A while ago I read an article written by a college student going to school to create comic books. Unfortunately I can’t find it now.

They said that in the classes about drawing, those professors said it was perfectly fine to use AI to help with writing your stories and dialogue, but warned how incredibly dangerous it can be to use even as inspiration to draw.

Their writing professors, on the other hand, told them it was perfectly fine to use AI to help with their illustrations, but that it was incredibly dangerous to use to even generate outlines or rough drafts when it came to writing.

AI is only ever good enough when you don’t know better.

If you cannot do it legally then it’s not legally ownership. You are talking about de facto ownership, which is another thing entirely.

I can totally bequeath in my will a safety deposit box with notes containing all if the credentials required to access all of my accounts and devices, functionally giving away my Gog account. However, if Gog or any of the publishers involved find out that I am legally dead they can totally ban that account and pursue legal action against anyone else who accessed it, violating terns of service

Kind of depends on what definition of ownership you want to use.

Can you re-sell it? No.

Can you give it away? No.

Can you bequeath it in your will? No.

So no, I don’t think so. Personally I prefer Steam’s more recent approach of just very clearly telling you that what you are paying for is a license for use. I find Gog’s redefinition of the word “own” distasteful.

You’re just proposing a much more drastic and rapid change than I am. I agree that a wealth tax would be a more immediate effect. It is also much more drsstixnand far less tested. The idea is interesting and I am neither opposed to it nor calling for it. I do not think it it necessary.

Increasing income tax rates and corporate tax rates would be a much slower approach. I didn’t mention them, but I would also add in property tax rates and capital gains. Luxury sales taxes, inheritancd taxes. In the US, make OASDI a progressive instead of regressive tax.

For existing billionaires, there are plenty of laws they’ve already broken to get where they are that just need to be enforced. Wage theft, antitrust, union busting, fraud. The SEC should have buried Musk in a dungeon years ago. So I see the answer to eliminating existing wealth being fines rather than taxes.

Of course, there is also room to increase the minimum wage and minimum benefits. That would hell redistribute wealth too.

I don’t know Gabe Newell, or even anyone who works at Valve personally, but every account I have ever read about Valve is that they usually treated and paid their employees well. Investigate all of these megacorps and prosecute appropriately.

Taxing billionaires is not some new and untested concept. In the US throughout the 1900’s the highest income tax brackets were often in the 70%'s, reaching into the 90%'s at times, and we did not see what you are suggesting.

Increasing the taxes on Gabe Newell’s profits from owning Valve would not suddenly cause him to lose money, just to gain less money. If corporate taxes and income taxes were increased across the board, then it is not as if he would benefit from selling Valve stock to invest elsewhere, and Valve would not be a more or less attractive place to invest relative to other options either. I am not sure why you think this would cause Gabe Newell to back out or investors to jump in. Heck, these rates have all changed pretty frequently within Valve’s existence and have not had a significant impact.

Also just to say, there is also the matter of jurisdiction as he lives in New Zealand while Valve is a US based company.

1. Taxing those outside investors too
2. Taxing Valve as a corporation more, making them less profitable and less attractive to said investors.
3. I’m not even convinced this would be an issue at all really. Remember Valve is not publicly traded. I suspect Gabe would hold on to controlling ownership as long as it was profitable, and remember that taxes are usually on profits.
4. Even if outside investors move in and enshittify, the moment they start doing anticompetitive you hit them with antitrust suits. Not to mention the industry can also be regulated even before all this: a lot of governments are cracking down on lootboxes already.

Even if Valve’s offering sucked, I still have not seen anyone point out a business practice I would call anticompetitive. They are not buying up studios or publishers, or even paying for timed exclusivity. I have not seen any hint that they are colluding with competitors on prices or fees. I haven’t seen then accused of stealing IP or poaching personnel. They readily welcome Microsoft and Sony to release games on Steam, and they have released their own games on consoles including the Switch. They let you install Windows or whatever else on the Deck, if you want to for some reason.

Billionaires should not exist, and Gabe Newell is no exception. He should be taxed more. I don’t love one company having so much control of this space. But I also don’t want to have a dozen different crappy launchers from different companies to deal with. There are a lot of benefits to the user to having everything centralized in one place.

1. It has gotten bigger. More active. More posts, more new content. When i first came over i would check the All page, sorted by eitber Active or Hot, and only find a couple of new posts per day. It is still nowhere near as active as Reddit was back then (probably a goos thing), but it has enough content to help me procrastinate at work now.

2. LemmyNSFW died and has been replaced by FediNSFW recently. I am sure that it will be better in the long-term, but it still doesn’t seem to be back to where it was yet. I think a lot of the old posters were bots, largely re-posting from Reddit, and not all of those have been rebuilt yet. I have mixed feelings about that.

