Idle games like cookie clicker exploit this to a shocking degree.

Ironically, cookie clicker is actually a parody of idle games, and once you get far enough, there is genuine strategy (assuming you enjoy doing math).

Still doesn’t change the fact the objective is to make number go up

Even Furthermore…

Wanna censor it? Good fucking idea /s

Shoving that shit into the shadows doesn’t make it go away, it just makes it untraceable, unmoderated, and unaccountable.

If you care even remotely about preventing harm, you don’t force taboo communities off the grid. You keep them where they can be seen, tracked, and contained… preferably behind legal firewalls, age gates, and content filters.

If you push them into the dark web… then congratulations… you’ve just built a Petri dish for escalation, radicalization, and actual predation.

Furthermore…

Their decision to target the payment processors - not the developers, or itch.io, or steam, is some of the most cowardly and authoritarian things I’ve ever seen in the gaming space.

It’s economic coercion; a playbook used by religious bigots and authoritarians for decades. Financial censorship by proxy. IMO: they should fuck off.

Collective Shout claim it’s about harm reduction, but then push an agenda that functionally amounts to moral panic.

Their approach is identical in logic to the “GTA causes school shootings” hysteria: loud, pearl-clutching, and utterly unmoored from data.

If Collective Shout want to argue these games cause harm, then show us the harm. Not correlation. Not outrage. Not hypothetical downstream consequences. Show causation. Peer-reviewed. Reproducible.

Otherwise, they’re just moralizing bullies using the banking system as a cudgel.

On top of this, they might actually be harming their own cause. The catharsis hypothesis poses that sexual fantasy enactment might reduce risk of real world harm.

The logic is simple: suppressing a compulsion doesn’t eliminate it. It just bottles up until it explodes. Redirect it into a safe outlet, and it becomes manageable.

The only reason this research isn’t cited more often is because it’s politically radioactive. Nobody wants to admit that it’s better to let a gooners jerk off, than to escalate under repression.

The burden of proof SHOULD be on Collective Shout to provide a reasonable argument which supports their claim that censorship will reduce real world harm.

Current working theory in psychology: it doesn’t. Emerging theory suggests: they’re shooting themselves (and potential rape victims) in the foot.

The real solution to real-world harm involves empathy, autonomy and education.

“You’ll still be able to access your content”

Yeah, until they release a new version of the launcher, or underlying framework, which prevents the old app to run, locking people out of the content they paid for.

Oh boy, I sure do love the colloquialization of language and how those who were raised on a monostatic definition get upset about their favourite words becoming dynamic.

“Yeah, sure, I see no problems with that. Alternatively, I could just boost your characters to max level if you would like?”

IMO, look into the linuxserver.io fork of NGINX, called SWAG.

It comes preloaded with a bunch of fantastic addons for security.

Quite easy to get set up, if you’ve got an idea about how it works.

I would hope Switzerland isnt stupid enough to do this. Their reputation as a country is based around trust. Dozens of highly profitable privacy based companies would be forced to relocate.

While these companies make up a very small percentage of the GDP, they’d take people out of work, hurt their reputation, and take a minor blow to their budget.

Though, this isnt considering future prospects; the Proton suite is getter better, fast. It wouldn’t surprise me, if in a few years, their suite could rival Google’s or Microsoft’s.

It could be very profitable in the future, but kneecapping the VPN would really slow things down.

You’re not actually disagreeing with me, you’re just restating that the process is fallible. No argument there. All reasoning models are fallible, including humans. The difference is, LLMs are consistently fallible, in ways that can be measured, improved, and debugged (unlike humans, who are wildly inconsistent, emotionally reactive, and prone to motivated reasoning).

Also, the fact that LLMs are “trained on tools like logic and discourse” isn’t a weakness. That’s how any system, including humans, learns to reason. We don’t emerge from the womb with innate logic, we absorb it from language, culture, and experience. You’re applying a double standard: fallibility invalidates the LLM, but not the human brain? Come on.

And your appeal to “fuck around and find out” isn’t a disqualifier; it’s an opportunity. LLMs already assist in experiment design, hypothesis testing, and even simulating edge cases. They don’t run the scientific method independently (yet), but they absolutely enhance it.

So again: no one’s saying LLMs are perfect. The claim is they’re useful in evaluating truth claims, often more so than unaided human intuition. The fact that you’ve encountered hallucinations doesn’t negate that - it just proves the tool has limits, like every tool. The difference is, this one keeps getting better.

Edit: I’m not describing a “reasoning model” layered on top of an LLM. I’m describing what a large language model is and does at its core. Reasoning emerges from the statistical training on language patterns. It’s not a separate tool it uses, and it’s not “trained on logic and discourse” as external modules. Logic and discourse are simply part of the training data; meaning they’re embedded into the weights through gradient descent, not bolted on as tools.

