I mean, drowning is kind of the least of your worries in those situations.
NEVER walk through even suburban flood waters unless it is life or death. Because you know those things called “sewers”? Yeah, they are under there. And if the water has reached the point where it is even a foot off the ground? Then those sewers are entirely(-ish) full and that “water” contains significant amounts of poo, medical waste, chemicals, and so forth. Let alone corpses of animals… and people.
So that is basically liquid hepatitis and Erastil knows what else.
It is also why you NEVER buy a car that has been in a flood area and houses really should be basically demolished at that point (but aren’t because Capitalism).
Exactly. It is the same logic as “This game is great if you play it with friends”.
Different people have different tastes. EYE Divine Cybermancy is still one of my favorite games of all time.
But also? Guess what game I will point out is objectively bad and has massive amounts of jank and UX issues?
I mean, Walz outright called him out on it.
The only reason trump allowed vance to be his VP (aside from all the ties to right wing tech billionairres…) is that he has committed to not having a spine. pence had a spine for all of one day and did his job and obeyed the will of the people. vance obeys the will of trump and knows he will be fired (if not given some Novichok) should he turn from that.
Ah, my mistake. I was not aware that lobbyists and special interest groups did not exist in the EU, that only the most qualified of consultants were hired, and that all laws were perfect.
Again, there is a way to set this up to win and there is a way to set this up for knee jerk reactions and “I trust 420JustBlazeItGaming_XXX because they are advocating on my behalf. I should use their offer code for tv dinners”. This is very much the latter.
But it is also being done in a way that, should this get enough traction in the demographics that actually matter, it can lead to a lot of bad legislation that will have global implications.
Instead we see remarks like
The industry has already ruined it for everyone. This is the best plan we’ve got to fix it.
That make it clear this is not about actually making beneficial pro-consumer legislature. It is about hurting developers for making “bad” games. And… I can’t imagine any other Movements that might be taking advantage of this. If only we had more Ethics In Games Journalism, am I right?
According to UESP, Oblivion had
Then we have Knights of the Nine (really mediocre) and Shivering Isle (arguably the best DLC Bethesda ever made)
Oh. And…
People tend to be more favorable to Fallout 3’s DLC than I am (most are incredibly tiny dungeons but with a new tileset). I suspect in large part because Operation Anchorage channeled how amazing storming the memorial was in the base game and… I genuinely don’t know why people are so obsessed with flipping The Pitt. And Broken Steel itself was one of the worse examples of “We’ll finish the game later” of the era… and I played ALL the Blizzard games.
I agree. Hence this initiative. Nothing will change without action, is this is the action that EU citizens can feasibly take. I’ve written my legislators, and that’s about all I can do in the US, other than spread the word on social media.
Relying on favorable interpretations of “reasonably functional” is just begging lobbyists and lawyers to ruin it for everyone.
Pushing for legislature with specifics that are actually good is how we get precedent.
“Stop Killing Games” is the former and most of “the movement” is twitch streamers telling their audiences what they want to hear.
Hoping things will turn out great is for idiots.
So rather than advocate for some vagueries that are primed to be corrupted… maybe actually start with those specific actionable laws to establish precedent that can be worked on.
Because a judge who has no idea what a vidya game is: “Oh, my grandson plays that gotchinson impact game. He is a good kid so clearly this is a different problem and this case is trash”. Or, more likely “Minecraft?!?! THAT IS THE GAME WHERE YOU HAVE UNCENSORED SEX WITH PROSTITUTES AND THEN MURDER THEM!!!”. Because the vast majority of court cases don’t have proper experts involved but still lead to precedent that can cause problems down the line. Hence why there is a lot of pressure to settle when “tech” ends up in court.
Also: If your only argument is that I am not taking the “Stop Killing Games” movement seriously enough? You don’t have one. Which… is par for the course.
Lobbyists and special interest groups are why we have an industry subsidized by legalized gambling for children and other ways of fucking us over.
And vagueries that will be interpreted by courts that likely have no knowledge of what a vidya game even is will resolve that?
People complain about it but there are a lot of reasons you do not want courts to actually rule on basically anything “tech” outside of special situations. Imagine if you were trying to convince your grandparent who still has a landline how cryptocurrency works and that their decision would actually become a law.
The thing is? Ignoring the apparent void that black skin creates on all cameras (oy), it doesn’t take much time. It takes computing power.
As poops and giggles a few friends and I took the public (rumble…) traffic camera feeds that a nearby county has online. Set up a simple python script to scrape those and then configured an off the shelf tool to track a buddy’s general car (green hatchback) and told him to just drive around for an hour.
We were able to map his route with about 70% accuracy with about two hours of scripting and reading documentation. And there are companies that provide MUCH better products for the people who have access to the direct feeds and all the cameras we don’t have access to.
Accursed Farms themselves have said variations of “We’ll figure out the specifics later”
Without “the specifics”? You are not proposing legislature or even “an initiative”. You are just writing the kind of MoveOn petition where Obama will have to do Hot Ones if you totally get ten million signatures.
And… that really matters for reasons we have already seen. You and I think Jack Thompson was a hack and a moron. But we semi-regularly see people talking about how loot boxes and gacha games need to be outlawed without even considering the underlying skinner box/operant conditioning aspects.
But hey? How about “stop corrupting gamers”? Gambling is bad and it ruins lives. So let’s get some legislature. Oh noes, now there can be no kissing or depiction of blood in any game because sex ruins lives and so does murder!
