but the key point is the contact with advertising customers, i.e., companies that want to engage in social media marketing. These contacts are only accessible to private individuals if they already have one or multiple successful accounts, which unfortunately only very few of those aspiring to a professional career in this field ever achieve.

I get the impression that you also generally have to already have a successful account to be considered by agencies, which would defeat the point somewhat of it being a way to get over the initial hurdle. I watch vtubers on Twitch and from what they sometimes say about how sponsorships work, much of it is somewhat automated and gated mainly by account popularity metrics, which makes sense because why would advertisers want to pay a premium to another middleman if they didn’t have to? There was a vtuber agency that collapsed recently when it came out that they were insolvent and had been defrauding many people they worked with along with various other corruption and abuse, and given how similar scandals aren’t uncommon and the need for creators to be doing the work of building themselves up as a business regardless, makes it seem like a pretty bad deal to have an all inclusive sort of contract with agencies.

from whom influential financiers can choose the content and the faces to go with it and pocket the lion’s share.

How? This kind of doesn’t make sense to me because it seems like some kind of talent manager wouldn’t have a lot to offer in terms of actually increasing someone’s chances of making it big on social media, if it’s a type of content that doesn’t require any special resources to produce and is suited to being made by one person.

Props to this article for actually attempting to explain about how 3d graphics worked

Yeah, I estimated the number of websites on that list and it’s around 100k

This does seem in poor taste by Polymarket, it looks like things to bet on are suggested by users but actually put on the site by the company itself. They should probably have a rule against bets that incentivize breaking the law this directly.

Doesn’t gmail already do this? I seem to remember there being ‘suggested response’ options before I turned it off in the settings that were definitely AI generated. That option being presented to me creeps me out because you can’t know if what you’re receiving was actually written by the person sending it.

You get a pet, which is supposed to be a companion and basically part of your family, and you don’t mind them being torn to shreds?

This is a fair way to feel about it, but if the question is only what is done with a body after it has been euthanized it seems more like a cultural consideration than an ethical one. Like there are cultures with strong feelings about treatment of human corpses to the point where organ donation is taboo, but that doesn’t mean being ok with family members being organ donors is some awful thing.

There’s a larger question about how pets and other animals are treated, and the thought of someone euthanizing a healthy pet for petty reasons is really disturbing (like stories you sometimes hear about this being done as a way to emotionally abuse someone), but that isn’t exactly the fault of the zoo or its practices.

If you have a terminal illness they won’t take you as they only want “healthy animals”.

The precedent setting supreme court ruling I’m thinking of is very recent, and there are other recent significant changes to law that could also be relevant. My guess is that the phone calls didn’t make the difference on their own, but rather prompted internal conversations about legal liability given the new landscape and how they should be handling it to best avoid potential damages.

Or if there is any possible ambiguity in the law. I’m thinking it’s possible this has something to do with the recent weakening of constitutional protections for adult content in the US, where censorship by states of somewhat arbitrarily “obscene” content can be deemed illegal. The quote in the article by Valve seems to reference the concept of offensiveness in Mastercard’s policies:

Payment processors rejected this, and specifically cited Mastercard’s Rule 5.12.7 and risk to the Mastercard brand. See https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/public/mastercardcom/na/global-site/documents/mastercard-rules.pdf.

the rule including the text:

2. The sale of a product or service, including an image, which is patently offensive and lacks serious artistic value (such as, by way of example and not limitation, images of nonconsensual sexual behavior, sexual exploitation of a minor, nonconsensual mutilation of a person or body part, and bestiality), or any other material that the Corporation deems unacceptable to sell in connection with a Mark.

So what I’m reading between the lines here is, there is now doubt among the lawyers of credit card companies or the lawyers of their middlemen that these games are for sure legal, and not in violation of obscenity laws that rely on hazy standards of offensiveness.

Competing for grades is so dumb, really glad to have school far behind me

Maybe he was talking about the Canadian border, that’s the one adjacent to Vermont

can fly through double-paned glass

um, how

Also I wonder how long it will take before this tech gets used for situations other than mass murder events

various forms of explicitly engineered right wing political propaganda last I checked

Any ideas for that? My main thought is to further develop technology for the anonymous web and get people using it, although probably some form of overtly political activism is also needed

If these types of laws keep coming there might be a lot of legal liability for running instances of things

I bet they will keep making movies after we’re gone

Kind of inevitable when automated moderation becomes the norm

Sorry, this post has been removed by the moderators of r/Steam.

Hmmm

I wonder if the real reason credit card companies have been responsive to these groups is the potential for lawsuits that drag payment processors into them, which is a result of various shitty laws that have been passed to generally empower these sorts of regressive trolls to do so. If so petitions from the other side might not be as effective, because they can be sued for providing services to the wrong people but not so much for cutting off service, and there’s not much actual risk to them even if a lot of people are mad about the latter.