dcow

Am I the only one who dislikes the term "misalignment"?

On one front it implies the model has a "mind of its own" (whether it does or not is besides the point). Why do we perceive human judgement as somehow more trustworthy than that of a model? I feel like I've experienced human misalignment somewhat regularly in life.

On another front I'm failing to conceptualize how alignment can be objective. How can you measure alignment when reasonable people will disagree whether actions are aligned or not? All the time I see humans operating in different zones of alignment with whatever goal they're trying to achieve and I suspect it's even a feature (socially) that we have people calibrated differently.

Do I want a model that's trying to push the boundaries of scientific understanding to be aligned strictly with the current dogmatic thinking? Or do I want it to "get creative" and think outside the box?

It seems to me more like accountability is the issue.

My family needs food though. Perhaps a supermarket is a poor example. I think people might purchase fewer luxury goods in a deflationary world which TBH I'm not sure is a bad thing.

To put it another way, the model you're presenting reads well in an economics textbook and I'm sure is exactly how we justify our MMT social policy but it doesn't fully account for actual human behavior. I'll buy necessities (house/food/water/electric/communication) even in a deflationary economy.

When was the last time you went to the grocery store and thought "I better buy this milk today because my money will have less spending power tomorrow"?

Yes. It really was a toxic mess wasn't it?

So we agree that Valve, Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft all operate platforms that support DRM. Wonderful!

I'm not interesting in bickering over who's DRM is the easiest to remove XD

In the US it's not piracy to make archival backups of digital media that you own in the first place, anyway. Even so, nothing gives you the right to use the software in ways that violate the EULA (except for your rights under the DMCA to create archival copies) regardless of whether you backed up the media with or without the DRM.

To put it plainly your right to create an archival copy does not extend to a right to run the media on unsupported/licensed hardware & software. I think that's an issue that should be solved, we likely agree, but let's not pretend that the situation with Steam is somehow healthy for society whereas with Sony it's not just because the DRM is slightly easier to circumvent.

And what people also don't realize is that you can run a non-compliant AP. I am 99% certain the legal framework places the responsibility on the clients and the APs (or at least the absence of a consistent one biases towards a conservative stance: i.e. not assuming it's only the AP's responsibility). If I am a massive multinational conglomerate and I ship clients that know they're in a regulated region but connect on illegal bands anyway to APs broadcasting them, then that seems to expose me to unnecessary risk. You can bet I'm going to take measures so that if this ever gets tested in court I can say "yes our software takes reasonable measures to not transmit on channels we know to be illegal in your country, your honor".

> Obviously the general populous won't care about this, but it is something we should be striving for

Hence idealistic

Let's put the actual numbers in front of people: 1,924 out of 43,179 games, or 4.4%, as of today (according to PCGamingWiki) are DRM free.

The vast majority check whether you've purchased the game at runtime. If you stick to only indie games and the one off AA or AAA with no license check on Steam then sure thou-art-holier.

I think the argument is more precisely made by saying: on Steam, while the platform supports DRM, the decision is up to the publisher whether or not a game will use it and at least that provides the option for consumers to speak with their wallet and play only DRM free games. On Playstation it's all or nothing, you have to reject the entire platform/ecosystem if you want to avoid DRM.

At large, the problem still remains that our society allows DRM in the first place and if people want to avoid it then they need to be principled activists.

While you are mostly accurate in your definition, I’d argue we have discovered that intelligence is emergent/empirical not analytical. There is not a substrate we have yet to discern. Intelligence does not have to approach humanity to be AGI.

You can’t back up your games on one PC and use them on another without constant permission from Value either. It’s the same and that is all I’m trying to point out. DRM is a red herring, the real problem is the phone home always online bullshit.

Both Valve and Sony run a completely legal video game platform service. There are minor differences here and there, of course… but this is 100% a general intellectual property law problem, not an instanced technical implementation issue.

If as a society we want to create an information age bill of rights and (1) protect hardware ownership and right to root (without exploits), (2) require platform marketplace neutrality, and (3) require digital intellectual property be distributed under lifetime irrevocable and transferable licenses, then I’d happily sign my name, and not least because you’re solving the problem at the core.

One can dream.

Same and even more so with a car.

> Disabling DRM is required for basic archiving if the issue is someone else having the ability to decide the thing you bought will self-destruct.

Don't move the goalposts.

The only thing I am conceding is that conceptually it still ownership if you own the encrypted bits but they work fine with some other hardware that has the keys to decrypt them. I can backup my games on one playstation and play them on another.

Otherwise, we agree ideologically. At the same time I'm rhetorically supporting the point at the top of the thread that this has been a problem long before Sony decided to go digital. I am copyleft and anti-drm and whatever else you can imagine. It doesn't change the fact that there's a precedent that consumers will purchase drm games that require a rootkit to run under ambiguous terms that make it clear they don't own the bytes and it's a true observation that for some reason people allow this to happen on PC but when Sony does it it's the end of the world. I think to make progress here you need to address the root of the issue legally, not attack Sony for doing what society has condoned for decades.

Oh I agree. It was a rhetorical example.

