They will succeed too.

Maybe, except their games will get more and more shit, and there’s plenty of alternatives in terms of games to play.

I highly recommend reading his book, this guy is an OG media pirate

I get that AI isn’t without its problems, especially Grok with that “Mechahitler” nonsense a bit ago, but there seems to be particular vitriol here. I’m genuinely curious to know why people hate it so much here.

The internet has gotten a lot worse at nuance. People don’t know how to have a perspective other than pro or anti for controversial things, and if you’re going to think of AI as a brand with a team then the team it seems associated with is big tech fascists, a group Lemmy’s userbase will naturally regard as an enemy. Similar story as with cryptocurrency, it’s seen as a brand, and associated with all the negative things that are done with it. Technologies are seen as themselves having a moral stance.

It’s very believable, who wants to admit to having a different opinion when everyone is so angry about something?

We made it through this much already didn’t we? We’re in a period of accelerating change and large scale organizational dysfunction is threatening our chances of navigating it safely, but we’re not all dead yet and it’s up to us to figure it out.

I wonder what the ideal placement or naming of such a file would be, where are credential scrapers going to check first?

I think that a lot of it is a result of forms of interaction that are easy to falsify and which real people are not expected to exercise judgment on. Fake likes, views, and upvotes involve little that can be scrutinized at the user level and are mainly a negotiation between spammers and a social media company. Those companies favor organizing their sites around these sorts of shallow metrics, and selling a passive experience that confers or requires next to no social agency, because they want to be able to treat the people using their services as commodities they own.

These problems would be greatly diminished with social networks that are actually social.

you are taking a risk either way. You are placing your trust in the dev and the few that can read code.

There is definitely a trust issue and a need for ways of conveying and building trust in smaller software projects. I think a much better solution there would be discussions about the code and how it works that aren’t hostile interrogations with foregone conclusions in pursuit of a broader anti-AI agenda. If someone just put a lot of effort into making something the details of that process should be on their mind, it should be possible to make them more accessible to people and convey that there is non-artificial understanding behind the project. Automatic hostility and suspicion makes those kinds of conversations harder and less likely.

That way a certain subset of members could just drive-by downvote without getting themselves dirty.

I think tags could be alright but only if this is not allowed, it is unreasonable to ask people to disclose something just so others can shit on them for it.

What would be better ways of doing it?

I learned about pings in college, because apparently my torrent client was constantly sending them, but the university network did not allow pings and they sent an email threatening to shut off my internet if I didn’t stop pinging.

This is why–as I’ve been saying as of late–AI needs a do-over. As it exists right now, I don’t give a toss what good it can do, what practical benefits it has once the techbros move on to their next mark. I don’t care about any of it at all because AI companies botched the first impressions so hard by telling me consent is a foreign concept and I need to just roll over and submit, or I’ll be left behind forever.

Not sure this is the right way to think of it, these companies in particular are your adversaries no matter how well or badly they are handling PR, and will always treat you with as much exploitation as they can get away with, there is no use trying to reason or negotiate with them.

So this problem should be solvable with only changes to client code then?

I don’t like the OP banner much but I do like this one. There’s something really compelling about the abstract take older image models had on video game environments.

You could have been banned for something else too, their ban bots are really arbitrary now. Not really a way to know for sure.

Confusing that they share a name with these evil things

I don’t know how the lemmy version of that sub works but I subscribed to the reddit version for a long time and it seemed uniquely dependent on very effortful expert moderation, involves removing a lot of highly upvoted comments, and historical topics are often politically charged, very intimidating task to take on.

One of my first exposures to the internet was in school, a teacher plugged a computer into a telephone, it made weird noises, then we waited five minutes to load a website with facts about frogs, I’m pretty sure he had to type in an ip address that was written down on paper. Later I printed out videogame walkthroughs at the library. It wasn’t until after Y2K that I really started using its more interactive features.

It basically means you need a VPN to torrent because if you rack up enough letters they might shut off your internet, but there’s a big distinction between those letters and a lawsuit, they are way closer to just a scare tactic. Their text suggests a lawsuit might be a followup possibility, but that isn’t really true.

One thing I think is worth mentioning (US specific), there was a period in the 2000s with a lot of prosecutions, but then industry groups switched tactics to pushing ISPs to do enforcement with mass copyright letters, and ceased actually bringing lawsuits against small pirates for the most part. People are normally more worried than they need to be.