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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 19th, 2023

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  • So like, if you were in a restaurant and ordered food, but it never came because a couple of the servers were blocking food from being served because the company wasn’t taking a strong stance against abortion, you’d think “these good people are taking a moral stand, good for them! The company better not take any action against them to make sure I get my food!”

    Or for that matter, if Google stopped all cooperation with the IDF, the company’s Jewish employees could (in fact should) disrupt business because Google was supporting terrorism?

    It seems to me that you can only support forms of protest you’d be willing to accept when the other side uses them against you. Basically the golden rule.







  • I think the fans & press deserve equal blame for the initial hype. At some point I saw a supercut of things Sean Murray said, then the resulting headlines and Reddit posts.

    In an interview, the journalist asks: “Will you be able to play with your friends in a shared universe?” The answer: “Well…we hope that eventually there will be at least some multiplayer functionality, though maybe not on day one…like maybe you could explore one another’s planets or share pictures or something.”

    Headline: “NO MANS SKY WILL LAUNCH WITH MULTIPLAYER!”

    Reddit comments: “I’m already forming a guild, we’re going to play as bounty hunters chasing down other players who are pirates in glorious multiplayer space battles!!”

    There were tons of examples of that. Journalists would poke and prod for a soundbite, take it out of context and exaggerate it, and the community would just go batshit with their expectations.


  • A while back, one of the image generation AIs (midjourney?) caught flack because the majority of the images it generated only contained white people. Like…over 90% of all images. And worse, if you asked for a “pretty girl” it generated uniformly white girls, but if you asked for an “ugly girl” you got a more racially-diverse sample. Wince.

    But then there reaction was to just literally tack “…but diverse!” on the end of prompts or something. They literally just inserted stuff into the text of the prompt. This solved the immediate problem, and the resulting images were definitely more diverse…but it led straight to the sort of problems that Google is running into now.






  • I think one of the differences (at least when I watched anime way back in the early 00s) is that anime relies on a whole different set of tropes from Western movies and cartoons, and those tropes are unfamiliar (or were, anyway) to Western audiences.

    When I started watching anime, it was hugely refreshing to be caught by surprise by plot twists and dialogue, and to see characters & themes that felt totally original.

    But then you watch more anime, and realize…oh, they weren’t unique, they were totally stereotypical. You just didn’t know the stereotypes they were based on.

    And before long you can see plot twists a mile away, the characters are predictable, and you can describe a new series as “basically X, but with some Y and monsters instead of robots”.

    It’s the false promise of that initial discovery that makes the eventual realization that much more disappointing.