I prefer the term Computer Intelligence to Artificial Intelligence or Synthetic Intelligence. It grounds the term in the computational logic of a math rock, and allows the intelligence not be a ‘pass/fail’, but rather what scales to what’s been discovered.
It covers modern LLMs, but also includes classic fuzzy logic, probabilistic calculations, Bayesian networks, etc.
I’ve had hit and miss with Ventoy. I love it and it’s my goto, but I have a handful of ISOs that it’s effectively just storage for - then I use Balena Etcher, Rufus, Raspberry Pi Imager, or sometimes classic dd to burn it to a smaller USB - but if I had to pick one tool, I’d recommend Raspberry Pi, Rufus, or Balena Etcher to a new user just trying to get the job done.
She’s told that someone on earth would die and she doesn’t know them. The twist is that while it’s implied that it’s a random person, it’s revealed at the end that it’s the last person to press the button.
That’s actually a fairly good take - they could make a bunch of old scripts and make them enticing to license, and couple that with a small fund to seed some ultra small-scale productions (by Hollywood standards). I like it.
Couple that with remakes on whatever gets traction and it could prove short term profitable as well as raise the overall long term value of their vault. (I hate that this analysis is needed, but unless we change copyright law, this buy-in would be a necessary step.)
Really itching to try that golden goose recipe.
It genuinely hurts my soul that this is a complete argument.
The idea that users could or should have preferences - to be responsible to opt (in or out) in any capacity is an unreachable goal.
It’s frustrating that a lazy or evil developer can so easily convinve the masses to give up privacy simply by dangling a shiny just outside the default security safeguards.
I’m already drooling at the prospect of them repackaging it and selling it back to us. “After acquiring contractual control of the electrical grid and pushing several security updates, we bring you e-power, an NFT driven energy packet exchange market. Now in partnership with DraftKings™.”
Thank you for your reply. I like it more than @[email protected]’s. Sorry for the delay - turns out living in a MAGA hellscape sometimes hurts your friends and family, who coulda guessed? 🤔😅 Got busy helping friends and decided that’s more important than arguing with strangers.
It is fundamentally immoral to have such wealth.
I’m unconvinced by this argument. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but this is more of an armchair philosophy discussion than a justification to kill someone. Capitalism, by its nature, concentrates wealth. It “picks winners” as a function of its structure. Murdering rich people, while cathartic, is treating the symptom and not the cause.
I believe, in today’s environment, once we start murdering people, it’ll be hard to stop. All the evil people in ICE will quietly switch hats because murdering rich people is more viscerally satisfying than murdering immigrants (but they’ll take what they can get, amiright? 🙄). From there - the concept of “billionaires” becomes fuzzy - a billion is an arbitrary number. Especially fuzzy if the dollar continues to weaken as the international fiat currency.
Secondly, you can NOT obtain such wealth without abusing others.
I can get behind this as a principal, but it’s still incredibly weak. Can you prove that it’s not possible to fairly gain that much wealth without abuse? That sounds like a statement of faith to me, and it relies on luck having some mystical upper bound that in practice has never been shown to exist.
On a more practical level - is GabeN really the poster child you want for this principle? How he made his money is pretty simple: he makes a 30% cut of every Steam sale and he made a bunch selling hats in TF2. Sure, we can quibble on if 30% is too high or not - but it’s not really backroom wheeling and dealing. There’s nothing particularly shady here. Or rather, if this is the hill you want to murder on, you’ll have to bring more evidence.
Similarly, how he uses his money matters - Tim Apple and Microslop are marching us into a tech powered surveillance state. Mr Newell has used his influence to encourage people to use Linux and every product he releases is the most open available. Pop quiz: Name some Nintendo exclusive titles. Playstation? Xbox? Cool. Name some Steam exclusives. Much shorter list. But it is a markedly better track record than many others. As a businessman, he seems to embody the philosophy of ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’. Does this make him a saint? I don’t know. But it also doesn’t make me eager to throw the guy to the wolves.
Third. Fuck his predatory gambling that feeds off the addicts and kids
Ya know what? Fuck this guy. I believe I said, “and if you can cite one, I’ll support ya”. This is absolutely one of his largest evils. I would not mind organizing around removing gambling’s influence in the economy and Gabe’s hands are absolutely bloody in this. Not for his TF2 hats (I mean, they don’t help his case) - but for all the other lootbox crap Steam definitely makes it’s cut on. If such a mob shows up at his door and Gabe can’t appease them, I wouldn’t lose much sleep over it. I might privately suspect that if such a murderous coalition were to start to coalesce, GabeN would likely be a smart cookie and would course correct their business - but if such remedy failed to materialize in time to save his life, I wouldn’t lose much sleep.
