[-] altz3r0@beehaw.org 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

It all the depends on the how and the what.

First of all, if the virtual reality is able to replicate physical sensation indistinguishably from the physical world, it's not virtual, then, is it? Then it's just alternative reality. If that was the case, the only dilemma would be the implications to the physical world. Will your body still exist, or are we talking San Junipero here?

As long as there are implications to the real world, then I believe a significant percentage of people will not abandon it, because of empathy.

I personally would only live an alternative reality if there was no one I love back in the real world anymore, or if I were to die.

As for virtual reality in the realm of possibilities, there will always be something missing, as addictive as it may be, so there will always be something to bring you back to reality

As for just trying it, hell yeah! As long as there are no negative consequences physically that I know of before hand.

[-] altz3r0@beehaw.org 4 points 11 months ago

No one should ever know about the torrentio addon for Stremio!

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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by altz3r0@beehaw.org to c/gaming@beehaw.org

I have to say, what they have showed so far is a bit lackluster for a game, hoping they step it up after the beta.

  • 25 player limit per server
  • Only gathering/crafting game play loop with no real goal besides improving itself
  • housing and relationship building is the goal, but tied to real time timer, which will likely become a premium skip eventually
  • Cosmetics seems to be only through payment, which is usually blindsided since takes alway one more goal from the game play loop

Everything kind of rests on how good questing and adventure zones will be.

[-] altz3r0@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

By the way, registrations are open, and the open beta begins August 10th.

If you want to give me a cool in-game item, register up with the referral below. :)

https://accounts.palia.com/sign-up?referral=867fb01e-c3b1-41dc-8474-c420df8ba032

[-] altz3r0@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

Oh I totally agree, I am very fatigued of violence driven games, and have high hopes for Palia. I'm just a little apprehensive that if they just try to copy the non combat parts of zelda and mix it up with animal crossing, it's not going to be enough.

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by altz3r0@beehaw.org to c/literature@beehaw.org

Update:

Thanks everyone for participating in the giveaway! The giveaway is now closed, I hope you all enjoy the reading. :) As the number of participants was around the expected, I have sent you all a copy of the book!


Since I was a kid, I was obsessed with computers, technology, and books. Science fiction books, palpable technologies with surreal events, were my favorite addiction. I grew up drinking from this source, dreaming of writing my own stories one day. But growing up on the periphery I quickly came to understand it was not more than a dream, especially in Brazil. So, I was thrown into the nearest lane, jumping from technical support to software engineer.

Years flew by, and in the rush of day-to-day life, I ended up forgetting the essence that propelled me down this path. Goals, projects, codes, stress... blah, blah, blah. You know the deal, you took it too. However, after several (miracle) therapy sessions, I decided it was time to take a break from the command prompt and dive into Word. And, after many, many months, liters of coffee, a herniated disc, and a hefty dosage of ibuprofen, voilà, a book was born!

It is a cyberpunk story that speaks about work dehumanization, communities vs corporations and kicking the corporative ass.

Coincidetally, or not, the story connects with what we have experienced with Reddit and Lemmy, so I understood it would be fitting to conduct the book's giveaway on the Fediverse only!

Ghost Trigger is available on Kindle and Paperback, as well as other digital formats. It's a dive into passion, at the cost of a beer, and about three hours of your life.

I will be conducting the giveaway of 10 copies, in either:

  • Paperback (North America, Europe and Australia only)
  • Kindle
  • Epub

To participate, just comment the format you would like to receive!

The giveaway will begin tomorrow, and winners will be chosen randomly.

[-] altz3r0@beehaw.org 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think the plan should be bracing for impact, and how to deal with the after-effect. Because let's be honest, we are in a late stage capitalism, and Meta megacorp will get what it wants.

I don't currently see it spilling it's poison to Lemmy/kbin. I'm hopeful rather, but I may be misunderstanding how the fediverse works.