THAT is the difference between a child screaming into the void and actually trying to enact positive change. The former is vague “gimme what I want and figure it out for me”. The latter is “We want X, Y, and Z because of reasons A, B, and C.”.
Because
Leaving a game in a reasonably functional state without intervention from the game’s publisher is pretty specific,
Yes. Nothing more specific than “a reasonably functional state without intervention”.
As for what actually would be specifics?
But once you get beyond that? You start getting into messes of things like MMOs where there are a lot of very valid reasons for not wanting the entire server infrastructure to be running on a single player’s computer. And the reality ends up being you have things like all the WoW and Everquest private servers that literally charge players money to play a pirated version.
Specifics are good. Vagueries are just how you get dicked over by lobbyists and special interest groups.
Yeah…
Basically every Oblivion DLC that was not Shivering Isles (and MAYBE Heroes of The Nine or whatever) was god awful. And Fallout 3 (aside from the last two hours of the story DLC) was only really tolerated because it was mostly sold as a season pass. Operation Anchorage was a cool novelty that made stealth trivial and the rest… existed.
I mean, you definitely want to wear a mask and some goggles at a protest. If only for the purpose of pepper spray. I totally don’t have a thin gaiter, goggles ,and a beanie and have definitely not heard great things about mountain biking helmets (the ones with faceguards) and totally am not considering grabbing one next time I do an REI run.
But also be aware that, with protests, you are almost always up against the groups who have access to all those “traffic” cameras and the like. And computer vision makes it fairly trivial to identify when a bunch of unmasked people walked into a dark alley and came out with their faces fully covered by tracking them back from the 4th street protest. It isn’t Enemy Of The State levels of asking Baby Busey and Jamie Kennedy to generate a 3d model from a single shot of Big Willy Style ogling some ta-tas, but most of the ways surveillance is used during that sequence are shockingly realistic and feasible.
Rhetorical question (because we clearly can infer the answer) but… have you ever seen a black person?
A bit of melanin does not make you into some giant void that breaks all cameras. Black folk aren’t doing long exposure shots for selfies or group photos. Believe it or not but RDCWorld doesn’t need to use nightvision cameras to film a skit.
Yeah but this is (basically) reddit and clearly it isn’t racism and is just a problem of multi megapixel cameras not being sufficient to properly handle the needs of phrenology.
There is definitely some truth to needing to tweak how feature points (?) are computed and the like. But yeah, training data goes a long way and this is why there was a really big push to get better training data sets out there… until we all realized those would predominantly be used by corporations and that people don’t really want to be the next Lenna because they let some kid take a picture of them for extra credit during an undergrad course.
No. I have worked with phone camera sensors quite a bit (see above regarding evaluating facial recognition software…).
Yes, the computation is a Thing. A bigger Thing is just accessing the databases to match the faces. That is why this gets offloaded to a server farm somewhere.
But the actual computer vision and source image? You can get more than enough contours and features from dark skin no matter how much you desperately try to talk about how “difficult” black skin is without dropping an n-word. You just have to put a bit of effort in to actually check for those rather than do what a bunch of white grad students did twenty years ago (or just do what a bunch of multicultural grad students did five or six years ago but…).
Because it isn’t really even an initiative. It is a random non-law pushed by a youtuber that people have latched onto because it is a way to say “lazy devs are ruining gaming”.
If you are talking to chat about why you are their best friend? Yeah. It is awesome. And “Let our representatives figure out what the law should actually be. We just don’t want Them to take our gherms!”
If you are someone who actually is looking at the feasability of this for the industry? You start to see a LOT of major issues. Which actually do matter in countries that care a lot more about workers’ rights (so a lot of Europe, where this actually matters).
And if you are a normy who doesn’t watch the Right streams? You say “Wait… we want to trust the government with nebulous demands to legislate our passion? Are you fucking stupid? Do Jack Thompson and Tipper Gore mean nothing to you???”
I am very much for consumer protections. But we need actual legislature and thought outside of kneejerk slogans and vaguery. Because fuck the publishers. But the devs? They are humans too. Humans being told they have to work 7 day weeks up until the next advertising campaign for a game that is like ten years delayed at this point.
For low contrast greyscale sequrity cameras? Sure.
For any modern even SD color camera in a decently lit scenario? Bullshit. It is just that most of this tech is usually trained/debugged on the developers and their friends and families and… yeah.
I always love to tell the story of, maybe a decade and a half ago, evaluating various facial recognition software. White people never had any problems. Even the various AAPI folk in the group would be hit or miss (except for one project out of Taiwan that was ridiculously accurate). And we weren’t able to find a single package that consistently identified even the same black person.
And even professional shills like MKBHD will talk around this problem during his review ads (the apple vision video being particularly funny).
Apple already demonstrated that you can still get pretty darn close from eyes and hair. Combine that with a bit of logic (There is a 40% chance this is Sally Smith but she also lives three streets over and works on that street) and you still have very good odds.
Well… unless you are black, brown, or asian. Since the facial recognition tech is heavily geared toward white people because tech bros.
The closest I can find is
https://www.ghacks.net/2024/10/01/mozillas-massive-lapse-in-judgement-causes-clash-with-ublock-origin-developer/
Which is only the “lite” version (which really has no reason to be used in firefox) and was likely based on an improper scan. Which happens constantly and is usually an email and a few days of waiting rather than immediately going to the press.
If you can find something about Mozilla actually being anti-adblock or disabling manifest v2 that would be incredibly useful. But maybe be aware of what is going on before vaguely making major claims?