Because part of the right-wing rise in Europe is caused by foreign influences of authoritarian states like Russia and China in order to destabilize democracies by divide and conquer strategies and to validate their oppressive governments. Higher living standards for normal people in their own or other countries are a threat to their power.

I am sort of in the same boat, because the game gradually unlocks improved recipes, I end up rebuilding and rebuilding the factory over and over.

Going vertically doesn’t really help, you have to re-plan and rebuild the layout every time some new technology unlocks. And (re)building in first person perspective, is rather fiddly. I doesn’t help when better tools are only available in later tiers, when I get fed up rebuilding the factory over and over before I even reach it.

I am fine with iterating over designs, but I get fed up when I cannot create a modular design, change it once and update all instances of that design in on go. Instead I have to manually rebuild everything.

ShapeZ 2 also has a similar problem, but they at least offer copy&paste early in game.

For Satisfactory I am waiting for mods to hopefully make factory building less cumbersome.

I would prefer if Satisfactory would focus more on designing new factory modules and optimizing, scaling up existing ones. So a first milestone would be, create 30 iron plates per minute, next 30 iron plates/min and 30 iron rods/minute, then both of those and copper wires 30/minute. The maybe 120 plates, 30 rods and 30 wires, and so on and so forth. That way the player doesn’t remove their factories, just and new ones or optimize/scale up existing ones. Together with a way to create, modify and instantiate blueprints, organized in a library, the boring and fiddly/gridy stuff of (re)building the factory is lessened. Also avoiding copy and pasting factories, by creating sub-designs and instantiating them would be great.

I think you misunderstood, after 6 weeks Telsa doesn’t need to pay anything, the state ensurance pays them 70% of their wage.

BTW, thank you for this discussion!

The crux of the matter for me is the question wherever “the selection process” alone is enough to create art or not, and depending on my mood I fall to one side or another on that question. Not specifically if it is under copyright or not, because that sort of follows from that.

Artists often use randomness in various parts of their creation process, what is really required is the human element. Is a picture of a cloud, that speaks to the photographer in some way art or just a picture of a random cloud?

I guess this has to be decided on a case by case basis, therefore I cannot completely exclude it.

Yes, and you have copyright on the photo - not the layout of the plants and trees in it, nor even the angle of the subject. Someone else can go with a camera and take their own photo without touching your copyright.

A work is original if it is independently created and is sufficiently creative. Creativity in photography can be found in a variety of ways and reflect the photographer’s artistic choices like the angle and position of subject(s) in the photograph, lighting, and timing. As a copyright owner, you have the right to make, sell or otherwise distribute copies, adapt the work, and publicly display your work.

https://www.copyright.gov/engage/photographers/

So if someone intentionally reproduces a picture, they violate copyright, IIUC.

In the case of minecraft, I think a case can be made, where the “picture” is the minecraft world, and the creativity is the selection process by the artist. The artist chooses their angle, position, lighting, etc, in this case they choose properties of the world, maybe by visiting thousands of them, using seed search machines, or other reverse engineering tools etc.

I all depends on if the artist can raise their work above just the random noise they get as an input in a creative way. I am not saying that all minecraft worlds (or save games for that matter) are subject to copyright, but since we are dealing with blurry lines of copyright, it is possible.

IANAL, but I think if I would look into case law, I would find examples for both options, in some cases the “selection process” was enough to demonstrate creativity, and in other cases it wasn’t.

You are correct it isn’t about the numbers, it is about the artistic and creative product that is copyrightable, which, in case of digital art, is represented as numbers, and distribution of those might be punished by law.

I am just saying that digital art can be more that just still or moving pictures and sound. It can be a world space the artist prepared for you where you can move around.

About the section on the law, I would read it just as stating what is covered under copyright, and not what isn’t. I also just mentioned what original work is, not describing derived work.

Nature is often random and unpredictable, but the process of selecting a interesting POV and taking a picture of it is still copyrightable.

I wouldn’t be so sure that if you discover a seed, that can be transformed using minecraft into a world with very interesting and specific properties, could not be under copyright protection.

In fact movies, pictures and books are specific numbers on a digital storage medium as well, that are transformed using a codec. That isn’t something that can be easily replicated without that codec.

I am not a copyright lawyer, but I think there are precedences where just the selection process from a stream of (semi-) random number, pictures, sound or events alone can produce copyrightable products.

I meant minecraft world file which stores the chunks the player explored and potentially modified. And I said “could” not “must”, it depends on if hits a certain creative threshold.

If the player decides to teleport around while creating a dickbud or whatever by just the explored chunks, that could meet it.

If someone selectivly openes quests to use the open quest markers on a map in an RPG to create a dickbud, that cloud meet it as well.

The save game could tell your individual story through the game, that cloud meet the threshold as well.

Also, because the unmodified minecraft world is randomly generated, it would not be under anyones copyright.

With AI, there could also be made an argument that the selection process might make it copyrightable. Like if you take a picture of a interesting looking cloud. The clouds might be semi-random, but you selecting a specific one reaches the threshold.

Well, I think both are human creation, you are using the machine and the game to create something new. In that sense, a save game file could also be under the players copyright. Lets say a Minecraft world for instance.

