If we don't get a section 230 for payment processors we're looking at serious consequences for 1A because everything will be a civil suit away from getting blacklisted. Economist reported that adult performers are having trouble keeping bank accounts open -- as soon as a bank or payment processor finds out it's porn-related it gets nuked. Now that this is established practice, what's going to happen when Visa/MC gets sued for handling payments to do with disagreeable political speech? Our right to freedom of speech is currently only as strong as what Visa/MC are willing to defend in court, or you'd better be willing to live without any access to the banking system -- even if you're a gazillionaire who doesn't have to work, you've got to keep your money somewhere (and satisfy KYC).
Even if somebody thinks certain speech should be censored, I doubt they'd want what they consider unsavory speech being driven to use a payment system like Bitcoin, and for that to become the norm, it would open up much more potential for abuse.
I think they would be far more likely to support a gun exception than a general “no moralizing” rule.
They seem totally fine with the age checks many states are enacting for porn sites. The Republican Party loves slagging pedophiles (real or imagined) and hating on LGBTQIA+ people or trying to make their lives as difficult/horrible as possible.
Yeah some games delisted were horrible. One of the main offenders had already been pulled as soon as Steam (or was it Itch) was notified. But they still used it as evidence. The platforms were policing themselves well.
But not only did gratuitous porn games and abuse games get delisted, lots of games on related to inclusiveness of LGBTQIA+ did too from what I’m seeing from developers on social media.
I suspect if anything the administration would be happy to let people use this as yet another hammer in their culture war against such people existing.
Because one of the goals of project 2025 is to make porn illegal.
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
Bonus: it also aims to eliminate sex ed.
eliminate central promotion of abortion; comprehensive
sexuality education; and the new woke gender ideology
So they want to not have women abort children, but also not have them aware of how their bodies and sex works. Surely not a formula for a dysfunctional future generation.
It’s not a contradiction at all, they want women to get knocked up as early as possible because (the thought is) that makes them easier to control. That’s what all this “tradwife” propaganda is about.
That they really want is to eliminate any sort of ground truth so that whoever holds the power can resolve related issues by fiat. Less policy, more kissing the ring and such.
This way, abusers can disagree about what constitutes abuse in private, but can form a bloc in public, unifying around the common ground that the boss's whims should be respected in matters where the bandying about of facts is taboo. Might makes right, etc.
Most of the people I've seen advocating for this kind of pressure, for the purpose of suppressing this sort of content in video games, would describe themselves as very much the opposite of "conservative". But perhaps it's for the better that they are recognized as such. Because it really is a conservative instinct, no matter what American party politics might currently be dictating.
If it’s not a credit card, it’s what debit? Different countries do it differently, so that’s a big hassle for the storefront. Sure you can use a payment processor, but look it’s someone to pressure to prevent you from taking money again.
Maybe Crypto? How do people buy that crypto? Probably want to use credit cards. Oops. Or debit. See above. How do you turn your crypto into currency to pay your employees? That’s an institution to pressure to block you again.
If your new system interacts with the old system at all there is an attack point. So unless you can bootstrap an entire alternate financial system where people can live without needing to access the old one you’re in trouble.
And if you do succeed, the law and the same groups will come knocking.
You can’t get away from the banking system. The only solution to this is regulation, and I don’t see that happening.
> If your new system interacts with the old system at all there is an attack point.
Yes but no. Currently the issue is that these two payment systems - both credit/debit card networks - (1) have the power to decide with impunity, because they have critical mass. And (2) have visibility into who each vendor is and what they are selling. If there is one case of abusing market dominance, this is it - and for all we frequently hear, this is REALLY not all that common. (And it's "funny" that we hear a lot about Apple's app store - but not about their anti-adult content rules!)
For example, right now a bank would have a VERY hard time preventing you from paying for $OBJECTIONABLE_CONTENT with crypto. That bank would have no visibility into who you are paying with that crypto. There are other crypto intermediaries but they are "diffuse". Nobody in there has both visibility and power.
For example, right now some vendors accept gift cards as payment. Buy a Home Depot gift card in cash at your local store and use it to pay for $OBJECTIONABLE_CONTENT. Obviously this is not a very efficient payment infrastructure but it exists.
But yes of course, imposing to credit card networks to be content-blind would be helpful and soooo much more efficient.
It's hard for the big companies which want to stay big - and so feel that they can't live without credit cards. But indeed that's not an issue for newcomers.
The problem with alternatives to things like OnlyFans is that the performers who work through OnlyFans want to go where people can find them. They can dumb down their acts - and have lots of paying traffic, or they can do what they would prefer - and have hardly any paying traffic. That's tough.
>These conservative groups aren't pressuring Steam and Itch directly
Pretty soon (in the U.S.) all porn and sexual-adjacent content is going to be illegal. The christo-fascists currently in power said they were going to do it, and they will.
