luciole

luciole, 6 months ago

About to be on vacations for the holidays. The season’s been hitting me hard and I (should) welcome a good two weeks of slouching about in unproductive bliss. On the other hand I’ve had so many bad Christmas that anxiety levels are mounting for no good reason. I’ve cut off a lot of unpleasant things from the holidays in the last years but I’m still coping with the aftermath.

Also I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that I don’t know how to rest anymore. So I’ll do my best to keep positive and do nice things even though I’m a little apprehensive. There are some bits of my mind I could do without, ugh.

luciole, 6 months ago

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.

luciole, 6 months ago

I wonder if Adobe will come back on their word that XD’s a discontinued product now that they’re not about to take over its competitor.

luciole, 6 months ago

Instead of chiptune inspired music, how about music that inspired chiptune ? Yellow Magic Orchestra had an important impact (namely) on '80s/'90s era video game music. Here’s Rydeen (1979).

luciole, 6 months ago

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.

luciole, 6 months ago

Add that whiff of eugenics from the pronatalism mixed with the longtermism and, if they get what they want, we have something closer to good old blue blood monarchs.

luciole, 6 months ago

Public Lending Right programs exist in 35 countries to compensate authors whose works are in libraries.

luciole, 6 months ago

They do already.

luciole, 6 months ago

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

luciole, 6 months ago

There’s some simple rules of thumb that can be inferred from Big O notation. For example, I try to be careful with what I do in nested loops whose number of repetitions will grow with application usage. I might be stepping into O(n^2) territory, this is not the place for database queries.

luciole, 6 months ago

I don’t see the contradiction. If you’re doing CRUD operations on 10,000 points, I’m sure you’re doing what’s possible to send it to storage in one fell swoop. You most probably get out of those loops any operation that doesn’t need to be repeated as well.

luciole, 6 months ago

I’ve been holding the same office job with satisfaction for the last 20 years or so despite being an awkward yet likeable (citation needed) weirdo. Here’s how I manage:

• Pacing yourself is key. If you’re allowed breaks every couple of hours, take them. If not, take them anyways. If you struggle to stop for a break, it means you really need to take a break.
• The politics is part of the job. Treat it as such, with a cool head and a healthy distance.
• In a professional setting, nothing’s personal. Leave your ego at home (it’s safer there).
• Disconnect once the day is over. You’re not paid in the evening. Find some grounding activity to help if needed.
• Ideally, look for a job where it’s possible to somewhat care about the organization’s mission and to actively align with it. It’s more fun building a cathedral than stone cutting, even if it’s the same task.

YMMV of course.

luciole, 6 months ago

How do you even walk in there?

luciole, 6 months ago

Agreed. Sewers serve an important sanitary purpose. I propose to characterize Twixxer as an out of control tire fire.

luciole, 6 months ago

If the Amazonian pajés didn’t make up a new language, why would we? Each language genuinely brings a different way of seeing the world and bridges are built through multilinguism. Embrace the diversity, it’s the homo sapiens thing to do.

luciole, 6 months ago

The writing is at morning program levels of goofiness; it’s jarring. At 17 kg this meteorite would be worth over a million USD if it was gold. It’s like the writer is taking a piss at the poor guy who hoped to get some money out of it.

luciole, 7 months ago

I’ve heard preparation is key for such endeavours.

luciole, 7 months ago

Left panel is the face I make when something smells like death.

Right panel is the face I make when I realize the stench is caused by cheese.

This is because good cheese is sometimes quite stinky.

It was a solid meme in my head.

luciole, 7 months ago

It’s a prototyping tool. You use it to whip up something quick and get proper feedback before spending efforts on developing the actual thing.

Adobe XD and Figma were direct competing products. That’s why XD’s discontinuation by Adobe coupled with Figma’s acquisition is seen as a sort of reverse killer acquisition.

luciole, 7 months ago

And this is how I’ve learned about yet another weird internet trivia.

luciole, 7 months ago

Beautiful words. Resilience is terribly underrated.

luciole, 7 months ago

Meming’s fun but I wish it wouldn’t be everywhere all the time.

luciole, 7 months ago

Hello! I’m a dad. My opinion is to stick to your principles. Amazon products often escape any and all safety regulations and babies need those. They chew things, break things, throw things, put things inside things and generally behave as adorable little avatars of chaos. So yeah, take the time to know what you want for your child and share your wishes with your relatives. In my experience most people are just relieved not to have to do the research themselves. The gift will still be a surprise for baby after all.

luciole, 7 months ago

Amazon ignores local legislation and product recalls. Here’s an article from Canada written in May of this year, specifically about dangerous and forbidden baby products. It’s in french, so you may have to grab an auto translator.

Furthermore, Amazon is fighting hard against a large counterfeiting problem. They’re getting better at it, but it’s still there.

luciole, 7 months ago

Safety on the road has been improved so far by having public orgs and governments pressuring companies with regulations. Without them there would be no seatbelts and dashboards might still be dotted with stylish pointy metal spikes.

