Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4d ago
Because characters in fiction aren't real? The thing that is bad about CSAM is the part where a person was abused to make it. There's no equivalent in fiction.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4d ago
This is in reference to the production of fiction.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4d ago
Perhaps some useful additional context: ShiftUp are also the developers of the gacha game Goddess of Victory: Nikke and that game has characters that I think could be argued are both children and sexualized. For example Alice or Liter.
On the main topic: I don't think it matters at all whether Evie looks particularly childlike or is particularly sexualized. She's not a real person and so her depiction and sexualization fail to have any of the features that make it bad when it's done to a real person. For any kind of depiction or action beyond a sexualized one I think most people understand this latter fact intuitively.
If you, as an individual, are aroused by a sexualized depiction of a minor then you may want to seek help from an appropriate therapist. But declaring, preemptively, that it is immoral to create fictionalized depictions because they might arouse pedophiles is insane.
A Tumblr post, amusingly, gets this right:
"I don't want to read this" is totally valid.
"This is disgusting to me" is totally valid.
"I don't want to read this because it is disgusting to me" is totally valid.
"I don't think anyone should be allowed to read or write this because it is disgusting to me" is authoritarian.
I've only quoted the top post for brevity but the whole thread I've linked is good, IMO.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
23d ago
At the very least you would think they would cut off trading in the market at the end date. The impression I get is a lot of people are mad because they traded after the 8-K came out and therefore regarded the bet as a sure thing. Same for the "clarification." Why allow people to continue to trade after either of these events?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
24d ago
Are prediction markets still culture war? I bring this up because there's been some... controversy surrounding Polymarket and its resolution of a bet earlier this week. The market in question is this one regarding whether Microstrategy will sell any Bitcoins by a certain date. In particular I want to draw your attention to the recently resolved sub-market for May 31st. If you expand the history of the market you'll notice some very odd behavior for the odds. On June 1st, after the deadline for the sale had passed, the odds briefly spike up over 56% before crashing to essentially 0. Why did people become so convinced that Microstrategy had sold bitcoin in the window? And then why did people become so convinced that Microstrategy hadn't?
They might have been convinced in the first place because on June 1st Microstrategy published their 8-K which said they had sold 32 Bitcoin between May 26th and May 31st. That seems like a good reason to believe that Microstrategy had sold bitcoin before May 31st! Unless you thought their 8-K was a lie. It seems like it was a mistake to let people trade after it was public information which way the bet would resolve, but that's what happened.
Then why did the odds crash back down to near 0? Well, on June 1st the market was updated to add this disclaimer:
No information from MSTR, on-chain data, or consensus of credible reporting confirmed that MicroStrategy sold Bitcoin within the market's timeframe.
Confirmation achieved outside of the market's time frame does not qualify.
We’re aware of the dispute on this market. If a clarification is to be issued, it will be at 1:00 PM ET on June 1. If no statement is issued at that time, then there will be no clarification by the Polymarket team. The orderbook will be cleared at 1:00 PM ET, regardless of whether a clarification is made.
It's true that in reality Microstrategy did sell bitcoin before May 31st. A bunch of people did correctly predict that. But the market pays out to people who made a false prediction because the evidence that Microstrategy sold bitcoin didn't come out until the day after the deadline!
This isn't the first time a prediction market has had some controversy over how they resolved a market. Kalshi had a similar scandal earlier this year concerning its resolution of a market on whether Ali Khamenei would remain in power in Iran. This ones feel pretty blatant as a resolution for certain polymarket insiders who control how markets resolve via crypto vote, though.
There's often an assumption that prediction market odds track some kind of real probability of an event (predicetion markets themselves certainly lean into this) and that therefore their resolutions will track reality. I think this is a reminder that this is less true than we might suppose.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
27d ago
I have no love for the United States' copyright and IP regime but, as a developer of enterprise software myself, I have a lot of sympathy for the developers I suppose. Unless you have planned from the beginning for the idea that your game should be runnable without access to a server or that your server must be runnable on random consumer hardware I can see why it would be pretty difficult to backport that capability. Thinking in terms of my own product, you would need to replicate an extremely specific network and storage topology to get my software running and releasing a version of our software where you didn't have to do this might as well be asking us to rewrite the software from scratch. I don't know what the internals of various gaming company servers look like, of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were similar. Especially in our modern era of cloud computing.
Egregious example: Microsoft plans to remotely disable Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac. To be clear, this software was a one-time purchase and works completely offline, Microsoft even explicitly stated at one point it would continue to function. I can't even play devil's advocate.
I am not sure this framing is quite correct. It sounds like Office 2019 for Mac shipped with a local certificate that does the verification of license keys. Microsoft has renewed that certificate but distributing the renewed certificate still requires an update to the software containing the certificate. Microsoft isn't releasing an update for Office 2019 since it has been out of support for 3 years. If they no longer have the source code this may be very difficult to do. They should not have made representations that it would work in perpetuity knowing this limitation.
California's Protect our Games act. Passed the state assembly (not yet law). It requires publishers to post a notice 60 days before shutting down their game, and provide some offline functionality or refunds, although it doesn't apply to subscription games (and may have other exceptions). Backed by Stop Killing Games.
I find it funny that this law seems like it could easily be more punitive to companies I think are much more pro-consumer than those that are anti-consumer, due to the subscription carve-out. Expect to see a bunch of companies add a $1/year subscription to their games to exempt themselves from California's law!
There is a whole sub-genre of this stuff of the form "character who is clearly meant to be a child but with large breasts."
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