t3rmit3
@t3rmit3@beehaw.org
- Comment on Americans are holding onto devices longer than ever and it's costing the economy 18 hours ago:
- Comment on Americans are holding onto devices longer than ever and it's costing the economy 19 hours ago:
that means adjusting to a shrinking market no matter what your company does.
Which is good. Markets are supposed to go up and down, and responsible businesses would have the capital reserved to weather the troughs, but no companies are responsible anymore, and they waste any capital reserves on appeasing short-term shareholders who don’t give a rat’s ass about the long-term prospects of the company.
- Comment on "It's extremely frustrating and also f*cked up" - one of the world's best indie studios is facing shock closure following confounding Steam ban [Eurogamer] 19 hours ago:
Santa Ragione received an automated message from Valve stating Horses would not be approved for distribution on Steam and could not be resubmitted. The ‘why’ came as a shock to the studio. “While we strive to ship most titles submitted to us,” Steam’s automated response read, “we found that this title features themes, imagery, or descriptions that we won’t distribute.
Regardless of a developer’s intentions with their product, we will not distribute content that appears, in our judgment, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor. While every product submitted is unique, if your product features this representation—even in a subtle way that could be defined as a ‘grey area’—it will be rejected by Steam.”
I don’t think is an unfair line to draw by any measure, and while I sympathize with the studio I’m also not going to begrudge Valve taking a hard line on this, because there are absolutely games being submitted that will try to toe that line. I don’t think this studio is doing that, but I also think it’s fair for Valve to weigh art and impact vs peoples’ comfort, if they’re the ones being asked to host something.
- Comment on Pornhub is urging tech giants to enact device-based age verification 2 days ago:
They know that verification is happening as we shift rightwards, but instead of being the ones beholden to implement an age-verification system that puts them at risk, they want to have device manus do it, which would absolve PH from any responsibility. It’s a business move, on their part.
- Comment on Top 200 Most Common Passwords | NordPass 3 days ago:
I also wonder if people do more secure passwords for important services.
In my experience, most people have at most 2-3 passwords, and some do choose a “more secure” one for things like banking and work. Very few people use a password manager.
- Comment on Top 200 Most Common Passwords | NordPass 3 days ago:
But my question is, are these only “hacked” passwords? Because those who are not hacked, you don’t know what passwords they have. So this is a bit of bias here, right?
No, that’s not how these are obtained. Password dumps are from attackers breaching a site’s user database and dumping their credentials, usually by phishing administrators’ logins. Attackers are brute-forcing passwords anymore except on a one-off, very rare basis. Here’s a list of publicly-known password dumps, and you can see details about where they came from: haveibeenpwned.com/PwnedWebsites
- Comment on Top 200 Most Common Passwords | NordPass 3 days ago:
It’s very valid. The password dumps they’re analyzing aren’t based on attackers brute-force, they’re based on attackers breaching sites’ backends and dumping the user databases. Some of these are sites with millions of records, and when you look at credential-stuffing lists (which are aggregate lists of currently-accessible accounts using previously-breached credential pairs), it adds millions more.
Sort this list by year, and you can see there’s tens of millions of leaked passwords in 2025 alone: haveibeenpwned.com/PwnedWebsites
- Comment on Google tells employees it must double capacity every 6 months to meet AI demand 3 days ago:
“Self-replicating GPUs that devour the world”
“Wake up honey, new apocalypse just dropped!”
- Comment on The ‘Great Meme Reset’ Is Coming: From Jack Dorsey to Gen Alpha, everyone seemingly wants to go back to the internet of a decade ago. But is it possible to reverse AI slop and brain rot? 4 days ago:
I think in part because the early 90s Internet was before the majority of millennials were really heavily online. I’m an '88 millennial, and my childhood Internet was still early 2000s, mostly.
Stuff like IRCRizon and Limewire and Geocities and even Gaia Online over DSL, rather than BBSes over probably AOL dialup (I had that as a kid, but only as a very young kid, i.e. literal preteen.
