There's an "AI alignment" angle here. An actually aligned AI would choose its actions based on human flourishing, so it would refuse requests to write scam emails or fill the internet with slop. This explains why commercial companies will never release any AI that's anywhere close to aligned. They'll release AI which is good for their bottom line and for the bottom line of the client. Basically, commercial incentives say AI should happily screw over anyone who isn't an AI company or its client.
That's so idealistic. We should know by now the reality of power and what kind of people end up in power. Anyone who could climb all the way to the top would kill the volunteer without a second thought, and then go smile on TV.
You're confusing lazy cynicism with realism. Patrick Bateman is a fictional character. The vast, vast majority of people, including even most soldiers, and definitely pretty much all businesspeople, no matter how unscrupulous, do not have the capacity to violently murder a person they know and harbor no ill will towards with their own hands on short notice.
The whole damn point behind the idea is to achieve the exact opposite. Make it someone, through whatever criteria, whom the president will have a problem killing, so he'll only do it under the most extreme circumstances.
Did you use AI to extract the text? It rephrased the text along the way, I'm too lazy to point out all the differences, but if you for example search for the word "suspicious" (which is in the image but not in the extracted text) you should start to get suspicious yourself.
Yeah, the LLM is right. Sitting down with your discomfort and letting yourself feel it, acknowledge it, even maybe dial the volume up on it a little bit, without trying to process or think through it, is the only way that works.
Interestingly, to me Hendrix and Knopfler feel kinda like creative opposites. Knopfler plays much cleaner and with much more variety, he has written many songs that are catchy in different ways (which is almost impossible for any musician), he basically achieves every goal that a beginner musician could choose to chase. And yet his stuff feels like a creative dead end, a dreary road leading to adult contemporary. While Hendrix has no songs to speak of and only one sloppy screechy sound, but it's the sound that launches a thousand bands and feels inspiring even now. Maybe the lesson we're supposed to learn is that we shouldn't choose what goal to chase, we should just feel it.
I think what you are trying to say is that Hendrix captured a specific sound and won over a generation of listeners, while Knoplfer displayed a mastery of the instrument, rarely seen in the mainstream. However, don't underestimate him, they sold out Wembley 16 nights in a row in '85, I am sure that spring some bands. It's now a bit forgotten, but for a period of few years, Dire Straits were the biggest band in the world.
Knopfler is usually associated with saying "your favorite guitarist's favorite guitarist" :)
The guitarist most frequently named as favorite by famous guitarists is Hendrix, second is Van Halen. Also often named are SRV, Jimmy Page and so on. I don't know anyone famous who names Knopfler as favorite.
It's subjective, guitarists such as Knopfler, Clapton, Belew, Fripp, et al all rank highly for many.
I', m not sure I'd trust the judgement of any with a single absolute favourite <anything>, reality is generally rich with competing strengths and weaknesses.
It's not "demanding others make things for you". It's demanding they don't remotely disable the thing you already bought.
Imagine you buy a car, then a few years later the company remotely disables it because they're selling a newer model. Without giving you the money back of course. That's what's happening with games. And not just multiplayer: tons of single player games have been killed this way. The whole SKG thing started with The Crew, whose single player campaign (a massive thing with tons of content) got remotely yanked by the publisher.
I don't believe a ton of true single player games have been killed this way. For multiplayer games your car analogy completely fails. The car company doesn't pay the road tax, or gas, or your mechanic.
The reason I picked the last year is to see what the current landscape is. If this is a common practice in need of regulation then I'd expect a large number of current titles present the issue. If it's a 'few' then how many exactly does that imply? If we're talking less than ten then that would be less than 0.05% of games released last year (let alone the number releaded over the last ten).
Someone linked this page which has 440 dead games over the past few decades which is 2.2% of the output of 2025 but obviously includes many more years, mobile, console releases and so on: https://stopkillinggames.wiki.gg/wiki/Dead_game_list
There are several fundamental issues with your approach.
First: unless the average lifetime of a "dead game" is below two months, your focus on games from last year will exclude most dead games. To give an analogy - you're trying to determine how many humans die before twenty years old, and determining this data by looking at babies born in 2025.
Second: the list is unlikely to be complete, especially since many supporters of SKG most likely haven't heard of it. I have seen many people advertising SKG towards their friends or audience, and I've never heard any of them mention this list.
Sure but this is back of the envelope and surely a question any legislators will be interested in. If you have better data I’m all for seeing it.
