Greenhouse gas emissions are only a fraction of terrible things that humans are inflicting on the environment, and meat/dairy are both nutritious food that provides requirements for sustenance, and if not eaten need to be replaced by something else that will also cause greenhouse gas emissions (aka, a 10% reduction in meat consumption does not equal to a 1.45% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions)
I think it's kind of crazy to place the burden of environmental destruction on individual buying habits, rather than the people in power who actually have the ability to make sweeping changes that might actually move the needle.
Let's start with not incentivizing, then disincentivizing the mass production and importation of plastic garbage waste and e-waste that not only create greenhouse gas emissions but pollute the environment in other, irreversible ways.
And if your government and leaders don't make this a priority, and regardless of who you vote in, big-name corpo donors get their way instead, then maybe it's time for a new government.
The average American citizen has less influence on politics in their "republic" than a citizen of a dictatorship. Only the will of the financial elite actually has influence. See Gilens and Page 2014.
It really doesn't matter if people are convinced to want single payer or not, it isn't going to happen. There are many, many systems in place to prevent the will of the people from happening if the elite don't want it.
They've also now launched the Warcraft 3 "remaster" twice, and it's still in a worse state than it was 20 years ago. First they did less than half the job, cut budget, and launched missing major features from the original project, with only some terrible new models to show that look decent up close, but bad from the overhead RTS view. Then they did a relaunch where they did lazy AI upscaling of old models and icons that don't actually look any better, added some realtime shadows that don't fit with the style of the game, and called it a "Warcraft 3 2.0".
Really terrible treatment of one of the best game series of all time, and being part of Microsoft hasn't helped. It would have been nice if Warcraft 3 got the same treatment as AoE2 or AoM.
I buy all games on GoG when I can, especially classic games, but new ones as well. It's so nice to just have a collection of DRM-free installers, and be able to support a company that does right by the classic games.
To be fair, using humans to spend time sifting through AI slop determining what is and isn't AI generated is not a fight that the humans are going to win.
You don't need everyone on every team to be a cross-functional thinker, but you need the people who are working cross-functionally to actually think about the big picture and realize they're optimizing for company success and not some arbitrary, often ambiguous goal like "good engineering".
Those people that are in the decision-making process need to then communicate the result of the decision with their team, and be able to justify the decision.
Maybe it's the norm, but it's a dysfunctional company if you have engineering that only cares about "doing things the right way", product that only cares about "get the next feature out as soon as possible", and corporate that just thinks "minimize software development costs". And on top of that, you have arbitrary regular deadlines that dictate the flow of work.
That points to everyone being focused on their own goals rather than working together to deliver the product that will satisfy customers the best.
Your idea of optimism is literally replacing the entire human race (the lineage of all humans on the planet) with a simulation of humans? That's pretty bleak.
The average person spends 9-11 hours per day consuming media depending on what source you look at. When people are playing games or browsing social media at the same time that they have the latest Netflix show on their TV, you can't tell me that this is really valuable time spent to deepen one's understanding of the human experience; it's a replacement for the human experience.
Most people will not notice if the soundtrack to a new TV show is made by a 5 word AI prompt of "exciting build-up suspense scene music" while they're playing pouring money into their mobile gacha game to get the "cute girl, anime, {color} {outfit}" prompt picture that is SSS rank.
You or I might not care for AI slop, but it's a lot cheaper to produce for Netflix or Zinga or Spotify or whatever, and if they go this route, they don't have to pay for writers, actors, illustrators, songwriters, or licensing for someone else's product. They'll just put their own AI content on autoplay after what you're currently watching, and hope most people don't care enough to stop it and choose something else.
Completely agree. When you see a business model like this, you know everything about the game is made to get you to spend more money and spend more time in it rather than actually have fun.
Maybe that's to be expected from SaaS B2B software or something, but there's no reason to settle for this kind of garbage in games. Tons of alternatives exist in older games, indie games, and even some AAA games where there is a creative vision with a goal that isn't to empty your wallet or waste your time as much as possible.
That's the same question I have. There is already a ton of great podcasts/music/everything in the niches that I like that I don't have the time to listen to them all. I also like to have quiet introspective time.
So where does AI regurgitated slop fit into my life?
I've made solid side income gambling over a number of different games and sports, and I say it should definitely be banned.
It ruins lives, funnels money to terrible people, makes sports worse for everyone, and has no positive impact on society. The benefits of the "freedom" to let manipulation of your lizard brain drain you of your past and future earnings is not worth it.
There aren't major innovations in chairs or mugs that make you throw out your whole collection every few years. Smartphones are just becoming a commodity and there's nothing wrong with that.
If a company has an AI tool, then you must treat everything that comes out of that tool as if it came from the company directly. If something harmful comes out, then the product is defective and they must compensate users like any other defective product.
If a hammer manufacturer sometimes produced a hammer that exploded like a hand grenade on impact, they would be held liable for that.
Make companies and their leadership responsible for any harm or damage that comes from AI generated content or actions. If a recipe is a hallucinated recipe and poisons someone, treat it the same as if someone created a salad recipe calling for raw kidney beans and rhubarb leaves in order to intentionally harm someone.
AI creates a ton of garbage unmitigated, and cracking down on when that garbage is harmful will be a good way to reduce the amount of garbage these companies put out.