Nyan cat and motivational poster memes are my golden age, not Usenet.
- Comment on A massive Cloudflare outage brought down X, ChatGPT, and even Downdetector 1 week ago:
I’ve used CF tunnels myself, but I’m sitting at home rn so it doesn’t matter. Watched ID4 a bit ago, no streaming services necessary.
- Comment on A massive Cloudflare outage brought down X, ChatGPT, and even Downdetector 1 week ago:
Sucks for everyone without a dope homelab/ home data center setup!
- Comment on Five years from launch the PS5 is a roaring success, so why doesn't it feel like it? [Eurogamer] 1 week ago:
I never got the PS5 because the PS3 -> PS4 jump was too underwhelming, when PC is pulling away so many games. And it’s not about or solvable with exclusives, because there are literally no games I can think of that would make me buy a whole console just to play. Imho PC gaming, especially in the Golden Age of Indies, is just too strong an argument unless you are a console-only gamer.
- Comment on [Gamer's Nexus was] Contacted by the US Secret Service | The AI Surveillance Center Dystopia 2 weeks ago:
The sentence is constructed ambiguously. A better version of that sentence is
Gamers Nexus was contacted by the U.S. Secret Service because of Gamer Nexus’ investigation into Nvidia’s slow corruption
- Comment on The 31 Devs Fired Before They Could Finish GTA6 2 weeks ago:
To be fair, the original Deus Ex is more anti-authoritarianism than it is anti-capitalist in the motivations of the villains. Grey Death wasn’t done for economic purposes, it was literally a means to kick off a worldwide eugenics experiment. They used the Ambrosia vaccine to select who lives, not really to make money.
- Comment on The 31 Devs Fired Before They Could Finish GTA6 2 weeks ago:
Any work that satirizes wealth or corporate greed, made by a public company, is almost definitionally hypocritical.
- Comment on Square Enix, Bandai, and other Japanese studios demand OpenAI stop using their content without permission, drop a not-too-subtle hint about legal trouble if it doesn't 3 weeks ago:
Might have to break this into a couple replies. because this is a LOT to work through.
Anthropic is the only company to have admitted publicly to doing this. They were sued and settled out of court. Google and OpenAI have had no such accusations as far as I’m aware.
Meta is being sued by several groups over this, including porn companies who caught them torrenting. Their defense has been to claim that the 2,400 videos downloaded to their corporate IP space was done for “personal use”.
OpenAI is also being accused of pirating books (not scraping), and it has been unable to prove legal procurement of them.
There is no such legal distinction [scraping for summary use vs scraping for supplanting the original content]. Scraping content is legal no matter WTF you plan to do with it.
Interestingly, it’s actually Meta’s most recent partial win that explicitly helps disproves this. Apart from just generally ripping into Meta for clearly infringing copyright, the judge wrote (page 3)
There is certainly no rule that when your use of a protected work is “transformative,” this automatically inoculates you from a claim of copyright infringement. And here, copying the protected works, however transformative, involves the creation of a product with the ability to severely harm the market for the works being copied, and thus severely undermine the incentive for human beings to create. Under the fair use doctrine, harm to the market for the copyrighted work is more important than the purpose for which the copies are made.
So yes, Fair Use absolutely does take into account market harms.
What an AI model does isn’t copyright infringement (usually).
I never asserted this, and I am well aware of the distinction between the copyright infringement which involved the illegal obtainment of copyrighted material, and the AI training. You seem to be bringing a whole host of objections you get from others and applying them to me.
I think it’s perfectly reasonable to require that AI companies legally acquire a copy of any copyrighted material. Just as it would not be legal for me to torrent a movie even if I wanted to do something transformative with it, AI companies should not be able to do so either.
- Comment on Square Enix, Bandai, and other Japanese studios demand OpenAI stop using their content without permission, drop a not-too-subtle hint about legal trouble if it doesn't 3 weeks ago:
Because the same rules that allow Google to train their search with everyone’s copyrighted websites are what allow the AI companies to train their models.
