Well, sure, with an image classifier, the bird identification is doable. I’m sure I could implement that if I went looking for some open source thingamabob that does that. But it’s still not something I could actually understand. That part definitely hasn’t changed over the years.

He he he

[Cyberpunk 2077 music]

/meme

I remember the last time I got messaged by some misogynist dipshit, way back in Halo 5, blaming me for losing the game. …When he was the worst performing player in the team. I just stared at the post game report and wondered how the heck the dude even managed to get a ranking as low as he did.

I always preferred the C64C style keyboard where the graphics characters were in the top of the keycaps. This is my C64G (old breadbin style chassis but with C64C style colouring and keycaps):

Quick summary: You get the left graphics character with the Commodore key (bottom left corner), and the right character with Shift key. By pressing Commodore+Shift, you swap between upper case + graphics characters mode and the upper case + lower case mode, applying to the entire screen (so you can’t actually use the right graphics characters in that mode).

Fun thing: To switch to another text colour you press Ctrl + number keys, with 8 colours available there, just as in the VIC-20. However, there’s also another set of colours available with Commodore + number keys, for another 8 colours. I guess with Jack Tramiel’s penny pinching, they didn’t bother to mark those on the keys when making the next gen system.

My favourite was the one Finnair used to do in the spooky season. Flight 666, straight to HEL.

That must have been frustrating when the user base responded “but I already got my Blåhaj”

Frankly they should have nuked “OneNote for Windows 10” long ago and quietly replaced it with the Office version. Or better yet, not launch a separate version to begin with under the same name. But this is Microsoft, having multiple apps with the same name is just the norm.

AI business is owned by a tiny group of technobros, who have no concern for what they have to do to get the results they want (“fuck the copyright, especially fuck the natural resources”) who want to be personally seen as the saviours of humanity (despite not being the ones who invented and implemented the actual tech) and, like all big wig biz boys, they want all the money.

I don’t have problems with AI tech in the principle, but I hate the current business direction and what the AI business encourages people to do and use the tech for.

In SMITE’s case, the characters come from mythological sources and those sources are public domain. However, the way they’re depicted was chosen by the game developer and their depictions are copyrighted by them.

If someone copied the list of characters and made their own game with their own artwork and gameplay and everything, SMITE’s creators could do absolutely nothing about it. But if they copied any substantial elements from SMITE directly, then it starts to go in the direction where lawyers start rising eyebrows. At that point it’s no longer making original stuff based on the same PD material.

I have no idea why the makers of LLM crawlers think it’s a good idea to ignore bot rules. The rules are there for a reason and the reasons are often more complex than “well, we just don’t want you to do that”. They’re usually more like “why would you even do that?”

Ultimately you have to trust what the site owners say. The reason why, say, your favourite search engine returns the relevant Wikipedia pages and not bazillion random old page revisions from ages ago is that Wikipedia said “please crawl the most recent versions using canonical page names, and do not follow the links to the technical pages (including history)”. Again: Why would anyone index those?

• Seats smell very faintly of pee
• On an unrelated note, the dashcam says “made in the USSR” for some reason
• It’s not a bomber, technically, but it does bomb a lot
• but don’t use that mode deliberately, because the ballistic system gets very confused sometimes and targets golf courses instead
• …I can’t think of any more lame jokes, I’ve not had my morning covfefe

GIMP (at least in v2) does have a vector path tool and stores the paths with the image! Thing is, they kind of work like selections and you have to explicitly stroke the paths on bitmap layers. It’s a bit more complicated than necessary and not easy to grasp at first.

For illustration work, having good support for both vector and bitmap elements is pretty damn convenient. For example, in comics, you draw the comics themselves in bitmap layers, while panels and speech bubbles go in vector layers. Having the ability to edit the speech bubbles easily is pretty neat.

(Optimally inking/outlines would be vectors too, but most people prefer to do that with bitmap tools anyway, or vectorise later.)

Krita actually does these pretty solidly - vector tools are there and they’re pretty easy to use. In GIMP 2, the vector path support actually is there and the editable texts are actually pretty great, but it has the air of “power user trick, for those in the know” rather than something people actually discover easily. You also need to update the vector strokes manually. (Haven’t tried GIMP 3 yet.) The fact that people still assume you can’t do this stuff really says it all.

The problem with cryptocurrencies is that you can explain it, without going to technical details, to a person with the intelligence of an average investment banker. (Which isn’t much. Many animals make more profitable random investments when prompted.)

Same with generative AI I guess.

Much of my PC gaming, back in the day, was “oh this looks like a good game. Runs like dogshit on my PC though. Maybe I’ll wait until I get a better PC.” [wait 10 years] “My ADHD has gone worse, I can’t play all this stuff”

There’s this Finnish joke that doesn’t translate well, about a physicist who got pulled over by police. “Uh, I guess I accelerated a bit.”

Some people may be asking “is that a bit too many crabs?”

The answer is that it’s an adequate amount of crabs. For that task at least.

The law defines “non-human” behavior “any type of behavior… [not typically] displayed by a member of the homo sapiens species,”

“My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Florida forever.”

Oh the term has rich history! First used in modern tech sector sense in 1975 about IBM.

[stern stare]

Forgotten the history, have we? I was referring to Microsoft’s tactics in the early 2000s.

Crypto bros have watered down the term and made it a laughing matter. They ruin everything they touch. Goddamn it.