And they saturate the media environment, particularly in children’s entertainment. If you have a political agenda, you’d be crazy to ignore the channel that is synonymous with child advertisement. The morals and attitudes espoused by Disney characters regularly shape perceptions of their viewers into adulthood.

So the goal of Disney Executives is to keep things bland and superficial and inoffensive as possible, to the point where critics (particularly conspiracy-minded ones) really need to wade into deep water to find anything resembling offensive content. You can watch Pocahontas and never really develop an opinion on colonialism. You can watch Robin Hood and Lion King without shaking your views on Monarchy one way or another. You can enjoy Frozen or Moana without challenging yourself on feminism.

It’s all just a beautiful magical carnival of adventures. Empty head put happy story in, slide over perfectly smooth brain, come out as laughter.

Truly, the modern Opiate of the Masses.

I started rawdoging urls a while ago.

Works best when you’ve got a web ring or other friendly community of contributors to reference against one another.

But those are few and fair between in the modern day.

But people are too used to products that are free because they make the person using them the product.

That’s definitely one model for operating a public service, but its far from the only one.

The joke of these games is that they aren’t notably more weird than titles Bethesda and Bioware were famous for turning out. Hard to get more weird than Fallout’s more esoteric vaults or Morrowind’s bizarre cults and exotic cultures.

BG3/KC:D have been, if anything, a direct successors to the old classics. They’re faithfully propagating the fundamental ideas these old titles represented in a way the new studios are unable to reproduce.

Also, honorable mention to the poor bastards who released Disco Elysium and then got their studio stripped out from underneath them by their financiers. Absolute gem of a game and you should feel free to pirate it without a twinge of guilt.

Citations Needed is the antivenom to the cobra bite that is listening to cable news during your teens/twenties. God bless Molly White and her crusade to do real actual journalism.

Anarchists recognize class as a social construct rather than a biological imperative or a free market condition. As a result, they will often make a point of transgressing or undermining the pageantry that class-centric organizations cling to.

Its not that they think “no classes” will be a result so much as they think “explicitly defying class” is a political act.

Real State of Exception Hours

Balatro is a Poker Game in the same way that Gin and Bridge and 52 Pickup are Poker games.

Circus subscriptions just went up again.

You, a socialist: “Please, I’m begging you, sports should be a municipal amenity not a profit driven cash grab.”

Me, an American Capitalist: “And then they made me pay for parking! And then I had to give Ticketmaster an extra 12% on top of the entrance price! And then half the stadium was just 20’ advertisement billboards! And it’s all going into the pockets of a dozen extremely rich oligarchs, most of whom don’t even live here!!! JUST LIKE COMMUNIST RUSSIA!”

Getting really far out into the woods and seeing the Milky Way in all its glory is a transformative experience, without a doubt.

Maybe we have it backwards. Maybe the light pollution is what causes the Autism and we just got lucky with Pluto before the sky was closed up.

Thousands of people suddenly start staring into the night sky, exhaustively cataloging everything they see, and writing long journal entries arguing over whether a vague flickering dot is a planet or not.

And you think Pluto caused Autism?

Me: dusts off hands Installed solar on the roof, bicycling to work, updated the insulation on all my windows, and drastically reduced the amount of plastic in my life.

Tech Company Next Door: CONSUMES 70 MwH OF POWER FOR TWO YEARS STRAIGHT POWERING AN UNOPTIMIZED AI

Me: Begins flipping through a copy of How To Blow Up A Pipeline

Hard disagree. The entire point of Lemmy is to move away from Corporate run, Billionaire run, Millionaire run, social media

Lemmy is a protocol for networking individual privately hosted social media instances. It is not a panacea for corporate control of social media infrastructure. You’re still hosting these sites on AWS / Azure / some other large corporately controlled private hardware setup. You’re still securing the URL from a private DNS. You’re still paying for these sites out of the surplus of a handful of wealth(ier) patrons and their friendly donors (or ending up like Hexbear.net, with a domain name up for grabs because it was mismanaged by part time broke amateurs).

Saying “Not our problem” is a woefully shortsighted.

There’s not a lot we can do about it individually. I would argue that the fractured - often openly hostile - intra-instance infighting on Lemmy feeds directly into OP’s image’s “this is too weird and scary” attitude.

If popping into the Fediverse and just picking a Lemmy instance was as straightforward as selecting “Communities I’m interested in” on other bigger social media feeds, the onboarding would be smoother. But if you poke around and see people going whole hog frothing at the mouth “Everyone on <instance>.<whatever> is morally degenerate and has ruined the community at large!!!” reactionary in between instances, that’s an immediate turn off that I don’t think anyone within the Lemmy network knows how to deal with.

Its the same intra-channel fighting we saw on Reddit, just ported into a more decentralized network. And it neglects the fundamentals of modern web hosting (we’re all at the mercy of the IANA / Cloudflare, etc / the major hosting companies).

Lemmy is, itself, a shortsighted patch on a much larger and scarier problem. The instance infighting only reveals how shortsighted.

Nobody with empathy wants to burn down a state building

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CYTcQUKTVY

https://apnews.com/article/costco-teamsters-union-strike-ce27314fa42af3e7ffff236867ec4cff

Union organizing has ticked up but overall membership is still falling.

Costco only recently has had to deal with string of labor actions

Costco is looking at the enormous shortfall in human labor, flipping open its Econ 101 textbook, and deciding “High demand? Low supply? Price must go up.”

That’s not “fighting fascism” just running a business intelligently. I’ve heard similar stories from HEB, from my local auto repair guy, and from a few neighboring restaurants. Businesses are struggling to keep staffed so income pressure is rising.

One could posit an ideal public sector development studio that takes grants from the state/federal government to produce useful Open Source software. Think public radio or public broadcasting, but for apps.

Hell, it isn’t even wild in the current moment. Modern day AWS and Azure subsidize much of its small/new user client base with the massive public sector clientele. OpenAI and DeepSeek are both the product of giant state-sponsored initiatives to develop AI that is free at point of service. Plenty of the original internet architecture was the product of public investment and grants, as was the university-centric ARPNET that would eventually be commoditizated into the commercial World Wide Web.

Look up the history of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the pioneering of Mosaic, the first widely available GUI-based web browser. It was the foundation for both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, which licensed the original design for the tiniest fraction of what it would ultimately generate in future revenues.

Microsoft Edge

I think maybe it’s naive to think that if the cost goes down, shrimp jesus won’t just be in higher demand.

Not that demand will go down but that economic cost of generating this nonsense will go down. The number of people shipping this back and forth to each other isn’t going to meaningfully change, because Facebook has saturated the social media market.

If you make it more efficient to flood cyberspace with bullshit, cyberspace will just be flooded with more bullshit.

The efficiency is in the real cost of running the model, not in how it is applied. The real bottleneck for AI right now is human adoption. Guys like Altman keep insisting a new iteration (that requires a few hundred miles of nuclear power plants to power) will finally get us a model that people want to use. And speculators in the financial sector seemed willing to cut him a check to go through with it.

Knocking down the real physical cost of this boondoggle is going to de-monopolize this awful idea, which means Altman won’t have a trillion dollar line of credit to fuck around with exclusively. We’ll still do it, but Wall Street won’t have Sam leading them around by the nose when they can get the same thing for 1/100th of the price.