sylver_dragon

No, a game should be what the devs decide to make. That said, it can cut off a part of the market. I'm another one of those folks who tends to avoid PvPvE games, without a dedicated PvE only side. This weekend's Arc Raiders playtest was a good example. I read through the description on Steam and just decided, "na, I have better things to do with my time." Unfortunately, those sorts of games tend to have a problem with griefers running about directly trying to ruin other peoples' enjoyment. I'll freely admit that I will never be as good as someone who is willing to put the hours into gear grinding, practice and map memorization in such a game. I just don't enjoy that and that means I will always be at a severe disadvantage. So, why sped my time and money on such a game?

This can lead to problem for such games, unless they have a very large player base. The Dark Souls series was a good example, which has the in-built forced PvP system, though you can kinda avoid it for solo play. And it still has a large player base. But, I'd also point out some of the the controversy around the Seamless Co-op mod for Elden Ring. When it released, the PvP players were howling from the walls about how long it made invasion queues. Since Seamless Co-op meant that the players using it were removed from the official servers, the number of easy targets to invade went way, way down. It seemed like a lot of folks like to have co-op, without the risks of invasion.

As a longer answer to this, let me recommend two videos from Extra Credits:

• Bartle's Taxonomy
• Balancing an MMO

These videos provide a way to think about players and how they interact with games and each other.

Because languages change over time and every once in a while someone comes along who insists they can "fix" the language by making a bunch of changes. They are probably right and the changes, if widely adopted, will probably make the language more sensible. However, since one of the common features of a living language is that it changes over time due to usage, oddities will start creeping back in. And the whole thing will need to start all over again.

Why can’t the U.S do the same, if Donald Trump is so bad?

We don't have a legal mechanism for it. In the US Constitution, the people do not have a direct power of impeachment. As a Federalist system, the US Federal Government was designed as a government of governments. So, the power to impeaching the US President is given to Congress, not the people.

Impeachment is a two step process in the US. The House of Representatives (the larger of the two houses) is required to pass Articles of Impeachment which list the reasons for removal. Those are then taken up by the Senate (the smaller house) which tries the President and requires a 2/3 majority to convict the President.

While it's easy to get a sense that everyone hates the US President, especially here on Lemmy, his popularity isn't all that far behind previous US Presidents. Yes, he is net unpopular, but not so much that his removal is politically possible. His own party (Republicans) still supports him, and they hold majorities in both houses. As such, they are neither going to pass Articles of Impeachment, nor would they convict him (and most certainly not at the 2/3 level needed in the Senate).

Why are some Americans even supporting him?

The US is rather starkly divided, politically speaking, at the moment. And people will overlook a lot from the leaders of their own party, if it means keeping the other party out of power. Trump is the latest, and one of the more extreme examples of this. His claims that he could shoot someone and not lose any votes may be close to true. There was a special election in 2017 where the Republican candidate had credible allegations of sexual misconduct with a minor. This was for a Senate seat from Alabama, which one would normally expect to vote overwhelmingly Republican. Moore did end up losing, but is was closer than one would expect, when one of the candidates is likely a pedophile.

Again, if your only source of information about US politics comes from Lemmy, you're getting a very skewed view. Yes, he's not popular at the moment, but there is a large segment of the US population which agrees with him. And that means we're kinda stuck with him until 2018.

Noting that EA had to take on nearly $20 billion in debt to finance the deal

A leveraged buyout, with the bought out company taking on all the debt, ya this is the death knell of EA. It's going to suck for all the people who are employed by EA, but in the long term it is a way to get the company broken up.

That's not fair, Trump's FTC is constantly on the lookout for shady deals.
How else is he supposed to get in on the grift?

Ultimately, it's going to be down to your risk profile. What do you have on your machine which would wouldn't want to lose or have released publicly? For many folks, we have things like pictures and personal documents which we would be rather upset about if they ended up ransomed. And sadly, ransomware exists for Linux. Lockbit, for example is known to have a Linux variant. And this is something which does not require root access to do damage. Most of the stuff you care about as a user exists in user space and is therefore susceptible to malware running in a user context.

The upshot is that due care can prevent a lot of malware. Don't download pirated software, don't run random scripts/binaries you find on the internet, watch for scam sites trying to convince you to paste random bash commands into the console (Clickfix is after Linux now). But, people make mistakes and it's entirely possible you'll make one and get nailed. If you feel the need to pull stuff down from the internet regularly, you might want to have something running as a last line of defense.

That said, ClamAV is probably sufficient. It has a real-time scanning daemon and you can run regular, scheduled scans. For most home users, that's enough. It won't catch anything truly novel, but most people don't get hit by the truly novel stuff. It's more likely you'll be browsing for porn/pirated movies and either get served a Clickfix/Fake AV page or you'll get tricked into running a binary you thought was a movie. Most of these will be known attacks and should be caught by A/V. Of course, nothing is perfect. So, have good backups as well.

Oh look, it's an air mouse. But, you can't change the battery, the licensing is all kinds of "fuck you", and with all those gestures, I'm expecting a frustrating experience with the device constantly interpreting unrelated motions into inputs.

A number of years ago, the cybersecurity office I worked for had a case come through where a 3.5" floppy was found in a drawer in an area which should not have contained any writable media. The investigator on the case had a hell of a time tracking down a drive to read the disk. He got lucky that someone in the organization just happened to have a USB based 3.5" floppy drive which worked. I can't imagine what we would have done with a 5.25" or 8" floppy. And such disks were known to exist at the site.

