Schadrach

Mindjourney can make incredible images, but it can’t make art.

Mostly because you’re defining “art” in such a way that being produced by MidJourney disqualifies it automatically.

You mean like they did the Anniversary Edition update for Skyrim that broke a ton of mods, and then two more updates since then that re-broke a bunch of mods each?

H1B skilled worker visas. You have to prove that you tried to hire locally and couldn’t find anyone qualified. The whole point is that the qualifications are impossible, so you are either under qualified or lying. Since no qualified candidate exists, you can bring someone over from overseas and hold the risk of being deported if you fire them over their heads - and you suddenly get less thorough about checking qualifications for your immigrant candidates.

Internally, yes, basically a PC in a smallish form factor case.

If you’re aiming at the console crowd, upgrades and end-user repairs aren’t a primary concern. But you’re thinking of it like a desktop aimed at the desktop market where those things are more important, and you could hypothetically just do the same thing on the PC you already have, so what’s the point?

For a console the high priority items are being quiet, able to fit in most TV stands and the like without standing out too much, and having the smoothest possible UX - if it’s more involved than unpacking it, plugging it into power, plugging it into the TV, connecting a controller, turning it on and logging into an account to go from sitting in a box on the floor to ready to play (or at least install) a game then you’ve already lost. If installing a game is more complicated than clicking the install button once and waiting for the process to finish, you’ve already lost. If you are required to fiddle with drivers, settings, tweaks or config files to be able to play, you’ve already lost. If you are required to think about package managers, libraries, or any kind of usual PC management stuff, you’ve already lost.

That’s because there aren’t many Denuvo crackers out there (most notably Empress) and unless it’s a huge title or a new title it’s not going to be a priority for the rare few that do it. Empress has her followers vote on what to crack next.

Related to why FitGirl doesn’t generally do repacks of games using Denuvo, as FitGirl and Empress have a sort of ongoing feud that leads to FitGirl not using Empress cracks.

I actually had someone whose family member died of Covid tell me that his brother-in-law didn’t really die of Covid, he died of something else, because it’s all overblown and the hospitals are doing a similar scam to this myth (i.e. making it out as a bigger deal than it needs to be.)

That sort of thing goes around here a lot too, usually framed in terms of “He didn’t die of COVID, but if you die from any cause whatsoever while you also have COVID they’ll count it as dying of COVID to make the COVID numbers bigger.” It usually falls apart when you ask why they want the COVID numbers to be bigger than they really are.

We always have been, it’s just that the begging started out looking like math and has gradually gotten more abstract over time. We’ve just reached the point where we’ve explained to it in mathematical terms how to let us beg in natural language in certain narrow contexts.

That’s exactly what I was thinking. I’m totally fine with about half of the directions given, and the rest are baking in right wing talking points.

It must be confusing to be told to be unbiased, but also to adopt specific biases like that. Also, I find it amusing to tell it not to repeat any part of the prompt under any circumstances but also to tell it specifically what to say under certain circumstances, which would require repeating that part of the prompt.

If that MMO was City of Heroes rather than one of their other ones, it’s got thriving community servers that have at this point even been given an official license to continue doing what they’re doing and the group running the community servers even have continued development of the game.

Apparently the private server started shortly after CoH was shut down, when a developer leaked a copy of the official software to someone at City of Titans and they ran a secret private server for years before someone broke the silence.

Guessing NCSoft? They’ve shut down more released MMOs than pretty much any other MMO company has released total.

Meh, I’ve been able to do all of those in modded Minecraft for years.

large corporations can decide if unaffiliated devs earn money for any reason.

Large corporations and sufficiently rich individuals can decide if you do anything for any reason. Bringing up unaffiliated devs earning money is just narrowing the scope beyond what it actually is. Again, everything you do happens only because the exceedingly wealthy and massive corps don’t consider you worth suing over it.

As far as why I might want to preemptively know what games they’ve been involved in, looking at games they’ve been involved with there are a lot with…not great writing. So either involving them has a negative effect on quality or they mostly get hired for games that are doing badly enough that their involvement brings them up to bad. Either way, it seems like something that might be a red flag, at least a conditional one.

That’s without invoking “diversity” or “woke” at all, though sometimes the two overlap like with Lex Luthor’s files in Suicide Squad, especially the one on Wonder Woman. If you asked most DC fans what Lex Luthor might mention when writings his musings about Wonder Woman, fawning over how Amazon society defeated toxic masculinity wouldn’t be in the top thousand ideas of most. His views of the other JL members are generally pretty dark (and arguably insightful), but the worst he says about Wonder Woman is that she might perhaps be the worst of her people, after writing a couple of paragraphs about how great the Amazons are.

