The system is ancient and built for a time when floppy disks were common. Notably, they're still used to load weather data into the system.

Such systems do not expect modern volumes of data transport, nor are they built to handle it.

"But this fairly modern threat isn't handled well by this ancient system". Indeed. But updating such systems requires functioning bureaucracy, that isn't devoured by corruption on one side, and by ideology that views competence as the greatest evil that exists on the other.

It's in fact one of the greatest achievements of US that it can run with this level of dysfunction and remain clear #1 in the world in most productive aspects, including adoption of commercial aviation.

If anything, I downplayed the reality. It's actually much worse than this, as evidenced by the fact that those books are data points on a graph, and the trend has been going in a specific direction for a while.

So it's not so much the spectrum as it is the trend. And it's going more extreme.

Also, fun part. A few years ago they started publishing male literature in the same vein. Of course for men, that sort of wish fulfillment is "man becomes very powerful, gets a harem of women falling all over him as he solves their problems with this power, with women not engaging in brutal competition with each other, instead bickering like a bunch of guys in a friend group". The equally delusional male dream.

Its popularity is but a tiny fraction of the women's relevant literature, because men are visual. Our porn is pictures, video, etc. Women are conceptual, so their porn is literary.

And just as male porn has been getting more and more carefully curated to specifics of ultimate male fantasy utterly incompatible with reality, same has been happening on female side. So milking farm is actually pretty tame compared to most of that particular side of the spectrum. Just visit those massive female romantasy reddits, and you'll find books that sell hundreds of thousands to millions of copies that make being a prostitute jerking minotaurs off for money only to have a Pretty Woman style relationship with that punter look like a wholesome 1950s family picnic.

I like how instead of addressing any of the points you're protesting, you instead decide to argue semantics.

Likely because you understand that you can't debate reality, you can only play semantics games to pretend to not understand reality as you do.

Your average female romance:

"He vampired billionairely across the room, his sweetly-softcore rapey vibes engulfed her small feminine self-inserty hair, she looked exactly like [you, the girl reading this], and he was very vampirey and mysterious..."

As seen in the standard spectrum of female romance books, ranging from 50 shades of gray to morning glory milking farm.

Puritans remain shocked, SHOCKED at this being mirrored by their behavior in reality. It must be something that the evil man did. It couldn't possibly be the universal female dream. All those 50 shades of gray sales were obviously some kind of a fascist psy op or something. They must be, or else you'd have to admit to being wrong about basic human nature!

Wait until you find out large plurality of who admits to wanting to be chocked during sex, vs who's massive majority doesn't want to choke women during sex. It will shock, SHOCK you again.

And then you'll continue believing what you believe, and not be moved on bit. Because "it's the current year" after all, and basic human biological impulses surely no longer apply.

Surely?!

Also, male power is the sexiest thing there is. See: female romance books.

But puritans are shocked. SHOCKED.

If you think steam is free for developers while unreal isn't, you should try selling things on steam.

You'll realize that steam is about as "free" as "unreal". As in, not at all.

I was looking for comparisons to other historic whores tanking great men.

Ironically, the GOAT in this female dominated field, like in all other fields is a man. His actions led to destruction of a massive nation.

Much more interesting thing to do math on:

Is this woman the most expensive prostitute in human history?

You should argue this in courts. They consistently found otherwise.

The sole exception is the curious case where generative AI was intentionally prompted by a different AI. I.e. human didn't have direct participation, and never claimed participation. Essentially, it was a test by an activist to see if copyright could be assigned to AI.

Court found that it could not, and basis for decision was that copyright holder must be a person.

Hard disagree on leeches part. They make Unreal Engine, which powers basically all of the most graphically intensive games out today. A significant percentage of games on steam are UE games.

So by your own logic of "things on one store are made with tech developed by the other store's owner", they are not leeches.

I think this "those are hate are everything bad" attitude needs to stop. There are plenty of things to critique Epic for. You don't need to make criticism look less appropriate by claiming that they are also "other bad things that they are patently not".

I remember that 2024 finding. It made rounds in the medical researcher side of X, and consensus seemed to reach the following conclusion: Condition seems to hit almost exclusively if not exclusively near terminal diabetes type 2 patients, in whom the rapid and permanent crash of sugar levels in tissues that have adapted to being massively overdosed by it is the likely cause.

Those drugs literally cure the problem that causes the disease immediately, as there's a significant percentage of near-terminal patients that are near terminal because they can't stop massively overeating just... stop overeating after the first injection. But they obviously don't cure the side effects of the disease, such as damage done by type 2 to tissues. Then rapid and permanent sugar level crash in tissues that are used to being massively overdosed with it for years may cause some additional damage, and in very rare cases, it can hit optic nerves.

The choice in those cases is almost universally "certain death of type 2's consequences within a few weeks or a tiny chance that curing the illness takes out some already damaged tissues out permanently with single digit number of cases recorded going permanently blind while their extremities stop rotting while patient is still alive". So it's a pretty great dice to roll.

Epic's problem isn't with that. It's with the fact that they built a consumer store that focuses on serving the sellers first and foremost.

Sweeney himself stated that this is going to be their competitive edge back in the day when they started the store.

Turns out, sellers may love you lots for making it awful for buyers with no key store functions like being able to post bad reviews, or have discussion forums to point out problems with games, but those same people also are buyers. And a lot of other buyers look for opinions on the game before buying.

May Gaben live forever, because otherwise the "fuck the consumer, it's all about the seller" storefronts like Epic (and basically every other major digital store today) will become a norm. And you'll have to learn to love eating shit. Because that's all that will be on offer.

It's sad, because once Epic's leadership realized that this isn't going to work, they were locked into the model by their deals with their sellers that there will be no steam style consumer friendly features on their store. So they started giving games for free instead. Except that most of those free games are even worse than Epic store itself.

Their latest "please don't pay attention to us not being able to have consumer friendly features" marketing drive has been about pretending that getting launcher start a couple of seconds faster is the thing people care about.

Considering all the bitching and moaning from Epic's leadership about how bad and evil Steam is with their "monopoly", they don't seem to be stopping them putting their launcher on SteamOS.

Weird, that.

Of course you can hold copyright over AI-generated output.

What you cannot hold copyright over is AI-generated output that didn't have human input. That was the subject of the court case you're likely thinking about.

His first theatrical release is already coming, and hilariously he played actor politics very intelligently, to the point where relevant mainstream publications have posted mostly positive things about him.

Because he still hires voice actors. The people who have been by far the most vocal and militant about being replaced by AI. Of all people, he got the most rabid anti-AI crown on his side by selling "we keep the voice actors, but replace everyone else" to them. And it seems to have worked.