Why is Jesus blasting that woman with Netherlands flag energy?

Open source money? Why not just call it crypto so everyone understands what this is about?

She has 110 millions insta followers. 100,000 represent a 0.1% loss. I wish only 0.1% of the population were homophobic.

Also chaotic neutral: prioritizes issues by curiosity.

OK hear me out: Minecraft in survival. For real. Nothing jump scares like a creeper going "psshht" in your back, telegraphing that you’re about to die in a destructive explosion. As you walk a narrow path over a chasm of lava in the Nether, the wail of the Ghast might make you fall out of sheer panic before it even shoots at you. The Warden is a special kind of scary too, as it’s nearly unkillable and will detect you by the noise you make. It sounds kind of silly but there’s plenty of players making the remark that Minecraft survival is basically horror.

And it’s all in a child friendly, non gory, voxel style.

To be fair when it came out seven years ago it really shook up the portable gaming scene. Every portable console coming out since is an iteration on that design. The joycons can go to hell though. And those weird ass online plans.

Wrong question, in my humble opinion. A bubble is speculative at its core. It’s about traders, the stock market, investors, speculators and shit placing much more value on a thing than what it’s worth. The distance with reality grows massive, until everybody wakes up and "pop!" all that sweet sweet wealth (or savings, for the peasants) vanished into thin air. Think housing market or beanie babies.

The question here is if indie game dev can remain sustainable. It’s like restaurants: the more there are, the harder it gets. The risk is not nearly as sudden and explosive as a bubble though. If there are too many, some shops close, others shrink.

Furthermore, the tools and knowledge required for gamedev keep getting more readily available. It’s an art too, so there will always be someone somewhere with the overwhelming drive to do it, profitability be damned.

The basic idea is that the West has declined irrevocably, beginning with what Srinivisan calls the birth of the centralized state that disempowered wealthy industrialists with antitrust laws, securities regulation, central banking, and adversarial journalism. Now, the thinking goes, we’re on the backswing with wealthy individuals reclaiming their power over supposedly corrupt public institutions, and we have the internet and its currency—Bitcoin—to lead us out of the darkness.

So the billionaire techbros feel powerless (wtf) and are offended by criticism (oof) so they want their own techbro dictatorship with no free press. Also please no peasant to support, only exploit. Got it.

Yet, in a redacted copy of an internal email chain released on Friday, Jim Kolotouros, the vice president of Android Platform Partnerships, wrote: “Chrome exists to serve Google search, and if it cannot do that because it is regulated to be set by the user, the value of users using Chrome goes to almost zero (for me).”

So Chrome’s whole point is bringing users to Google Search… and Google Search's whole point is Google Ads. I’m Glad I use Firefox.

Personally I find the "there is no such thing as a real picture" argument facetious and dangerous. Filters, optimizing zoom and autofocus is not the same as convincingly taking someone out of a scene they were in or putting them in a scene they never were in. One is a purely aesthetic adjustment while they other purports false information. Samsung Generative Edit further trivializes the latter and leaves no indication of the manipulation.

Do you really think it's OK to seed an AI with other people's work, generate strikingly similar images with it, pass them as real and farm engagement from that? Because that's the trend this article is about.

One more entry for https://killedbygoogle.com/

Spotify’s success is heavily qualified, though. It may be the Netflix of music, but it’s never posted a profit; in 2022, with nearly a half-billion users around the world, around 200 million of whom pay for the service, it lost 430 million euros (the company is based in Sweden).

How does one get to repeatedly lose hundreds of millions of dollars on and on and somehow endure? Some stockmarket shit?

Another thing: let's not forget that when music streaming showed up, the music industry was already struggling. The CD era was over; everybody and their mom were sailing the high seas on P2P networks.

• C++ is fine
• Python is fine
• C# is fine
• PHP is fine
• JavaScript is fine
• C is fine
• Java is fine

I could go on

Moreover, Luddites were opposed to the replacement of independent at-home workers by oppressed factory child labourers. Much like OpenAI aims to replace creative professionals by an army of precarious poorly paid microworkers.

What a horrible decision all around.

• Generates e-waste as controllers are bricked for no reason.
• Kills costly custom built accessibility controllers. No consideration for marginalized users whatsoever.
• Retroactively screws all customers over.
• Goes as far as breaking peripheral compatibility with a discontinued console.

Is it to kill cheating devices used on competitive titles? Is it a money grab? It probably won't achieve either. From a customer protection standpoint I'm wondering if this position can be attacked legally.

Nevertheless it reminds me that other time when Spencer was daydreaming about buying Nintendo and it feels like Microsoft is being a little unhinged as of late.

A community needs to reach a critical mass to live, but what is that critical mass made of is complicated to quantify in my opinion. It suffers a lot from Goodhart’s Law (when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure). What good is a huge user base if it’s just lurkers, inactive accounts and bots? What good is high activity if it’s just spamming? In the end what makes a community worthwhile is qualitative to me.

She’s technically correct, the best kind of correct.