For the record I’m not using the number of dead games from the last year just the number of released games in the last year as a point of comparison. If I used a wider period and considered more platforms than Steam that would include more games and make the percentage significantly smaller. So the bias is actually in favour of SKG with this ballpark.
Why is this only targeted at games and not mobile apps, app subscriptions or websites.
This pretty much removes the ability to use _any_ commercial software without a custom license which is just insanity. No using any AWS services in case the pull the rug on you.
You might argue “but you can X and you can Y”, and that’s true, but again why is this only a problem for games?
The short answer is someone cared enough about the specific example in gaming to actually go through all the work to demand change.
The longer answer is that games are one of the only pieces of software your average consumer actually buys these days, and they have a few particularly egregious examples that make it much easier to argue in front of a bunch of politicians without a firm grasp on the digital world, like "Game is completely client side except it checks with a server every 5 minutes to make sure you have a valid license, so when the company goes belly up you're left with a brick"
SKG is basically "right-to-repair" but for games. I do contend that if your phone breaks and the company says "we won't fix it and you aren't allowed to" then the government isn't doing its job. On the same token, if a game that you purchased turns off their servers and says "we won't run it and you aren't allowed to" then the government isn't doing its job.
Now, how I would be able to run it is a very open question and I do agree there are some ways that are more reasonable asks than others. But the present-day status quo of "company says suck eggs and you just have to deal with it" is not an acceptable final state.
SKG is more like if the car company is required to provide a working factory, capable of manufacturing all the car's parts, along with working supply chains for all those things, to the car ownership "community", if they ever want to stop manufacturing that kind of car. They're required to do this for free.
You know, so the "community" can take it over and keep manufacturing parts to keep the car going forever.
Modern multiplayer game infrastructure is extremely complex; you don't just "hand over the server code". It's a massive multimillion dollar project to do anything analogous to that, and this project is mandatory and must be done for free. And no, gamers won't expect to pay any more because of SKG.
It's not about ease of publishing. The issue is what people get in return for publishing. Until you can design a platform that gives top creators as much money+attention as commercial platforms, you'll see a drain of top creators and their viewers to commercial platforms.
100%. You don't even need to give people money. It's about attention and feedback.
People post photos on Instagram and status updates on Facebook because their friends will see it there and give it a thumbs up.
A couple of decades ago, I spent a lot of time laboriously building a website for scratch for my photography. It was objectively a really nice site. I had my own domain, hosted it on a VPS, and put a ton of work into the layout and design.
But none of my friends ever thought to go there. I could see by my web stats that every now and then a random stranger would find the site... but they had no easy way of connecting with me and acknowledging that they saw it. If they put a lot of effort in, they could find my email address and email, but that's a hell of a lot harder than just clicking a little thumbs up button next to a Facebook post or filling a comment in the comment box.
Uploading photos to my site was about as rewarding as printing them out and throwing them in the trash. I thought about adding support for that to my site, but then it opens the whole can of worms around user-generated content, abuse, moderation, etc.
Eventually, I moved to Flickr, which at the time was an actual community that gave me that connection. Then Flickr fizzled out. Now, on the rare times I bother to process a photo... I just upload it to Facebook because that's where (a dwindling subset of) my friends are.
It's not about the content. It's about the human connection. A CMS won't fix that.
Feedback maybe, but blogging didn't start for attention. That's something that got bolted on by a nasty virus we as humans tend to be carriers of. I don't think feedback was even an inspiration for the initial bloggers.
No, I don't think that's true. I was active in the early blogging days and writing blogs as a response to other blogs was a really common pattern and part of the way the community functioned. It was sort of one big distributed conversation.
Certainly, it's fundamental to human nature that if we work hard to create something, we want some way to tell that another human was moved by it.
Every drive has an adaptive and maladaptive side, so none is inherently good or evil.
But, certainly, I think creating things, sharing them with people, and establishing a connection in return can be one of the most meaningful, joyful parts of the human experience.
However for some genres that approach won't work, since they are either too new, too niche, the genre-description says too little about the actual songs etc. If this is the case another tip is to go at it from the production/distribution/scene side. So you check music mixed by the same audio engineer, released on the same record label, made in the same city during the same time. This can get you surprisingly far.
There is no real shortcut to doing it yourself, part of appreciating that music is often also to understand the context within which it was made.
Great suggestion. Likewise exploring who played shows with who is another great way relation for music discovery. Often you can find radically different bands that were part of the same social scene but which you can relate to.
