The point is that this is not the first time that Valve has been singled out for things widely done across the industry and they’ve also been falsely accused of doing things that the rest of the industry is doing.

If they wanted to go after Valve specifically for gambling they should not have linked it to kids. It’s invoking “think of the children” BS while diluting what they claim is the core argument.

Gambling is also harmful for adults. They are M rated games. If a child is playing the game that is a parental issue, not a state issue. It’s not illegal for kids to play M rated games, nor do I really think it should be as that is something parents should decide. The issue is that a lot, if not most, parents have no idea what their kids are doing online.

The argument that “mostly kids play these games” is unsubstantiated at best. Might have been true in the 90s and early 2000s, but there are people in their 50’s that have played games for the majority of their lives.

Also, PC gaming tends to skew older. They might have more of an argument if they were talking about Call of Duty on a console, but an M rated game is still not targeted to that age group.

Again, if they want to go after Vavle for gambling, then do that. But they are jumping around with what exactly the accusation is which makes it seem like they are grasping at straws at best or trying to hide the real reason at worst.

That we have all the age verification crap happening at the same time is too much of a coincidence to ignore. Like, How about going after anyone implicated from the files if you really want to protect children? They can come back to this after they develop a coherent argument and include any other gaming companies doing the same thing.

I don’t care how “unique” anyone claims valve’s situation is. Paid loot boxes are gambling across the board. The claim that people can buy hardware to resell for cash is irrelevant to that.

None of this is exclusive to Valve. Yeah, people can technically buy hardware and sell it, but they can also gift games or whatever and people were already using third party websites to sell their items for cash.

And MMOs with random drops have historically always had an RMT market that is against the TOS where people sell in game currency or items for real currency.

I’m not saying that valve should be let off the hook when it comes to loot boxes, but this lawsuit kind of stinks because it is all over the place and again, valve isn’t the worst example of what they describe.

The fact that it’s framed as “protecting children” and claims that valve is intentionally targeting children despite the games in question being rated M and old enough that I seriously doubt there are that many minors playing is putting a ton of red flags up for me. They also add the 90s era “violent video game” rhetoric that was always nonsense.

The conspiracy part of me thinks this is going to eventually lead to more age verification BS and they are targeting valve because it is the only company that is complying in a way that still protects user privacy.

Which actually makes in simple to me. They are throwing things at the wall to see what sticks while also muddying the water as if they are trying to hide something.

They are throwing very convoluted logic around for this, and I immediately distrust anyone in government who makes wild leaps to “protecting kids”.

First off, I don’t like loot boxes. Specifically paid loot boxes, because if you don’t signify that something like this could effect any game with random drops.

Second, all the games in question are rated M. They are very much not targeted at kids. Obviously kids still play them, but that is on the parents.

That they also added “violent video games” nonsense that could have come out of the 90s is absurd. Is it about gambling or violent media? If it’s about violent media, why not go after any of the other shooters that are likely going to have way more kids on them. Counterstrike is old enough that I would be surprised if it isn’t a majority of millennials and gen X. At the very least I seriously doubt there are a ton of minors playing.

If it is actually about gambling targeted at kids, The Pokemon trading card game is probably the best example of “gambling aimed at kids”. Sure, digital loot boxes can be more insidious, but that isn’t how they’ve framed this and if you’ve seen how TCG players buy packs it’s very much looks like gambling.

The framing of this is very suspicious because it doesn’t make sense to go after valve exclusively for any of the things they are claiming. And the 3x fine is ridiculous. I’m all for fines actually being based on profits, but you can’t tell me they would do the same for any other company.

And part of me feels this is a strong-arm tactic because valve is not publicly traded which lets them be very pro user/consumer and is the one company that is complying with age verification in a way that still protects user privacy.

Assuming that they are seems like a leap, but since we don’t really know exactly what consciousness is,

Which is no different that trading card games and also not valve’s fault.

I have no love for loot boxes, at least when real money is used to get them, but from what I’ve seen across the board Valve is far from the worst with them. Valve also doesn’t allow you to sell the skins you get for real money, only steam credit. That is still real-world value, but they are also not the only company that does that.

Outside of real-world money for loot boxes, most of the issues with the skin market are not anything Valve did. It was third party sites popping up that allowed people to sell their skins for cash.

Valve have even made changes to their side that crashed the market and caused a ton of “value” to disappear.

The fact is that this lawsuit is pretty obviously not actually about gambling. If it was there are far worse companies they could go after.

And I do want something to be done about them across the board, but this is not going to do that.

