No, we are both dreaming butterflies.

It’s weird that Obama is being nuanced here, yet the US has been unwavering in supporting Israel, including during Obama’s term. Maybe his stance has changed. Or maybe it’s easy for him to say things when he doesn’t have to act on it at all. Talk is cheap, after all.

The video also calls out that one of the challenges in moving off of fandom is SEO. The fandom sites often are above the new sites even when the fandom site becomes a pile of unmaintained, vandalized garbage. This suggests that vandalism actually helps fandom.

The best thing we can do is not visit the sites and don’t link to them, instead using and linking to their new sites.

My best guess is that they hope some agriculture or GMO company might have a use for it. Basically crops + future theme. Maybe they were trying to stand out from the likely vastly more common corn + person in lab coat?

I’m doing an evil playthrough now and finding various things I missed from the first playthrough. But oof, I feel really awful about the horrible things the game lets you do. 😅

Personally, I enjoy the problem solving. Debugging is fun once you’re good at it (and when there isn’t major time pressures).

Professional software dev is also waaaaay more than just coding, too. And the more you do it, the less coding you’ll do. A junior dev might spend most of their time coding, but senior devs are spending a lot of time doing high level design, helping the juniors, and reviewing various kinds of things.

Same, first 20 years of my life I disliked the idea of tattoos and thought I’d never, ever get any. Turns out all that was just society pushing puritan ideas on me and I just had to get over that.

Jeez, where do you live?

I’m in Canada and have never had to wait even remotely that long in any city I’ve been a pedestrian in. It’s certainly a poorly followed law in that I’ll regularly see people not stop even if they had tons of time, but the majority of drivers do stop. I don’t think I’ve ever waited more than maybe a minute. I’d usually have to wait longer at a light than I would at an uncontrolled intersection or no-intersection crosswalk.

That said, the most annoying was in Saskatoon, where I went to university. There’s a road going up to the university where there’s a very long stretch with no controlled crosswalks until you get to the very end. I learned to just cross at the end (even if it meant needing to loop back) because crossing at an uncontrolled crosswalk in the middle was annoying. I would have often been on the top part of a T intersection and there were always parked cars, so being seen as trying to cross the road was the challenge there. But even then it usually wasn’t more than a minute and crossing from the other side was a lot easier because it was so much more obvious that you were waiting to cross. It was also a 2 lane road, but usually when one direction stops, drivers in the other lane figure it out.

How does this happen? Really soggy, thawed pizza?

Hot pursuit was the one that let you play as or against cops, right? I freaking loved that as a kid. I’m not much for racing games, but that’s the exception.

Which half the provinces don’t even recognize (as in, not a stat holiday). Not that it really matters that much. No problem has ever been solved by merely declaring a holiday and there’s no shortage of shitty actions speaking louder than any holiday could.

Yeah, the average consumer doesn’t buy Windows. They buy a computer and it happens to come with Windows most of the time. Those consumers aren’t going to want to pay for a subscription. Especially when you look at the prices of the kinds of computers that most people are buying. They’re budget machines. No way a subscription would go over well. And why would OEMs want to deal with the fallout of people not buying their computers because of subscriptions?

Agree and I sympathize with all the points.

On the financial point, we, as a society, badly need to stop depending on jobs for survival before it’s too late. But I know that we’re unlikely to change until a lot of people get hurt.

And on the self-worth point, it feels awful to be replaced, even if the money isn’t an issue. People take pride in their work and want their work to be celebrated. Yet, we’re quickly approaching a point where it’s going to be very difficult for people to create art by hand that can hold a candle to AI art. Sure, there’s still many master artists, but they got where they are through hard work. How many new potential artists will be willing to put in that hard work when any random Joe Blow can generate something better in seconds? Human made art (from scratch) won’t go away, but it is harder to feel good about what you create when it feels like your art has no place anymore.

I don’t think that’s necessarily a dead giveaway. Because there’s been controversy about AI art that added watermarks. The controversy being because it implied the AI was scraping images that it definitely wasn’t allowed to use.

Hands are only a give away for bad AI art. There’s no shortage of examples with great hands (especially when using features like Stable Diffusion’s ControlNet, which allows you to give hints to the AI for the shape that something should match). Just so many people posting AI art generate once or twice and post that. If you’re more selective and selectively regenerate, you’ll be able to get much more believable results.

This is also a rapidly changing area, with the most cutting edge AI being way better than something from even a year ago. Used to be that no AI could do even remotely believable text, but in recent weeks, I’ve been seeing many examples of AI art that got small amounts of text perfect.

