In terms of business decisions it may make sense, but honestly the very fact the show's had additional seasons already seems to really kill the spirit of it. A spinoff would feel like sending that spirit to further depths of hell.
Avatars generated by artificial intelligence are now able to sell more than real people can, according to a collaboration between Chinese tech company Baidu and a popular livestreamer. ...
Not a fan of this application of AI, but I thought it was a little funny to read. It figures businesses would want to create artificial sales and marketing drones.
I guess on the plus side it may mean unlike real people you could more ethically and comfortably find ways to shut them down.
Unless I'm mistaken, it sounds like they were running without human input, see last sentence:
AI avatars can sharply reduce costs since companies don’t need to hire a large production team or a studio to livestream. The digital avatars can also stream nonstop without needing breaks.
The phrasing is clunky, I'll give you that, which I think is attributable to this being early days for the tech.
Scientists and engineers at UNSW Sydney, who previously developed a method for making green ammonia, have now turned to artificial intelligence and machine learning to make the process even more efficient. ...
This is the kind of AI/machine learning I can get behind, especially given it may sort of help even out some of its energy use in the process. More of this application of the tech could be great if the results hold up.
Nice detail to use when searching the internet btw:
"But if you're collecting data before 2022 you're fairly confident that it has minimal, if any, contamination from generative AI," he added. "Everything before the date is 'safe, fine, clean,' everything after that is 'dirty.'"
Try running searches set pre-2022, at least for older info, to reduce the possibilities of AI generated noise.
Anyway, kinda funny to see these generators may be producing enough noise to make producing more noise somewhat harder. Hopefully this doesn't also impact more productive AI development, such as what's used in scientific research and the like, as that would genuinely suck.
Edit:
Revised from generators "have produced" to "may be producing" to better reflect the lack of concrete info regarding generative AI data pollution as someone else pointed out. As they note:
"Now, it's not clear to what extent model collapse will be a problem, but if it is a problem, and we've contaminated this data environment, cleaning is going to be prohibitively expensive, probably impossible," he told The Register.
Sort of odd to see this again (from Vox as well, I think?). It seems to add more detail, but the bottom line remains the same: it's largely because fewer people are trying to immigrate into the U.S. since the Trump admin entered office.
Trump might struggle to ramp up deportations along the border, as Obama did, simply because significantly fewer people are coming. In March, border apprehensions fell to 7,181, a 95 percent decrease from March 2024.
This all sucks, and another part that sucks about it is that as usual, in the absence of as many of the Republicans'/conservatives' favorite scapegoats, they begin turning inward and grabbing anyone and everyone that remotely resembles those scapegoats to abuse and deport to appeal to their base. Without more pushback, and as those deportation numbers continue to dwindle, you can expect that they'll begin more widely rounding up their detractors (or at least attempting to).
Video essay on how the hyper-focus in design on convenience and concealing the inner workings of things in everything can influence people individually and society more broadly. ...
Holy shit, how long has it been? Everybody assumed the devs ran with the money, they silently disappeared and stopped updating the game despite being in early access.
The other day I shared this video (Failure of Battlebit Remastered), which itself was uploaded by its creator only a week ago.
It's great to see the devs coming back to it. Tbh I don't think it's my sort of game personally, but I typically prefer to see projects revisited and restored well instead of abandoned.
Thought this was interesting primarily for the section on providing dedicated servers while winding down/removing official servers in some(all?) regions.
The section concerning dedicated servers potentially contributing to the decline in playerbase struck me as a kind of microcosm example of some of the difficulties federated social networks have been facing for years. Albeit unlike this game, there are still communicative software devs around here.
In a better world, this (or one of its forks) would have taken off instead of Mastodon. It makes a way better case for itself by its distinct features compared to Mastodon, which is too easy to ignore (by everyday people) as Nerd-Twitter.
It has a similar issue as attempts to respond to criticisms of Mastodon (or other federated software), the people criticizing it and in this situation Bluesky, are clearly criticizing them as social media and don't care about the technical foundations. They do not care if there's other software using the protocol, and other apps to interact with the protocol to filter out what they don't like.
