The huge difference between mail or phone and telegram is that both mail and phone work with law enforcement, with useful records being made available upon subpoena. Telegram, by design, will not.

If you think drawing that parallel is useful to Telegram, they would then also be required to maintain the same standards of security as the mail, with package inspections, drug dogs, entire teams of government officials investigating illegal activities etc.

The criminals use it precisely because it is not a parallel to other available channels, as it circumvents those safeguards.

Yep. The issue is that they put out a tool that does some good things, but is also heavily adopted by criminals who piggyback on it.

Should we let child abuse just proliferate with these tools, because there’s so much need for privacy? How do you weed out the bad without kneecapping the good? There’s no good answer here. The good parts of the tech working enable the bad parts, too.

There has to be a certain level of knowledge and acceptance of the bad parts to continue developing it. It’s a catch 22, so law enforcement has to pick between sacrificing the privacy or allowing a tool to exist that proliferates child abuse material and other ills.

There are valid arguments for the importance of privacy, and valid arguments for making sure there these crimes shouldn’t have a safe haven. Action to either end will hurt some people and enrage others.

Thanks for clarifying. Cool project! I’ve been looking for a guilt free LLM that sourced its training data in an ethical way. Tell me if I’m way off base, but I take it your app is to the LLMs similar to how the Ice Cubes is an interface for the fediverse. Nice!

I wish you well with your project. If any of the models you work with fit what I’m looking for, or you know of any such models please let me know!

Sounds interesting! May I ask where the data used to train came from?

In TF2, players cannot completely disable the hats. It takes a server operator employing mods or plugins to disable them. The equity was there. It ended with CS:GO.

As well, even if a player could opt out of seeing them, it doesn’t change the fact that the game was built around the gambling and still impacts other players you interact with.

There are some non-competitive games I think handle cosmetic-only micro transactions well (ex: Last Epoch). But I don’t try to fool myself that it doesn’t impact development or gameplay.

Absolutely.

The key gambling system 100% impacted the community, who are the ones to provide gameplay to each other in these games.

All previous Counter-Strike game had a 100% level playing field— all players had access to the same gear and visuals. This equity was very important to gameplay by keeping it competitive, specifically being able to recognize weapons and enemies easily.

CS:GO took a sharp turn with this, effectively ending equity in the game. Not only did you have to spend money if you wanted you or your gear to look like others, but it also made it much more difficult to recognize enemies and gear people were carrying unless you more carefully inspected them. Bits sticking out around corners became much more difficult to recognize.

There is likely much more impact to the game and its development on various levels, but this is a clear example of a negative impact of microtransactions being introduced.