Modder, programmer, and all around tinkerer. Yes, I’m that New Vegas and Deus Ex guy.

You can also find me over at lemmy.sdf.org under the same username. Also kbin.social if it ever comes back from the dead.

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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 25th, 2025

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  • Pretty much nailed it, but for anyone out there thinking “hey I can do that”…

    Point #1 is hard to do these days as a solo effort. A lot of these piracy groups have massive manpower backing them up, whether it’s a paid business or just a bunch of like-minded enthusiasts.

    Point #2 is a little more doable, but you’ll spend all your time doing that to keep up with the release schedule of these groups. That or you’ll have to rubber-stamp your releases without much quality checking, which will affect #3.

    However, Point #3 is where small enthusiasts can absolutely shine. A great example (though possibly on the more involved side) would be Adywan, who made their name focusing entirely on releasing maximum quality Star Wars releases, recuts, remakes, and remasters. There’s maybe a few dozen releases to their name, but mention that name to any piracy-aware Star Wars nerd and they will know it.

    For as much content as the big names cover there’s lots of stuff that falls through the cracks, whether it’s entirely absent or just present with sub-par quality. Despite how large the Star Trek fanbase is there’s basically one copy of the non-remastered version of The Original Series floating around out there, and it’s a rather ancient encode.



  • Is it? You can have female hormone levels and still have male genitalia. Science is cool like that. And no, people aren’t defined solely by their genitals, but they aren’t solely defined by their appearance either, or their biology. It’s a big mash up of those things and a few more.

    Point being it’s really hard to describe that situation as being solely one or the other. It’s definitely something that needs to be indicated for medical reasons though, but most Identification Documents don’t draw any distinction between sex and gender, much less allow for notation of something like that. Once again, paperwork lags behind reality.




  • Despite the apparent speed of advances, AI is a technology that is still in its childhood. It’s as if tech companies found a way to create a 6-year-old out of GPUs and way too goddamn much electricity. If you can overlook the resource usage required, that’s kind of cool.

    The problem is that those same tech companies (and some governments) have decided that they all need their own synthetically created 6-year-old and that they should give it unlimited funding and the ability to make life-changing decisions for everyone else, and anyone who isn’t jumping at the chance to have their life overseen by a machine-generated child with poor impulse control and a propensity to hallucinate is just “getting in the way of progress”.




  • I mean this positively: current AIs come up with the most bizarre, insane shit. Sometimes that’s great: a new approach or perspective when trying to solve a problem or interpret data can be exactly what is required to actually accomplish the task. Other times it’s unhelpful, but often so unhelpful it can be hilarious if the stakes are low-to-nonexistent.

    That said, that’s exactly why they need to not be as ever-present as they are: by human standards they are literally insane, incapable of consistent reasoning and frequently perceiving the world in ways that do not match reality. It’s not accurate to say the technology is in its infancy, but at best it’s in its adolescence, and just like an 8-year-old it should not be put in charge of dangerous things like drone strikes or ambulance dispatch.