leftzero

TESIV Oblivion is 2006, Tachyon The Fringe is 2000... 1994's Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger has a whole IMDB page, with the likes of Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, and Malcolm McDowell playing main characters.

And there's earlier games with less stellar casts, like 1991's Tex Murphy: Martian Memorandum. Actors in games have been a thing for quite a while.

I got glasses. That definitely changed the way I saw things. Everything suddenly became more focused.

I thought the standard was a 1-7 scale, with 5/7 (with rice) being the highest possible score...

Because scientific facts, or social and economic issues (that definitely affect and belong in the workplace) are not “politics” regardless of how much you'd like to label them as such so you can shove them under the rug and forget about them, you retrograde fossilized lich, and because “agreeing to disagree” with assholes who hold harmful opinions only serves to empower them and enable them to keep causing harm.

Exactly, Steam got where it is because it managed to be more convenient than piracy (as Gaben himself said, piracy is a service problem), as did Netflix before the fragmentation (and rampant enshittification) of the streaming market made piracy once more the most convenient (and better quality) option.

Epic store exclusives don't promote Epic, they promote piracy, as that is the second most convenient option after Steam (it's worth mentioning that Steam also acts as unobtrusive DRM; infect your game with malware like Denuvo and suddenly piracy again becomes the more convenient — even the only reasonable — option, as cracked games perform better and are more stable than malware DRM infected ones; Steam provides a good enough and, more importantly, harmless option for both consumers and developers, something no alternative, including piracy, has managed to achieve).

And, of course, the instant Gaben retires and Valve goes public and begins to enshittify itself we won't be going to Epic or GOG (unless they manage to replicate what Steam has achieved), we'll be back to sailing the high seas.

The point is that, other than Gabe, Valve doesn't have any shareholders to put before their customers. A publicly traded company, on the other hand, effectively has no choice but to cause as much harm as possible to their customers and to society in general in order to maximize short term shareholder profits, leading to runaway enshittification.

Great, just tried it, now it crashes every five minutes instead of every fifty... 😤

So, not genetically manipulated, then. 🤷‍♂️

Salt.

In science fiction there's sometimes a distinction between virtual intelligence (something that simulates intelligence but isn't really intelligent) and actual artificial intelligence (something really intelligent but created through science and engineering instead of natural biological evolution).

Large language models would almost certainly be VI by those definitions, not AI.

"...And that's what your holy men discuss, is it?" [asked Granny Weatherwax.]

"Not usually. There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment on the nature of sin, for example." [answered Mightily Oats.]

"And what do they think? Against it, are they?"

"It's not as simple as that. It's not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray."

"Nope."

"Pardon?"

"There's no grays, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is."

"It's a lot more complicated than that--"

"No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts."

"Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes--"

"But they starts with thinking about people as things..."

—from Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett.

And about DC being arses, and Finger's gay son having against all expectations a daughter being the only reason said arses eventually recognised him as co-creator.