I only guessed a single one as generated by AI and I was wrong on that (the mouse in the boat drawing felt like unusual shaping and shading for a human). I really could not identify any telltale signs of AI in any of them, so answered entirely honestly that none of the others looked like AI generated.

To be honest, I expected that. The telltale signs people often talk about are only problems for bad AI art. Well done AI art really is indistinguishable. Stuff like weird fingers, faces, and teeth are only problems if the prompter is lazy and just picks the first thing generated (and doesn’t selectively regenerate). If you’re selective, you can get AI art without the things some people claim make AI art easy to recognize.

It’s like photoshop or movie CGI. Anyone can detect a bad photoshop and we’re used to seeing those. But well done photoshops by experts can be near impossible to detect (short of careful pixel level inspection, which doesn’t really apply to AI art). Yet, a lot of people are over confident in how well they can spot photoshops.

I wonder if this will change anyone’s mind? I’ve always wanted to do this for a few topics, including AI. I’ve also wanted to do this for trans vs cis people (so many transphobes claim they can “always tell”), movie CGI vs practical effects (see also: Captain Disillusion videos), and for various kinds of food and drink (so many people are elitist that something tastes better – simple example that I’ve actually seen disproven is the various kinds of eggs, including store bought vs locally sourced).

I’m sorry, but 99.99% is a laughable hyperbole. A huuuuge number of people have disabilities and disabilities are extremely diverse. A simple example is colour blindness. Google says 8% of men and 0.5% of women are colour blind. Video games frequently do use colour in a way that makes colour blindness a problem and colour blind modes are an accessibility option.

Google also says 15% of the world has some degree of hearing impairment. That’s admittedly biased towards seniors, but I can find numbers that say 9% of 20-39 year old Canadians have detectable hearing losses. Captions are an accessibility option.

And those are just two examples. There’s tons of disabilities out there. Even when an individual disability might only be 0.1% of the population, add them all together and there’s a substantial number of people who are left out by lack of one accessibility option or another. Aside from obvious disabilities, there’s also just general worsening of reaction times as people age.

Yeah, I’m hearing impaired and need captions. I’ve never seen a major game without them for many years now, and recent games have gone above and beyond with things like captioning sounds (not just dialogue) and directional indicators.

I kinda hope someday they’ll remaster the original Assassin’s Creed. It’s the only non-spin off in the series that I haven’t played. I own a copy, but gave up on it because it has no captions and I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying.

I also love how difficulty settings are much more common now. I’m never gonna buy a Dark Souls game. Fuck those. I tried the first game and learned my lesson. Thankfully, most games these days don’t take such an elitist stance with difficulty. It’s really common that games these days will let you change difficulty on the fly. Some games have split puzzle vs combat difficulty. I’ve seen some games have specific settings just for reaction timing. And also love those settings that highlight interactive objects so I don’t waste so much time looking for subtle hints that something is interactive.

Some of these I get, but I don’t get the T9 thing. T9 was so bad! It took ages to type many words. Today’s predictive keyboards are miles better.

Also, no software updates? Sure, every now and then there’s a shitty update, but most updates are great. New features and especially bug fixes are amazing. Used to be that if something had a bug, you just had to deal with it. There’s no guarantees it’ll be fixed today, but many companies do fix their bugs at least eventually. The ability to iteratively develop is huge for software quality. These days, unless you’re developing something that absolutely cannot fail (like a mars prober or radiation therapy machine), it’s widely agreed upon that iterative design is superior to “waterfall” design of trying to plan it out all ahead of time. Part of why is so you can get feedback continuously instead of only after you’ve committed to months of tech debt.

Bash is so bad. I literally use it every day and have written many Bash scripts, yet I’m constantly having to search for how to do things in it because syntax is so bizarre and difficult to remember. Need to do a for loop over lines in a file? You can bet I’m googling the syntax for it. I have a general idea for what it looks like and know what to search for, but no way in hell can I write it correctly in the first few tries.

String manipulation is the absolute worst. Have fun getting to learn the unreadable syntax of most sed and awk programs (the only thing most people have memorized is find and replace). Stuff like “split a string of comma separated ints and add them up” are way harder in Bash than in Python, despite the fact I often need to do stuff like that in Bash. Well, in the terminal anyway. Sometimes I’ll just use Python, but Python’s weakness is executing programs and getting their output, which is nowhere near as convenient as it is in Bash.

Side note, isn’t it weird that for a language where flags like --foo bar are so commonly used, there’s no built in or standard tools for accessing flags?