There's nothing subtle about the things Banksy attacks either, in this case flag-shagging. Yes, he's about as subtle as a sledgehammer, but so what? We are definitively not living in an age of subtlety. Why should opposition be subtle when power isn't?

If anything, I'm more surprised Banksy didn't depict literal flag-shagging.

This really seems like straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.

Sure, it's great to be independent when you can, but of all the groups you depend on, and all the ways you depend on them, this doesn't rank high!

One thing which I don't know if you've noticed (and I don't consider this a spoiler) but Nethack has level scaling. If you get levels too fast, faster than you get better gear, enemies outscale you. In my (admittedly very dated) experience a lot of the difficulty was striking that balance between exploring too quickly and lingering too long.

Thanks. Are you referring to the dungeon level (depth) or the experience level?

Dungeon level depth, mostly.

This being NetHack, an answer is often not as straight forward as it could be. Most of the time the level difficulty is proportional to how deep you are into the dungeon but there are levels where your experience level factors in as well.

If so, it's changed. Back when I played, spawning of random monsters (i.e. almost all of them) was based on simply dungeon level + experience level.

Spelunky seems in particular inspired by the slashem mod of Nethack, since there's a black market and shopkeepers with shotguns.

I agree Nethack is not one of those games. People always pretended it was, though. They called "spoilers" what would be called documentation in most games. No one didn't use them (the "unspoiled" win mentioned elsewhere in the thread was a stretch even if you take them at their word). It was supposed to be theoretically possible to find out core game features from e.g. random rumors, but that was completely hypothetical - I'm pretty sure at no point in Nethack's development was it ever playtested with new players.

Not just random rumours, there are multiple specific mechanisms built into the game that explain core features, which a curious player can stumble on and then deliberately mine for information.

NetHack in many ways has common heritage with text-based adventure games of the 1970s and 80s, such as Zork. NetHack’s in-game currency is even a reference to Zork! Solving Zork without spoilers is also extremely difficult, despite lacking the tactical combat of NetHack. However, playing Zork with spoilers completely ruins the game, whereas NetHack is still a lot of fun even for highly spoiled players.

DCSS has also changed so much, it's hardly the same game anymore. It's maybe a better game in many ways, but it's not the game I spent time getting to know and getting good at.

Maybe an early example of "forever games" like Minecraft which just keep getting expanded forever and move ever further from the game you knew.

This sounds like a really counterproductive system. Usually in age verification, you prove that you're over a certain age. 9 year olds don't have very many ways to prove that they're 9 years old. What's stopping the creeps from pretending to be younger than they are?

They automatically assign you to an age group based on AI/guessing/face verification. If you've been assigned to an incorrect group, you need to do KYC verification with ID.

My 9 year old got verified as 21+ somehow. He obviously doesn’t have a photo id, so there is no way to verify him as a child. Support refused to help. The whole system is insane.

Exactly, but it's pretty clear adults can work around the automatic assignment (being adult makes you much better at figuring out how to fool such profiling systems). And the verification with ID is only good for proving that you're old, i.e. to keep kids out of adult spaces. It's no good for keeping adults out of kids spaces.

nothing at all, because it's PR security theatre done out of desperation as their platform has been gradually revealed to be a machine that destroys children's lives

It's a interactive prompt needing a webcam. You move your head to prove it is a live face.

I've seen a video of someone getting verified by drawing a face on a thumb.

It was fake

I've seen people getting verified by using a video game character creation screen. How can these AI systems possibly tell?

One thing is sure: if they can be fooled, adults will figure out a way to fool it. (Young enough children might not, but that doesn't help security). And once they're in, their child victims and their parents will be all the more likely to assume they're a child.

I don't know about music, but there are plenty of pioneers of AI art who were pretty interesting in my opinion. Mario Klingemann, Tom White, Memo Akten and Samim Winiger are some names I remember who made a lot of cool stuff. I admit I haven't kept up at what they're doing today, though (maybe because I left Twitter, and I think many of them did too).

Agreed, and it matters that even the most vapid pop star isn't just a product of our collective (or individual) desires. They're a real person existing for their own sake, and not just for our sake, no matter how much they cater to us.