I’m your average nerd. You can feed me sci-fi/fantasy book recommendations and I won’t hate you for it.
In return, I can post some music recommendations (mostly synthwave, dreamwave, ambient and some avant-garde type post-everything metal).
Occasionally I’ll write something about music, Linux, gaming or all three.
We’ve had a comparable system to Wero in Switzerland for about a decade (called Twint) and the conglomerate who owns it already signaled they would enable cross-payment with Wero if Wero is interested, so I wouldn’t rule out that it grows beyond the EU. Nothing concrete has been agreed so far, though, at least not publicly.
Cool, I’m sure the sables are thrilled to be tortured and killed again in higher numbers.
I might go back to Sekiro but for some reason the first few bosses pissed me off so much more than anything I encountered in DS or Nioh, and I’m not good at parrying. It’s like trying to go back to Mega Man on NES, I just can’t, two bosses in and I’m twisting the controller unil it creaks :)
I did try Sekiro three times in total so far so it could still work. It took a while for DS to click, too. Demon’s Souls lost me at Flamelurker, though, not doing that again (tried a new playthrough from scratch at least five times over the years).
Pretty much the same, I went DS2, then DS1R, then DS2:SotFS and then DS3. I don’t normally enjoy replaying games but SotFS was fine because enough had changed.
Still can’t get into Sekiro or Elden Ring, but I did finish Nioh and I’m sure Nioh 3 will be nice in a year or so when all the expansions have dropped.
I’m guilty too and I let (mostly local or hydro/solar-powered) LLMs write utility scripts for me, but I’m fully aware of the illegal way they’ve been put together and I wouldn’t use them to make a product I sell, that would feel unethical.
I hope one day someone makes a model that is trained on e.g. only GPL, MIT or BSD-licensed code that gives full attribution to the generated output, and one that uses only Creative Commons art that is cleared for remixing, for example. And then there’s the huge corpus of public domain texts you can use for general text analysis. It’s not that these things aren’t available, just that the commercial incentive (those billionaires, eh) is stronger to simply steal everything and ignore any licensing or laws.
All this can be done ethically and with small environmental impact, the fact that they choose not to do it in order to chase power and profit is the most offensive part.
I can’t speak for everyone who downvoted, but maybe allow me to share a viewpoint.
Some see the use of generative AI as simply stealing other people’s hard-earned craft and talent (for the generated art) and programming skills, without even so much as credit or visibility. Plus setting the planet on fire for it, using up precious non-renewable resources, draining aquifers, endangering jobs etc. while making billionaires richer and more powerful and taking away the means of production from the common folk. Who will have to pay the powerful for compute time because they’ve deskilled so much they can’t put together a gallery shooter game themselves anymore.
Not trying to troll or flame or anything, but what’s a good tool for some is all those bad things for others. That’s why any use of it gets such a negative reaction, especially in the fediverse.
I’m curious too, especially because this in effect means it relies on US technology and services. If the US government were to cut off Master Card and Visa and then presses the off switch on those app stores or Google Play Services for Europe, you’re not going to be able to pay, whether it’s through Wero or through a US-run credit/debit card.
We have the same problem in Switzerland, we’ve had something like Wero for a decade (it’s called Twint) but the damn thing runs on Google Cloud Platform and is an app that’s exclusive to iOS and Android.