So you’re pretending you didn’t say all art are ideas so therefore they can’t be stolen now that you’ve realized how silly of a statement that was. But now you’ve moved on to other silly statements.

Scraping art for AI usage is not merely making copies. You would need to be woefully ignorant of how LLMs, AI companies, and people have been scraping work for AI usage for the past 5 years to believe that it’s tantamount to taking a photo of a painting and not used any further.

The laws and norms of copyright usage have not been properly applied to AI scraping at all either. You’re just referring to a poor understanding of copyright history as if that will magically making scraping all art, content, and IP be the justifiable thing to do, while ignoring who all are behind doing such a thing in the first place. You’re arguing that what OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Twitter, and Microsoft are doing is actually anti-capitalist practice by stealing all content they can, while also saying they’re not stealing because art are ideas and therefore all art is up for grabs.

You should take a step back and realize you’ve sided with the capitalist companies against an independent creator here in order to suggest that it’s the artist who’s wrong and the big capitalist and it’s the big trillion-dollar companies that are correct and anti-capitalist.

Scrapist is a name shared by many tools that scrape webpages and content as well. The content of the comic is not about sexual assault at all though. It’s clearly all about consent.

The only thing idiotic here is that art=idea and therefore no art can be stolen. To prove this, go take some art from your nearest museum. I’ll wait.

But tell me more about how stealing someone’s art for use by AI is an authoritarian idea created by the capitalist class, and how the idea that all art is up for grabs by anyone so it’s totally okay to use it for AI is not the idea from the capitalist class. This is the kind of explanation that deserves some popcorn.

It’s really telling that the people who are crawling out of the woodwork to brag about how much they hate Pizzacake don’t seem to know the difference between consent and sexual assault.

Imagine using sexual assault as a pithy justification getting upset about a webcomic.

It was about consent anyway, which apparently you can’t differentiate from sexual assault somehow.

Those feelings cannot be rooted in anything except xenophobia. Mollifying the language doesn’t get away from the root of where such sentiments even come from.

You cannot lament your personal ideal of your country being diluted or ruined by the influx of people of other races without a significant amount of fear or hatred. Otherwise it wouldn’t be an issue in the first place. The very thought requires othering a group of people determined to be undesirable.

If you can’t complain on the internet then there’s nothing to say? Interesting perspective.

Everything’s bigger in Texas, including the raging stupidity and lack of respect.

deleted by creator

At 5 feet deep you wouldn’t hit your head on the bottom

Yes, you absolutely would if you dove headfirst into it. That’s why swimming pools say no diving when they’re less than 8 ft. deep.

You can also definitely break your neck diving headfirst into mud.

That’s not how it goes for Tyler Durden

I stopped because I don’t have a hatred of these comics, and I was interested in the comments.

I’m not doing either of those things. There’s no way to read my comment and get to either of those two conclusions without making something up out of thin air.

So just scroll on by. You chose to open up the comment section for the comic. Nobody made you do that.

Professional just means getting paid.

No, Steam existed for a while before HL2. It was used for Counter-Strike 1.5, over a year before HL2 came out. Its initial purpose was for anti-cheat and anti-piracy. There was no inclination to block secondary market sales there.

What you’re describing there is anti-piracy mechanisms, not resale market blocking, which is indeed something Steam was built to tackle.

Now who’s nitpicking? My point was never that there was one killer feature that’s worth $100b/yr. Again, it’s weird you think there is one, a weirdness that can only be chalked up to a total ignorance of what Steam actually offers. The whole point is that the entire meme argument of “Steam doesn’t deserve the 30% cut!” is based on flawed premises based on the PR campaign of a competing billionaire trying to take much of that capital for himself, there is not a single way to make a reasonable point in that direction unless the argument is that nobody deserves a 30% cut but, given the features provided compared to every other retailer out there, Steam would deserve the highest cut (even if that’s something like 15% instead of 30%).

Accusing collusion, pretending Steam doesn’t have any extra features compared to other retailers or digital platforms, ignoring market and industry standards, and accusing any pushback as being a defense are not reasonable lines of argument.