Unfortunately safety regulations have solely focused on the occupants of the concerned vehicle. It follows that any feature that protects the occupant at the expense of everyone else is still measured as a net positive. Ultimately this is leading to an arms race.

Vehicle safety needs to expand to the other side of the windshield.

luciole, 7 months ago

That’s terrible. Wishing you the best of luck to find a fulfilling job.

(For those curious like me) ブラック企業

A black company (ブラック企業, burakku kigyō), also referred to in English as a black corporation or black business, is a Japanese term for an exploitative, sweatshop-type employment system.

While the term “sweatshop” is associated with manufacturing, and the garment trade in particular, in Japan black companies are not necessarily associated with the clothing industry, but more often with office work.

While specifics may vary from workplace to workplace and company to company, a typical practice at a black company is to hire a large number of young employees and then force them to work large amounts of overtime without overtime pay. Conditions are poor, and workers are subjected to verbal abuse and “power harassment” (bullying) by their superiors.[1] In order to make the employees stay, superiors of black companies would often threaten young employees with disrepute if they chose to quit.

luciole, 7 months ago

Further proof that the electric car is gay. A manly man rolls coal.

luciole, 7 months ago

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

luciole, 7 months ago

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.

luciole, 7 months ago

We’re definitely lightyears away from that cursed era of building layouts with float.

luciole, 7 months ago

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.

luciole, 7 months ago

Can someone explain for the layperson?

luciole, 7 months ago

Ah OK, so this paper argues that given the right conditions the appearance of life is not necessarily likely. Basically it’s hard to know for sure with a single example (Earth). If it is in fact unlikely, it could explain why we haven’t met extraterrestrial life already. Thanks!

luciole, 7 months ago

What if you get 1 million dollars, but you hear voices telling you to do things.

luciole, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

They aren’t windmills, they’re the actual giants, so go forth and vanquish you valorous knight! We are legions of Sancho Panza.

luciole, 7 months ago

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are cool though. Great parody of knighthood even if four centuries old.

luciole, 7 months ago

That look caused the furries isn’t it?

luciole, 7 months ago

I mean it must be possible to be both intelligent and gassy.

luciole, 7 months ago

Biological evolution of our species has been on hold for a pretty long time already and I don’t see it changing any time soon. There are two univeral factors:

• the drive to reproduce away from your immediate group, further enabled by the tendency to migrate all over.
• the family societal structure, as opposed to a strict alpha male hierarchy.

These two things block the sharp rise of mutations and promote a wide diversity of individuals instead. It helped us to remain a unified species despite our spread all over the planet.

We evolve mainly through our culture, which complexifies at a spectacular rate. The downside is that a catastrophic collapse could wipe all our progress, even if we do survive it.

luciole, 7 months ago

The youth is doomed, it’s been known since the dawn of time.

luciole, 8 months ago

Glassware FTW

luciole, 8 months ago

wait they see everything

luciole, 8 months ago

When my kid was younger he had a “garbage games on tablet” phase as well. As others have said, paid games are the way to go (Play Pass sounds cool). Looking for indie games for Android, or PC games ported to Android gives some good results. Stardew Valley’s an obvious one. I haven’t played Ordia, but it looks gorgeous.

What worked really well for us was to teach him about some dark patterns in simple terms and spot them with him in the freemiums he was playing. “Fear of Missing Out” events/notifications and “Progression Paywalls” are typical ones. It made him realize the game wasn’t built to give him a good time as much as to frustrate him into endlessly spending real money in exchange for some phony currency. In the end he was happy to switch to saner games. It’s a good opportunity to work on their critical judgment basically.

luciole, 8 months ago

You’re not being ethical to the artists and devs that work at Nintendo though. You’re pissed at the leadership but it’s never them who gets sacked when the shit hits the fan.

luciole, 8 months ago

I work at a small non-profit publisher and our clients respecting copyright is basically what decides if we continue existing or not. I struggle as well with the general “end all copyright” sentiment. There’s this idea that circumventing copyright means sticking it to corporations, as if their creative employees making a living don’t exist.

Furthermore, I feel that generative AI is just the latest tech bro venture based on siphoning revenues out from under existing businesses whilst escaping the laws that apply to the sector. Advertisement revenues were siphoned from under the press, hotels are facing competition from business subverting residential housing, restaurants are being charged exorbitant prices to get their goods delivered. The ambient cynicism serves to maintain indifference towards these unethical tactics.

luciole, 8 months ago

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.

luciole, 9 months ago

The strongest argument against AI art is that it is derivative of the copyrighted art it is based on. A photo of a copyrighted artwork would be similarly difficult to copyright. In this sense, AI art is more akin to music sampling in that it uses original material to make something new – and to sample music you must ask permission.