If they cared enough, they might seek out that other software or those other apps, but either in what they're saying or doing (e.g. returning to Twitter/X or switching over to group chats or something else instead), they indicate they don't.
The real response to people's disinterest or distaste for a social media platform isn't anything easy to provide. Some of it can be moderation, clearer guidance around the interface to tailor your experience, more outreach to bring in a greater variety of conversation, and so on. However not much of it can be addressed by the underlying technology, because the vibes of social media are produced by the people there, and no amount of tech can ethically address that.
In the meantime, block and mute at will and stick to feeds you know you'll enjoy to better avoid the worst that may emerge from the net.
For those unfamiliar, the rubber duck method is more or less laying out a problem to something else (rubber duck, pet, whatever) to try to solve it. I've most often come across this as explicitly talking to the rubber duck, but apparently writing to them is also an approach? ...
Welcome to my TED talk. I'm a massive Tool and A Perfect Circle fan, going into this. I knew of Chevelle, the lovechild of Deftones and Tool with a sprinkle of Korn, but I always felt they sounded derivative, but over the last week, I've found a band far deeper than a song about someone who gets angry. ...
I've seen this band name before, but not sure if I'd heard them before so gave "Young Wicked" a listen. They definitely sound like some other bands I've heard before...Albeit with their own touches.
Not too bad, not something I'd listen to all the time, but when you want this kind of rock grit, I can see the appeal. Appreciate the track suggestions and recommendation!
A senior adviser to Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign is joining Coinbase’s global advisory council, which already includes several former U.S. senators and President Donald Trump’s ex-campaign manager, as the cryptocurrency exchange broadens its political reach. ...
Cryptocurrency orgs have done one job extremely well here, and that's blatantly demonstrate that the best way to try to fast track legislation is Big Money.
It's like how all the cryptocurrency screwups demonstrate why there are financial regulations to begin with, now they're inadvertently helping demonstrate extremely clearly why we need to get money out of politics.
This caught my eye as I hadn't read/heard of Ne Zha before, and while I imagine the video's only scraping the surface, I thought it was a decent overview of the character and their background. It's some cool insight into some ancient Chinese mythos/folklore.
Look at some of what people chafe against with Reddit, e.g. karma requirements and ambiguous auto-moderation, to invite them over to communities around here.
If you have an interest in something new and upcoming, post about it in the broader communities here and if the moderators there are cool with it*, use those posts to invite people to a specific community about it.
Create specific communities about new/trending stuff and invite people from elsewhere to discuss it here instead of Reddit.
Whichever instance wants to take a shot at an Ask Me Anything community (as you'd want both admins and mods on-hand for this), consider it as these Q&As can draw attention to this space very well with the right people invited to ask about whatever.
* Moderators of these broader communities, if you're okay with people inviting others to more specific communities around here, clarify that somewhere easy to find. People coming from elsewhere may assume it's not and never ask due to their prior experiences.
Ultimately, have fun with it all! If you're not having fun and enjoying things here, why would anyone else want to join?
The diarist John Evelyn, whose 1661 treatise Fumifugium focused on London’s growing pollution problem, had no doubt that Parr’s death was caused by “the Aer, which plainly wither’d him”
Fumifugium is such a great title!
Honestly this article gets better as you go...We could use a modern medical series like the old "Anatomy of Quackery" to debunk the insidious nonsense still being spread today!
Is there anything else you want people to know about Bluesky?
This is a choose-your-own-adventure game. You can get in there and customize the experience as much as you want. If you’re not finding what you want within the Bluesky app, there might be another app within the protocol ecosystem that will give you what you want. If you can’t find it, you can build it. You don’t get this level of control anywhere else.
Emphasis added on last sentence. If nothing else tells you an interview is as much marketing as it is aiming to be genuinely informative, it should be statements like this.
That last sentence is basically a lie, as anyone across ActivityPub networks can tell you. I would say I don't know why they would say this, but I do know at least one reason: marketing.
It can be argued ActivityPub doesn't enable the same level of control, but the problem is that it's so damn flexible that it'd be somewhat disingenuous to do so.
AuthTransfer has similar problems but of a different sort, primarily that too many people not using it don't realize how it's still rapidly changing and that already there are some independent and semi-independent platforms emerging built with it.