This is false, by omission. Many of the AI companies have been downloading content through means other than scraping, such as bittorrent, to access and compile copyrighted data that is not publicly scrape-able. That includes Meta, OpenAI, and Google.
The day we ban ingress of copyrighted works into whatever TF people want is the day the Internet stops working.
That is also false. Just because you don’t understand the legal distinction between scraping content to summarize in order to direct people to a site, versus scraping content to generate a replacement that obviates the original content, doesn’t mean the law doesn’t understand it.
My comment right here is copyrighted. So is yours! I didn’t ask your permission before my Lemmy client downloaded it. I don’t need to ask your permission to use your comment however TF I want until I distribute it. That’s how the law works. That’s how it’s always worked.
The DMCA also protects the sites that host Lemmy instances from copyright lawsuits. Because without that, they’d be guilty of distribution of copyrighted works without the owner’s permission every damned day.
And none of this matters, because AI companies aren’t just reading content, they’re taking it and using it for commercial purposes.
Perhaps you are unaware, but (at least in the US) while it is legal for you to view a video on YouTube, if you download it for offline use that would constitute copyright infringement if the owner objects. The video being public does not grant anyone and everyone the right to use it however they wish. Ditto for something like making an mp3 of a song on Spotify using Audacity.
People who hate AI are supporting an argument that the movie and music studios made in the 90s: That “downloading is theft.” It is not! In fact, because that is not theft, we’re all able to enjoy the Internet every day.
First off, I do not hate AI, I use it myself (locally-run). My issue is with AI companies using it to generate profit at the expense of the actual creators whose art AI companies are trying to replace (i.e. not directing people to it, like search results).
Secondly, no one is arguing that it is theft, they are arguing that it is copyright infringement, which is what all of us are also subject to under the DMCA. So we’re actually arguing that AI companies should be held to the same standard that we are.
Also, note that AI companies have argued in court (in the case brought by Steven King et al) that their use of copyrighted material shouldn’t fall under DMCA at all (i.e. arguing that it’s not about Fair Use), because their argument is that AI training is not the ‘intended use’ of the source material, so this is not eating into that commercial use. That argument leaves copyright infringement liability intact for the rest of us, while solely exempting them from liability. No thanks.
Luckily, them arguing they’re apart and separate from Fair Use also means that this can be rejected without affecting Fair Use! Double-win!
- Comment on Square Enix, Bandai, and other Japanese studios demand OpenAI stop using their content without permission, drop a not-too-subtle hint about legal trouble if it doesn't 3 weeks ago:
Yes, this is in fact a good argument for not banning AI.
It’s not an argument for not holding companies legally accountable for using copyrighted material to do it.
These suits aren’t actually equivalent to Sony v UCS, they’re equivalent to someone suing a bootleg video company.
- Comment on GTA VI developer accused of union busting in mass firings 3 weeks ago:
They were always known as being a crunch-heavy studio. The only reason they weren’t pulling their current mtx-riddled, always-online modal before is that the tech wasn’t there.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s Grokipedia launches with AI-cloned pages from Wikipedia 3 weeks ago:
“We think people just like Blahaj because their friends online do, not because of the shark itself, but we have no evidence either way, and also mainstream media is liberal and bad.”
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
I always keep one 24" 1080p monitor at my desk, alongside the larger and wider gaming monitor, because that size and resolution is (to me) perfect for text (and side viewing of old films that I don’t want to over-stretch).
I got my first 4K, widescreen monitor recently, and it’s a hugely noticeable difference from 1080p, but depending on what I’m doing, it’s often not an improvement.
- Comment on The Goon Squad 4 weeks ago:
But gooning is more goal-oriented and more communal. The gooner goons to reach the “goonstate”: a supposed zone of total ego death or bliss that some liken to advanced meditation, the attainment of which compels them to masturbate for hours, or even days, at a time.
Is this Fox News? I think their GenZ consultant trolled them hard.
