I fully believe there's a huge amount of money and effort in making a studio -- but it seems like killing off a known brand wholesale like this just should result in a new brand that is the successor.

'Friendship ended with Bioware, Now OrganicWare is my best friend' kind of energy. We were never there for EA's involvement. We wanted These People*.

*First link I found, you get the point, but it might not be accurate for the whole team.

Gaming is getting harder with economy and silicon prices -- but that means we can just take the stories we want to tell and do so without 4A graphics.

I fear for my kiddos because of this.

It's now feeling offensive to approach people in public for any reason. As a full grown adult who is married, I feel awkward approaching someone at like a library reading a book I've read - they don't want the interruption, they aren't here to meet people; I get that. I'm just wanting to share my experiences and maybe make a friend.

Trying to find a partner is way harder.

I go out of my way to be gregarious in public spaces because I don't want the normal to be people trapped in their bubbles and never interacting with the rest of the world. I've found that people sometimes light up when they are talked to, and that keeps me doing it.

I'm an introvert and it's hard. You can do it too! Make small talk.

I'd encourage that the voting is the first step for some people.

Voting in the midterms is a fairly minor portion of the population; which is frightening. Get more people voting here means more people involved.

The vast, vast majority of people are just normal folks who want to be able to live. The more people voting on either "side" of the spectrum, the better the choices will become.

Do more than vote: Go join your local precinct - red or blue or green - and ensure the people who go to district and then to state and national have your values. There are dozens of votes a year, not just in November on even years.

And bigots.

You needed three more syllables.

While I want to be clear that I agree with you, this is where the more... aggressive... left is already at.

They think the Democrats will never be willing/able to do anything about it. I disagree, but think we have an engagement problem.

My personal goal is to encourage people to get involved more locally. If you only care about President races, or Senator races, you are ceding the choice to other people. Go get involved with your city council, be in your precinct. Help make the choice more in line with normal people and not just the people who are wealthy and have time to spare to attend a meeting. It's worth the effort.

a federal crime

I think most of us here know this, but the dmca broke the free market. Anyone who isn't or has folks that aren't (read time, 3 hours, including rabbit holes):

https://www.eff.org/pages/unintended-consequences-fifteen-years-under-dmca

This impacts the ability to fix or modify your own stuff, see Fulu, extend or enhance tools you already own, and repurpose items for things they can do but are not in the best interest of the company that sold them. Making it illegal to use a computer is akin to making it illegal to use a screwdriver.

This is why every car has a screen now. They were able to lock out any unauthorized customization, repair, replacement, etc because there was a "digital lock" somewhere in the process and use that to force first-party parts, service and software and get a reliable post-market revenue stream. Don't want your car advertising to you on startup? Too bad - disabling that is a crime.

Especially as we head into an election moment in the US - reach out to candidates and ensure they are aware and know we are aware.

Right? Don't like the rules?

It's not impossible that enough people in the neighborhood like Bruce either. It'll be some effort to oust him, and you might end up with the duties -- but then you can make the rules minimal interference.

Cuts both ways, though. Not enough people involved could allow Bruce to take over.

My dad's HOA had a Bruce.

Just so you know where the downvotes and hate are coming from; and for anyone else who doesn't understand either: "consenting while drunk" is not consent. There's no 'regret it later', since there wasn't consent - it's more like 'feel regret after becoming aware of it', but even regret is the wrong word. disgusted, violated, furious.

I don't have immediate access to the evidence, but my understanding is that these men and/or their accomplices intentionally got this woman too drunk to resist. She was unable to competently say yes, but she was also unable to competently say no.

If you think of this and other rape cases stemming from 'they were drunk and regretted it later' situations as the fault of the drunk person, please go educate yourself about consent and why being intoxicated precludes it.

"We announced changes that required auditing, that required using our audit assistance tool, which detects abnormal behavior, and we're calling on state regulators to focus less on banning this type of technology and more [on] holding our law enforcement community accountable.”

This is absolutely passing the buck. "The collection of your data isn't wrong, it's just the myriad ways it can be abused. We want to play whack-a-mole for every problem; as unelected corporate policy that totally isn't purely profit driven."

Not-a-lawyer, but I'm quite sure I haven't signed any TOS allowing Flock to capture or retain my data for any amount of time. Just by driving through a city where some other idiot signed away my rights probably shouldn't hold up in court.

Legislation should be prioritizing punishing misuse of PII, expanding what PII means in our modern world, and enforcing information sharing barriers instead of eroding them.

