• 0 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
cake
Cake day: December 26th, 2023

help-circle

  • Google does not have a monopoly on search. Bing / DuckDuckGo works just fine.

    Around 82% of search engine requests are issued through Google. Bing around 10%. I don’t know if we just have differing definitions of “monopoly,” but Google is the default on all Android devices, almost every non-Microsoft browser, and probably on Apple products as well. And most users don’t know enough or care enough to ever change from that.



  • Article is a bit click-baity. Many of the survivors who saw the film were okay with its depiction and understood why the film presented the atomic bombings the way that it did. The film is ultimately about J. Robert Oppenheimer, and showing the physical outcome of the bombings would have itself been a potentially crass and shocking inclusion in a relatively subdued character study of a complex and tortured individual. Everyone knows that the physical outcome of the bombings on Hiroshima are shocking and terrible and left a lasting scar on the nation, coming to define the national identity of the Japanese, and especially Hiroshima natives that survived the blast, throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. But it’s sort of like The Wind Rises. Oppenheimer was a physicist, and a very talented one. That his work contributed to the horrors of war is part of the tragedy of the individual and their story, just like it was for Jiro Horikoshi, the designer of the Zero.



  • This is a laundry list of things that are just very obviously the opposite of punk, though. It’s like if you asked someone to define “anti-punk,” they’d rattle of something very similar to this. It’s also in “Microblog Memes,” a meme community. The things posted here are jokes, and as such its nature as a joke is reinforced by the context in which the text is presented. This is Media Literacy 101, stuff.









  • I’ve written poorer documentation than this.

    “Here is a work around to fix [weird bug in production]:”

    “Edit: Disregard the above. It fixes [weird bug in production] but causes [bad thing] to happen.”

    “Edit 2: Apparently the first edit is wrong. It doesn’t cause [bad thing] to happen. Bad thing just happened to occur simultaneously the first time I did the workaround.”

    “Edit 3: [weird bug in production] has been fixed. This workaround is no longer needed.”

    “Edit 4: Turns out [weird bug in production] we fixed is what allowed our systems to communicate with one another. Had to rollback change. Work around is now considered ‘the fix’ going forward.”

    “Edit 5: Turns out it DOES cause [bad thing] to happen, but [bad thing happening] is a core component of our system’s design and also PAYROLL NEEDS IT TO FUNCTION?!”



  • Wizards/Hasbro hires contractors to produce art for their game. They make virtually none of it in house. It’s most likely they neither know nor care who or what produces art for MTG. Besides, they produce so much content in a year, some of it has to be AI/ML generated, so this is incredibly unsurprising. At this point, MTG is starting to enshittify by dumping out product as quickly as possible. Their quality control and playtesting has gone out the window. Most of their recent sets are pretty poorly received in the limited magic space. I don’t personally care about the use of AI art, but I can say that for money making enterprises, they’ll eventually have more and more art produced via ML over time, and eventually they’ll use ML to design sets in some capacity, as well. Right now, people are upset over it or annoyed by it on some quasi-ethical grounds of “stealing from artists by not compensating them for the work they produced being used to train the models.” But it’s going to eventually become the norm, purely on the basis that they aren’t going to lose any money from using ML to produce art and they’re going to save money by doing it.