When the current copyright comes from books, wouldn’t plugins or transient changes/cheats be like taking side notes with a pencil on their individual copy?

Are side notes and annotations copyright infringements?

I would love to see them argue that taking snarky side notes, which change the tone of their words, is copyright infringement.

Who was that developer? Where are those numbers from? Any sources?

I remember ~9 years ago the Blizzard CEO said this: “[…] I would assume most of those people also have access to a Windows or Mac device capable of playing Blizzard games.” https://www.change.org/p/blizzard-entertainment-support-please-release-native-linux-clients/u/9982826

Which is pretty disrespectful, but just one part of these arguments.

If a game offers multiplayer, they should also offer a dedicated server that people can setup for themselves.

For MMOs, they can make the servers optionally federated.

Yes they are, UX designers are not asked to make more efficient or usable designs, they are asked to make designs that “look good” in marketing, support ad integration, hook people into others services provided by that same company, make it more difficult to incorporate with workflows that include third-party applications, etc.

This is deliberate UX design, which is part of the enshittification process.

People spend lots of money to buy big screens, only for apps/websites to use a fraction of it.

I cannot control how every application or website I have to use looks, but where I can, I try to find solutions.

When I am occasionally on reddit, I use old.reddit. I use addons for youtube, to remove unecessary stuff, or open videos directly in mpv.

I use reader mode to make many sites easier to navigate.

Mastodon and Lemmy have a much better design than Twitter or new Reddit.

On the one windows machine I still have, I use the classic shell, to replace the start menu with something more usable.

I use Libreoffice, and many other Software with sane functional UI.

I don’t want to use old software, because the older software gets, the more hostile the environment becomes for it.

A lot of UI decisions on the Internet seem driven by the need to create empty spaces to put advertising into, and with adblocker it looks just bad.

Sure it isn’t a good system, but it is the one we have. And if you have concrete improvement ideas, it would be interesting to hear.

I mean, where ever we set the age limit for instance voting to 14, some 10 or 9 year old will feel disenfranchised. We could remove it completely and let toddlers vote. What would the consequences of that be? I have no idea!

The reason is to protect the physically or mentally weak from the strong while also having rules that are easy to follow and to enforce, that don’t require psyche exams, which depend on the examiner.

Age might not be a good metric of evaluating maturity, but it is the best and most practically useful we have. (I use “maturity” here as having reached certain physically and mental level where they can operate, think and decide independent, and the risk of being manipulated is low.)

Because age is not a good metric, that means that we have false positives and false negatives on a maturity tests based on age, which we need to balance. And I would rather have more false negatives (wrongly ascertained immaturity) than false positives (wrongly ascertained maturity).

If someone comes up with a better and still practical maturity test, that would be interesting. “Solutions” like every citizen has to do a yearly physical and mental exam in order to keep their rights as an adult, seem much to harsh and easily manipulatable. Especially around blurry lines like disabilities.

Wherever certain thing needs a maturity test or not and where that should be, I cannot say. Just if the age limit is too high, then mental decline will raise the false positives, which would be bad as well.

The achievement enabling is part of the script extender

Personally, New Atlantis deserves a side-quest where you either start a revolt together with the people from the the well to take on the bourgeoisie government (which might end up creating a fascist state), or change the system electorally, establish unions, social security and public healthcare, with its own risks. Or even play the part of a populist, or help one to take over the government. The “liberal utopia” in New Atlantis is just not a stable system, there would be too much disgruntled people. Being part of change here, would be very interesting.

But that would take too much courage from Bethesda. No, I have to support my parents there, because the government doesn’t care for their people.

I do hope so. However that also means that the base game needs to have a good base experience for people like to get back into it.

Personally I really like Starfield for what it is. I think it is a unique mix of RPG and space sim. I am not a big fan of pure sandbox games, and other space sims with quests often felt doing impersonal jobs. In Starfield you meet people and learn their individual story and can help them, etc. Which is just not something I have seen before in a space game. (Mass Effect is maybe the closest, but that isn’t really a open world space sim game)

Of course the game could be better. One of their error was relying on procedural content generation, which is often bleak, uninteresting and unexpiring. Also the main city, New Atlantis, is just too clean, too huge and very bland. It doesn’t look like it was build for people. It got a very MMO feeling to it. It looks like megalomaniacs build it, but that isn’t really addressed in game. Other cities/locations are better. But the political of societal critique, which is normal for the Sci-Fi genre, is missing or not apparent enough. The devs where IMO not bold enough there, to make a clear statement.

So IMO there is a lot to do for modders, we will see if enough of them are interested in fixing that game.

Yes, but not with an unmodified toolkit, which opens levels as read-only, and disallows creating new levels. But there is a patch for the toolkit on nexusmods which unlocks the toolkit and makes the map editor and other stuff available. If you know what you are doing, you should be able to edit the main campaign or make your own.

I played around with it a bit, and all I can say, its complicated.

Right, they saying “We are just following the law.” as if that was an apolitical statement. While they still get to choose whom laws to follow by deciding where to make business, which are political decisions.

As you see with Twitter or starlink, they decided to be do business in Brazil, but when the country actually have laws against uncontrolled mass propaganda and hate speech, they are suddenly against the law, and do not try to stop or limit doing their business there, when they do not want or can’t abide by these laws.