“We will provide you with a tool to emit garbage and a platform to share content. If you put the two together, you are liable.”

Attractive nuisance much? Is it too much to ask that they should have to label it a garbage generator instead of “AI”? Why does honesty always have to take a back seat?

Might be this dude; it is not free, just very affordable in their market. It turns out making it affordable also brings in a lot of revenue.

https://youtu.be/44Do5x5abRY

So you’ve got me thinking about a potential dark browser pattern relating to this that I think was introduced by Google in Chrome.

Wayyyy back in the day, you might have a page full of animated gifs all doing their thing, and what you could do once the page was loaded was to hit the stop button (or hit the stop button twice if the page was still loading), and all of the gifs would stop animating. Today you couldn’t do that, because the stop button has been intertwined with the refresh button; once the page loads, the stop button turns into the refresh button.

I bring this up, because there used to be a simple universal mechanism to indicate that you wanted to stop things from moving/animating, and it would do so, but now there isn’t. Funny how that mechanism has been subtly removed from an advertiser’s browser, where it is in their best interest to keep the ads blinking and changing to draw your attention to them.

It’s too bad that there is no longer a mechanism that is as simple and universal that can stop movement. Now every site has to devise its own way to handle stopping movement, and there will be competing standards and methods, and it will no doubt end up being a pain intentionally, just like cookie popups.

Maybe browsers should bring back universal stop for animated gifs, SVG, video, and (some) CSS, with an event to notify the page script.

Does this apply to spinners and other wait animations used to indicate to the visitor that something is happening or giving comfort that their request is indeed still being actively processed?

I can’t help you with your animal fear, but I’ll give you a higher priority reason to avoid a cat for now.

I’ll give what will probably be an unpopular opinion; cats (and pets in general for that matter) are a luxury… item. I have 3 of them, and I would never recommend one to a person who is struggling financially and/or has lost their job. Their food and vet bills are not cheap, and even a cat that seems perfectly fine can suddenly have an issue that requires an expensive vet visit. As they age, they will inevitably have health issues, which not only adds more expense, but increases the rate at which expenses accumulate. They can also damage things and ruin things, which adds further expense.

All of this is fine, if you can afford it. However I don’t think very many people actually sit down and work out the numbers. On top of food, litter, and equipment costs, IMO people should be saving ~$70/a month for the first 5 years, then maybe half that after that if you didn’t have to use any of it, to be prepared for big vet events. It sucks not being able to afford the care your pet needs.

Further, I have found that having multiple cats does not decrease the amount of expense per cat due to expected efficiencies from overlap. There are subtle things that accumulate like cleaning expenses and drain on your time and greater resources. I wish I only had one cat, honestly.

People say you can’t put a price on them because of their cuteness and company and what have you. But believe me, you can if your cat(s) turn out to be absolute dicks, but nobody talks about that either, IMO because of some kind of Stockholm syndrome, sunk cost combo. People generally gloss over the shitty parts of pet ownership.

Don’t do it. Be well-off first. Your GF’s sister is probably finding this out.

against your bias and narrative

If being a regular person who just wants to enjoy the things they pay for in peace is bias, and being fed up with this crap is narrative, what does that make you?

Stop trying to normalize exploitation by greed, and stop normalizing the acceptance of it.

Just because Sony can manufacture a bait and switch with some boilerplate doesn’t mean they should. Regular people should not be blamed for being exploited when purchasing in good faith. The developers made a game that works, clearly, and Steam delivered it, so they are culpable, but if Sony can stop their horseshit, and this all goes away, it is clear who really is to blame.

Did the CEO of Sony write this? A bait and switch scam is fine apparently, as long as there’s some legalese to protect the company in there.

It seems Steam should have some limitation in place on their end, and the Dev picks sales on Steam, not the publisher.

Then what is the job of the publisher? To perpetrate scams it seems, because seemingly the devs published the game just fine all by themselves to Steam. If they didn’t do that right, the publisher suddenly has no responsibility to make sure that was distributed correctly? Whose job is it to ensure the product is published in line with their inevitable goals, we wonder.

so why would they list it for sale in those countries?

Because they botched the bait and switch. And now Valve is cleaning up Sony’s mess. Too bad they couldn’t clean up Sony’s mess of leaked customer data. I guess they can’t fix it but prevent the next one by making publishers agree up front that they can’t require data from players, in order to publish a game, but I digress.

no one seems to want to accept personal responsibility

No one should have to expect to be subject to a bait and switch scam in the first place. Which is what this clearly is, because if they were truly up front, they would have required the account on day one and had the appropriate region filters in place, so consumers could never be in this position.

Stop blaming the victims of corporate greed and scams; people should be able to reasonably enjoy things they paid for without being molested and exploited. Personal responsibility my ass when there should be laws to prevent this kind of thing in the first place.

Those samples were cool as hell.

13 minutes by air, or 13 minutes by ground, out of curiosity?

nothing to do with the future of Lemmy

Let’s not go that far. That said, it’s certainly not everything to do with it either. Let’s call it an indicator and keep an eye on it.

They’d point you at the code of conduct link found in the very GitHub repo this incident concerns, but then you would realize how many of their own rules they’ve violated.

You demonstrated that you are unaccountable. It’s a lesson for anyone considering investing in this project, indeed.