Freelancer is 2003 Microsoft abandonware which still has an online mod community. Most prominent is probably the Discovery mod, which hosts a 24/7 RP server.

https://discoverygc.com/

Bots can be extremely useful and the flexibility of where and how bots could work was one of the things that made Reddit popular. Before, well, y’know.

Bespoke bots can also allow particular communities to develop local features or functionality. I assume Lemmy’s mod tools are fair bare bones right now too, so I suspect someone, somewhere is probably working on an automod toolkit.

Bots should be allowed, but must be flagged. I don’t know if it’s a default lemmy option, but the app I use has a toggle to hide bot accounts if you don’t want to see them.

That said, I would very much prefer if bots were restricted to just making comments rather than posts. Certain communities have bots that automatically post article links and they completely blanket feeds sorted by new until you block the account.

since C2PA relies on creators to opt in, the protocol doesn’t really address the problem of bad actors using AI-generated content. And it’s not yet clear just how helpful the provision of metadata will be when it comes to media fluency of the public. Provenance labels do not necessarily mention whether the content is true or accurate.

Interesting approach, but I can’t help but feel the actual utility is fairly limited. For example, I could see it being useful for large corporate creative studios that have contractual / union agreements that govern AI content usage.

If they’re using enterprise tools that build in C2PA, it’d give them a metadata audit trail showing exactly when and where AI was used.

That’s completely useless in the context where AI content flagging is most useful though. As the quote says, this provenance data is applied at the point of creation, and in a world where there are open source branches of generation models, there’s no way to ensure provenance tagging is built in.

This technology is most needed to combat AI powered misinformation campaigns, when that is the use case this is least able to address.

So conspiracy probably isn’t the right term, although there are common factors that are causing - or at least influencing - a lot of these trends.

With inflation being a major issue, central banks are reacting by increasing interest rates. These rate hikes have the effect of making credit and borrowing more expensive.

This is significant because central rates had been low (nearly 0%) since basically 2008, with quantitative easing (cash printing) pumping billions of additional dollars into the stock markets in particular.

The effect of loaned cash being effectively free is an explosion of activity from investor hedge funds who were willing to take huge risks on speculative projects. This fuelled the massive boom in tech startups across the 00s.

The trouble is, many of those startups weren’t profitable, they were ‘potentially profitable’ and fuelled by credit. Or they had the underpants gnome model of profit where the means and mechanism of the ‘???’ stage would be figured out later (WeWork).

Investors were happy to fund those losses to create products that controlled markets (Uber) or amassed huge userbases that could be flipped from potential to profit in the future (Reddit).

Only now the rates have gone up, and credit is suddenly expensive. Business models that rely on running at a loss suddenly aren’t viable, and those startup investors that owns chunks of those businesses are now insisting on actual returns on their investments.

You can see the effects all over social media and tech, but Reddit (urgently need to get profitable for a stock launch, need the stock launch for funding) and Twitter (basketcase debt load at the worst possible time for debt) are the most obvious examples.

Techbro austerity means worse products for consumers or aggressive monetization policies which users will likely dislike. So not a conspiracy, but decades of reckless investment by hedge funds that have been caught with their pants down by interest risk.

Wait… why doesn’t the USA have a system like this already?

I always found cryptobro preaching about instant cash transfers perplexing, but this explains a lot.

UK district and borough councils have a homelessness prevention duty which also applies to refugees. Unfortunately said councils are also largely falling to pieces and social housing stock hasn’t met demand since Thatcher eviscerated it in the 80s.

This basically means that a bunch of them are going to end up living long-term in ‘emergency’ B&B placements due to a lack of available social housing, unless they can find private arrangements themselves.

So… was this intended as suicide by border guard? I imagine whatever his original plan is he’s going to end up regretting it.

1. It’ll be funny if Georgia also gets off the pot and indictes too.

2. Could this go in US News instead? Lemmy is broadly very US-centric already, so posting US politics here too drowns out other global stories.

I’m convinced that Musk is involved in some kind of Brewster’s Millions situation with Twitter.

I also feel sorry for the CEO (well, not really) as they’re clearly being set up as a scapegoat for the inevitable failure that Musk’s erratic and short-sighted behaviour will cause.

Why would blockchain be necessary to do that? Honestly, 99% of the time blockchain is just a highly inefficient buzzword.

Usually there are better ways to achieve the same outcome, with the added bonus of not automatically attracting a cavalcade of Web3 con-artists and grifters.

It does seem nice here. The only thing I’m a little uncertain of is the restriction on Community creation, but the staff seem to be very responsive to requests so that’s probably okay.