He died in 1982 but his works are hugely influential:
Philip K Dick.

I don't understand the comments suggesting this is "guilty by proxy". These platforms have algorithms designed to keep you engaged and through their callousness, have allowed extremist content to remain visible.

Are we going to ignore all the anti-vaxxer groups who fueled vaccine hesitancy which resulted in long dead diseases making a resurgence?

To call Facebook anything less than complicit in the rise of extremist ideologies and conspiratorial beliefs, is extremely short-sighted.

"But Freedom of Speech!"

If that speech causes harm like convincing a teenager walking into a grocery store and gunning people down is a good idea, you don't deserve to have that speech. Sorry, you've violated the social contract and those people's blood is on your hands.

A comedian isn't forming a sentence based on what the most probable word is going to appear after the previous one. This is such a bullshit argument that reduces human competency to "monkey see thing to draw thing" and completely overlooks the craft and intent behind creative works. Do you know why ChatGPT uses certain words over others? Probability. It decided as a result of its training that one word would appear after the previous in certain contexts. It absolutely doesn't take into account things like "maybe this word would be better here because the sound and syllables maintains the flow of the sentence".

Baffling takes from people who don't know what they're talking about.

Genuinely one of the best pieces of software that these heroes are giving away.

Emulating games is important but I would argue that preserving the games is moreso. If you have discs of old games lying around (I grabbed the original floppy disk version of Marathon by Bungie for less than 5 quid), please find out how to dump them into an ISO or some other archive. It's important now more than ever as games tend towards digital distribution and old games are lost to time. The games don't have to be good, they just need to be preserved.

The problem with flat earthers is that they don't listen to reason.

You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

Can anyone explain why they all look like they have tomatoes for heads?

Don't work at Bethesda. Not going to claim this is in anyway accurate. Maybe the reason they left was because they weren't allowed to design interesting quests and thus were tired of being railroaded. I say this because any quest designer is essentially a storyteller so for quests to be so bland to lack character has to be intentional.

Yor is one of the main characters from SpyxFamily. She's known for being a highly-skilled assassin and extremely gullible. She has these "friends" who don't really like her for some reason.

Just wanted to add some context for this post.

Microsoft - erosion of any motivation to understand your PC so they can put whatever they want in their updates and you won't know until you dig through the logs

Facebook - erosion of any critical thinking by rewarding echo chambers and groupthink. Just look at their Metaverse shite.

Amazon - erosion of labour standards and publishing anti-union propaganda to prevent workers from realising they're being abused. Also, instituting anti-competitive measures and strongarming third party sellers.

OpenAI (insert any LLM/generative model company) - erosion of the creative process thus allowing people with zero artistic expression to plagiarise other artists' work

EA (or any AAA studio but also Nintendo) - erosion of consumer rights to own the products they buy and preventing any effort to preserve their games AND THEN complaining about piracy.

Dear lord, it is so exhausting to list these out.

Okay this article is shittily worded and the Bloomberg article it links to is paywalled so I found this which goes into much greater detail.

TLDR: Valve and five other publisher's were blocking activation of keys sold to people/distributors from distributors/vendors who purchased them from cheaper regions.

One of the few games I don't regret buying before release was Baldur's Gate 3 but that's an anomaly. Most games I'm happy to wait a year or more when it's in better shape.