I am more concerned about what types of murderous mobs I unleash on the world. “Kill all Billionaires” makes a protest potest poster, but as a policy is ripe for abuse. The first things that will happen is many clever rich people will cleverly hide their riches better (not all, but enough of them will do well enough to effectively escape justice in this life), moreso, many clever billionaires will use their influence to set up other billionaires, which turns the whole apparatus back into a tool for the rich.
Anyways, thanks for listening. Would love to know your thoughts.
I’m comfortable with boot having a either a plaintext key or two key halves to XOR together, used to unlock the base OS. I honestly don’t trust a TPM to store this, and as long as the OS is designed to guard the key from all but root, I don’t see any security issue.
They shouldn’t, but Mr. Newell didn’t invent capitalism. I blame coffee and the enlightenment for that. And for all the flaws it brings, it’s still a step up from feudalism.
Valve found a niche in the gaming industry. Gabe created a good product and stewarded it well. He has an industry gold standard stance on piracy and for as much he has made Valve’s product indispensably useful, their product fosters indie developers and small creators in ways the competition struggles to play catch-up on. By biggest frustration with the guy is largely about worrying about what happens when he steps down and is replaced by someone else.
For all this, the system has showered him with money. A frankly stupid amount of money. And for that, you assert he should die. Do you think if we Thanos snap away all the billionaires that the system which creates them will automatically go with them? If it does are you naïve enough to think that it would easily be replaced by something better in the power vacuum that follows?
The bottom line is: there’s no shortage of billionaires who deserve a good pruning. Plenty of uncontroversial targets whose absence would send a clear message. Choosing Gabe Newell as a target of convenience does far more damage than help. I’m not saying don’t murder monsters, I’m saying don’t let bloodlust lead you to shooting yourself in the foot.
I don’t believe you. I believe you’re earnest, I just also believe you’re wrong. If you grew up in a modern industrialized nation with luxuries like plumbing, sub millimeter precision engineering, electricity, internet - are you suggesting we tear those things down because others don’t have access to them? 'Cause if no, I have news for ya, buddy - by the standards of history, you’re exceedingly rich. You wouldn’t understand though because all rich people are evil, obviously. 🙄
Is this just blind zeal for dogma, or do you have any scrap of justification to mob justice this guy? To be blunt, I can point to evils that Gabe is responsible for, and if you can cite one, I’ll support ya - but if you’re oversimplifying “rich = evil” because it’s a convenient and fun, than you’re as evil as those you’d behead.
In the wake of the French revolution many good people died for the crime of being distantly related to a noble. After we murder a few billionaires, can we take their money and make a gift of it - we could then gift billions of dollars to anyone we don’t like and murder them for being a billionaire! It’s a perfect system! </s>
Yes. Gabe is rich - but honestly their behavior is by and large the practical example by which other billionaires are condemned. If all billionaires were as responsible as Gabe, society would be much less inclined to grab their pitchforks in the first place - we’d still have a broken system that needs fixing, but without gaudily selfish billionaires I’d be optimistic that it could be fixed without bloodshed.
Right? For ‘they slept her way to the top’, to work, the organization has to be littered with people who are willing to trade the best interests of the organization for an evening of their own personal sex lives. But it’s not their fault for selling out the corp - it’s the fault of the entrepreneur who’s successfully working the broken system.
ICANN says thanks, but that one is theirs, and they are also happy to let people register whatever they want (but for say … $227K a pop)
I did a web search:
https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025
According to this site, China is in a four-way tie ranked 76 of 181 countries measured in terms of corruption (lower is better). It scored 43 of 100 on their “Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI)” (higher is better).
I think the parent post has merit, as China is notably more corrupt than many similarly sized western world countries. (But my afternoon web search is far from authoritative or definitive).
I, by coincidence, am also actively campaigning for Linux.
You should try it. It has a lot of issues and problems - but far less than you think, more importantly far fewer of it’s problems come from enshitification (software forking helps resist that), and most importantly, since many projects are community-driven the more people use it the better it’s likely to get.
This box from Pandora once contained all the world’s doomscrolling.
Yes. It is very possible for average dudes to look incredible naked, even to traditional beauty standards. Plenty of gay photographers take on this challenge and have portfolios filled with such shots (presumably in part for the challenge and in part for the subject matter).
Technically this is a tangent to the question you asked, save for the case where they do nude self-portraits. Nonetheless, I have been to a few homes where all the walls filled with their own photos of basically average gay bears in posing in very artistic ways that I’d assume were professional models, if not for the fact that I could identify subjects to their local ‘online dating’ profiles. (And to be clear, while some photos definitely have ‘I’m here to fuck’ energy, many more were going for tender vibes and artistic poses).
Guys with [good, interesting] tattoos appear to make great photography subjects - I suspect that it gives the artist something to compose the rest of the shot around. Unless you’re a modern prude, tattoos don’t carry the stigma they used to, they’re [often] artistic, and broadly well-fitted to the male beauty aesthetic.
Wish I could give you names and such, but in my defense I generally wasn’t visiting to see the wall art.