internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she
the website for it is pretty comprehensive as far as i can tell
yeah, no shit, that’s not the same as “your entire company being predicated on the unpaid labor of children who you also let do whatever they want without supervision or actually working filtering features”–not least because you could actually get banned for both of the things i mentioned from 2010, while what’s happening now is explicitly enabled by Roblox as their business model and an externality of doing business. as has been demonstrated by recent investigations into how they work down, they basically don’t have a company without systematically exploiting children
it’s been very strange to watch this game i grew up on–pretty innocuously, i should note–gradually morph into one of the most exploitative, undignifying, generally dangerous spaces for children online. the worst stuff i got into on Roblox in 2010 was online dating and learning about 4chan. now the company seems to openly revel in exploiting the labor of children and ripping them off
What you mean? Have you seen all those articles publisher website just giving out 8-9 on every damn game they get early access to?
this has been an issue people have complained about in gaming journalism for–and i cannot stress this sufficiently–longer than i’ve been alive, and i’ve been alive for 25 years. so if we’re going by this metric video gaming has been “ruined” since at least the days of GTA2, Pokemon Gold & Silver, and Silent Hill. obviously, i don’t find that a very compelling argument.
if anything, the median game has gotten better and that explains the majority of review score inflation–most “bad” gaming experiences at this point are just “i didn’t enjoy my time with this game” rather than “this game is outright technically incompetent, broken, or incapable of being played to completion”.
hardly surprising. we talk about enshittification today but Skype was one of the most egregious offenders before the term was even coined, in late-stage Skype (circa 2016-2017) i couldn’t even run the fucking thing without lag because of in-line ads. the user experience was frankly awful, and once you’ve used something like Discord or Zoom there’s just never any reason to go back.
joint statement by GMG Union and Onion Union:
The Onion and GMG Unions are saddened to report that our colleagues at Gizmodo Español, a site that once housed original, quality Spanish-language reporting, have been replaced en masse by an AI translation service. Instead of relying on the talented journalists at Gizmodo Español, G/O Media has enacted an automation that takes English-language Gizmodo articles, translates them poorly into Spanish, and posts them on Gizmodo Español almost immediately, with no Spanish-language editing. We offer our deepest sympathies to the Gizmodo Español team and share in their frustration as jobs for working journalists continue to disappear worldwide. The Gizmodo Español team comprised of four full-time employees—one editor and three writers—who have been employed by G/O media for over a combined 25 years. Because of the nature of their yearly contracts, they will not receive adequate severance.
They were employed at half the rate of American staff writers due to the nature of these contracts, and were rarely offered raises. Unfortunately this move to eliminate the Español team represents yet another broken promise from G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller and Editorial Director Merrill Brown, who have repeatedly said that the company’s AI experiments were intended to supplement human writing, not replace it. This week, a team of four has been [replaced] by an undisclosed automated machine translation service. Adding insult to injury, when the Gizmodo staff objected to having their bylines attached to machine translations, G/O management removed all bylines from Gizmodo Español—even the bylines of the four journalists who were laid off by G/O Media this week. We remain stringently opposed to G/O Media’s use of AI-generated content and pledge to continue fighting on behalf of journalists and the indispensable public service they provide.
As always, we appreciate your support — and your continual support of real journalism.
fyi to you and @sigmaklimgrindset@sopuli.xyz, lemmy has inbuilt spoiler markup. it’s:
::: spoiler spoiler
[text]
___
:::
so for example
test
like, to be clear: the scope of the article is laid out by those qualifiers, so naturally it’s not going to prescribe how to get rid of in-built batteries in consumer electronics since they fall outside of that scope. even so, it addressed the quibble you’re getting at here pretty bluntly, i think:
Of course, outsourcing chemical energy storage to the device is not the most sustainable option. The production of lithium-ion batteries requires fossil fuels, and (unlike lead-acid batteries) they are not recycled. The best solution, of course, is to reduce the use of electrical devices. But charging them with direct solar energy is a lot more sustainable and efficient than via other batteries or a fossil-fueled electricity grid. If we use high-tech devices, then preferably in the smartest way possible.
and Low-Tech Magazine has previously covered alternatives to battery technology in other posts. so i’m just not seeing what the objection here is.
yes, i literally posted it. the article’s context makes it pretty obvious that “Off-Grid Without Batteries” refers to off the power grid (because you’re receiving direct solar energy) without batteries for holding your solar panel’s energy (because those are carbon intensive and expensive), hence i don’t know what the purpose of your comment is and it appears entirely derived from reading the headline and thumbnail alone.
Would you be interested in supporting an outlet financially? Would you even if all content was available freely, eg. public media as opposed to “premium access.”
if you think you’ll be doing this for a long time, i think “should this be paid or free” is more a question for yourself to determine and not the hypothetical audience you think you’re writing for. at least for now, there is room in the medium for both paid gaming journalism and unpaid gaming journalism.
this will be a blunt comment. people would have no problem if you were doing this, but just in a quick scan, something like 10 of your last 15 submissions on our instance (Beehaw) are you obsessively posting about China–often from sources that are straight up fearmongering and/or guilty of doing literally the same thing they’re complaining China is doing. one of the most egregious submissions you’ve made in this vein is quite literally from the House Select Committee on China, as if the American government’s committee on “competition with the United States” doesn’t obviously have a vested interest in portraying things China does in the most uncharitable light possible (much as China would for America).
separately, and in a Beehaw context: at least from our userbase, you will largely not find disagreement that China is bad–nobody here really needs to be proselytized to the fact that China is an authoritarian capitalist country guilty of acts of imperialism against their neighbors, and probably of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Xinjiang. in fact, partially because of our political disagreements in that space, we do not federate with many of the Lemmy instances you might characterize as “pro-China.” this fact makes it incredibly conspicuous when someone like yourself obsessively posts every neurosis a Western country has about China on our instance. we’ve had a pattern of several users doing this in the past year or so–and at this point it’s blatantly propagandistic and Sinophobic bullshit we’re just not interested in letting people use our instance for.
even if you aren’t doing this for propagandistic reasons, though, and just think you need to push back against pro-China campists on Lemmy or whatever: this is also not your personal anti-China dumping ground, nor is it a place for you to shadowbox with campists who think China is cool. if you are genuinely posting in good faith: diversify your submissions and, if you don’t, at least drop the persecution complex when people push back on your voluminous China posting; if this is just using us as some middle-man in a bigger thing: going forward we’re going to aggressively prune these types of post.