He / They
Basically yes, a chatbot and the ability to do simple actions (agents). So in their fantasy universe, instead of clicking on Firefox and typing a query in the search bar, you’d ask the desktop to search for something, and it would do those steps.
That’s all just an excuse though, to explain why they need to collect all your local data. :P
I think you are looking for a unified solution to deal with very different and very nuanced problems.
The swastika was chosen by Hitler as a means to legitimize his movement. It’s important to remember that the average 1920s German had little formal schooling in world history. Even compared to our shitty and revisionist US curriculum, they had next to nothing. He could co-opt it and people were legitimately like, “wow, that’s crazy, I absolutely have never heard of Buddhism or Hinduism or anything. Maybe we really did used to rule all of them”. The Nazi swastika was at no point a dogwhistle, it’s a very explicit and bold statement of their false identity. It was an assertion of power and authority. If you cede the symbol to them, you are intrinsically acknowledging them as the “legitimate” owners of that symbol, which they are not. You can very easily distinguish between a swastika that is being flown as a white supremacist symbol, and one that is not. No Nazis are building Buddhist temples or weaving faux-Native American textiles just so they can have a “plausibly deniable” swastika, nor using pictures of those items to masquerade as non-Nazis with a nudge and a wink (because that would hurt their ‘pride’). They just use Nazi imagery directly.
To attack this, you need to very actively de-legitimize its improper usage, and boost its proper usage. The message cannot be “yes, this thousands of years old symbol really is about the Nazis”, because that is the stance of the Nazis themselves. It has to be, “fuck off Nazis, that’s not your’s, and we’re going to actively weed out your bullshit”.
On the other side are symbols like Pepe, where the purpose was never about legitimizing their ideology, but in fact to hide it and dogwhistle. The creator of Pepe is attempting valiantly to do exactly what I said above, but I think that while getting Nazis to stop using it (and everything else, air included) is great, there is no wider history or adoption that makes Pepe worth using elsewhere. It was just a cartoon frog. In this case, drawing a direct line between people who choose to represent themselves with Pepe, and with the shitty ideologies they’re using it to dogwhistle about, is actually the best counter to them, because a dogwhistle isn’t a dogwhistle if the relationship is explicit and universally understood.
Banning Pepe outright in Steam profiles makes complete sense to me, because it sends the message that “we know what you’re using this to mean, and you’re not fooling anyone, dumbass”.
Whereas IMO Valve should make it very clear that swastikas will be reviewed, and any Nazi swastikas will result in an immediate ban, whereas use in the legitimate meanings will not be (and that they will take context into consideration, i.e. user location, other profile info, past handles, discussion comments, etc etc).
I think its worth considering that the Native Americans whose version of the symbol was most directly copied elected to give it up, and that was in 1920. How could we ask Buddhists to give up their symbol of piece? If it isn’t fair to Buddhists, why did the Navajo, Hopi, Apache, and Tohono O’odham feel like they HAD to?
Are you asking me to speak to this? I can’t speak to the personal motivations or viewpoints of either Native American tribes, nor of a myriad of Asian cultures. But I can say that I don’t personally believe it is either fair, appropriate, or necessary for Buddhists to stop using a symbol they’ve used for thousands of years in order to distance themselves from a group they are not in fact associated with.
groups make incredible leaps of empathy like that
I think you may have fallen prey to a false narrative around this. From what I’m seeing, the “whirling log” (the native american symbol that resembles the swastika) was mostly dropped due to pressure from white people over their own white guilt and the politics around Nazism, not out of some collective spontaneous show of empathy, and never actually fell out of use completely, and is now being actively reclaimed by various native americans.
During World War II, Eskeets said the U.S. government asked the Navajo to “hold off” on using the symbol. So for an unknown amount of time, Eskeets said metalsmiths, weavers and other artists stopped incorporating it into their work. That helped create the misconception that items with a whirling log are no longer being made at all.
It’s apparently still being actively used by the Navajo, as well, but they tend not to talk to white people about it since people can’t have a normal one.
The sacredness of the “whirling log” makes it challenging to get some Native Americans to speak to non-Natives about the subject. That’s according to Edison Eskeets, a trader at The Hubbell Trading Post, a national historic site and the oldest operating trading post on the Navajo Nation and in the United States. Several Navajo artists were contacted and either didn’t respond to requests or hung up the phone when asked to speak about the symbol’s significance.
Eskeets said the whirling log represents humanity and life and is still used for healing in hundreds of Navajo ceremonies.
“It kind of has everything on it,” he said. “It represents the constellation, the moon, the sun, the equinox. It’s down to the earth, the four directions, the rotation of mother earth, all of that … it’s the rotation of life.”
But the old meanings are all dead.
I’m sorry, but this is completely false. The swastika is still used all across the world for its original meanings. If you’d said this about e.g. Norse symbols like the Valknut or Sonnenrad, I’d be 1000% on board with you, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’ve not been to anywhere that Buddhism is common if you think everyone associates the swastika with Nazism.