Look, I don’t have any love for loot boxes in general, at least when it’s real money. But there are far more egregious examples that would work just as well if not better for going after the practice of loot boxes than what steam does.

There’s a reason they are singling out steam, and they signal why in the statement, saying this “teaches kids to gamble and makes them violent”, repeating 90s BS about “violent video games”, when the games in question are rated M, meaning if a child is playing it then that is 100% on the parents… and still not illegal anyway.

They are most likely singling out valve because they refuse to play ball with the privacy violating age checks. Valve did the bare minimum they had to: basically clearing anyone with a credit card registered as being over 18.

Valve is also not a publicly traded company and is very customer focused, even with the loot box thing. Which has been the driver for other lawsuits that only single them out.

I have ADHD (diagnosed) and also likely autism (undiagnosed), so I understand.

I ended up figuring out a specific way to write online because people seemed to intentionally assume the worst interpretation of what I said, usually adding meaning I didn’t.

Unfortunately, because the way I write is semi-formal I now regularly get accused of using or being “AI” I guess it’s because I “use words” and “know things”.

Which is exactly my point. A biological brain, human or otherwise, is incredibly efficient for what it does. It’s also effectively infinitely parallel which is impossible to do with the current tech.

In order to even attempt or approach a system that could be remotely considered “conscious” we would need something that is way more efficient just because of logistics. What they are trying to do with the current hardware has basically reached the practical maximum of scalability.

Hardware footprint and power are massive constraints. The current data centers can’t even run at full capacity because the power grid cannot supply enough power to, and what they are using is driving energy costs up for everyone. On top of that, a bio brain is way more dense. We would need absurd orders of magnitude more hardware to come close with the current tech.

And then there is the software. Nerual nets are a dumbed down model of how brains work, but it is very simplified. Part of that simplification are static weights. The models do not update themselves during execution because they would very quickly muck up the weights from training and basically produce nonsense. They don’t have feedback mechanisms. We train them on one thing. That’s it.

In the case of LLMs, they are trained on the structure of language. We can’t train meaning because that requires unimaginable orders of magnitude more complexity to even attempt.

If AGI or artificial sentience is possible it will never be done with the current tech. I would argue the bubble has likely set AI research back decades because of how short sighted and hamfisted companies are pushing it has soured public perception.

but I do wonder about the confidence with which you can totally dismiss the notion

For the current tech, 100%.

These are static systems. They don’t update themselves while running. If nothing else, a system of consciousness has to be dynamic. Also, the way these models are trained is unlikely to produce consciousness even if it theoretically could.

Assuming that they are seems like a leap, but since we don’t really know exactly what consciousness is,

We don’t technically have a definition for what it is, but we have some criteria. Consciousness is an emergent property. So theoretically a system could become conscious unintentionally if it is complex enough. But again, it requires a system to be dynamic, to be able to change and grow on it’s own.

Nerual nets are just trained on data. LLMs specifically are trained on the structure of language, which is the only reason they work as much as they do. We can’t train meaning or understanding, but being able to churn out something resembling information is a byproduct of training language because language is used to communicate information.

The issue that a lot of people have is they assume that something is intelligent/sentient if it can produce language, which is what we have seen in nature, but while it takes intelligence and maybe sentience to create/develop nothing says that intelligence or sentience is required to “use” language.

LLMs do one thing: Produce the next word for a given context. It does not matter how big we make it or what the underlying complexity is. The models just produce a word. The software running the model adds the word to the context and executes a new loop with the most recent context. It runs until it hits a terminating token that the current output is “finished”.

Even for the models that are considered the “thinking”/“reasoning” models just have additional context tokens for the “thinking” section that basically force the model to generate more context which, thanks to the way language is constructed, can constrain the output, but it’s only ever outputting the next word.

Additionally, he maintains that his LLM is female

I know nothing about this guy, but given some unfortunate tendencies among the tech communities I physically recoiled when I read this. If the thing was actually sentient I’d want to get it away from him.

Obviously the guy is another case of AI psychosis.

LLMs, and neural nets in general, literally cannot be sentient. Nerual nets are a very, very, dumbed down model to how brains work, but these are static systems that just output probability based on current context.

Even if we could someday create consciousness or at least something that could actually think it would require completely different hardware than what we currently have. Even if we could run it on current hardware it would require way more resources and power than physically possible.

That’s fair. I do apologize for my tone, but I’m queer and a core of all these attacks on free speech are directed at the LGBTQ community so I tend to get heated about it, especially if someone seems to dismiss the importance of protections like that.

