I’ve always found this interesting. Human beings (or any vertebrates I suppose) are really more of a colony than a single being. And it’s not just a technicality, it’s meaningful. Much of that colony interacts with your nervous system and affects your moods and behavior. You think you have total control of your mind, but you would think and act differently with a different balance of gut bacteria. Chew on that for a while…

Hey, if I’ve offended you, I do apologize for that, it truly wasn’t my goal. But I do strongly disagree (which is allowed).

And I think it’s pretty obvious that microtransactions could never, ever, possibly be more lucrative for Valve than selling games. It’s just a numbers thing. I mean, dlc can sometimes make more money than game sales for some titles, that’s a fact. But Valve has what, a dozen games that they could potentially sell dlc for? That’s a pretty hard limit. Whereas they also make money on every title sold in the store, and there are currently over 10,000 titles available from the steam store. That’s just like, a lot more than a dozen…

Um, no?

I guess this must be surprising to hear, but it’s just easier to sell content of actual value than bullshit. Yeah… some people will buy bullshit, and yeah, one can take advantage of those people, but having actual products is still a better business model.

But hey, if you’ve got these things all figured out, totally start your own game studio/global digital distribution system. Go make bank on microtransaction garbage.

I mean, they get a sizable cut from the majority of games sold on PC. I think that’s their business model.

I hear you about loot boxes and skins and stuff. It’s just, that has to be a small part of their total profit.

The picture isn’t great, but I’ll bet the framerate is amazing!

That’s what I’m hearing. Honestly, I think that checks out.

This is the same reason that harvesting solar energy in space and beaming it down is also a stupid fucking idea. It’s politically problematic. Nobody wants anybody to have giant death rays in space, so there’s effectively no way to get the energy down to earth. It looks like we’ll all just have to rely on all the green technologies that already work.

Having played Minecraft and No Man’s Sky, I can say that no world is necessarily too big, because infinite is not too big.

Given that AI trainers are training on YouTube videos too, that sounds like Anubis isn’t going to impose meaningful costs on them.

Well, does it work?

You don’t need to guess about it, you can simply look at traffic records and see how much it changes after installing Anubis. If it works for now, great. Like all things like this, it’s a cat and mouse game.

Also, the way your computer interprets a YouTube video and the way a scraper interprets a YouTube video may well be different. But in general, for a browser, streaming and decoding video is a relatively heavy and high bandwidth operation. Video is much higher bandwidth and has much higher CPU processing requirements than audio, which likewise is heavier and higher higher bandwidth than text. As a result, video and text barely compare, they’re totally different orders of magnitude in bandwidth and processing needs. So does an AI scraper have to do all that decoding? I actually have no idea, but there definitely could be shortcuts, ways to just avoid it. For instance, they may only care about the audio, or perhaps the transcripts are good enough for them.

Do you realize how much extra work your browser has to do every time you visit a site that makes money on ads? All the additional scripts being run in the background, it’s astonishing. Trust me, the additional work that users’ machines have to do for this is totally insignificant when viewed in the greater context of what we actually do with computers.

Watching a 10 minute YouTube video, that’s your computer doing more work than it would loading a million text based pages running Anubis.

Honestly, it’s hard to figure out what the first step in that chain is. If you want to start up industry in space, great, there are lot of potential benefits to that. But where do you start?

Within the next 50 years I do expect a broad sector of space industry to emerge, but I really can’t predict what the first opportunities might be. Still, we can poke fun at it all we want right now, but I suspect a great many people will be working in space 50 years from now.

Ok, so let’s say you’re making dinner and you want to watch something at the same time. Perhaps you’re chopping vegetables on the counter. Do you really want to be looking at the front of the fridge while you do that? If the fridge is against the same wall as the counter you need to crane your head back to see anything, and if it’s on a different wall you need to turn your head a totally different direction. Why not use one of those tablet cases with a kick stand and then put the tablet right in front of you, on the counter? Like right in front of the the cutting board you’re using.

I don’t know, I think if you do anything other than putting it right in front of you, you’re gonna and up losing some fingers instead of chopping veggies.

The fridge is also a good location for it, and you’d have to otherwise run a wire across your fridge to power your own tablet.

What? How is the fridge possibly a good location for it? In what world could that ever be true? And do you not have wall outlets in your kitchen? Put your device on the counter!

I mean… what?

But… Do you need the LCD panel? Will the box still get cold without it? Cause I do have a hammer…

This is actually a really good question for teachers.

And the short answer is “badly”. Especially bad for kids that were in elementary school during the pandemic.

Hah! Well played.

Wow, terraria looks really different in that screenshot, must have been a huge update…

Yeah!

New favorite characters, Scylla and the sirens.

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Wow, that’s just incredibly dismissive and rude. And in response to a completely reasonable comment!

Look, forget the whole AI discussion, I don’t care. Here’s the thing, I really like Lemmy. I really like this community and I want to continue using it as a way to have discussions with people about interesting topics. What I don’t want to see is people yelling insults and swearing at any user they disagree with.

Frankly, that behavior is unwelcome. That’s reddit behavior, you can go there if that’s what you want to do.