Who is in charge of defining what is hate speech and extremist behaviour?

The specific behavior that’s being called out here - antisemitic, Nazi, sexuality- or gender-based hate, and white supremacist content - are pretty common definitions of hate speech and extremist behavior. Either way, he calls out Valve’s own internally written content policies - which he states aren’t being enforced - as the point of contention; he doesn’t seem to be imposing outside views on them.

What if it were the people who don’t agree with your definitions is in charge of setting the definitions?

Then Steam becomes X or Truth Social, I guess? I think the chances of that happening are incredibly slim. A more likely negative outcome would be the terms being interpreted to broadly and positive speech being limited along with the negative, but to your point

Slippery slope.

Aren’t you the one committing the slippery slope fallacy here? You’re seemingly suggesting that a crackdown on hate speech will lead to or open the door to a bunch of negative outcomes.

Free speech is one of those things that is absolute. You are either for it or not, any encroachment is going to be the anti position. Obviously popular speech isn’t something that needs to be protected.

If you’re defining ‘free speech’ as the ability to say whatever you want, wherever you want (including on private platforms), without facing consequences, then no, I don’t support (your rigid definition of) free speech. I think that’s a ridiculous definition to use, though, and I don’t think it should be viewed as black or white. ‘Free speech absolutism’ is what leads to misinformation on the scale we’re currently seeing (in the US). Furthermore, ‘free speech’ as outlined in the first amendment doesn’t apply here at all.

Regardless, I don’t like the idea of my kid (or any kids) being exposed to Nazi, white supremacist, or discriminatory rhetoric when he’s on a gaming platform. Since that’s specifically what Warner claims to be addressing here, I support calling it into question.

As Black Friday and the holiday buying season approaches, the American public should know that not only is Steam an unsafe place for teens and young adults to purchase and play online games, but also that, absent a change in Valve’s approach to user moderation and the type of behavior that it welcomes on its platform, Steam is playing a clear role in allowing harmful ideologies to spread and take root among the next generation.

In fact, the clip was a scripted experiment by a Reddit user who fed NotebookLM a detailed prompt instructing it to simulate a conversation about the existential plight of an AI being turned off.

Someone gives an LLM a prompt, gets the result they asked for. Not sure what the collective gasp is about. Is it interesting to think about? Sure, I guess, but we’ve had media about AI achieving sentience for a long time. The fact that this one was written by an AI in the first person is its only differentiating attribute.

Asking Valve to crack down on hate-speech and extremist behavior? Sounds great. There’s some really awful shit on there and I’d love it if they’d do something about it before it becomes fully entrenched as a Nazi bar.

Edit: I’d also love to hear why the folks who apparently disagree feel that way. Is it because other platforms are worse? Because they are, but that doesn’t mean our platform should be allowed to be bad, too. Is it because it’s a gaming platform and you want to keep the politics out of our hobby? I’m with you, but this isn’t really political per se, and it’s not like he’s specifically targeting Steam - as the article notes, he’s been drawing attention to this sort of thing on a variety of platforms, so why is it suddenly objectionable to you that he’s calling Steam out?

I guess what I’m getting at is, why not engage in a discussion about it? The downvotes here suggest that you have an opinion on the topic, so why not share it?

The ILA’s president, Harold Daggett, brings in nearly $1 million a year ($902,000) in salary

Wow… I didn’t know that, but that’s kind of disgusting, too.

I think one of the best solutions for this is to offer some sort of retraining for the workers who will be displaced by automation.

The problem with retraining being the only consideration given is that unless they’re maintaining the same level of pay in whatever position they’re being retrained for, it’s not equitable. A possible improvement would be for workers displaced by automation to continue to receive salaries from their old positions for a period of time, with the percentage of their original pay rate decreasing over that time. This needn’t just be dockworkers; there’s plenty of difficult, demanding or menial jobs that could be automated, if we didn’t have this misguided sense that everyone has to have a job, no matter how unnecessary it is for a human to be doing it.

