koreth

I think this is a more subtle question than it appears on the surface, especially if you don’t think of it as a one-off.

Whether or not Scientology deserves to be called a “religion,” it’s a safe bet there will be new religions with varying levels of legitimacy popping up in the future. And chances are some of them will have core beliefs that are related to the technology of the day, because it would be weird if that weren’t the case. “Swords” and “plowshares” are technological artifacts, after all.

Leaving aside the specific case of Scientology, the question becomes, how do laws that apply to classes of technology interact with laws that treat religious practices as highly protected activities? We’ve seen this kind of question come up in the context of otherwise illegal drugs that are used in traditional rituals. But religious-tech questions seem like they could have a bunch of unique wrinkles.

Tunic, but that was kind of the point.

Or the flipside of that: the foreigners in “Squid Game” whose English dialogue sounded like it was written by someone who’d taken a couple years of English in high school and never had an adult conversation.

Probably true for most languages. The one that bugs me is when they hire a Chinese-American actor to speak Mandarin but the actor doesn’t actually speak Mandarin fluently or speaks it with such a thick accent that I stop being able to believe the character is from China.

Their track record isn’t that bad, is it? Castlevania and Edgerunners were pretty good adaptations. Dragon Age was all right. And Arcane was amazing, though Netflix wasn’t involved in that one early on. So there’s reason to be at least cautiously optimistic, IMO.

The “developed or supplied outside the course of a commercial activity” condition is part of why people are up in arms about this. If I’m at work and I run into a bug and submit a patch, my patch was developed in the course of a commercial activity, and thus the project as a whole was partially developed in the course of a commercial activity.

How many major open-source projects have zero contributions from companies?

It also acts as a huge disincentive for companies to open their code at all. If I package up a useful library I wrote at work, and I release it, and some other person downloads it and exposes a vulnerability that is only exploitable if you use the library in a way that I wasn’t originally using it, boom, my company is penalized. My company’s lawyers would be insane to let me release any code given that risk.

This post begs for a list of games whose stories avoid most or all of these traps.

I’ll start with an easy one: Disco Elysium.

I think this is about Waze, the mapping/navigation app.

ChatGPT is certainly no good at a lot of aspects of storytelling, but I wonder how much the author played with different prompts.

For example, if I go to GPT-4 and say, “Write a short fantasy story about a group of adventurers who challenge a dragon,” it gives me a bog standard trope-ridden fantasy story. Standard adventuring party goes into cave, fights dragon, kills it, returns with gold.

But then if I say, “Do it again, but avoid using fantasy tropes and cliches,” it generates a much more interesting story. Not sure about the etiquette of pasting big blocks of ChatGPT text into Lemmy comments, but the setting turned from generic medieval Europe into more of a weird steampunk-like environment, and the climax of the story was the characters convincing the dragon that it was hurting people and should stop.

I don’t understand why people are saying this will reduce misinformation. The fringe sites peddling things like genocide denial aren’t news organizations to begin with, so users will still be able to share their content freely. It’ll become harder for other people to counter the misinformation by linking to legitimate news sources.

“Rogue One” is a pretty well-regarded prequel.

I’m cautiously optimistic after that teaser. Never expected it to be as China-focused as the books, but it seems like they’re keeping some of the core elements like the Cultural Revolution connection.

D&D rightfully get a ton of flak for how Game of Thrones ended, but the first several seasons of that show were amazing and I’m curious to see how they’ll do when they’re adapting a work that is completely finished and has a solid ending. They will know from the get-go which elements of the story end up being critical and which can be adjusted to make for a better adaptation.

No clue how they’ll portray some of the stuff in book 3 visually, though.

It Takes Two is a good one to play with a significant other.

Wish people wouldn’t do this, though I do understand the motivation. IMO it ends up punishing other Internet users (who are the ones getting value from year-old comment threads) vastly more than it punishes the owners and employees of Reddit, Inc. (who get most of their value from people participating in active discussions and seeing ads along the way).

The end result is that you search for “how to fix a broken curtain rod” on Google and the search results are full of comment threads like

• Anyone know how to fix a broken curtain rod?
  • [deleted]
    • Oh, that’s a good idea. How do you unscrew the end if you do it that way?
      • Hello! I have removed my comment from reddit because I don’t like the way they’re running their company. You can find me on Lemmy.
        • Thanks! That worked.

Reddit still gets the revenue from the ad at the top of the page, so the only person you’ve successfully stiffed is the person who was looking for an answer.