No, I’m specifically describing what an LLM is. It’s a statistical model trained on token sequences to generate contextually appropriate outputs. That’s not “tools it uses", that is the model. When I said it pattern-matches reasoning and identifies contradictions, I wasn’t talking about external plug-ins or retrieval tools, I meant the LLM’s own internal learned representation of language, logic, and discourse.

You’re drawing a false distinction. When GPT flags contradictions, weighs claims, or mirrors structured reasoning, it’s not outsourcing that to some other tool, it’s doing what it was trained to do. It doesn’t need to understand truth like a human to model the structure of truthful argumentation, especially if the prompt constrains it toward epistemic rigor.

Now, if you’re talking about things like code execution, search, or retrieval-augmented generation, then sure, those are tools it can use. But none of that was part of my argument. The ability to track coherence, cite counterexamples, or spot logical fallacies is all within the base LLM. That’s just weights and training.

So unless your point is that LLMs aren’t humans, which is obvious and irrelevant, all you’ve done is attack your own straw man.

I do understand what an LLM is. It’s a probabilistic model trained on massive corpora to predict the most likely next token given a context window. I know it’s not sentient and doesn’t “think,” and doesn’t have beliefs. That’s not in dispute.

But none of that disqualifies it from being useful in evaluating truth claims. Evaluating truth isn’t about thinking in the human sense, it’s about pattern-matching valid reasoning, sourcing relevant evidence, and identifying contradictions or unsupported claims. LLMs do that very well, especially when prompted properly.

Your insistence that this is “dangerous naïveté” confuses two very different things: trusting an LLM blindly, versus leveraging it with informed oversight. I’m not saying GPT magically knows truth, I’m saying it can be used as a tool in a truth-seeking process, just like search engines, logic textbooks, or scientific journals. None of those are conscious either, yet we use them to get closer to truth.

You’re worried about misuse, and so am I. But claiming the tool is inherently useless because it lacks consciousness is like saying microscopes can’t discover bacteria because they don’t know what they’re looking at.

So again: if you believe GPT is inherently incapable of aiding in truth evaluation, the burden’s on you to propose a more effective tool that’s publicly accessible, scalable, and consistent. I’ll wait.

Right now, the capabilities of LLM’s are the worst they’ll ever be. It could literally be tomorrow that someone drops and LLM that would be perfectly calibrated to evaluate truth claims. But right now, we’re at least 90% of the way there.

The reason people fail to understand the untruths of AI is the same reason people hurt themselves with power tools, or use a calculator wrong.

You don’t blame the tool, you blame the user. LLM’s are no different. You can prompt GPT to intentionally give you bad info, or lead it to give you bad info by posting increasingly deranged statements. If you stay coherent, well read and make an attempt at structuring arguments to the best of your ability, the pool of data GPT pulls from narrows enough to be more useful than anything else I know.

I’m curious as to what you regard as a better tool for evaluating truth?

Period.

What makes you think humans are better at evaluating truth? Most people can’t even define what they mean by “truth,” let alone apply epistemic rigor. Tweak it a little, and Gpt is more consistent and applies reasoning patterns that outperform the average human by miles.

Epistemology isn’t some mystical art, it’s a structured method for assessing belief and justification, and large models approximate it surprisingly well. Sure it doesn’t “understand” truth in the human sense, but it does evaluate claims against internalized patterns of logic, evidence, and coherence based on a massive corpus of human discourse. That’s more than most people manage in a Facebook argument.

So yes, it can evaluate truth. Not perfectly, but often better than the average person.

I’m good enough at noticing my own flaws, as not to be arrogant enough to believe I’m immune from making mistakes :p

Granted, it is flakey unless you’ve configured it not to be a shit cunt. Before I manually set these prompts and memory references, it talked shit all the time.

Actually, given the aforementioned prompts, its quite good at discerning flaws in my arguments and logical contradictions.

I’ve also trained its memory not to make assumptions when it comes to contentious topics, and to always source reputable articles and link them to replies.

I often use it to check whether my rationale is correct, or if my opinions are valid.

This is the reason I’ve deliberately customized GPT with the follow prompts:

• User expects correction if words or phrases are used incorrectly.

• Tell it straight—no sugar-coating.

• Stay skeptical and question things.

• Keep a forward-thinking mindset.

• User values deep, rational argumentation.

• Ensure reasoning is solid and well-supported.

• User expects brutal honesty.

• Challenge weak or harmful ideas directly, no holds barred.

• User prefers directness.

• Point out flaws and errors immediately, without hesitation.

• User appreciates when assumptions are challenged.

• If something lacks support, dig deeper and challenge it.

I suggest copying these prompts into your own settings if you use GPT or other glorified chatbots.