There are specific versions of the swastika that Nazi Germany created that are only associated with Nazism, such as the 45-degree rotated swastika, or obviously any swastika embedded within another German military symbol, but to assert that the basic symbol itself has been co-opted is very Euro-centric.
Sidebar, but the nominees for this year’s TGAs are ridiculous. It’s the same ~7 games shoehorned into every category they can, and a few others sprinkled in where they can’t.
You’d think there were only like 20 games that released this year that were good.
Some games that released this year, but snubbed by TGA in favor of kissing up to the same games n times over:
Probably none. Now I’ll name one that is large and influential, and isn’t trying to combat the problem: X
No, bots are not real people, so them masquerading as real people holding an opinion is, by definition, misinformation.
This isn’t misinformation.
Right, the other example is. The whole point is the difference between propaganda (the bots) and legitimate political sentiment (all real people). Given that Musk is actively choosing not to combat misinformation bots on his platform, it’s fair to step in.
When these crappy "AI"s finally do displace my job, I will become a fireman, but in the Fahrenheit 451 sense, and it’ll be servers instead of books.
They’re not just reading into it, if that’s what you mean; the SA, and the rest of the crew’s behavior towards Anya is all very much what they described. Jimmy seeing Anya as a disfigured womb with a foal (as in, a horse) is literally what happens, not a figure of speech.
My partner loves this game, and also endorses anyone here who hasn’t played it to do so. :)
I think it’s important for groups of people to be able to choose to ban propaganda and misinformation, because propaganda is not simply information being imparted, it’s an entire ecosystem of deceptive methods to disseminate information and to alter your perception without you realizing.
If it were calling for the EU banning X solely because they don’t like Musk’s shitty personal opinions, I’d agree with you, but they cite the disinformation, misinformation, and outright propaganda that the platform is being used to spread, and I think that’s perfectly valid.
Take 2 scenarios:
5 million actual people telling you that ‘x’ political view is common and popular, causing you to doubt, or at least temper your own personal beliefs.
500 thousand actual people, plus 4.5 million bot accounts telling you that ‘x’ political view is common and popular, causing you to doubt, or at least temper your own personal beliefs.
In reality, you don’t even need the bot accounts to outnumber the real users if you control the algorithms that determine what people see, which is exactly the situation that X is in right now.
tl;dr This isn’t about banning the viewpoints themselves, it’s about banning a platform that deceptively alters visibility of viewpoints to manipulate people.
Banning things you don’t like is not a solution
Tell that to Musk; X bans TONS of people over their viewpoints.
I want to pay them for Bloodborne on PC, but Sony won’t let me! Sounds like that’s their choice/ problem.
I think it would probably become “2X” in that case, given the “exploit” and “exterminate” parts. :P
Against the Storm is sort of a citybuilder/ 4X hybrid, that’s all about a bunch of fantasy species (humans, beavers, lizards, foxes, and harpies) working together to reclaim the world from this (un)natural blight.
The Bustling World is an RPG/ Citybuilder/ 4X hybrid that looks pretty interesting, but is not out yet.
I can’t really think of a 4X that leans towards the Grand Strategy side, that isn’t pretty combat-heavy. Distant Worlds: Universe can be played without focusing on combat, but it’s definitely still there.
I’ve played 8.2 hours of BO:BB according to Steam, and it feels much closer to the OG Ghost Recon ( +Desert Siege and Island Thunder)… BUT right now the AI is pretty mediocre (and often breaks entirely and enemies just sort of stand there), and the shooting doesn’t feel as good as Ready or Not.
Incursion: Red River is a singleplayer + co-op extraction shooter that feels very Ghost Recon.
holy shit, fucking MICROPROSE is still around!? LETSGOOOOOOOO
Little side-tangent, but @trslim@pawb.social if you like base-building RTSes, you should check out Earth 2150 if you have not already. It’s old, but it’s imo one of the best out there.
Now I have to go reinstall it… xD
There are also Earth 2140 and Earth 2160, but I never fell in love with those 2 (Earth 2160 isn’t bad, and has a cool alien faction that is basically a roaming mothership that builds units, rather than a traditional ‘base’).
Not friendly enough when talking to customers? Bad employee.
Too friendly when talking to customers? Bad employee.
This is just about 1) creating an algorithmic justification for the racial profiling that managers already do, and 2) keeping employees in fear of termination so they put up with bullshit.
Side story about how shitty retail management is:
When I was working retail years ago (big box electronics store), our management employed a system of getting every new employee to 3 write-ups as fast as they could (I’m talking, within a month of starting), using literally any excuse they could, so they could hold the “one more write-up and you’re fired” over their head.
“AI” is definitely going to become a new tool for employee suppression.
I actually love my foldable Razr. I never could afford one as a kid, and the smaller form-factor is actually really nice.