I do agree with you that automation should be the end-goal, though. We just need a better system to support anyone whose jobs are made redundant by it.

This is really frustrating. Not because there’s possibly another strike coming up (which I fully support their right to plan), but because automation of a dangerous, labor-intensive and manual industry, which should be something that benefits us all, has to be a point of contention like this. That we have to fight against what should be progress, because progress benefits only a select group of already-rich individuals and means loss of jobs and income for everyone else. It’s fucking disgusting.

At least while I was going to school there, my high school’s football team never won a single game.

It sounds like he’s a legitimate danger to others on the road. I wouldn’t let that go unreported. Think about it like this: If you do nothing, and then later read that he hit someone and hurt or killed them, will you feel guilty about not saying anything?

Criminal criminal defense lawyer. If you suspect you might be victimized by one, you can hire a criminal criminal defense defense lawyer to protect you.

Maybe it’s just for the catharsis.

The only downside is that the participants need to be familiar enough with their chosen game to do a randomizer which means roping in casual players is difficult.

Casual players can be fine with some games. Some actually become easier with Archipelago (e.g. Noita, Risk of Rain 2) since you’re getting meta-progression between runs that normally wouldn’t be there. Others though are especially punishing for new players (Doom comes to mind - you have to be pretty intimately familiar with the levels. There’s keys hidden in secret areas sometimes, for example, and ammo can be very scarce.)

Augusta, Maine. They have one actual city in the state. It isn’t Augusta, it’s Portland. However, Portland wasn’t central enough, so Augusta got the crown. Being centrally located is its only noteworthy feature.

If his lashing starts to threaten Republicans, they might consider ousting him before he can start doing things they consider to be real damage. We can hope.

If the DNC was thinking ahead even the slightest bit, they’d be planning to do everything they can to publicize the impact Trump’s policies are having in real-time. Getting messaging out to everyone who is negatively impacted every time Trump does something, making sure they understand exactly what is happening, and why, would be a lot more effective than their usual strategy of doing nothing until a few months before an election then trying to convince people who’ve been told for years that democrats are the devil that Trump has been hurting them.

Contact these people personally. “Hi - Trump’s policies mean you will no longer be covered by the ACA; here’s some information on other, far worse and more expensive, insurance options. This is how much this is likely to cost you. Please contact your representative if you find this to be distressing.”

I like this, because it can be seen as either a left-wing or right-wing meme depending on the reader’s views. Firmly in the 'Fuck ‘em’ crowd, myself.

Every time I see this, I can’t help but feel like it works better without the third panel. Showing it happening dulls the comedic impact of the final panel. Anyone who doesn’t know what Kirby is about isn’t going to understand the comic anyway, and anyone who does doesn’t need the third panel to understand what happened.

And really, they’ve never been easier, with the advent of gaming laptops and the Steam Deck and etc. - no more having to lug a desktop PC, mouse, keyboard, CRT monitor, and a box of cables and find room in your friend’s garage to set it up.

Did you read the article?

The protesters yelled slogans including “Free, free Palestine.”

If they had been chanting ‘Stop the Genocide!’, then I’d agree with you - it would have been an anti-genocide protest. But they weren’t; they were chanting pro-palestinian slogans, so calling it anything other than a ‘Pro Palestine’ demonstration would have been misrepresenting the situation.

I don’t know where you get the takeaway that they’re talking about you, or that you are in any way involved in what happened here, unless you were specifically there. This isn’t about you, or any other anti-genocide protest; this is about a very specific, pro-Palestine protest.

I was talking about what they’re calling me

What? Are you in the wrong thread?

Not that he should, but it’d be a power move if Biden immediately pardoned everyone involved in the attempted assassinations against Trump. Send a message.

Edit: I want to be super clear that I’m not advocating for this. Once that door is opened, there’s no closing it again, and it’d be basically the worst possible outcome of all of this. It was in jest. Do not actually support this.

It’s assumed that you already have a pear tree; the partridges are just being installed into your pre-existing tree. Don’t be greedy. Mature fruit trees are expensive.