3. The Connect app has gotten better and better. Love it.

4. For the past year or so, Lemmy has been of a size big enougj for patterns to ripple and promulgate through it bht small enough to notice them. For example, almost immediately after New Years several different communities on different instances started to see a drastix influx of webcomic posts. Usually 4-panel ones. Usually low-fidelity ones (XKCD-style, not Girl Genius for example). And usually oned with some sort of error or controversy. Rage bait to get the comments going, but nothing controversial enough to get banned or removed.

There would be new accounts made that just posted a handful of these comics quickly, and sometimes argue with people in the comments. Once people like me started pointing out the pattern they started deleting the posts and accounts after a couple days. I’m not sure when it stopped, but i have not noticed one for probably a month.

Sony Xperia 1 IV. Their naming scheme is terrible.

Main reason is because I wanted a future-proof, flagship phone with a headphone jack and micro SD card slot. Both have proven very useful, and I am still kind of in shock that most manufacturers have dropped them.

Stock android. Still using the NoVa launcher because I haven’t had the free time to try out others, plus my pi-hole seems to block the ads they have been introducing for now.

The Xperia has a weirdly narrow screen. I like it in a vacuum better than todays phablets, but I think the occasional webpage scales weirdly.

Congratulations!

Whatever is the most appropriate for the task at hand. Sometimes it makes sense to make your own.

I honestly am starting to think the anti-vaxx crowd has been astroturfed by pharmaceutical corporations in order to convince the general public that anyone who questions Big Pharma is some loomy who thinks vaccines cause autism wants to drink raw milk.

I remember when I was a child and I first got experience with computers. I saw how file systems worked and thought to myself “wow I should structure my own mind this way so I can try to think as well as a computer can!”. I may have autism.

AI is the exact opposite. Taking something beautiful, clear, clean, organized, efficient, definitive. And inserting all the messy, sloppy, uncertain, unreproducible aspect of our bloody electric meat brains. It’s a move in the opposite direction of where I think humanity should be going.

What about 1870 then?

I don’t know the context for this microblog, but I don’t think whats happening in Iran is what he was thinking of when he said “digital horrors”.

I remember seeing footage of bombings from the Bosnian war in the 90’s. Well before digital video on the internet was popular, it was just on cable TV.

I don’t know Lauderdale personally, but he has a funny YouTube channel and seems cool enough that I’m gonna hold off on judging this without context.

I never claimed Uber was 100% safe. There’s also plenty of cases of non-sexual assault and robbery. There’s way more cases of simple negligent driving resulting in injury and death.

Uber’s own data indicates 99.9998% of trips in 2021-2022 were completed with no safety incident. Now if you want to discredit that self-reporting as biased, fair enough.

What would you say is the threshold for justifying gender segregation? 99.9999%? 99.99999%? 99.999999%?

Transphobes will use any excuse to be transphobic.

I’m not sure what your point here is.

I’m comparing gender identity to other forms of protected identity: race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.

I’m not making any judgements about any group being superior or inferior to another. You’re the one doing that. Being “physically imposing” is subjective and variable. There is significant overlap between the largest women and smallest men, and that’s just staying withing the confines of binary cis people. Not to mention… Guns exist. Cars themselves are weapons far more dangerous than any human regardless of gender.

Building a just society means we need to leave behind our biases and fears. To judge individuals not on the circumstances of their birth but the content of their character. That means discarding the luxury of pre-judging people, not just when it is easy, but also when it is hard.

I’m sure a lot of anxious Nazi’s got a lot of peace of mind in the early 1940’s too.

I sure a lot of anxipis transphobes got a lot of peace of mind when Trump banned trans people from military service.

Giving anxious people peace of mind it’s the point of segregation. That doesn’t make it right or good.

The US government has been investing billions into AI, drones, and other autonomous and remote weapons systems.

Sending a bunch of young men to the opposite side of the world would be not just unpopular, it incredibly expensive. Food, clothing, equipment, healthcare costs. I highly doubt the end goal is to actually annex Iran, so they’re much better off trying to find a local group to support in taking over the country and establishing a US-friendly puppet state. There’s no need to have Americans in guerilla warfare for that.

The only way I see them doing that is if they WANT to kill off a chunk of the male population in that age group. Which… Maybe? I could certainly see Trump and Hegseth trying to send “undesirables” overseas to die, but they’ve also made moves like banning trans people from military service. Unless they reverse policies, it looks like Trump will prefer to cozy up to the military rather than use it as a tool for getting rid of people.

Maybe Trump will just do what Netenyahu tells him to. But I think this is more about trying to manufacture a reason to cancel mid-term elections like they outlined in 2025 than anything else. With the added benefit of funneling more government money into the military-industrial complex.