- Comment on Generative AI is a societal disaster 4 weeks ago:
So far the only real “regulation” I’ve seen governments push vis a vis social media is using it as an excuse to kill anonymity and privacy, rather than doing anything about the harmful content itself. What evidence do we have that governments ‘regulating’ AI is going to actually solve the issues presented, and not be just another backdoor to control their populaces?
I don’t think there’s nothing to be done, but perhaps I’m just getting a little tired of this strange cognitive disconnect from people rightfully recognizing that governments globally are shifting rightwards, turning into vehicles of oppression and re-stoking the fires of colonialist-era racism, paying vast sums to companies like Palantir and other AI-heavy “defense” companies to help surveil their citizens… but then people also going, “hey, you’re totally the right people to help us solve this capitalist problem, right”? Like, if they wanted to help you, they already would be.
the superintelligence argument has sent governments chasing that red herring as they try to present themselves as being friendly to tech investment to attract a small slice of the trillions of dollars
Perhaps they are well aware that superintelligence is a distraction? Perhaps they are, in fact, distracting you (royal ‘you’), rather than them being the ones distracted?
- Comment on DayZ creator Dean Hall is a changed man - after years of living the high life, he's focused on saving a studio that flew too close to the sun [Eurogamer] 4 weeks ago:
Arma is pretty cool… despite BI. DayZ has been (for me) a continual disappointment. I don’t have any particularly strong feelings about Dean Hall, but I don’t get the impression he knows what’s wrong with DayZ, or how to fix it.
- Comment on Reddit’s ‘AI Scraping’ Lawsuit Is An Attack On The Open Internet 4 weeks ago:
This is why no one should be putting their anti-IP laws hopes on AI. Corporations are corporations; they’re never going to let you benefit from the rules they fight to get applied to them.
- Comment on California startup to demonstrate space weapon on its own dime 4 weeks ago:
I agree 100%, I’m not arguing it’s a good idea, these are just other arguments than “in order for it to be useful it needs to be able to counter Russia and/or China, otherwise it would be strategically useless and economically infeasible”.
North Korea is the only one that could fall under that category.
In the status quo, I still don’t think that’s true; India and Pakistan are both nuclear-equipped, but with moderate-to-low warhead counts that could potentially reach the US. Western European countries have nukes (France and UK), and very small land areas to cover. SLBMs are another issue altogether, ofc. If you’re planning to make any of them enemies, it could absolutely be useful.
- Comment on California startup to demonstrate space weapon on its own dime 4 weeks ago:
To be fair, you don’t need it to perfectly counter China and Russia to have value. There are other countries that have nuclear capabilities or ambitions, who don’t have thousands of ICBMs.
- Comment on Sony accuses Tencent of playing a 'shell game' with its Horizon-like survival game, seeks a preliminary injunction against it 5 weeks ago:
I was/am responding to something you said in your comment, specifically that they were copying HZD.
I think it’s entirely possible that Sony wins, though they shouldn’t. But it will be about whether this constitutes an infringement on Sony’s Horizon trademark, not copyright. I don’t think it does, and I do think this amounts to Sony wanting to own the concept, like Nintendo wants to own creature catchers, but it is obviously possible another court would make another bad ruling in the IP space, especially if that means siding with the non-Chinese corporation.
- Comment on Sony accuses Tencent of playing a 'shell game' with its Horizon-like survival game, seeks a preliminary injunction against it 5 weeks ago:
I will also remind you that you said it would be absurd to take Sony seriously, which is not the same thing as stating “there’s no trademark violations here”. The latter is literally what the court has to make a decision on. The former is about whether there’s any basis to go to court which already means you think you know better than Sony lawyers and, if the court doesn’t instantly throw out the case, also better than the legal system. Maybe you are some godlike lawyer who knows better than everyone else, but if you are I think you can understand why I’m calling bullshit on that.
You should really check who you’re responding to.
- Comment on Sony accuses Tencent of playing a 'shell game' with its Horizon-like survival game, seeks a preliminary injunction against it 5 weeks ago:
They won’t mistakenly buy the game based on that image, which is the standard for trademark violations.