I would like to offer as a counterpoint that everything is political. Tech is no exception. Tech is a tool, a tool comes with a specific affordance and an affordance suggests to the wielder a certain worldview. To wilfully ignore the social and political impact of one's work does not protect it from the world's turmoil.

I’m sad that the workers blame each other rather than the corporate giants hiring them for getting paid less and less.

I wish clickworkers were more visible. They’re an essential part of today’s new technologies, they’re clearly kept in precarious conditions and I bet most users don’t even know they exist, seeing only the tech gurus at the top of the pyramid.

We have no reason to laugh at ancient Rome's unfortunate use of lead pots for cooking beverages and lead pipes for drinkable water. Down with plastics.

What is this cursed place? The clickbait has eaten everything. uBlock should make this into a blank page.

Instructions unclear, uninstalled Windows

The AIs we are talking about are large language models. They take human work as input and produce facsimiles. They are owned by individuals or companies that have no permission to exploit in this way intellectual property tied to other people's livelihoods to copy them.

LLMs are not sentient, they don't have inspiration, they are not creative and therefore do not create in the sense an artist would. They are an elaborate mathematical equation.

"Training" an AI has nothing to do with training an actual living being. It's just tuning: adjusting an algorithm incrementally until the operator is satisfied with the result. I think it's defendable to amount this form of extraction to plagiarism.

For anyone wondering about how they'll eventually address financial sustainability if Stract takes off:

Stract is currently not monetized in any way, but its website says it will eventually have contextual ads tied to specific search terms but that it will not track its users, which is similar to the system DuckDuckGo uses. Stract also plans on offering ad-free searches to paying subscribers.

I'd pay for independent, non meta, ad-free search. I bet a more straightforward approach is more energy efficient as well. In the meanwhile the big tech are running a gazillion processes on our data to suck every bit of wealth they can out of our existence through their free (in it's littlest sense) products.

We even had federations back then. Called them webrings. I'm not sure if I'm kidding.

Oh to marvel once again at life as through the eyes of a child.

The weekly "How's it going" thread is always sweet; I understand what you mean. I wonder if a platform built roughly like Reddit can properly support sharing on a more personal level though. The tools are never neutral.

E-Shop is very feature poor compared to Steam. I use Deku Deals to get notified when something I want goes on sale. They offer a pricing history as well to gauge how often a title has price cuts.

Wikipedia (citing NASA) states that the force would be 1,200 megatons in TNT equivalent. Tsar Bombas being 54 megatons, Bennu is 22 Tsar Bombas.

13 years account here. I’ve been postponing doing the same thing. In the last months I’ve grown opposed to Facebook, then Twitter, then finally Reddit. I’ve come to the conclusion that any form of corporate social media is harmful to individuals and communities.

Every discussion you’ve had has contributed to how you are today and that remains.

The actual research page is so awkward. The TLDR at the top goes:

single portrait photo + speech audio = hyper-realistic talking face video

Then a little lower comes the big red warning:

We are exploring visual affective skill generation for virtual, interactive characters, NOT impersonating any person in the real world.

No siree! Big "not what it looks like" vibes.

Most depressing thing on the box is the alcohol percentage.

I've had a fine experience with a Brother black and white laser printer. Just a big ugly gray block that prints my documents and my shipping labels fine. It doesn't die regularly like those cursed HP contraptions. The cartridge goes on forever and it doesn't blotch, wretch, coagulate or whatever the fuck inkjet cartridges do whenever you let them be for a month. I don't miss the colors. Apparently it's not good to print photos lol.

I don't want an experience similar to Reddit though. I want a small active community with shared values and a variety of subjects.

I can't believe convincing everyone your new tech may destroy civilization is how you build hype nowadays.

I want to ditch Windows, I really do, but when I get free time I want to either play a game or tinker on some side project. I don’t want to fiddle with drivers and what not for my OS. A year ago I killed a few weekends trying to get a Ubuntu partition nice and cozy for gaming but I got fed up fighting with all kinds of issues on basic things. The fact that games actually running correctly on Linux is hit-or-miss as well... It’s a hard sell (even though it’s free). Microsoft seems to be hell-bent on convincing me to try out some other Linux distro at some point though.

I contest the use of derogatory "small dick energy" memes on the grounds of body inclusivity. Small dicks are valid, positive and worthy of appreciation.

This is getting to be a trend.

Last year, Warner Bros and HBO Max undertook the first massive purge in the industry following the merger between the two companies, removing dozens of titles — reportedly to save on residuals and other costs. This spring, Paramount + also removed original content from their platform.

Looks like they’re trying to optimize offering as little content as possible while retaining as many subscribers as possible. I know the term is usually applied to platforms of a different nature, but it does feel like the usual march towards enshittification.

Old people need to grow the fuck up and accept that they are old.

Good sir. Since you are a man well into your forties, we'd like to bring to your attention the shocking silliness of your username. It is entirely unfit for a venerable gentleman such as you to engage in booger humour, no matter how undeniably comical.

Furthermore, we would like to seize this opportunity to remind the elders present that video games are entirely too childish for citizens of our decorum. Animes are right out as well. We urge you to engage instead in respectable hobbies such as afternoon TV, yelling at clouds and filing your taxes.