The thing about the galactic barrier is that it's pointless. The average distances between galaxies is so vast that a ship moving at Warp 9.8 would take about a millennium to cross.
cyd
joined 2 years ago
It's worth mentioning the Interactive Fiction Archive, a massive catalogue of hobbyist-created text games, many based on free text game engines like TADS.
The problem is that the Federation is extremely conservative about the use of AI and human enhancement, so once you drop in someone like Data and allow him equal rights, there's a wild power mismatch. So he can wreck havoc if he goes rogue.
Data would never be able to pull off the shenanigans he did on Brothers against a Culture craft. Even if he's not going up against a Mind but "only" the humanoid crew, he wouldn't have such a crazy advantage.
Owner of Destructoid, The Escapist, Siliconera, and others Fires Writers and Hires for "AI Editor" to Churn Out Hundreds of Articles Per Week
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The regulation not only puts obligations on users. Providers (which can include FOSS developers?) would have to seek approval for AI systems that touch on certain areas (e.g. vocational training), and providers of generative AI are liable to "design the model to prevent it from generating illegal content" and "publishing summaries of copyrighted data used for training". The devil is in the details, and I'm not so sanguine about it being FOSS-friendly.
A lot of people can't look past the gacha, and understandably so, but Hoyo's games really have a remarkable amount of craft going into them, including top notch world design, battle system design (Genshin Impact still has negligible power creep, 3 years and 20+ characters later!), and character design.
The theorycrafting and lorecrafting surrounding Genshin (and to a lesser extent the new Honkai Star Rail) reminds me of Blizzard in its heyday. For that matter, so does the rule34...
They're okay for niche applications, but the use case is pretty narrow: situations where you want high efficiency solar harvesting, but only for a limited period (because the material degrades). Oh, and you can't use them for (say) cheap solar powered kids' trinkets, because they contain lead.