> I don't think it's realistically viable to compete with Steam (or Itch) without access to Mastercard and Visa.
They could not allow those games to be sold through those particular payment processors and require wire transfers instead. More cumbersome payment method, but better than outright banning them.
If the payment processors try to dictate what content these sites may host even when it involves competing processors that sounds quite anti-competitive practice.
The impression I get is allowing them to be purchased at all is grounds for the payment processor to suspend their account. So this solution is a no-go.
Probably the only way around it is to spin up a completely different corporate entity which only allows for payments via wire transfer, ACH, or perhaps some of the various payment apps available.
Like I said, that smell like anti-competitive behavior. It basically means the payment processor denies competitors a business opportunity for cases they don't want to service.
Just get people to mail you cash. Sounds stupid, but that’s how I built my first ecommerce business in the 90’s, and it was a pretty normal way to pay for stuff online. Cash, money order, bank cheque, whatever.
> Bezos: We got an order from somebody in Bulgaria, and this person sent us cash through the mail to pay for their order. And they sent us two crisp $100 bills. And they put these two $100 bills inside a floppy disk. And then they put a note on the cover of the floppy disk, and they mailed this whole thing to us. And the note on the cover of the floppy disk said, "The money is inside the floppy disk. The customs inspectors steal the money, but they don't read English." That shows you the effort to which people will go to be able to buy things.
You can’t realistically target anyone inside the US with it either. USPS is allowed to seize cash in packages if it believes it’s being used for illegal purposes.
They're not "targeting" payment processors. Payment processors have to deal with significantly more problems due to the nature of porn games and chargebacks. Fix those problems and the payment processors won't have a reason anymore to ban porn (or anything). What's the point of a capitalist economy if not for startups to target market needs like these?
> Payment processors have to deal with significantly more problems due to the nature of porn games and chargebacks.
This is commonly repeated, but doesn't hold up. Chargeback fees (especially for card-not-present transactions) are paid by the merchant and are simply increased (with reserves required) for high-risk accounts. It also wouldn't make sense to target hyper-specific niches if it were really about chargebacks, they would go after all of it, and go after things like the CS marketplace.
But the biggest giveaway IMO is that they do not allow, e.g., Steam selling these games crypto-only. It's either remove them entirely or remove credit cards entirely. If it was really about specific titles having high fraud/chargeback rates, selling them some other way would be fine.
Maybe a silly idea, but here’s a solution to prevent financial censorship: make the game free. Or monetize via another way—ads, subscriptions, credits. There’s actually a lot of options for Steam if they aren’t being pressured directly to remove the content.
> if they aren’t being pressured directly to remove the content.
The problem is that they aren't being told "we won't let people buy this through us", they're told "this needs to go entirely or no more credit cards for you".
Fair enough - so in reality they _are_ being pressured directly to remove the content and it has nothing to do with selling the products. A slippery slope indeed!
Most of the games that have been deindexed on itch.io and some of the ones that were banned/removed were free or Pay-What-You-Want/Donation-Ware (some even via Patreon or SubscribeStar rather than itch.io's own payment processing).
The problem isn't just "the Payment Processor doesn't want to support this game" but also "this game shows Guilt-By-Association that your platform's money might go to 'criminals' or 'sinners'."
Guilt-By-Association is real gross, but a large part of the current fight, too, especially looking at itch.io's payment processor-required actions, not just Steam's.
>Or monetize via another way—ads, subscriptions, credits.
All of those are still prone to censorship if the attacking group is motivated enough.
Even crypto, which should be the ideal solution to this problem, is not ideal because most transactions are performed through centralized exchanges which can easily blacklist whatever transactions they want.
I see multiple comments arguing that using a CAD package is only easier and faster if you already know how to use a CAD package, and this is a 'better' UI for people who don't have those skills....but in that scenario, are you not then just trading the fixed upfront time investment to learn the basics of CAD, for ongoing inefficiency and difficulty every time you want to model something?
For a user of a UI like this, there comes a point where their time would have been better spent learning a CAD package.
Another layer is if you are modelling something that has to be machined or built in real life, you have to be keeping an eye on how it will physically exist throughout the entire process, stock it will be machined from or materials it will be built with. Thinking in terms of CAD workflows help with this greatly in my experience. The operations shown in the demo are not only easier to perform in a CAD package than describe in English to an LLM, but also the easiest part of it (except maybe if you are designing strictly for 3D printing)
> For a user of a UI like this, there comes a point where their time would have been better spent learning a CAD package.
for some users, they will think of few enough designs in a lifetime to make learning any specific software worthwhile. For these users, the LLM's inefficiencies are worth the trade-off.
But the thing is, those users are unlikely to have thought of anything novel simply because they are not designers: if the tool is going to be successful then what they want is likely to be in the training set and easily googleable.