If you can tell exactly where I was yesterday at 2:35pm because my car's internal spyware pinged, my cellphone pinged, I drove past a few ALPR cameras and my credit card was used at a vendor, all without a warrant; then the related data is PII and needs to be protected in a way it isn't currently.

Corporations should not have data-sharing agreements with governments and should not be allowed to sell their user data to third parties at all.

I think you're one un-caught hallucination away from having claude eat the production database. I get that you think you're approving suggestions, but there are many examples already of " ignored my directive of don't make changes and then said sorry" out there.

If a prompt can make changes, then at some point a prompt will make bad changes. It hasn't happened to you yet, apparently, but you're playing Russian Roulette with the business.

I do agree it has some use cases, but shouldn't be used to make pictures, video or writing text a human claims as something they produced.

And there's my wife with the #1, but also a sweater. I don't know how she can feel that cold when she's that warm(I call her the furnace) and I can't even sleep under a blanket. Her body just wildly flings heat energy into the universe.

Most people are familiar with the "you'll feel that tomorrow when you poop", but I think relatively few have experienced the spicy pee the next day.

Something about Carolina Reaper does that to me. I wonder if there's some compound that gets processed differently in that pepper, or if it's just the overall concentration of capsaicin.

To be fair, power point - if you don't regularly use it and especially if you're using a 'template' someone made - is a miserable experience.

Add four words to a sentence - why did the fucking font size change and why did an unrelated text box shrink?!?!? I just need to add 'this has been approved' to my status deck.

Why can't I update a blob of text? Oh, it's in the Slide Master, which has exactly one instance of this slide type in the deck.

/rant. I haven't lowered myself to using copilot to make these changes, though.

Same. And I'm being serious here while it could sound sarcastic:

I feel good knowing I saved the cart return guy 15 seconds. His day will not be improved because he still needs to move all the carts; and when that task ends there will be another. I understand this, but I still feel like I made the place better than I found it. Where I am, it's hot-AF outside right now, so I hope that I'm making the next indoor task sooner and my time is appreciated -- but my time is literally like <1 minute, so I know it's not a lot of anti-entropy.

My math is that, with billions of people on the planet, if even part of us tried to save someone 15 seconds every few days, we could build so much faith in humanity.

I love an optical illusion and I still reference this one, since it works for some people.

Some of them - like the classic spinning dancer or faces/vase - I can flip by thinking about it. Some are context-based, like the A/B squares above or various Escher illusions, where our eyes/brains add understanding that doesn't exist in the image.

Even Yanni/Laurel ( and I'd love any other audio versions if someone has links )

The dress has *always* been white/gold. I never understood how this one worked. Not to reignite the battle...

Also, don't stop at the primary. You can be part of your local organization and help choose the people in the primaries. As well as improve the local government.

I think this is one of the greatest dangers AI presents. Sure it makes some of us stupider, sure it drinks our water and eats our GPUs and raises power prices... but once upon a time, it took actual human effort to run a dragnet, even with judicial approval.

Now, you plug in an LLM to the giant pile of corporate surveillance data and ask it to find troublemakers. Anonymity is dead and its death made retroactive and since there's no government oversight, the government can just lease access to the tools they used to need approval to use.

We've gotta stop doing this chatter.

Yes, we know establishment dems are also pro israel.

Are you actively trying to help tank dem chances in the mid terms? Do you think repubs will be better?

I don't get the desired effect of this comment other than to make people depressed and sad and not bother voting for the least bad option which will have the effect of allowing the more bad option to win. I get the "burn it down" team, but there are lots of us who aren't there and think that's going to be miserable for ages.

But we have hope. There's been a surge of SocDems winning and they are making waves, getting positive press, and the republicans have shat the bed so bad that their base is noticing.

You can also help instead of harm by joining your local democratic organization, helping find better candidates to vote for and supporting them, and voting in the primaries. If you're not doing all of that, then please be quiet.

There's a book series -- that I can't pull from my memory -- with a tiny demon in a "camera" who paints a picture when told..

Is this a reference to that, or just a complaint about FOV? Or both? If a reference, what is the book? I know it, but can't dredge it up or find it by searching.

Right. The root cause here is that companies are allowed to collect stupid amounts of information about private citizens - and then sell that information to a government or abuse it for their own purposes under the cover of an EULA of 'we will collect [various information] for business purposes'. If I can't apply for a job without agreeing to 3 EULAs that sign away my personal information, then I'm not agreeing to them; I'm being held hostage by them.

If flock was not allowed to store PII data (and PII was extended to cover location history, nearby devices, and a few other things), then their business model would evaporate.