The other thing they don't mention in the article is tapes. A couple decades back I was a sysadmin at a site where we were required to store data archives for 10 years. Given the age of some of the data, it had been archived to DAT tapes and put in storage. The problem was the drive to read those tapes was just as old and had a SCSI interface from about the same time period. So, we also had a vintage SCSI controller for the drive. That controller was for an ISA bus slot. And this was at a time where ISA was just about fully phased out. By the time I left, I don't think we had a motherboard which could have accepted the controller. We might have been able to source a SCSI controller which used PCI and was the right generation of SCSI to interface with the drive. Then we would have had to hope that Symantec's Backup Exec would still be able to read the tapes. Given Backup Exec's propensity to just silently declare, "fuck your backups" this was not something I was hopeful for.

It's really cool that these folks are doing this work. There are a lot of hidden difficulties but saving that data can be very important.

immediately lost my $20, never entered a casino again.

You didn't lose it, you paid $20 for an education in why gambling in a casino is a bad idea. It could have been much, much worse.

As a species, homo sapiens have managed to adapt to every environment on Earth. We are the first species to have any measure of control over the natural forces which have wiped out countless other species. Diseases which once ravaged our populations are now gone or minor inconveniences and we continue to find new ways to mitigate the worst effect of many diseases. Should a large asteroid be heading our way, we are the only species which may stand any chance of diverting it or mitigating the long term impacts when it does hit us. While it was certainly not a "choice", the evolution of higher cognition, problem solving and intra-species communications has put our species in a unique position of having a high degree of control over out fate. Sure, it has its downsides (we are the only species which might be able to end all life on Earth), but it's been a pretty amazing run for us. On the balance, I think we're in a much better position to keep going as a species than our ancestors or cousins (homo erectus, homo hablis, neanderthal, great apes, chimpanzees, etc).

So, was it a "mistake", I think the current state of evidence is against that. While it may result in a really shit deal for individuals of the species from time to time, as a species I think it would be silly to consider it a mistake.

I really liked Primal, but part of that was the fact that they had the balls to kill the main character. I'm assuming season 3 is going to start with Zombie Spear jumping over a megalodon.

Short answer, no.

Long answer: We are a long way off from having anything close to the movie villain level of AI. Maybe we're getting close to the paperclip manufacturing AI problem, but I'd argue that even that is often way overblown. The reason I say this is that such arguments are quite hand-wavy about leaps in capability which would be required for those things to become a problem. The most obvious of which is making the leap from controlling the devices an AI is intentionally hooked up to, to devices it's not. And it also needs to make that jump without anyone noticing and asking, "hey, what's all this then?" As someone who works in cybersecurity for a company which does physical manufacturing, I can see how it would get missed for a while (companies love to under-spend on cybersecurity). But eventually enough odd behavior gets picked up. And the routers and firewalls between manufacturing and anything else do tend to be the one place companies actually spend on cybersecurity. When your manufacturing downtime losses are measured in millions per hour, getting a few million a year for NDR tends to go over much better. And no, I don't expect the AI to hack the cybersecurity, it first needs to develop that capability. AI training processes require a lot of time failing at doing something, that training is going to get noticed. AI isn't magically good at anything, and while the learning process can be much faster, that speed is going to lead to a shit-ton of noise on the network. And guess what, we have AI and automation running on our behalf as well. And those are trained to shutdown rogue devices attacking the cybersecurity infrastructure.

"Oh wait, but the AI would be sneaky, slow and stealty!" Why would it? What would it have in it's currently existing model which would say "be slow and sneaky"? It wouldn't, you don't train AI models to do things which you don't need them to do. A paperclip optimizing AI wouldn't be trained on using network penetration tools. That's so far outside the need of the model that the only thing it could introduce is more hallucinations and problems. And given all the Frankenstein's Monster stories we have built and are going to build around AI, as soon as we see anything resembling an AI reaching out for abilities we consider dangerous, it's going to get turned off. And that will happen long before it has a chance to learn about alternative power sources. It's much like zombie outbreaks in movies, for them to move much beyond patient zero requires either something really, really special about the "disease" or comically bad management of the outbreak. Sure, we're going to have problems as we learn what guardrails to put around AI, but the doom and gloom version of only needing one mistake is way overblown. There are so many stopping points along the way from single function AI to world dominating AI that it's kinda funny. And many of those stopping points are the same, "the attacker (humans) only need to get lucky once" situation. So no, I don't believe that the paperclip optimizer AI problem is all that real.

That does take us to the question of a real general purpose AI being let loose on the internet to consume all human knowledge and become good at everything, which then decides to control everything. And maybe this might be a problem, if we ever get there. Right now, that sort of thing is so firmly in the realm of sci-fi that I don't think we can meaningfully analyze it. What we have today, fancy neural networks, LLMs and classifiers, puts us in the same ballpark as Jules Verne writing about space travel. Sure, he might have nailed one or two of the details; but, the whole this was so much more fantastically complex and difficult than he had any ability to conceive. Once we are closer to it, I expect we're going to see that it's not anything like we currently expect it to be. The computing power requirements may also limit it's early deployment to only large universities and government projects, keeping it's processing power well centralized. General purpose AI may well have the same decapitation problems humans do. They can have fantastical abilities, but they need really powerful data centers to run it. And those bring all the power, cooling and not getting blown the fuck up with a JDAM problems of current AI data centers. Again, we could go back and forth making up ways for AI to techno-magic it's way around those problems, but it's all just baseless speculation at this point. And that speculation will also inform the guardrails we build in at the time. It would boil down to the same game children play where they shoot each other with imaginary guns, and have imaginary shields. And they each keep re-imagining their guns and shields to defeat the other's. So ya, it might be fun for a while, but it's ultimately pointless.