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Some video games have been trying to use generative AI for years now, and for the most part people simply have not been having it. Why would we? It's lazy, it's ugly, it's an ethical black hole and it's being driven by an executive class desperate to lay off even more workers. While earlier and more brazen attempts at employing the tech were obvious, lately it's becoming more common for studios to slide a little AI-generated content in without drawing attention to it.

Jurassic World Evolution 3 launched with some AI-generated character portraits, then got bullied into removing them. Clair Obscur, which will be a lot of people's game of the year, appeared to quietly launch with some AI-generated art then just as quietly patch it out. I was going to review the city-building grand strategy game Kaiserpunk until I saw they were using AI-generated images for their dialogue sections, after which I promptly uninstalled it.

The latest culprit is The Alters, which has found to have shipped not only with AI-generated placeholder text in-game, but also employed AI-generated translations in some of its side content as well. None of this was disclosed prior to the game's release; it was all discovered later, by players, and has prompted an explanation of sorts from the developers which tries to calm everyone down, but which has just made things worse, because if it took people discovering these specific instances to find that 11 Bit had used AI-generated content in the game's development, how do we know there's not more of it?

Considering the overwhelmingly negative feedback, I am hereby withdrawing this Change proposal.

The reasoning is twofold:

1. I have always argued that Changes that are overwhelmingly rejected by the community should not be approved by FESCo. So it would be very hypocritical if I attempted to push this through over the almost entirely negative feedback. I stand by my positions and also apply them to myself.
2. At this point, I believe that this has no chance of being approved by FESCo for Fedora 43, so I do not want to waste everyone's time by continuing this discussion that is not leading anywhere.

Truth is, to get right to the point, the fact that Matrix was accompanied by a for-profit entity, funded by venture capital was the biggest mistake that Matrix as a project has ever made.

A Reform UK election candidate standing in the postponed North Northants Council (NNC) election for Higham Ferrers could trigger an immediate by-election if he wins the seat after he moved to China.

Alan Beswick had been on the ballot paper as one of the two Reform UK candidates for the May 1 elections but, due to the death of Liberal Democrat John Ratcliffe just before polling day, the election in the two-seat Higham Ferrers ward was postponed until June 12.

Names of four nominated Reform candidates were submitted to NNC’s election team. A party spokesman says Mr Beswick’s circumstances changed but they were unable to remove his nomination.

Toot

As decentralised social networks grow and evolve over time, so does the meaning of the word decentralisation. People do not understand a meaning of a word in a vacuum, they form an understanding of what a word means based on their think other people think a term means. The term decentralisation is a good example of this: it is clearly an important term to the communities that make up networks like the fediverse. But the meaning of the term decentralisation has shifted over time. Communities take on a shared mental framework to understand a technology. Once a framework has been established, changes to that shared framework are slow, and can happen due to forces of other communities who have a different shared perspective.

The fediverse, and the networks that it grew out of, are decentralised social networks in two different ways: they are decentralised in a technical description of how the network architecture looks. But the fediverse is also decentralised in the sense that this became a core part of the identity of the network. For a variety of reasons, as the fediverse grew and matured, being decentralised became a core way how people on the fediverse understood the network themselves. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, it gave a strong validation of the idea that centralised ownership of social networking is bad, and thus that good social networks should be decentralised.

Over time, the meaning of the term ‘decentralisation’, as understood by people on the fediverse, grew more diffuse. Other characteristics of the network became conflated with the idea of the network being decentralised. Traits of centralised platforms that people deemed bad, such as a single algorithmic timeline controlled by an oligarch, became a template for how an alternative social network should do the opposite: only have a timeline where the content displayed is fully controlled by the user. The boundaries blurred between features resulting from a decentralised networking architecture versus those from human-focused product design. It is totally possible to create a decentralised social networking platform with only algorithmic timelines. But the connection between fediverse platforms largely only having ‘following’ feeds and the network being decentralised was regularly implied.

Toot

Stats from here: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats

Like, has an instance gone down and if so, why hasn't there been a comparable drop in users and comments?

Edit: Thanks to @example@reddthat.com here for pointing to zerobytes.monster becoming more aggressive against bots as the likely culprit.

He also said the Loops backend will be open sourced along side this.

This comes up surprisingly often, but this comment chain in the recent AMA prompted me to start a general discussion to maybe put this discussion to rest.

The only other place I'm aware that this has been discussed in detail is this pull request from 2023, which the creator ultimately closed.

What I'm ultimately in favour of, and what actually gets requested (one, two, three), is letting mods edit the metadata around a post. Things like the NSFW toggle, or post tags in 1.0.

But I'm throwing this out to the floor. What, if anything, do you think mods should be able to change about a user's content?