The irony is that Buzzfeed actually had some legitimately hard-hitting investigative journalism. They had multiple Pulitzer winners on their payroll. But that shit takes time and costs money, so they used the clickbait BS to pay the bills.

Yeah, in the audio production world, it’s commonly referred to as a “compander”. A compressor for the loud parts, and an expander for the quiet parts. Commonly used in speaker phones for being able to pick up a large range of volumes, meeting rooms for remote meetings, plug-and-play ballroom mic systems, overhead announcement systems, etc… Basically anything that you want to set up once and then never worry about tuning. They can be a pain to properly dial in at first, but can be extremely useful.

That’s because enforcement is largely based on viewer reports. And nobody bothers to report them.

There is a car rental company that has been pushing legitimately awful AI ads on YouTube. Congrats, I probably wasn’t going to rent a car from you. But now I will specifically avoid your company if I ever need to rent a car.

Rock, Paper, Scissors was one I always thought would be great to put on a TV in a bar, and let it run and let people make bets on it.

My friends and I get drunk and do this with SaltyBet. It’s based on the freeware Mugen game engine, and uses community-made characters and levels. So you can be hanging out with friends, and suddenly Shaggy is fighting Optimus Prime. If I’m at a friend’s house and nobody else is using the TV for anything (usually sports), I’ll sometimes log into my Plex burner account, and load up MXC (the English dub of Takeshi’s Castle) for people to zone out with. It has absolutely zero plot, so people can tune in and out of it without missing anything.

Yeah, SSDs are one of the biggest innovations in computer speed in my memory. That, and actual good internet. I was raised with dial-up and HDDs, though I remember my dad coding (and playing things) with MS-DOS before I was old enough to understand it. I fully remember going to a game site and loading up a 2MB Adobe Flash game. I had time to go make a sandwich while it downloaded.

I had lots of games individually bookmarked, because it saved a lot of time compared to waiting like 30 seconds for each page to load. If I only bookmarked the site’s landing page, I would have to wait for the welcome page to load, then the Games section to load, then the first page of the Action Games genre to load, then the second page of the Action Games section to load, before I could finally get to my game. Even skipping those four or five pages and going directly to the game page could easily save a solid 2-3 minutes of waiting.

Hey, can y’all like… Maybe denounce genocide? Literally just say genocide is bad. You don’t need to take any other action. Literally just say the three words “genocide is bad” in that order without any other words before or after it, and I’ll be happy to vote for you.

Conservatives: No. And since you asked, we’re sending ICE to your house to murder your dog and kidnap your spouse.
Liberals: No ❤️✊🏿🏳️‍🌈

Weren’t there suspicions that Wish (a major Disney movie that flopped hard) was largely AI generated? I don’t think Disney has too many objections to AI use…

Yeah, this actually looks similar to the early concept sketches that Nomura cooked up. Back before Disney noticed he was trying to put a chainsaw-wielding character next to Donald and Goofy, and told him to chill out.

The original concept was that the keyblade was going to be an end-game weapon that you worked towards, while the primary weapon was going to be a chainsaw. Then Disney went “hey-… Uhh… We noticed you’re going to put a chainsaw-wielding 12 year old next to Donald and Goofy. Maybe fucking don’t do that?? Take it down like two notches.” So Nomura pivoted and just gave Sora the keyblade right at the start of the game.

Looks like Castle Oblivion, which was a major plot point in several games. It has a very “Escher met Castlevania, then got puked on by Disney” vibe.

The two states that are most conveniently located for sending people to space, because they’re closest to the equator, have access to deep water barges for large shipments, and have relatively mild weather for clear launches. Plus, congress had a large say in NASA’s decisions, and Texas had a lot of influential politicians at the time. You think NASA headquartered there because they liked the politics? Clown take.

I’m reminded of the “I Am Rich” app. The app cost (IIRC) $1000, which was the price cap for the iOS App Store at the time.

And all it did was display a floating diamond on the screen. When you tapped the diamond, it displayed the text “I am rich, I deserve it, I am good, healthy, and successful.” That was it. That was the entire app. It was just a way for rich people to waste their money and show off to their other rich friends that they could afford it.

