From your second link...

The story comes from author Jane Friedman, a veteran writer and academic who woke up to find AI-generated books listed under her name on Amazon.

I don't think AI is the problem here. It's that I can write a book, claim George R. R. Martin is the author and Amazon won't fact check me.

If successful, he could force the companies responsible for applications such as ChatGPT or Midjourney to compensate thousands of creators. They may even have to retire their algorithms and retrain them with databases that don’t infringe on intellectual property rights.

They will readily agree to this after having made their money and use their ill gotten gains to train a new model. The rest of us will have to go pound sand as making a new model will have been made prohibitively expensive. Good intentions, but it will only help them by pulling up the ladder behind them.

You're still stuck when it comes to anti-cheat in multiplayer games. Some do allow it to work on Linux, but a significant number don't. Hopefully the tides slowly start to change thanks to the Steam Deck.

Mind, I am not blaming young people who want to create games. They lack the experience to know they are getting exploited. It’s all the cynicism of managers who know no loyalty and only want profits.

I blame them at least a little. CS professors give students ample warnings and the industry's bad reputation isn't a secret. There a variety of outcomes....

• listen and steer clear entirely
• listen but decide to do it anyway. They do research on potential employers, their work culture etc. and they have standards.
• Ignore the warnings or be willing to do game dev no matter the cost

The second group will be fine and knows when/if they need to call it quits or look elsewhere. The real problem is the third group.

Popularity makes all forms of support infinitely easier. I'd struggle to come up with any technical reason that could be worth giving up the ability to easily google for issues or install software. That doesn't mean I think you shouldn't use other distros, just that I believe Ubuntu is the best choice for a default install targeting average people.

Yeah. I thought this was the norm, so I don't know why this is news. At my company everyone is a 3 or 4. A 5 literally means you're going to be promoted to the next level. There's absolutely no other way to get a 5 and promotions are obviously rare.

Devil's advocate. It means that only large companies will have AI, as they would be the only ones capable of paying such a large number of people. AI is going to come anyway except now the playing field is even more unfair since you've removed the ability for an individual to use the technology.

Instituting these laws would just be the equivalent of companies pulling the ladder up behind them after taking the average artist's work to use as training data.

The problem is they keep changing the license terms every 6-12 months and the changes have always been retroactive. I think they've changed it about once every year for the last 5 years and this year they did it twice. Games often take years to make and that means you might have no idea what the terms are going to be by the time you're ready to release.

So lets say they walk this back. What about next time?

It's still a win if the move causes widespread adoption by the average consumer. The more privacy conscious can just use a different client.

Sometimes they can afford to not know because they have a relative who can manage the device for them. In which case they really wouldn't be installing software on their own really.

You would be surprised at how many people cannot even change the volume on their tablet.

Devil's advocate. There's no such thing as an effective protest that doesn't inconvenience the public. I've heard people say the exact same thing about the blackouts. This protest would not have worked if people could use Reddit normally and totally ignore what was going on. Unlike most protests, none of this does any harm to people IRL so I think people should be OK with being heavy-handed. It's "oh no, I can't access reddit to help figure out how to fix my wifi" vs "protests are blocking me on my way to work, causing me to be late and possibly be fired". The situations just don't compare.

Beyond that, Reddit has replaced all forums and discussion boards and it's actually a huge problem in terms of being a single point of failure. It's a net positive that this issue was highlighted for the non-tech crowd.

People are only using the 3rd party app line because it's the most relatable argument. It's much more than that. A ton of moderation tools and useful bots are going dark tomorrow thanks to the API policy change. Even if we all go back to Reddit, there's no bringing back those tools. Reddit communities are going to slowly go to shit as spammers all realize that moderators aren't as effective as they used to be. This was going to happen regardless of how the protests turned out. There's no scenario where things get better for Reddit.