It’s set in 2077. Why the F does it need to feel American? There’s enough Americana in media already.

Are they? As the article OP shares suggests, these films quietly make us compare our lives to what is portrayed on screen. This is advertisement 101: display people in enviable positions to portray a sense of longing for a lifestyle that one would not normally seek. A food commercial isn’t selling you a product, it’s trying to make you hungry.

If all you wanted out of these rom coms is the portrayal of a carefree life, you could just watch pharmaceutical, banking, or insurance ads.

Looks like I’m installing Linux tonight.

The problem is the hysteria behind it, leading people to confuse good sounding information with good information. At least when people generally produce information they tend to make an effort to get it right. Machine learning is just an uncaring bullshitting machine, that is rewarded on the basis of the ability to fool people (turns out the Turing test was a crappy benchmark for practice-ready AI besides writing poems), and VC money hasn’t reached the “find out” phase of that looming lesson, when we all just get collectively exhausted by how underwhelming the AI fad is.

The average human considers the Pythagorean theorem “sophistication”. Let’s not take our education for granted.

The benefit of AI is overblown for a majority of product tiers. Remember how everything was supposed to be block chain? And metaverse? And web 3.0? And dot.com? This is just the next tech trend for dumb VCs to throw money at.

Other than making sure to be wearing your glasses if you are near sighted enough that your local licence requires it, glasses are an irrelevant factor. It’s not like you are going into active combat duty…

It’s being made because there is a successful franchise to be exploited to death for the sake of earning a few more pennies for shareholders.

You aren’t looking at the creative human spirit here. You are looking at a stupid money printing machine banking purely on the inertia of fans hoping for more of what made the original work of art magical.

What about the right to be forgotten? Where is that feature? Why isn’t Microsoft making and marketing a version of Windows with something like “Windows Forget”?

I’ll tell you why: no opportunity to double dip by collecting and selling your personal data.

To be fair the possibility of compromise was enough not to do it. Being sure of compromise doesn’t change that math all that much.

As with most AAA-games, the people that view entertainment as a mere tool for money extraction got involved.

Support developers that are actually passionate about entertainment. The ghouls that make games as a means of profit seeking (and who exploit the people who are passionate) can wither away.

That made sense before rich people and foreign interests figured out how to use the same tools to get people to part with their money, to also vote against their self interest.

Democracy cannot prevail when people are so easily dupped by ads, fake news, unregulated influencers, and social media algorithms. Democracy assumes people are critical thinkers with the time, energy, and knowledge to filter information.

I’ve done it all my life by following one simple rule: Don’t Do Crimes.

TBF, That’ll be a lot harder for you to do if Republicans get back in power and make breathing, or some other unavoidable bullshit, a crime.

How is it that so many “tough guys” in the States are such big fans of this weakass soft boy.

Trump is a poor man’s idea of a rich person, and a weak person’s idea of a strong man. Always has been.

Right. Microsoft themselves just announced a feature to disable screenshoting some webpages in Edge, which is a complete 180 from recall.

I expect windows to be split into two tiers of products again: the free version that is paid for by ads/tracking/AI bloatware possibly even mandatory cloud connectivity, and an enterprise version with all off that off, but that is paid.

Triple AAA games are usually very polished. But polish doesn’t make games fun. Polish is important with accessibility, and it’s easy to see why accessibility is important for a big studio casting a wide net.

But fun? That comes from creativity and innovation. Big studios are averse to risk taking, and struggle to attract creative individuals, because the corporate culture seeks to stamp out individuality in the name of process and procedure.

So yeah, more evidence of this. My money is going to Indy devs who prioritize fun over polish. (But polish is good to have too).

You could make the same chart, in reverse about progressives hoping Trump will ever be held accountable for his many crimes.

A conviction is about as close as we have gotten, but it’s meaningless if there is no jail time served or some other meaningful penalty to prevent more criminality.

Left, right… These are meaningless labels when progressives / social democrats / libertarians have to join forces against authoritarian trash of any kind.

that government should have zero to do with marriage

Uhh… Marriage is a government affair before anything else. It’s a legal status, that comes with default clauses on a wide range of issues, from wills, property ownership, parental rights, taxes, power of attorney… All secular stuff. I think you mean to keep the church out of the government’s affairs?

I’m pretty sure it’s accepted pretty universally that countries must accept citizens back. Reason being, if they don’t, the rejected person becomes another country’s problem, and that is bad for relations.

Right? The concert is not the problem. The problem is who is paying for it/who is deserving of this (or any other) company benefit.

Though I guess there is an argument to be had that the performers are enabling class exploitation instead of standing in solidarity. Then again, it’s entirely plausible that the performers don’t know any of these details.