I'd say it's how the Imperium swallowed up and destroyed a number of civilizations that had separated from them that had been developing in much more progressive, prosperous ways. The Olamic Quietude and the Interex come to mind as examples. They showed that humanity didn't have to go down the terrible path they've ended up on.

Or, going farther back to look for a single "worst thing" that's had the greatest awful knock-on effects, I'd say that'd be the Old Ones' refusal to grant any aid to the Necrontyr when they asked for it. That one selfish act sparked off the War in Heaven, created the Chaos Gods, and everything that followed.

If you can't find the books available through legal channels in your country, you might want to consider looking for them on the high seas. !piracy is a good resource for that sort of thing.

In the original trilogy of novels by Timothy Zahn, Grand Admiral Thrawn is a legitimate strategic genius who keeps winning until the heroes manage to squeak out a final victory by finding exactly the right flaw in his plans.

In the Ahsoka TV series, Thrawn mumbles vapid syllogisms that only sound profound if you listen to the tone of voice instead of the words. He constantly makes basic Evil Overlord mistakes and oversights, and only achieves the barest minimum success in the end through plot armor and luck.

It's like they're two different characters.

What really bothers me is that the original plan for that open source code was to make Reddit federated. They wanted to make it so that other people could run their own Reddit servers for their own communities. Sure, they would have locked it down somehow and tried to make it so that they got paid in the process, but the concept of the Fediverse could have been a common thing over a decade ago already. I'm sure that would have been a far easier walled garden to break out of than the current-day monolithic Reddit is.

One of my favourite characters was a wizard/barbarian lizardman. He believed that if you defeated a powerful foe you could gain its power by eating its heart (and also knew that this wasn't literal, it was a cultural thing). He explained to the party that he was very smart because "I ate a wizard, once." In fact, the wizard had had a Headband of Intellect that Xarg took from his corpse. He disguised the headband by wrapping it in crude leather decorated with teeth, making it look like a tribal collar thingy, so that people didn't know how important it was.

For those who can't get through the paywall, this is an article about a system called Kudurru that is monitoring a bunch of websites with images listed in the LAION-5B metadata set. When it sees the same IP address downloading images from those websites simultaneously, it assumes that it must be a bot that's scraping the data in order to train an AI with it and either blocks them or "poisons" the scrape by sending incorrect images back.

Frankly, I don't see much likely impact from this. AI training has moved beyond simply using LAION-5B, we're discovering that a smaller higher-quality dataset is better than just throwing mountains of data at the AI in training. So anything a trainer is downloading is going to be extensively curated before being used for training and this sort of obstruction will be fixed or filtered out.

I don't remember this Mirror Universe episode.

The Fetish-Trigger Episode.

Aha! Through the miracle of AI processing, I was able to restore Razira to her full un-blurred clothing-free glory!

Their previous edition of this game used public domain art, which was literally free for them. Were you avoiding that edition as well?

We can’t even get rid of it on TTRPGs.

It's really really easy to do so. Just... don't use it. It's not like Hasbro can force you to play with their AI. Just get together with your friends and play D&D the old fashioned way if you prefer.

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.

It's kind of hilarious. For years the mods of /r/piracy have been walking on eggshells about what kinds of links and discussion are permitted there because they were afraid Reddit would shut them down at any moment. And now Reddit is tossing the mods that worked so hard to toe their line and forcing them open.