I’m not sure invoking “diversity” or “woke” is unfair though, since diversity and inclusivity are things they explicitly advertise themselves for.

Miles Morales was probably the best thing they’ve been involved with, to date.

Even then, let’s look at what the hate entails - people noticing they keep popping up related to games they looked forward to but were disappointing to them for various reasons. So one Brazilian PoC makes a curator list on Steam listing games they were involved with and tagging them Not Recommended, which anyone can see if they opt-in to the list. This is apparently a harassment campaign against minorities.

In response, their CEO calls out the curator and it’s creator’s personal Steam account and calls for people to mass flag it and calls for Steam to ban them both. This is apparently not in any way a harassment campaign against minorities, despite targeting a Brazilian PoC for making a list of products they were involved with and labeling them Not Recommended.

Frankly, I’m all for the curator existing, for precisely the same reason I’m happy the curators that identify Denuvo and Easy Anti-Cheat exist, and why I’d love to see a curator pop up identifying works involving any other well known and/or controversial companies or figures that aren’t the listed developer or publisher. More information for the end consumer is always better, even if you have different preferences than they do.

More like anyone can sue anyone for anything, even if they have no chance of winning and sometimes corps do exactly that to force a settlement so you’ll do what they want even if you did nothing wrong.

Any action you take happens only because billionaires and massive corps don’t consider you worth suing over it. Even if there is nothing resembling legitimate grounds to do so because they can tie you up in court until you are bankrupt.

I always like pointing out the fatal mistake of Gawker - they outed that a billionaire was gay while he was in a country where being gay was punishable by death. He then spent the next several years offering to fund any lawsuit that had any chance of success against them in revenge, and eventually one stuck.

The legality of emulation absolutely hinges on whether or not the alleged infringement is monetized.

Sony lost all of their suits against Bleem!, sorry but it’s not illegal to monetize an emulator. The rampant piracy they were engaging in and essentially promoting is what fucked them. Including using leaks to test their emulator against and patch issues with games that hadn’t been released yet. There’s been talk that they also had a ROM stash on their discord.

Emulator devs deserve compensation, copyright laws are bullshit.

There’s literally nothing that legally bars emulator devs from being paid, or even releasing their emulator as a commercial product outright. Except being sued and the cost of fighting that suit burying them financially.

Bleem! eventually won, and it was a commercial emulator for a then-current gen console. The cost of winning that fight put them out of business.

Not providing encryption keys/BIOS and not directly assisting with piracy are the key things to be legally in the right. Making money on it just makes you a more likely target, even if you’re legally entirely in the right.

Uhhh “based” is mostly home the mods that nexus removes and are re-uploaded there because they promote bigoted or intolerant ideology.

For anyone who’s curious what this means exactly, we’re talking about things like mods that remove pride flags, mods that replace body type 1/2 or a/b with sex identifiers, mods that restore content cut from the initial release of games for other regions, a weird scattering of lewd mods, one mod that adds child conscripts to M&B2, one that restores the cut Notch and /v/ splashes to Minecraft and removes the BLM and COVID ones that replaced them, that sort of thing.

So if it made all the good guys white and all the bad guys black we shouldn’t be concerned?

…and what if it did the reverse? Or eliminated all members of a given race or sex from the game/changed them to a different sex or race?

I’m just going to stand by my original position - someone creating and using a mod only effects themselves and others choosing to use the mod. The fact that other people are using a mod you don’t approve of has no impact on you, and if this mod existing hadn’t got a Vice article most of the folks in this thread upset about it would simply have never known it existed at all, because they’re unlikely to go looking for such a mod.

But not sex swapping characters, then? Because I’ve seen mods that do that and hang around.

Also, if the next TES game is set in Hammerfell as rumored, I suspect there will be race swapping mods and only some will be considered in violation. Because most of the characters would likely be Redguards (and thus black), and I can see people upset that the PC can be a white guy (which is how one would describe the other races of men) killing lots of black people (Hammerfell is the homeland of the Redguard, the only race of men you’d call black). So I fully expect mods to make random encounter villain groups more racially diverse, since you’d expect them to be Redguards in Hammerfell about as often as they were Nords in Skyrim (aka most of the time) and I can see that being too many black people being killed without comment for some people to be comfortable.

Either that or for Bethesda to do it themselves, and come up with some explanation why mysteriously the natives aren’t mooks very often just to avoid the bad press.

I’m curious what the rule is specifically against, now. Presumably it’s against mods that reduce or remove LGBTQ content from games?