I remember it being especially bizarre because it basically means going through a large portion of the game with a more or less useless character soaking up xp, after which you either have a slightly less useless underlevelled character or one that’s brokenly OP depending on how you planned out the combo. And if you dual class too late you just never get to that point and it’s all drawback no benefit.

Here’s what the US copyright office says about when AI art is or isn’t copyrightable:

In the case of works containing AI-generated material, the Office will consider whether the AI contributions are the result of “mechanical reproduction” or instead of an author’s “own original mental conception, to which [the author] gave visible form.” 24 The answer will depend on the circumstances, particularly how the AI tool operates and how it was used to create the final work.25 This is necessarily a case-by-case inquiry.

So if an image looks like AI and you decide to just take it, legally that could be a risky proposition if you don’t know the artist’s workflow and the situation doesn’t exactly match up with settled case law. Afaik most of the market is for custom images, so in practice most of the time it’s not going to be a situation of just putting in a prompt and handing over the result but rather a multi step process and a hybrid of different techniques, which could weigh more towards generated content or more towards traditional drawing or image manipulation. The reason to pay someone for that instead of just using AI yourself would be the same as the reason for paying for non-AI art; they have the skills to get better results than you easily can on your own. The reason an artist might use AI is that it improves quality and/or reduces the amount of work.

Well probably, immigration and gender are both things that people have basically always had strong feelings about. Though I see your point; what if it’s more of a top-down phenomenon and wouldn’t be a big deal without the propaganda? But in that case the apparent anti-democratic message of the comic seems similar; the task of good politicians being to manipulate people in more responsible directions they actually believe in and not just lazily seek power appealing to whatever stupid ideas, which still seems to imply voters are not and should not actually be making any real decisions or in charge of anything.

Maybe it could also be thought of the other way around though; if ‘bones’ represents something actually pretty bad, then despite being ruled by a group naturally interested in doing the wrong thing, the right thing gets done anyway because of their incentives and lazy greed.

But the premise of the comic is that the politicians are themselves pressured by the voters to represent positions they think are insane (and are actually insane?) and hope won’t actually become law, yet they do become law because the conspiracy to pretend to do something while doing nothing fails. With direct democracy you would assume those same laws would pass for the same reasons, not a different outcome.

Is this an anti-democracy comic?

My thoughts on this are, humans are pattern propagation machines. If someone is infused with spite and misery to begin with, love which fails to acknowledge and process that spite comes off as hollow and meaningless. Seeing others express the same things you feel is cathartic and generates trust. There is a profound need for sharing in feelings like contempt, rage, and the desire to hurt others that isn’t fulfilled, and that gets exploited by people crafting those feelings to fit into their ideological narratives.

The funny thing is that those spaces are themselves very heavy on enforcing dogma through fear of social rejection. For example when the Christchurch massacre happened, I decided to go see what /pol/ was saying, and there were actually a few comments expressing mild disapproval, in a “I hate muslims too but cheering at people being brutally murdered as they try to get away is too far” kind of way. These people were of course shouted down and insulted and their sympathy painted as weakness. That validation is conditional.

The less leeway people are given by their community to explore and express their genuine thoughts and feelings, the more inaccurate and fucked up the popular consensus is free to get.

The good thing about nano is that it has clear instructions for how to close it right there immediately in front of you

hold button to restart computer

IIRC an aspect of this is that earlier forms of trade and currency were more tied up in the personal relationships between the people trading and their culture, which makes for an impractical environment for a foreign mercenary with no local familiarity or trust to do business, hence the terrible power of gold’s fungibility.

If you ever have an interest in running local LLMs you’re gonna wish you got even more

Relevant Snowden quote:

Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say

I pay for vpn service anonymously even though I probably don’t need to, as my main use is torrenting. I can see a remote possibility that vpn payment records at some point end up being used against pirates, even just as some kind of risk factor flagging, in the same vein as what you are saying: “If someone is paying for a vpn, surely they’re doing something bad?” In countries that really want to crack down on speech and human rights, vpns get banned outright to varying success, and if you can’t pay anonymously in that situation you’re pretty screwed, this hurts those people.

In general I think everyone should be trying for some level of actual privacy online as a matter of principle, just because of how everyone being fully tracked and observed puts way too much power in the hands of those watching.

The current administration and its agencies have clear contempt for any sort of crypto privacy they have shown in a variety of ways. The Tornado Cash sanction and criminal charges, recent Bitcoin mixer criminal charges, the proposed rule putting a “Primary Money Laundering Concern” black mark on people seeking crypto privacy in virtually any way… if it’s possible to still purchase online services privately after this, I’m sure they will go on to take further measures to try to close the “loophole”. They don’t want anyone doing things without being able to monitor them.

if somehow the population of pirates increases, that will lead to maybe tighter controls on piracy or a more global crackdown of piracy

Yes, I think most people accept that this is how it would likely work. And it actually is the case that many pirates do not agree with what I am saying, and see this as something to be avoided by keeping piracy niche, and would like to preserve their own access that way, and use this reasoning to argue against greater accessibility. But it’s kind of like voting; any action you can take as an individual affecting the broader society is unlikely to make much difference in determining outcomes that affect you personally. It’s possible to mistakenly imagine that they do, it’s possible to not be thinking about it at all, and it’s possible to have different ideas about what you would like to affect; for instance a person wanting to keep piracy niche might have some idea of a group identity of more technically literate and connected insiders like themselves, and want to act to protect the interests of maintaining media access for that group.

To me, this subjectivity of goals and the relative absence of direct personal consequences make these choices very unlike a game of prisoner’s dilemma, in which you can expect the consequences of your choices to be unambiguous, tangible, and personally experienced. Instead of working out an optimization problem for clearly defined personal interests that are the same for all actors, the task is one of empathy and imagination - what can the world look like, what should it look like, who do we care about and what do we want for them? How do different visions of the world weigh against each other?

We definitely don’t want more people to pirate

Many of us do. Why would we seed torrents, donate to crackers and repackers, offer useful advice etc. if we did not? Personally I would prefer for everyone to stop paying money for software and media entirely, and for the industries that produce those things to collapse, and the legal structures protecting them to be dismantled, because I think we would create better stuff without financial incentives. Not everyone is operating under your idea of a rational perspective here.

I’m not really sure how to find the good ones

It’s frustrating because when you click on those, if you then want to vote/comment you have to figure out how to manually get to the same place from your own instance/client. Probably would be hard to fix too since it looks like the comment id or whatever is different depending on what instance you are viewing it from.

If you set up qbittorrent with the built-in search you can torrent stuff without ever opening your browser

I think the joke is they set it to 70C, which is very hot

OP has preempted your comment by specifying “TOS-breaking” tho