DreamerOfImprobableDreams

It’s a far right conspiracy theory, that OP’s trying to tie to legit criticism of the CIA’s atrocities despite having nothing to do with each other-- all in order to try to hide the fact that it’s literally part of the Great Replacement conspiracy.

Because if everyone involved is quitting their jobs, they’ll have no money with which to buy food. Which means they’ll have to farm it themselves. And farming, even with top-of-the-line modern tech, is backbreaking fucking work. Also unpredictable as hell: bad harvests aren’t uncommon, especially for novice farmers with no formal training like these guys would be.

In other words, one bad harvest, and everyone in the system you’re proposing fucking dies. Yeah, there’s a reason in the 1800s people were abandoning their family farms for the horrorshow of Victorian era-factories en masse: because even that hell was still preferable to farming.

I’m truly sorry to hear you’re not having a good time here. Good news is, there’s a big old world out there, with plenty of countries to explore! I sincerely hope one day you’ll be able to find a country where you’ll be just as happy as I am in the US. :)

And what of the many atrocities committed by humanity?

Half Life 4: The Search for Half Life 3

If this is actually Half Life 3… it kinda makes sense they waited for all the hype to die down, for it to fall out of meme culture, before releasing it. Even five years ago, the expectations for this game were astronomical. There was absolutely no way a game made by mere mortals could ever live up to that kind of hype. Now, people have chilled to the point they can actually appreciate Half Life 3 on its own merits.

Which is a long-winded way to say my bet is Half Life 3’s been done for at least 5 years now. Valve’s just waiting on the right moment to pull the trigger.

I can be proud to be American and a human at the same time. Saying “I love my family” doesn’t mean I don’t love other people too, and it doesn’t mean I think my family is somehow better than other human beings, it just means I love my family. Same logic applies here.

Yes, which is the single biggest reason I’m proud to be American: because our people’s willingness to stand up for one another and keep fighting for a better tomorrow, even against the most powerful opponents, even at risk to their own lives.

Abolishing slavery, ending Jim Crow, giving women the vote, becoming one of the first dozen countries on the planet to legalize gay marriage, helping win WW2, helping support Ukraine, donating more to foreign aid than any other country on the planet, the Marshall Plan, everything about NASA, best national parks on the planet, entertainment capital of the world, first country to land a man on the moon, the whole “nation of immigrants” things making us one of the most diverse countries on the planet.

And of course, none of that excuses the dark parts of our history, the slavery, genocide, imperialism in Latin America, among many, many others. But that brings me to the thing I love most about American: with the exception of the loud Republican minority, we’re a country that actually reckons with the dark parts of our past and tries to make up for them instead of sweeping them under the rug. And then we get to work fixing them.

We’ve made so much progress even in my relatively brief lifetime-- in agonizing two-steps-forward, one-step-back fashion, for sure, but that doesn’t make it not count. I’m so excited to see where we go in the future.

Good points, but even so I’d still rather have a less-than-optimal sub that still lined up with what the characters were saying in the dub, than having the two conflict with each other. (Maybe if you turn the dub off, the subs could be replaced with the better sub-only version?)

Yeah, to be honest I’m a bit worried studios might use this technology to start changing lines in already released movies, so subtly only film buffs who know the film line-for-line would ever notice.

Even done for well-intentioned reasons (like removing slurs from old-timey movies) it would open up a whole moral and ethical can of worms about whitewashing the past. And I have zero faith in studios to do it for well-intentioned reasons-- especially not when they’re under pressure by religious fanatics, authoritarian governments, etc.

Also, for some reason the dub and subtitles use different translations, so the character will be saying one thing and the subs will read something completely different. It’s confusing AF. Often end up getting so frustrated I just turn off the dub and focus exclusively on the subs.

Lovely! What part of Germany was this taken in?

So back in the day, r/IAmA used to actually get really cool people to come do interviews on a pretty regular basis: celebrities, authors, activists, politicians, prominent scientists. They even got President Obama to do an AMA, while he was sitting US president! (For a long time, it was the most upvoted thread in reddit history.)

And I don’t just mean once or twice a year, these interviews were happening multiple times a month. Users could ask whatever they wanted, no matter how off the wall, blunt, or challenging, and the interviewees would usually answer almost all of the top questions.

It was all thanks to Victoria. She was the reddit employee in charge of reaching out to celebrities to do AMAs, and then helping them get set up and navigating reddit for them when the time came. It was one of the coolest features of reddit, and it was all thanks to her.

So naturally, of course, they fired Victoria on the flimsiest of excuses.

Why? We’re still not 100% sure-- reddit never officially explained. But the leading theory is that reddit wanted to change the way IAmAs were run to limit users’ ability to ask hard questions. Ever hear about the Woody Harrelson IAmA disaster (“Can we please focus on Rampart, people?”)? Maybe reddit’s plan was to limit the kinds of questions users could ask, to reduce the odds of PR disasters like that. Who knows.

Whatever their plan was, though, it failed. Killing the thing that made IAmAs so cool compared to normal interviews also completely killed users’ interests in them. And without Victoria to reach out to celebrities and help them with the IAmA process any more, the rate at which celebs would show up on site to do AmAs tanked.

Nowadays, you’re lucky to get one AmA with someone people have actually heard of a year, and even then they’ll usually only answer a handful of cherry-picked questions. For all intents and purposes, the feature is dead.

Yeah, and the author all but freely admits that. But they’re apparently willing to throw all that away to have it “feel like everyone’s there.”

Maybe this is me being uncharitable, but to be blunt it sounds like he just wants to feel like he’s sitting at the cool kids’ table.

Also, Chat GPT at least still writes at the level of a somewhat talented ninth grader. Its prose is stilted, and the way it structures essays and stories is super formulaic.

It’s absolutely not at the level it can replace a talented human writer yet. (I have no doubt that day is coming, probably sooner than we think, but it’s not here yet.)

So publishers making the switch will see the quality of their content drop, and with it the number of clicks / revenue they get. Enough to offset the salaries of all the writers they fired? Probably depends on the publication. For clickbait farms, probably not, but the higher quality the readers are used to the more the publishers stand to lose.