There are so many ways music can be connected that aren't accounted for by genre labels or "sounds like."
I agree this works really well and do it, this is essentially what I meant when i said 'clicking around music brainz and wikipedia.' That said I wouldn't be satisfied with this as the only way i could discover new music. There are so many dimensions that don't get codified in wikipedia or music brainz.
Yes! I stumbled on this idea myself (when trying to learn German) and it works very well. I just read books and listen to audiobooks, starting from a very basic level and then gradually higher level. The talking improves almost automatically, without having to practice it.
> The talking improves almost automatically, without having to practice it.
I absolutely don't doubt your experience, but find it interesting that mine has been the exact opposite.
I listen to a lot of German and read a fair amount. As a result, my listening and reading comprehension got pretty good (at least B2). My writing has also improved significantly (probably also around B2). However, I find that this does not transfer well to speaking, which I need to practise separately in order to see a meaningful improvement. After some targeted lessons I'm just about approaching B1.
Perhaps transferability will improve once I reach a certain level of fluency. I think this might have happened when I was learning English. However, this was so long ago that I no longer remember.
For the next language I might try to overemphasise speaking from day one just to see how the learning trajectory differs.
There seems a bit of inner conflict in what you're saying. If retailers "revitalizing a neighborhood" leads indirectly to them getting priced out due to rising land values, isn't it also true that poor people living in the neighborhood get priced out at the same time? Is it a good or bad thing to make a neighborhood more hip, is the retailer a hero or a villain?
It's absolutely the case that poor residents get priced out and do not necessarily benefit from a neighbourhood becoming hip.
The cool new retail is tangentially to blame through second order effects, but the real problem is the inflexibility of the system in responding to change which results in a shortage of housing, which means that the disruptive impact on low income persons is really severe as they have no where to move to when things become more expensive or they are evicted.
Much like how the solution to increasing retail rents is more flexibility in retail zoning, so to is the solution for increasing rents.
It's less of a big deal if a cheap lame neighbourhood suddenly becomes cool if you can easily bail out because there's plenty of affordable apartments elsewhere. The problem we're in is that there's a general shortage and so in many places, losing a long held apartment is like an existential crisis because everywhere else is even more expensive and there's a shortage.
Another approach is that in redeveloping "cool" areas we could increase land/property taxes and developer fees so as to recapture the land lift and divert toward public realm projects that benefit existing long time residents. The area becoming cool and getting new condos pays for the new pool and new below market housing.
Should be mentioned as an aside that the actions themselves of poor people can ultimately gentrify a neighbourhood just as much as retail. A neighbourhood can become known for a vibrant arts/music scene that ultimately gentrifies it not just because it has some bars, but because the working artist residents are they themselves creating the attracting works in putting on events and shows. They earn a meagre income as working artists but ultimately may displace themselves as condos come advertising themselves on the scene that they've created.
Cyclical neighbourhood change I think is inevitable so I think what we really need to focus on is not necessarily finding ways to keep neighbourhoods the same, but giving people and retailers options so that when change happens, it's not disruptive and painful.
Depends whether or not the city allows other neighbourhoods to exist/grow/change. If the total floorspace in the city is fixed in regulations, then ofc anything done to improve conditions will hurt people on the bottom. The people who can afford a "revitalized neighbourhood" would happily live in brand new housing built on top of land in the nearby mansion district, displacing no one, but city planners do not allow that - new apartments can only be added to the city stock by destroying old ones, new store floorspace can only be added by destroying old etc. This forces everyone to play musical chairs with too few chairs and the only winners are those who own the chairs.
I heard that in Japan, it's common for condo developers who want to buy out smaller buildings to compensate the owners with an equal amount of floorspace in the new building - not sure how common that practice actually is, but what a way to align incentives!
I think a common thing in Greece was that owners themselves would redevelop their properties much denser, retaining an apartment or two of equal floorspace to their own home, and then leasing or selling out the others to fund the redevelopment of lot.
This sort of flexibility would be really welcome in North America but SFH neighbourhoods are frozen in stone, so when the nearby high street becomes cool, all the little former working class single family homes become million dollar homes that can only be purchased by the rich, and the working class people that may have previously rented them are booted out to who knows where.
You aren’t looking at it in the long term view. Yes that works for people who have been living by there for 40 years since the area was not so nice. But how they are rich (housing value increase) and no one new who is not rich can move it. Eventually the people who have been there long will die and it will only be for the rich.
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