There are like eight cities in the US that give me hope for you guys.

Not a crazy amount of hope, to be clear. But I like seeing this more than the good old find out half of the imperial boomerang.

I have to find a new home at some point and it’s good that not every single community in one continent has decided to continuously shoot itself in the foot at every opportunity. I’ve got friends who moved to Boston and they say it’s nice. Frankly any place where a house costs eight billion dollars better be nice.

The companies that market machine learning tools to investors and the masses have not been set up by people who believe art has value. Everything is content, and content exists to be aggregated alongside advertisements or displayed for a fee.

I genuinely hate that actual artists can’t use a lot of pretty neat novel digital levers to make stuff. Because it’s synonymous with garbage. The ability to leap across the uncanny valley has lost all novelty and is downright banal now.

But the answer to your question is the same as every desperate attempt at getting a “good” use case for slop generators. It’s for cranking out low effort trash.

As a dedicated fan of walking simulators I can already see the amount of shovelware we need to dig through to find the good stuff multiplying by orders of magnitude.

It’s been a year since I played INFRA and I’ve thought about it without fail at least once a week and it damn well isn’t because they haphazardly made boring environments.

Remember seeing this in a book as a kid and not knowing if it was real or not. Must have been a Disney-themed encyclopedia I think.

I love/hate that this is a common experience. Someone did this to me too, although this was sort of a work friend taking the piss.

I have straight up backhandedly implied people senior to me who get paid 5x more than I do are throwing any possible expertise they might have out of the window. To their face. My stance on these slop extruders is well known among my colleagues.

I’ve even told people who used them in front of me, in a gentle but unflinching way, that their willingness to use them uncritically is a red flag for me and that comparing my genuine work to general machine output is something I can’t simply decide not to take as an insult. Including people who are supposed to review my work. As a professional I have to do something that exceeds the first page of Google in specificity. I do the long yards. Why is that suddenly a problem? If our work was this simple why are we getting paid to do it?

Some of these people trust me enough that they’re getting queasy about the whole AI thing after initially giving in. Yeah it’s decent at summarizing mass emails from corporate. Summarizing mass emails from corporate is not our fucking job. At least two people were paid subscribers to OpenAI’s product and no longer pay for chatbots. Proselytizing against the death of critical thinking is not a lost cause.

I have to get the fuck out of corporate.

I have a lot of 90s - aughts edutainment stuff that might be of interest to some people in my life. This might be a half decent way to preserve my old PC library for this stuff. I feel like virtual machines are pretty hit and miss and non-technical people don’t seem to enjoy messing around with them

They’re hit or miss. They aggregate a lot of the important tech news, but frankly, I wouldn’t trust them for anything important like figuring out what size and alloy of meat cleaver is the best for changing the SSD in my computer.

Huh. A pen and paper little puzzle format that I’ve never seen before.

I wonder what this whole category of games is even called. Used to see them in things like kids magazines mostly.

Here’s the thing. Digital computing fits very neatly in the orderly march of technological progression. So yes the algorithms might be very advanced but advanced algorithms are just part of doing tech.

Jiggling hydrogen atoms of conscious beings and watching what happens is stratospherically more sci-fi than even the coolest signal processing tech. Like on a fundamental level.

How amazing does the average person think “A”I”” is? This is an order of magnitude more impressive than any society-melting party trick.

same species

One of the loose ideas I remember from university was one professor talking about the progress of technology, concluding with something like “every invention is a logical step up from the previous one, built on increasingly intricate understanding of the way the world works and on more refined designs to employ our understanding. Except for MRI machines. If aliens landed tomorrow and we showed them our inventions, they’d be pleased to see how our progression accumulated, but at some point they’ll take one look at the MRI and say what the actual fuck is this.”

Another time he described MRI technology in our current time “like if the Crusaders had microwaves”.

To this day, any time an actually interesting innovation gets described, I still feel like it’s nothing compared to MRI tech. Really. It makes my head hurt just thinking about it. What the actual fuck is this.

"My method is I read an article about something, you know, and I get convinced that, oh, I gotta have this stuff,” he said. “And then I get it and then six months later I’m still taking it. I don’t remember what the article said. So, I end up with a big crate of vitamins that I’m taking, and I don’t even know why.”

I feel like this is a lot of people’s experience, we all know someone like this. I know that’s not the kind of thing the Lemmy demographic would look very kindly at, but this is a type of person. Some of them are batshit and others just had a lot of bad luck with the field of medicine.

I really feel like if this guy had a kinder worldview and wasn’t genuinely fucking bonkers he would be a much-needed voice that could speak reason to people who have lost their trust in medical science. Instead he’s this. So he isn’t that.

That quote could have come from someone who has come to a good realization about their understanding of health. Okay, you got sold a crate of vitamins big boy. Are you fixed yet?

But I really feel like the only ones who talk nicely to those people are industrial suppliers of snake oil and that just makes the world worse. Especially now that they’re at the wheel.

Demoscene, baby. People made things, shared them anonymously, and almost turned their nose at building a reputation or a brand.

The internet I fell in love with years ago is nothing like the pathetic shadow of it we live with today.

Macroblank has a fun compilation of remixed demo music, many of the original tracks are mostly known for being used in keygens. It’s called Keygen, obviously.

CalcKey? FireFish? Developers of Discord alternatives are just a special kind of person. Their efforts are commendable of course.

There was an idea tooted over on Mastodon

It’ll just be called Microsoft Copilot.

None of you are in an abusive relationship with the cruel mistress that is Windows and her accursed family and it shows.

Personally I’m excited for when they rerelease regedit as Windows Copilot, MFS as (Co)Pilot, and Purble Place as Copilot Kids Demo.

I used to refuse change at the bakery when I was a kid and would instead pick something out of the stack of pirated PS2 games. Something like two US dollars? Three? Not an egregious sum for my child self to waste every so often. The death of the on the ground piracy culture of the third world really sucks, although those beautifully dodgy TV boxes give me hope for humanity.

Those were the fucking days eh? You either catch a movie on TV or in the cinema, or you get lucky with whatever they’ve got on random counters in random shops. Remember watching schlock? Was that bad for culture? Was it really that bad?

Has Z Lib just been down for a while? I think I remember using it not that long ago

The fact that they pass a referral link by default even to Lemmy is really funny.

I’m writing Lebanese Arabic so the vowels are all a bit off, mind you. Here is the standard Arabic and the Lebanese dialect equivalents, alongside what I would consider a relatively unambiguous non-IPA transcription.

إمّايَة = /ʔmːaːja/ (MSA) = Immaya(h) (MSA) ≈ /ʔmːeːje/ (LA) = Imméyé (LA)

خِزّانات = /xizːaːnaːt/ (MSA) = Khizzanat (MSA) ≈ /xizːeːneːt/ = Khizzénét

The ء below the ا is basically an ـِ for it, and the ز is easily confused for a ذ. Thanks for playing!

My kidneys hurt just reading this. I guess that makes sense. I knew about the mineral layer and the lead being “fine” if left alone, but it’s really hard to shake off the thought of drinking water having to run through so much surface area being a liability. Shows you how little you know about things you take for granted as just how the world works.