It was made before HL2, and they supported physical console games (where pretty much all secondary sales were happening) for many years after (and including) HL2.

Unless you’re going to show that this price fixing was somehow agreed to and accepted by regulations decades ago with brick and mortar stores, and then there was an agreement from all the digital marketplaces to join onboard, you can’t assume it must be a grand conspiratorial cabal except, somehow, for Tim Sweeney and Epic Games, who are standing against literally everyone else.

Nothing you have said about Steam seems to indicate you’re aware of anything Steam does beyond distribute games. Even here, you’re not demonstrating any knowledge of its other features. It says quite a lot you think there must be one singular feature that makes all the difference, it’s like you have no frame of reference for how many other features Steam has compared to other stores and how they could all be of immense value together. You did, however, reference yet another piece of disingenuity: the bullshit MFN clause complaint. Yet another standard retail practice and agreement that someone is disingenuously claiming is unique to Steam. I’d chalk this up to another EGS thing but there’s no proof they’re connected to or, you know, colluding with this Dutch group behind the odd class action suit.

So much of this is just ignoring what the standards are and lying by saying they’re unique to Steam and nobody else. Standards are standards. There are other agreements in place to keep digital pricing the same as physical pricing too, we should be talking about standards more, not less. There’s no good reason to reject acknowledging and considering standards and how little they have been changed. This is Tim Sweeney’s whole push about lowering the fee to 12% too.

Pointing out the basis for your arguments are wrong is not nitpicking. The premises are the foundation of the argument and directly lead to the point. You don’t have a point if everything that leads to it is wrong. It’s also not defending anyone to say that you, and specifically you, are working on false information. If anything, it’s closer to being a attack on you than a defense of anyone else.

Speaking of not reading what is being written, you somehow missed I told you what you legitimately could grieve Valve, Steam, and Newell over and you somehow missed it entirely in order to keep up this lie that Valve or Steam are being defended by pointing out you’ve been played to believe something that isn’t actually true because you have little to no experience with the services in question.

Speaking of billionaire worship, I notice a distinct lack of you questioning why billionaire Tim Sweeney would be manipulating public thought and argumentation against his competition in the exact same way that billionaires have been doing for the last decade, and how you fell for it. If you’re really anti-billionaire, you should be mad that happened and actively untangling all of the bullshit away and moving on to more legitimate grievances and criticisms instead of doubling down on them by hoping yelling “collusion!” enough will make it real.

What I am getting at is that you are using another billionaire’s disingenuous talking points uncritically while thinking you’re being anti-billionaire. You heard something that sounded good but didn’t verify or research any of it.

This whole idea of “Steam takes 30%, that’s terrible!” is from Tim Sweeney’s anti-Steam PR campaign. The 30% cut was always the standard retail cut, and has been part of every retail store until EGS made a big thing about their lower amount and their disingenuous PR campaign that suggested that only Steam was taking an exorbitant cut. The fact is that all stores took that same standard retail cut. Steam makes a bajillion dollars more than everyone else just from the sheer volume of sales they do. The idea that they make all this money because they take a bigger retail cut is a lie.

And, in case this hasn’t been made clear enough to you yet: you don’t seem to know what Steam is if you think it’s only a service to download games and doesn’t offer anything else to users. It has a huge amount of features for users, games, and communities beyond just that, far more than another other retailer or store is offering. It is completely disingenuous to pretend like Steam does none of these to force the argument that they are just taking money and offering the most basic of a singular service. So if you want to argue that Steam specifically doesn’t deserve the 30% cut that every retailer takes, then you’ll need to demonstrate how Steam offers less than every other retailer. If this requires ignoring all the features and advancements Valve and Steam have done, then that really shows the quality of that statement, doesn’t it?

Taking a step back to assess situations fairly and accurately isn’t a defense of anything. There’s so much to criticize Valve and Steam for if you took the time to be informed, most notably with the lootboxes and gambling aspects (which is also where much of its profits come from). So if you’re really as anti-billionaire as you claim to be, are you going to go and examine these assumptions you held and figure out why you got misled so deeply by another billionaire, and make sure it doesn’t happen again?