It’s also a fundamentally different user experience. Sure you could load SteamOS onto a machine you built. But the point is that this targets the couch players, instead of the desktop players. And very few PC players will build a new PC just for their couch.

I love my Steam Deck, because it has caused my wife’s complaints about gaming to dry up almost completely. When I’m at my computer desk, she can’t snuggle with me. But by moving to the couch, we can snuggle while I play. Her complaints weren’t really about my gaming; they were about my physical unavailability. And the Steam Deck allows me to access the vast majority of my PC games on the couch, so we can both be happy.

OH NO brother they’re RAFFLING IT!? hahahaha that’s fucked

I’m actually glad to see it. A raffle is one of the only realistic ways to deter scalpers while still leaving the console eventually accessible to people who actually want to play on it. Fuck scalpers; anything that hurts them is a win in my book.

Yeah, I’m hoping we see game devs actually focus on optimization again. Early game consoles forced devs to really focus on things like memory usage, pixel map storage, texture sizes, etc… Super Mario Bros reused pixel maps for clouds in the background and bushes in the foreground, and simply changed the colors.

Hell, the second gen Pokémon games actually pioneered brand new data compression methods, to the point that the devs managed to fit the entire first gen region in as a post-game Easter egg. So they managed to compress the entire first and second regions into a small enough space to fit both regions on a similarly sized card as the first game alone. They literally fit two games into a card that was only originally expected to hold one. It originally started because one dev was focused on eking out small performance improvements, by compressing the game code and assets more efficiently. And eventually they got it so well optimized that they realized they could fit the entire Kanto region on the game card too. And so they rebuilt the entire Kanto region and added a secret superboss at the end. All for an Easter egg that most casual players would never see, because reaching Kanto required completing the Johto Pokédex.

The first Crash Bandicoot game brought major innovations to classic game model design, because the character didn’t have a “skeleton” in the traditional sense. They wanted the character to be cartoony, and be able to squish or flex as he interacted with the environment. If he gets rolled over by a boulder, they wanted him to pancake like a cartoon would. And traditional skeleton models (where the character model is built around a rigid skeleton, then simply follows along as the skeleton is posed) wouldn’t allow for the flexibility that they needed. So they pioneered new modeling techniques where they tracked each individual facet of the character’s model, to be able to fit within the PS1’s hardware limitations.

Early game devs had a very specific target. They couldn’t just send it out the door and let the hardware catch up later. Imagine moving an entire 5 bedroom household across the country. Modern game devs will look at the amount they need to move, and go “eh, we’ll just get a bigger truck.” There will be lots of wasted space, because they’re not even bothering to stack boxes or furniture in the truck. But early game devs were forced to make everything fit into a single 20’ box truck, so they focused on what was truly essential, and packed everything as efficiently as possible. And we’re quickly reaching the point that players won’t be able to afford a bigger truck, so game devs may actually start packing their games efficiently again.

They don’t just read license plates. They analyze faces/pets/distinctive clothing to ID people, scan nearby WiFi and Bluetooth signals to track devices, scan distinctive features of vehicles (dents, scratches, bumper stickers, etc) to track them even without a clear license plate, etc… Calling it a license plate reader vastly downplays their capabilities.

It’s like someone calling a fully automatic high-powered machine gun “a rabbit-hunting gun”. Sure it could be used to shoot rabbits, but that’s vastly understating the capabilities.

It’s a fairly common phrase. Language can change and have regional differences. This isn’t Quebec defending their weird version of French as the only “correct” way to speak.

Yeah, the vast majority of people barely even know how to use a web browser. They won’t care about (or even notice) this change.

My problem is that my landlord would make random unscheduled visits with his dogs. I assumed it was him or his dog. It was a home invader, who found the front door unlocked. My landlord left it unlocked. I know it was him, because I parked in the back and never used the front door.

I’d argue that the HP stripe logo is just as bad:

The KIA logo always reads as “KN” to me, but at least I can fucking read it. The first time I saw the new HP logo I legitimately didn’t know what I was looking at. lip? lili? lqi? lgi? I basically always end up reading it as “lip” instead of “hp”.