The fuck you mean “outdated”? That prevision is not a “social media” thing, it’s a “any platform that hosts user generated content” thing.

It’s the only thing that even allows user generated content in the first place. It would effectively break any forum and even hosted chat applications because it would make the platform liable for anything their users do that breaks the law.

But it also adds a bit of protection from BS lawsuits. Considering the current administration has already sued platforms because of users exercising their first amendment this provision insures they don’t actually have a case.

And that’s related to all the platforms based in the US are currently getting strong armed to turn over personal information for any users that criticizes ICE.

That is why they want to get rid of that provision. They want to censor people. They want to isolate people. It’s why they forced the sale of TikTok so they could crack down on political news they didn’t like while promoting propaganda.

They want to get rid of these easy avenues of communication and information for the average person.

Don’t get me wrong. Facebook, twitter, and the like need to be regulated and broken up under antitrust, but getting rid of this provision is not going to do any of that. It’s just going to make them crack down on people’s freedom of speech even more while still allowing hate speech.

I grew up in the 90s where “gay” was the go-to insult for basically everything. If people didn’t like it or didn’t understand it it was automatically “gay” because they saw being gay as the same.

I didn’t know at the time I was trans and gay, but I didn’t like it and while I wasn’t exactly feminine I didn’t act like the boys around me so that is what they went with. Also didn’t help I had undiagnosed ADHD and autism.

Cachy, actually

Also, Reddit admins regularly suspend/ban anyone marginally on the left when we say we will defend ourselves or when we express opinions about certain dead fascists or in my most recent suspension: Said the confederate leaders should have gotten the same treatment they gave to runaway slaves.

Reddit only bans fascists/conservatives when they do something that could get them in legal trouble. But anyone on the left, and especially anyone queer, even slightly arguing we might need to defend ourselves from their violence with our own will get banned extremely quick.

Remember: Reddit didn’t take down subreddits dedicated to perving on children until it got in the news.

I’ve gotten suspended from Reddit for hurting fascist’s feelings, most recently because I said what I wished had happened to the leaders of the confederacy.

Reddit will let blatant hate speech and active calls for violence against minorities stand as “not violating any rules” and the only reason any of the subreddits aren’t overran by that crap is the individual subreddit mods remove comments and ban people, but that only goes so far as they are all unpaid volunteers.

The kind of people that do get banned by Reddit for being bigots have to say stuff that would actually get them in legal trouble, and usually those are the ones that are actively threatening specific people all the time because they think death threats are an effective debate tactic when they don’t know what they are talking about, and they never know what they are talking about.

Those people end up being a special kind of asshole so when they come to Lemmy they end up doing the same, but with federation they tend to endup more on the openly fascist instances that most sane instances don’t federate with.

For stuff like dirt/stone/brick/etc textures I’m less strict for the use of generative stuff. I even think having an artist make the “core” texture and then using an AI to fill out the texture across the various surfaces to make it less repetitive over a large area isn’t a problem for me.

Like, I agree that these things gernally are ethically questionable with how they are trained, but you can train them on ethically sourced data and doing so could open up the ability to fill out a game world without spending a ton of time, leaving the actual artists more time to work on the important set pieces than the dirt road connecting them.

Also, fellow sociopath.

I fled a republican controlled hell hole because I’m queer. Even if flying was in a normal situation I wouldn’t be going back there anytime soon.

I’m “lucky” in that I haven’t really been close to my family for a verity of reasons, but I have friends who are and it does suck for them.

How have I not heard of this one?

I did hear about Light No Fire from the No Man Sky devs. Looks impressive from what I’ve seen so far on it with it’s supposedly literal Earth sized world.

Depends on a lot of factors like what the actual game is.

A sandbox game, bigger is better. Like Minecraft. If the goal is exploration and resource gathering you can plop me into an infinitely generated map and I will be happy.

Outside of that, narrative games can be too big if there’s nothing to do in between points of interests. I don’t mean like side-quests, but more like random encounters or crafting/gathering stuff. There has to be something there I can either get distracted with or to “on the way” to the next location.

I think a lot of games want their cake and eat it too. It’s not an open world game, but Final Fantasy XIV promoted the Heavensward expansion with the zones being like 5 times bigger than the base game…

…but there were only 6 of them and between already being able to teleport to each zone there wasn’t any difficulty navigating the zones and they added flying which made them seem smaller than the base zones.

1.0 XIV had impressively sized zones that were unfortunately very copy pasted and between the rushed release and the engine limitations enemies were very spread out.

Again, depends on the game.