This whole idea seems contingent on imagining a situation where a non-CAD user has an idea for a truly novel physical object, has extensive geometry skills, and can describe that object in some magical level of detail that doesn't involve any terms of art from the CAD domain.
It's not a very likely scenario. And the energy put into tools to support this scenario would be better spent improving searchability of the data that is going to go into the training set, and simple tools to allow objects in the training set to be combined (such as those offered by TinkerCad or Microsoft's 3D builder).
It's also prone to the risk that the LLM gets something wrong: makes a part that is prone to failure, or will actually destroy a CNC, or be unprintable by a 3D printer, etc.
> It's also prone to the risk that the LLM gets something wrong: makes a part that is prone to failure, or will actually destroy a CNC, or be unprintable by a 3D printer, etc.
You can destroy 3d printers too... especially if you get the bright idea of generating gcode... and one might reasonably get this idea since so many factors matter like the settings (but can easily result in things like ASA poisoning...)
These users can download plenty of designs for the objects they think of - you don't often create truly unique things, most stuff already exists.
More importantly, creating a 3D model without understanding mechanical properties is a meaningless exercise. Go ahead, ask anybody who has built things about their first attempts - and this approach means they will always be first attempts.
But this is just so dismissive of the whole profession(s)
It's like saying I only want 2 sculptures on my garden so we should make a thing that sculpts like Michelangelo because I don't want to learn to sculpt for only two statues.
This is why we have civilization, trade. We can each specialize, master, one thing, then share our surplus for others'.
Why wouldn't you hire someone who can do it on an hour?
Worth noting that this clause was removed early this year, whats interesting is you can see it under previous terms on the unity site, which indicate it was replace on October 13, 2022, linking to the new terms (that don't have this clause), implying that this clause was removed nearly a year ago...
However, the clause was still in the October 2022 terms, and was still there in March 2023 [2], and was actually removed in April this year...
It's likely just an oversight, but it does feel pretty dishonest in the face of removing the github repo, its the difference between "that clause has been gone for a year" and "that clause was removed less than 6 months ago"
Probably also consider all Google employees complicit. All of them -- especially those who could easily just choose to work someone else, like their developers -- are either in favor of, or okay with, Google's mission to destroy the web.
Can't comment on the bluesky aspect, but you've touched on my frustration with ActivityPub. When people were migrating to Mastodon, I took a look at making a single-user instance that would suit my personal needs and gracefully interact with the wider ecosystem and found that in my case the capabilities of ActivityPub are irrelevant, you are tied to the Mastodon teams choices.
Felt very much like in practice it just gives you tools to make mostly-insular federated apps, rather than letting different apps interact.
Off topic, but I clicked around /g/, which I haven't done in probably more than a decade, and a thread caught my eye about learning to code. The replies were overwhelmingly of the position that it is useless, and you will be replaced by AI before you can get a job if you start learning now.
I think that's nonsense, and 4chan is bent towards pessimism but it's still surprising to me.
/g/ is ridiculously overdramatic (and often offensive, though much less so than the political boards where the nazis fester), but regularly interesting. Agree that the pessimism here is misplaced, but not by much. The main change I see is not that AI will render coding or coders superfluous, but that it will massively shift the economics in favor of solo developers and small teams that don't have access to significant capital.
Yes and no. If you expressed interest in learning to program and were handed a book on x86 assembly language, most people would call that a waste of time. Even if you succeed at learning x86 as your first language, the knowledge will not be especially useful when employers are looking for fluency in modern C++ or Rust or whatever. It never hurts to have a solid grasp of the low-level fundamentals, of course, but it's not the name of the game. Not anymore.
The way I think of it is, all current programming languages are now assembly languages. Coding will not go away -- not by any means -- but the job will be utterly unrecognizable in ten to fifteen years.
And it's about fucking time.
I just picked up a new 13900k / RTX4090 box the other day at the local white-box builder. I was telling my partner how cool it was that it could do almost a trillion calculations per second on the CPU, and maybe 40x that on the graphics card. "How does that compare to the big mainframes from the late 60s?" she asked. "About ten million times faster. But I still program the same way those guys did, using almost the same language and tools. How weird is that?"
I reckon that the format of the site caps how large of a community it could build, and its (well-earned) reputation for being the dregs of the internet has continuously selected and pushed new people meeting that description in (forcing others out). The result is distillation. As the internet gets bigger and bigger, 4chan gets worse and worse.
Combine with that the fact that anonymity combined with a relatively small community (relative to, say, Reddit) creates the perfect grounds for false consensus building, and a real echo chamber forms.
I don't think it's realistically viable to compete with Steam (or Itch) without access to Mastercard and Visa.
(For anyone thinking crypto: we have a different idea of what it means to be either "realistically viable" or to "compete with Steam")