But for mastodon, I would say the outcome is a segregation, as it's safe to assume that communities that integrate wirh Meta will be consumed. Unfortunately that likely means starting from scratch, with a even nichier community, as far as I can see. Not exactly from nothing, but content loss will be inevitable, which is the Fediverse greatest weakness imho.

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by altz3r0@beehaw.org to c/cyberpunk@lemmy.ml

I've compiled a timeline of cyberpunk books that, in my opinion, represent significant shifts in the genre and its ideas. Whether it's the early explorations of AI and dystopian futures, the emergence of virtual reality, or the more recent reflections on environmental and social issues, each book on this list adds a unique perspective to the ever-evolving cyberpunk landscape.

However, it takes a village and all that. So I would like to list them here in c/cyberpunk, cross-posting it at literature, to know your opinions on the genre, the books, and if you have any suggestions, complementary or disrupting, on this list.

  1. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K. Dick (1968): To me, it all begins here. This novel, which served as the basis for the movie "Blade Runner", popularized the groundwork for many cyberpunk themes like artificial intelligence, dystopian future, and the blurred line between reality and the artificial.

  2. "Neuromancer" by William Gibson (1984): Often considered the genre defining work, it introduced the concept of cyberspace and explored themes of artificial intelligence and corporate power, and to me it indirectly set the core principle of the genre, "high tech, low life".

  3. "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson (1992): This book further pushed the envelope on the concept of virtual reality, offering a blend of ancient cultures, linguistics, computer science, politics, and philosophy, and fucking added fun to the genre.

  4. "Ghost in the Shell" by Masamune Shirow (1995): I cheat a little big here by adding a manga series. It deserves a mention, along with the movie, because it dives deeply into the themes of self-identity, artificial intelligence, and societal intrigue that really brought cyberpunk to the world. It had a profound influence on cyberpunk literature and media after it's conception.

  5. "Altered Carbon" by Richard K. Morgan (2002): This may be a little controversial, as I don't really like the author to be honest, but this novel adds more depth to themes of identity and humanity through the concept of consciousness transfer and immortality.

  6. "Accelerando" by Charles Stross (2005): This one added weight to the genre by exploring the societal and personal changes that might happen as a result of the technological singularity, a theoretical point when technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible. I personally dig this aspect, and try to write more of it.

  7. "Windup Girl", by Paolo Bacigalupi (2009): I know, I know, "biopunk". But I refuse to budge on it. To me this retains the core concept of cyberpunk, and is cyberpunk, because it is about technology, and its effect on quality of life and society. But the simple fact that the novel brings this discussion makes it a remarkable point in the genre.

  8. "Player One" by Ernest Cline (2011): Another controversial addition here, but this book is a blend of dystopian future with nostalgia for the pop culture of the 1980s, and revives themes of virtual reality and the influence of technology on society, giving breadth (and a new breath) to the genre.

  9. "The Ministry for the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson (2020): This near-future novel tackles themes around climate change and global politics, focusing on the power of technology as a tool to combat environmental disaster, and offers a more optimistic view of the future. I like this one here because it brings the discussion to current topics, maintaining the genre alive.

  10. "Repo Virtual" by Corey J. White (2020): White's novel explores cyberpunk in an age of late capitalism, AI, and questions about sentience and autonomy. Along with ministry of the Future, this serve the same purpose of maintaining the genre purpose alive and bringing us to the point we are now, which is also a good concept that I agree with: it doesn't need to be about things far away in the future, because soon some of these novels will be about things in the past, and the genre must remain the same still.

[-] altz3r0@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

You are right in assuming there will be a symbyosis between AI generated text and human generated text, but jumping from there to assume that we will be using solely AI generated text is wrong, in my opinion.

AI generated content is not good enough on its own, despite what OpenAI marketing team wants you to think. No quality content is made by simply prompting chatGPT. Not just in writing, but in any field of knowledge, actually. Using chatGPT without some level of domain and fact checking on the subject you are prompting is a sure way to get screwed, as some lawyer in the USA will tell you.

