Because this confuzzled me, note that the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the Digital Services Act (DSA) are two separate things.

The Digital Markets Act is the one which is meant to remove economic barriers by “gatekeepers”. For example the DMA is used to force Google and Apple to open their app stores.

The Digital Services Act is the one that regulates (among other things) moderation, political neutrality and removal of extremist content on social media platforms. That’s the one Thierry Breton oversaw and threatened Elon with.

So while exTwitter’s lawyers may sigh in relief, because they got out of the DMA; the DSA is still looming large.

Additionally to what has already been mentioned: People are susceptible to politics that confirm their prejudices. Right-wing political thought is largely based on confirming that whatever prejudices people hold, they are morally good and justified. Thus elevating an in-group above out-groups. That is a powerful lure.

My ‘I’m No Fucking Predator Or Pedophile’ T-shirt is raising question already answered by my ‘I’m No Fucking Predator Or Pedophile’ T-shirt.

Yes and no. Like in Stardew Valley, technically you can romance every NPC in your party, but in practice you have to meet certain criteria to do so and those differ from character to character. Of course, it is possible to “game” that system.

The most famous one ATM is probably “Baldur’s Gate 3” which offers a wide variety of mechanics and stats to measure if an NPC member of the player’s party is romantically interested in the player character. Two examples given in the talk I linked are the VNs “Monster Prom” or “First Bite”.

I love this game (500 hours played), but I have to bring up a point of criticism…

One aspect which has not aged well IMHO is the “kindness coin” mechanic: The exchange of goods for the NPCs’ friendship and/or affection. You give the NPCs stuff, then you give them more stuff, then some more on top, then you get a cut scene and then you get back to giving them stuff until you trigger the next one.

Yes, the requests on the blackboard and the occasional personal quest mix up things a little bit, but overall the mechanic remains the same and for me over the years this has cheapened the interaction with the NPCs for me somewhat: They are mostly transactional and predictable to the point where you can calculate their outcome.
You have to give character A so-and-so many objects X to romance them. It takes so-and-so many days to do that.

Sure, the “kindness coins” mechanic was industry standard at the time, but I wish there were more variety in regards to the interactions with the NPCs, because they are amazingly written and I wish there was more to do with them besides giving them stuff over and over again.

AI execs: Our AIs are going to be so powerful. More powerful than anything. Soon they could be able to destroy humanity!

Governments: Well, then we better regulate that shit and make sure that doesn’t happen…

AI execs: Nooooo! We did not mean it that way!

No, you see it’s not like education makes you see past your own prejudices and that makes you more liberal. If you are liberal you get awarded an education by the shadowy cabal that controls the education system with DEI measures! This guy only wants a tRuE mERiToCrACy where disenfranchised, downtrodden bigots get a chance to attend university where they are taught about the superiority of their white Aryan race.

/s if it isn’t apparent.

How often does it need to be said? Do not preorder games based on what they looked like in the trailers!

Seems like Elon thinks he can use Teslas as compute resources without the cars being charged…

Yeah, Majestic was incredibly interesting because it was an attempt to create an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) that was more than just a marketing campaign and could support itself financially. Its failure led to ARGs being abandoned as standalone games and ARGs mostly remained marketing which - ultimately - led to a slow, but inevitable decline of the ARG as a genre when the marketing money dried up.

They also leave out half of the story: The whole thing already started in October. After months of harassment one of the employees snapped and called their shit out. But they leave that part out, claim they got attacked out of nowhere and play the victims.

It’s a cult. Altman is one of the TESCREAL devotees. He truly believes that he can build the electronic messiah.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

In that regard, you cannot make a manager understand a thing that may detrimental to the profits of the company. Because the profits decide upon the size of the manager’s bonus - even if the profits are entirely fictional, only exist as a plan, a power point presentation or are pure hype for investors. So managers have a vested interest in insisting that they can circumvent regulations/disregard laws/lobby for exemptions/… in order to make more money, no matter what reality looks like.

I am shocked to hear that the company which needlessly and cruelly killed animals with their experiments, did not bother to keep records of the cruelties they committed. SHOCKED!

The week after: Google introduces AI Mail that will receive and automatically respond to all mail. This will happen without the users’ consent or knowledge. In fact, users won’t be able to access their mail anymore at all “for security reasons”.

Yeah, I am in the same boat: I really don’t understand what the outrage is all about. First off, because Mastodon is built on open standards which are 100% intended to be interoperable. Second because everyone can read a Mastodon feed that isn’t private and the same goes for BlueSky accounts. Hell, BlueSky supports RSS for its feeds, so people with an RSS reader can follow BlueSky accounts without the user knowing about it.

Personally I do not trust the people behind BlueSky, but neither do I trust all the admins of Mastodon servers. There are a ton of questionable Mastodon servers out there, operated by people with very dubious motives, if not outright malicious intent.

This is incredibly funny for people who followed this. Everybody and their grandma told the European Commission that there was no way that breaking end-to-end encryption was compatible with the law. Yet they constantly pushed for it anyway and now look at this mess.

I am almost certain that the European Commission will claim that there are still ways to break end-to-end encryption, only to defeated in court yet again. Like they tried with data preservation for law enforcement purposes. They just can’t stop themselves.

The enshittification continues, until morale profit improves.

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.

Elon Musk: At long last, I have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel “Don’t create the Torment Nexus”.