If they raise the prices in those countries they would make less money because volume of subscribers would go down enough for total income to decrease.

If they lowered the price in the US, they would make less money because the subscribers they would gain would not be enough to offset the reduced income from each.

That’s it, it has nothing to do with operating costs or fairness, it’s just a question of what price point they believe will make them the most money in a given market.

Yup, exactly. The only regulation I’d be in favor of for AI is this: if it was trained on data which can be accessed by or was posted by the public, it must be freely available, such that if anything in the training data was posted online in a way anyone can see, then then I have free access to tge AI too.

Basically any other regulation, even if the companies whine publicly, is actually one that benefits them by raising the barrier of entry and making it more expensive for small actors to create AI tools.

They’ve gotten smart enough to use reverse psychology on this kind of thing.

This very much feels like “Only please, Brer Fox, please don’t throw me into the briar patch.”

Smart in one way but it did cause a lot of storytelling problems because they constantly had to come up with half baked excuses for why it wasn’t working this time when just using the transporter would solve a major problem without fuss.

I did years ago when Google started censoring my search results even with safe search off.

Unfortunately Bing is doing it too now and I can’t find a search engine that isn’t, though I would love to learn about one that isn’t.

I think abolishing intellectual property would hurt capitalism more than it would benefit it. Already it is strongly in favor of the rich and the big corporations. Getting rid of those limitations even without abolishing capitalism first, would, I think, be more to everyone’s benefit than detriment.

Yes, as long as people keep focusing on fighting the technology instead of fighting capitalism, this is true.

So we can fight the technology and definitely lose, only to see our efforts subverted to further entrench capitalism and subjugate us harder (hint: regulation on this kind of thing disproportionately affects individuals while corporations carve out exceptions for themselves because ‘it helps the economy’)…

Or we can embrace the technology and try to use it to fight capitalism, at which point there’s at least a chance we might win, since the technology really does have the potential to overcome capitalism if and only if we can spread it far enough and fast enough that it can’t be controlled or contained to serve only the rich and powerful.

I bet some people flashed that one and such too, but I could find no indication that it was shut down because of that.

It feels like society has backslid tremendously on some freedoms in the past 15 years, particularly where it comes to prudishness.

These days we even have otherwise progressive people jumping on the prude bandwagon along with hyper religious controlling anti feminists and it just makes for such strange bedfellows.

If it is solved it will definitely be through technology of some sort. While I agree it will not be one brilliant scientist, technology will be the solution.

That technology may come in the form of a way to produce more energy without fucking up the climate, and the engineering and logistical capacity to roll out the change at a breakneck pace.

It may come in the form of simply developing a way to control the global climate directly.

It might come in the form of some technology to control the behavior of humans so that we can actually respond appropriately.

Or it might come in the form of the singularity, when self improving machines grow so far beyond us so fast that they can just do what is needed whether we like it or not.

But one way or another I guarantee that if it’s solved, it’ll largely be a technological solution, because getting humanity to just…stop using energy at our current rate…is just not going to happen.

Yeah, since we’ve designed our world for humans, the best general purpose robots will have a human shape in order to function effectively in the same areas.

They could turn that into a running theme, like how every Elder Scrolls protagonist is a prisoner to start with…

But Divinity already has a long history and so does Baldur’s Gate so…ehh, doesn’t fit in quite as well. Maybe with a new IP they make it a tradition for.

More like 1997, or even 1983, when the UK handed them back to China, or the earlier date, when they decided to prevent them from having British citizenship.

If everyone in Hong Kong had the right to emigrate to any British territory, China would have to be a lot lighter touched there, or there might be a mass exodus.

One problem is people see those whose work may no longer be needed or as profitable, and…they rush to defend it, even if those same people claim to be opposed to capitalism.

They need to go ‘yes, this will replace many artists and writers…and that’s a good thing because it gives everyone access to being able to create bespoke art for themselves.’ but at the same time realize that while this is a good thing, it also means the need for societal shift to support people outside of capitalism is needed.

There’s probably a decent number of people that buy a game and don’t install it immediately. I often do this when something is on sale. By the time they realize they didn’t get what they were after, it may be outside the refund window.

Odd comparison, and internally inconsistent. They criticize KOTOR for having only one decision that affects the overall story, but fail to consider that SWG had zero decisions that affect the overall story.

It is true that as a multiplayer game there are theoretically more opportunities for roleplay in SWG, and if they’d focused on that it would make more sense and be more consistent.

Don’t discount the generative AI either!

Language generating AI like LLMs: Though we’re in early stages yet and they don’t really work for communication, these are going to be the foundation on which AI learns to talk and communicate information to people. Right now they just spit out correct-sounding responses, but eventually the trick to using that language generation to actually communicate will be resolved.

Image/video/music generating AI: How difficult it is right now, for the average person to illustrate an idea or visual concept they have! But already these image generating AI are making such illustration available to the common person. As they advance further and adjusting their output based on natural conversational language becomes more effective, this will only get better. A picture paints a thousand words…and now the inverse will also be true, as anyone will be able to create a picture with sufficient description. And the same applies to video and music.

That said I love your managing production point. It’s something I e been thinking too - centrally planned economies have always had serious issues, but if with predictive AI we can overcome the problems by accurately predicting future need, the problems with them may be solvable, and we can then take advantage of the inherent efficiency in such a planned system.

This is actually what I look forward to most in gaming in the next decade or two. The implementation of AI that can be assigned goals and motivations instead of scripted to every detail. Characters in games with whom we as players can have believable conversations that the devs didn’t have to think of beforehand. If they can integrate LLM type AI into games successfully, it’ll be a total game changer in terms of being able to accommodate player choice and freedom.

I don’t know my Greek mythology that well, but my instinct is Aphrodite. She wouldn’t want her champion to be ugly, so she would make me beautiful (but not as beautiful as her).

Not a good damn thing, unless everyone with a higher standard of living than I do has already sacrificed enough to bring them down to my level. If I was anywhere near the top standards of living then I would be more willing to go first. But I am not going to be tricked into giving things up on my own, or even as a sizable group, while some individuals and corporations are continuing to make issues worse.

If it was me in their place, I’d try giving up as little as possible then seek some sort of binding defense agreement, whether NATO or something else. And if necessary do it in secrecy so Russia doesn’t hear about it until the agreement is fully in force.

Honestly I just think the US is simply not reliable, and with Ukraine seemingly relying heavily on the US, they need to be looking for the quickest exit strategy they can come up with at a moment of strength.

Hopefully, if Republicans prevent continued US support, other countries will still provide enough…I just fear it may not be, and that seems like a worse outcome for Ukraine’s people.