs had to go and torrent a pirated copy of the game since the original code was gone and they forgot to remove the cracker's logo. There was also the infamous GTA remake that was made from the phone version of the game for the same reason.

[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I agree with you that it's a complicated issue with no right answer and I don't think that warrants the total destruction of the piece of media in question. And I don't think you meant that it did either, but it seems that people think you did.

This situation reminds me of the old episodes of Mickey Mouse (Steamboat Willy? I can't remember the exact cartoon the episodes came from, if they even came from a specific series at all and weren't just one-offs) where Disney has a disclaimer on them if they're ever shown anywhere about how they are for archival purposes only and that they reflect the views and culture of the time that they were made in, and how that doesn't make those views okay. Because they're super fuckin' racist cartoons, like full on black people = monkeys racist, and Disney knows that that's not okay (more like they know that showing that would lose them money at any rate), but that doesn't mean that they're not worth preserving so that we don't lose sight of what the past actually was like and allow people to slap rose colored glasses on the "better days" or something.

As others have mentioned too, it also depends on how the depiction is used. Like when there was all that outrage over the Cyberpunk 2077 Chimaera "Mix it Up" posters of the girl with the giant "package" under her one piece. Yes, those posters are gross sexual objectification and horribly transphobic, but that's the point. They're intended to show how fucked up the dystopia of 2077 America is and how advertising has always used sexual objectification to sell products, and if a company thinks that using trans people's bodies will sell a product, they absolutely will. Just like they do every year with Rainbow Capitalism during Pride.

There are times when the destruction of something horrible is absolutely the way to go, like when Germany destroyed all the Nazi statues right after WW2 and put a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust where Hitler's bunker had been. But even then, it's vital to preserve that past so it can't be washed away. The Germans also took photos of the statues they destroyed, to preserve it so that something like that can't happen again. We can't learn from our mistakes if there's no evidence that they even happened.

[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 6 points 2 years ago

There's a great video on this that was made when YouTube first started rolling this out called The Cobra Effect: Why Anti-Adblock Policies Could Hurt Revenue Instead, and one of the points mentioned in the video is the rising number of people who use an adblocker, and not specifically mentioned but shown in the video is a graphic from an article from 2015 which shows that just under 43% of people use an adblocker. That number will have obviously changed in the past 7 years, but if we just use 25% of viewers as an estimate, that's 25% of all viewers on YouTube who may turn to more "malicious" forms of adblocking such as things like AdNaseum and ReVanced or sites that host YouTube videos without the ads, and tell others to do the same if they're sick of ads. And even if they do give up and watch the ads, the science says that people who use adblockers are much less likely to click on an ad and make a purchase, which is bad for advertisers since they pay for the number of views an ad gets and their clickthrough rate would go down, making it more expensive and less profitable to do business with YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIHi9yH6UB0

[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 7 points 2 years ago

Exactly. Shocking as it may be to some people, we can hate 2 flavors of fascism at the same time. And it's not like lemmy as a whole has had to defederate from 2 Nazi instances in the past couple of months due to their awful behavior, which cannot be said for a certain 2 tankie instances.

[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 1 points 2 years ago

For me, it's more about how much I enjoyed the experience than a simple dollars per hour equation or something. It's a very case by case basis for me.

I remember when Alien:Isolation came out, I told people I got my money's worth in just the first hour from how scared shitless I was the first few times the xenomorph came out to hunt you.

On the other side, I got Starfield for $20 off in the release week, but despite how many hours you can sink into that game, I found the entire experience rather bland and dull and regret buying it.

[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 1 points 2 years ago

One step at a time.

[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 1 points 2 years ago

I don't disagree, but there are 2 issues when you're talking about AI generated art:

  1. People aren't usually compensated for the labor saved in a meaningful, direct way. The people who did those jobs are often left to learn new skills to find jobs in other sectors with no safety nets.

  2. With art, you're talking about automating away human creativity rather than labor.

AI has the potential to be a great tool for artists to help improve their workflow with stuff like iterating variations of design concepts and the like. But that's not how companies will use it (and already are). It's being used to avoid having to pay artists and writers entirely.

In an ideal world, these tools would prove to be a boon for just about everybody. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world and have to worry about how these tools can be abused to destroy people's ability to afford to live. This doesn't mean that we put the genie back in the bottle and stop forward progress, but we do need to make sure we protect people from the downsides as much as we can.

[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 12 points 2 years ago

I've seen people make the argument that no matter what you do if they successfully break adblockers, Google stands to make a profit, but it could actually hurt advertisers.

Obviously, if you stop watching, then that's less overhead for them, and if you pay for premium, then that's literal money in their wallet. But if you start watching ads, Google can leverage more money from advertisers for the increased views. But people who use adblockers are unlikely to click ads, so advertisers pay more for their ads to be shown to people who weren't going to click on them anyway.

Ironically, it's in both our interest and advertisers to stop Google from breaking adblockers.

[–] Khotetsu@lib.lgbt 4 points 2 years ago

On the one hand, you gotta do what you gotta do to put food on the table. But on the other hand, that's 3 years to be looking for a new employer...

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