But going back to writing specifically, what we will see at first is actually an improvement on the overall quality of human generated writing, with AI offering a solution to the mechanical and usually boring side of writing good content, such as eloquence, syntax, clarity, etc.

Then, what we will also begin to notice is the more frequent use of what I like to call shitstorming.

Shitstorming consisting in prompting a LLM model to bring up ideas, drafts and opinions on subjects you want to write about, and have some understanding on. What you will receive in response will be a biased, somewhat lacking content, which will either inspire you to modify and refactor in a way that it makes sense, or make you so angry that you will have to write something better in response to it. Writer's block will become a thing of the past.

There are others aspects and nuances to this symbiosis, but to avoid going longer on an already long post, I would conclude by saying that this evolution will be a loop that will keep improving LLMs, while also improving human writing simply because we will continuously look for ways to make the content better, and more original.

The bad side is that, for those that don't know how to use the tool, the amount of lacking content and standardized communication will indeed flood the internet, but this will only serve to contrast original content to the point where we will immediatly recognize the two apart, much like we do with advertising nowdays.

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submitted 1 year ago by altz3r0@beehaw.org to c/cyberpunk@lemmy.ml
[-] altz3r0@beehaw.org 39 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Used to be a fan of Louis back on my days of computer repair shop. Nice to see he is still going strong!

But yeah, the writing on the wall is clear, and it's not just Reddit. Imho, this situation emphasizes the importance of smaller, connected communities rather than massive social media platforms. We came to love massive social networks, but didn't realize the consequences of getting lost in the crowd and becoming mere data points for profit. Small, connected communities offer a more personal and respectful alternative.

What we have here with the Fediverse is a gold mine. Picture 00's phpbb forums, but all with access to each other. That just sound like a good time to me. It's rough around the edges, sure, but it's own corner of web.

[-] altz3r0@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think preservation is happening, the issue lies in accessibility. Projects like Archive.org are the public ones, but it is certain that private organizations are doing the same, just not making it public.

This is also something that is my biggest worry about the Fediverse. It has tools to deal with it, but they are self-contained. No search engine is crawling the Fediverse as far as I've looked, and no initiative to archive, index and overall make the content of the Fediverse accessible is currently in place, and that's a big risk. I'm sure we will soon be seeing loss of information for this reason, if not already happened.

[-] altz3r0@beehaw.org 14 points 1 year ago

This is the gist of it. It will happen again, and again, and again. After they go public, every quarter that they need to come up with some shenanigans to satisfy shareholders, it will happen again. Eventually, either a new thing will come up and start it all over again, or we will be mostly decentralized.

[-] altz3r0@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Lemmy was not created last week, man. All you see here today already existed and was running when spez hit the fan.

In that sense, part of what attracts me to this is a bit of the barrier to entry. I find it enticing, it reminds me of the good old days, where you had to earn your way in, in a sense. Of course that's silly old man talk, because honestly, all you have to do is select any random site and sign up.

Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, it all comes down to the same thing. This "barrier" to entry is almost fictitious, and I feel that's the ideal type of barrier.

[-] altz3r0@beehaw.org 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If you think Edge is a bust, I got news for you: if you are using Windows, pretty much everything spies on you now days. :)

[-] altz3r0@beehaw.org 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The main reason is that although the concessions we make may seem ever so insignificant, they pile up and dettach you from what you were looking for in the first place. You barely see your acquaintances posts on instagram or facebook anymore. Twitter is on it's way to become a cesspool. Every new Reddit "feature" just makes the experience worse. It won't be long for those platforms to all converge into a big mind grinder for propaganda.

In fediverse there is no valuation seeking to ruin things, and there won't be for the foreseeable future, so it's good ground to build upon, it's just good sense.

Take the content problem for example. You can think of that as an opportunity to be the content you want to see.

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submitted 1 year ago by altz3r0@beehaw.org to c/music@beehaw.org
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altz3r0

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