Sony can add a signature to a list and your game stops launching even if it's a physical disk is the point. We should fight back legally and prevent publishers from trampling on the rights of individuals to use bits they paid money to presumptively own. If I buy a digital asset nobody should be able to take that away from me. You can stop selling it but it shouldn't be allowed to be disabled in the field. Seems like something our society could agree on and legislate 100%.

> A Sony exclusive and any other game are not two kinds of anything.

Are they not two kinds of games?

I'm arguing that your comparison isn't the right one.

A BMW and a Volkswagen are two types of apples. They both let you drive form A to B.

A Playstation and a Nintendo Switch are two types of oranges. They both provide entertainment in the form of video games.

How you drive (and how enjoyable your drive is) from A to B, or which games you play, are specific characteristics of the hardware you chose to use to accomplish the task. Neither of those are two types of anything, as it were.

Sony doesn't DRM the power that you use to run the Playstation either. But to try and meet the comparison: there are different manufacturers of fuel just like there are different publishers of games and while Volkswagen can't force you to not put standard fuel in your car they can certainly void your warranty if you don't use premium (and fuel is still tested and regulated for industry compliance).

I'm getting a tad lost, though. The point of the sub-thread is that Sony does not have a monopoly over the video game industry. They get to choose which games are allowed on their platform and under what terms. Consoles and Cars both have proprietary components and open interfaces. A console and car have different purposes. And the average consumer has broad discretion to use cars and consoles from whatever manufacturer they wish to.

Apples and oranges. If you goal is to simply play games, well then there's plenty of hardware out there for you to use. If you want to play Sony exclusives then you have to use their hardware. If I want to get from point A to point B then I can use any vehicle. If I want to get from point A to point B in a Volkswagen then I have to buy a one.

Probably the same place you can buy an aftermarket CAN board and controller for your Volkswagen.

Oh, looks like cars and consoles aren't that different after all.

You can't get the Volkswagen engine sound or drive experience in a BMW, though.

Not really. I can plug a generic usb cable into my Playstation and it charges my aftermarket controller just fine. I can even use aftermarket screws or put the console in an aftermarket enclosure.

By inserting storage media into the removable/external media port and copying or moving the files.

Woah, we're not talking about cracking your games. I think every console from at least the last two generations has supported copying game files to external/removable media.

I think you're under-appreciating the importance. It's not just pedantry. This has been true since EULAs have existed. And it's kinda insane that people think owning a disk gives them ownership of the intellectual property contained on it. You've always been given a license. The difference is that you can often transfer that license by selling the physical copy of a game whereas most digital licenses are exclusive.

The ability to deny ownership does exist these days. Sony can push an update that bricks your Playstation.

So this whole thing is actually an argument over whether games should be made available in a form that allows license transfer (which I support) or not. But it's a fair point to argue that for any actual benefit the remedy has to be applied globally, not just to Sony.

Nobody is arguing the risk values are exactly the same. The argument is that the risk posture is the same. You're taking a pretty rigid stance that the only thing that matters is risk value, which is an individual value judgement and thus incredibly far from an assumed fact. Some people do care about posture more than value and different people weight value differently as I'm sure your thousands of assessments have uncovered.

In any event, I think with all the data you'd see that Value has also removed games from its platform. So I'm not sure the value gap is even as wide as you seem to be implying.

We are in the most emotionally driven period of human history to date where reasoning takes a back seat. It's super frustrating but once you realize this instance isn't a one off you can start to focus on the bigger picture. I'm not saying this makes it less frustrating, but perhaps it'd help you to cast things in a new light. You're mostly talking past people who are dunking on Sony right now, because they are more interested in riding the emotional wave than actually making sense of the situation. Never mind that owning a physical disk has pretty much been dead for the better part of a decade or two anyway with day 1 patches and online activations. GIVE ME PHYSICAL DISK. To be 100% honest I think people want to put games on their shelf and look at them and any whiff of an argument is just people grasping at something, anything, rather than something based.

Yeah, right XD

Yes, you do. When you play a digital game on Playstation you also download the files...

It may be harder like you say but the law doesn't really see it any differently PC vs Console if you want to archive/backup your digital game media.

Based on the initial response, it does not, in fact, seem like this is the conclusion.

No. At the same time I do believe it’s a huge problem when even a small number come here fraudulently and abuse the welfare systems we have to unduly enrich themselves at the expense of American taxpayers.

A judge vacated the previous “more humane” way the state department was doing this (targeted pause on specific problem countries) so this is reactionary. Not including that in the calculation feels disingenuous.

> the expectation is that you'll need to become self-sufficient very quickly because the financial support diminishes rapidly

The US has this same expectation. It’s the long and short of what this reaction of pausing visas is about: bickering over how to make sure the expectation is being met during visa screening.

I don’t see anybody anywhere even remotely implying that hard working immigrants shouldn’t be given the benefit of the doubt and be allowed to make their own way in the US. I do see people rightly upset that when given the benefit of the doubt a Somali fraud ring setup to extract money from the welfare programs we’ve set up to provide children with education and generally people with healthcare runs rampant. Stopping that indeed involves more “public-charge” scrutiny during the visa process.