MudMan

Everybody took slaves from prisoners of war in any conflict, not just the Romans. Slavery was ius commune, it had nothing to do with ethnicity and it fit in very different social and anthropological functions across all societies of the period. Everybody stop it with the application of modern, anglocentric concepts to ancient Mediterranean cultures. It was cute when you were just building a whole bunch of anachronistic white marble columns, but that’s as much as I can tolerate.

Frankly, way less annoying than Americans trying to apply a concept of “whiteness” to first century social dynamics.

Not even the first guy to incel his way to an extremely inaccurate AI virtual girlfriend chatbot based on an inaccessible married celebrity.

Just saying, Geordi is NOT the face you want to use for warnings about ethical generative AI usage.

Hah. Yeah, I’ll do that as soon as you invent a way to freeze time.

For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure it’s less energy efficient to run a local open source LLM than to offload the task to a data center, but the flexibility and privacy are too big of a deal to ignore.

In any case chatbots suck at finding accurate information reliably, but they are actually pretty good at reaching things you already know or can verify at a glance with suprisingly little information. The fact that a piece of tech is being misused often doesn’t mean it’s useless. This simplistic black-and-white stuff is so dumb and social media is so full of it. Speaking of often misused technology, I suppose.

Not to be that guy, but if there’s a fictional character that made a career out of prompt engineering a surprisingly flaky AI it’s Geordi La Forge. The guy hasn’t given the hand to a “Computer!” interaction in his life.

He literally fed his notes to a chatbot to make a custom assistant and then dated the custom assistant.

Igual que los “yankees” con el “a/o”, y funciona igual de mal.

One of the joys of learning languages is getting to be equally annoyed at anglophones thinking ending words in “o” and “a” is hilarious and at Spanish speakers thinking that adding “ing” to random words counts as English.

It’s not a culture war if they make policy based on it. Can’t really be shouting from the fence at the migrants being detained, put in camps and deported or the women being denied abortions or the trans people being arrested for having to pee that the culture war is a distraction and if they only looked at it from a class perspective everything would be fine.

I mean, you can, but after a while it starts to suspiciously just seem like you actually agree with the fascists and the anarchocapitalists on the issues, or at least that you’re just as willing to use attackig marginalized scapegoats for your own political gain.

See, I’ve seen this do the rounds, and it always loses me before Saddam, because let’s be honest, if you’re into knees you’re clearly more respectable than being super into ass. Weirder, for sure, but more respectable, in an old timey, strangely prudish way.

I genuinely don’t think the wrapper impacted much one way or the other (the sequels got tons of praise in any case), but it’s definitely way more cumbersome than it needs to be. Especially when they went from 1 to 2 and they started doing this thing where you needed to transfer not just your saves but the entire first game over to the second game as DLC to put it all in the same place.

The thing is I actually preferred how the first game was released as an episodic thing in the first place. To me that sort of justified having a big wrapper to launch each episode. I get that keeping the wrapper going across the sequels then allows to have seasonal missions and user generated missions across all maps of the franchise, which is pretty cool, but they just never found an elegant way to handle it and without the episodic cadence there is just less of a reason to mess with all the live content anyway.

What I don’t think is that the games are too similar. If anythingI think more games should be like Ryu Ga Gotoku/Yakuza, where they just keep using the same tools to pump out a ton of games with the same tech and leave the iteration for the story and the level design. Games are too expensive and consistent anyway, you really don’t need to reinvent the wheel from scratch every time.

Don’t need a massive platform launcher to consolidate all of it, though. If anything, once you’re moving at that speed the game itself rolls back to becoming the seasonal content.

Eh, I get it. Someone recently said “twenty year old” games, presumably meaning something like the N64 and when I checked it turns out that twenty year old games are Shadow of the Colossus and GTA San Andreas.

Personally I have a hard time getting past the PS3/360 cutoff. Part of it is personal lived experience, part of it is you still get stuff like Crysis 3 and Red Dead Redemption show up in benchmarks. I think with Hitman since it’s been a bit stale after Hitman 3 I have more of a sense of waiting for another full sequel or reboot separate from the World of Assassination trilogy.

I think Hitman is in this weird haze where… yeah, there was a game’s worth of new content three years ago, but it was just the same engine and even inside the same launcher as 1 and 2, so that’s just been an ongoing thing since 2016, so it feels older than it is, even discounting how far away 2022 feels right now for other reasons.

Still, you said “new Hitman” and got me excited. I guess it’s back to waiting for the inevitable cancellation of that 007 thing they’re supposed to be doing now.

Hah. On the one hand, it seems like it wasn’t that long ago. On the other hand, it was a lifetime away. Hey, remember Covid?

Still confused. Hitman 2025 seems to be a Jason Statham movie. Hitman World of Assassination is IO’s weird episodic game thing where they released Hitman 2 and 3 in this strange, convoluted platform that was meant to drop a map per month, which didn’t really work, so they rolled back to doing full price games.

I don’t like that, there’s a reason I did finish the first season with the monthly episodes but not the other two “games”. The whole platform framework is also incredibly convoluted and impractical. Great games, messed up wrapper and release strategy.

If they changed something this year (or last year) I didn’t hear about it.

Wait, what “new” Hitman game? Isn’t the last Hitman game like five years old? Did I miss something?

I don’t know, that’s very clearly romantic love they’re talking about throughout the whole thing. The entire point of the curse is making the Beast ugly so he’d have to be nice to get some, and she certainly didn’t get into that dress to friendzone him.

You made me go check, the curse demands that he “learn to love another, and earn HER love in return”. I don’t think beloved drinking buddies would have cut it. This is not subtext, it’s the text.

I… well, yes.

I mean, normally these “adult hot take” things on children stories are forced to present a cynical joke, but… yeah no, that’s the entire point of the story. Like, that’s the plot. It’s what the movie is literally about.

You absolutely get to say you made it. Plus modify it, reproduce it, use it as the basis of other art and anything else you want. Any exception to that is some negotiated contractual clause that sets how crediting is meant to go or some policy to disclose it.

Movies have a long tradition of strict crediting rules (in the US, anyway). In comics there’s few people involved, so it tends to be easy. In games you can absolutely have a ton of art applied throughout (or concept art used as the basis for something) with no direct attribution beyond telling people yourself.

Hey, if AI hate gets people to realize how little recourse the actual person doing creative work as a contractor has to claim it at least this nonsense will have a positive effect.

It is not. The issue here is not “praise”.

It’s weird to see this used as a con. This is exactly the framing AI app creators use. If it’s the same as paying an artist to make you art, then there are no issues whatsoever with using that art wherever.

There are deeper questions here.

This is weird to have to say, because I feel like I’m more open to AI generation than most online people, but I still think it needs a new copyright framework, it’s not the same as buying work from a human.

Well, just to put things in perspective, you absolutely get to show, sell and promote something you comissioned, at least under most agreements. I’m not sure that is a great comparison. There are bigger issues with AI image gen than there are with paying an artist for something and using it for your project, whatever that may be.