What remains important to keep an eye out for is if/when the AuthTransfer protocol is fully released from Bluesky's ownership/control and becomes an open standard. I think that's as important or more important than any fully independent "instance", to put it in ActivityPub terms, built with it.
See Rule 5: Posts concerning other instances’ activity/decisions are better suited to Fediverse or Drama in the Fediverse communities.
I'll be locking this accordingly. That said, this post is also sort of a request to World's admins, which may be better directed to Lemmy.world Support.
The interface on old Lemmy is perfect. If a post hot into the front page allowing for seamless connection from your reddit account to Lemmy this site would instantly get millions of new users and probably overtake reddit cause the fedverse is superior.
I prefer the all at once approach so I can watch it at my own pace. If it releases weekly, whether a few a week or one a week, I ignore it until the season is done and if I remember, then I watch at my pace.
Alternatively I wait till the show has run its course entirely and then whenever I remember, I watch it and finish it if it keeps my interest.
I've probably been through every release scheduling approach the distributors can try, so I'm done trying to follow them (especially when they make it unclear which they're trying this time). If the show catches my interest, I'll watch it whenever and however I prefer pending its availability.
Fred Luo from Outlaw Star, for those interested. Show's a tad dated in some respects, but there's still little else like it so far as I'm aware. ...
A man in a green jacket, orange-ish shirt underneath, with dark blue hair and a red headband points to himself, with his mouth open, and text along the top and bottom quotes him saying, "My inquisitive nature won't be satisfied until I explore other amorous pursuits!"
I joined Lemmy a few days ago and have been reading around. 90%+ of the content I see, even on non-politics related communities, is political in some way. I have no interest in that, so it’s tiring, especially when it’s inserted in the comments of completely unrelated posts.
Some apps (e.g. Voyager/Thunder) and web frontends (Tesseract? not sure which tbh) enable keyword filtering.
In the case of the apps, it's found in settings under filters & blocks or filters, respectively. Unfortunately I can't recall which web frontends enable it for sure, but I do remember there seemed to be fewer of them that did last I checked.
Context: I made a poll on PieFed about the new post flairs (so if you are one of the few hundred people who have a PieFed account, follow that link and answer there). Unfortunately Lemmy has neither polls nor post flairs, so this post is to open up the discussion to the wider Fediverse, or rather the subset of it that ...
Personally I dislike anything with -verse involved because big companies have run it into the ground and then some.
The boring, dry ways of describing them work best in my opinion.
Federated forums is the driest, most technical and to the point but not very telling.
Swap out forum for link aggregator and you have similar, arguably even more technical (certainly more of a mouthful).
Connected/linked forums might be more approachable, more readily conveying how these are separate forums but networked together.
Cross-forums may work as well to the same end, but not sure how immediately understandable cross may be in this context and outside of gaming spaces.
Whatever the case I kind of think this has things backwards. What's more important than describing and talking about the backend tech is pointing people to any of the sites built with them that have anything of interest to them to bother with. I can't think of anything online I've ever gone to or used because someone told me it was using Apache, Nginx, phpBB, or like an Open Source Web Server or using such and such CDN.
The reason why is simple: next to nobody talks like that. The only people that might are deep in web dev.
Maybe this already exists. But couldn't one theoretically create a world within a world that is like the Net we all knew and loved before it was enshittified? I know the wayback machine exists, but I was thinking something that is still alive. IRC chats, forums, flash games (maybe not, with security concerns..), video sites ...
Last night my SO and I were looking for something lighthearted to watch and we stumbled across The Last Belle. The animation is buttery smooth and contains a sequence by none other than Roy Naisbitt (The Thief and the Cobbler) which was IMMEDIATELY obvious. ...
Going off the headline alone makes me think of when the idea of putting cosmetic patches on things felt cool. Personally I still think it's cool, maybe others do too, I dunno.
Anyway, repairing things is cool whether it's electronic or cloth!
This is a great demonstration that if Bluesky really wants to walk their talk, they're going to have to do more. More in terms of educating people on the value of self-hosting their own Personal Data Severs, and encouraging the building of other PDS hosting/entryway services.
Nevertheless even then the protocol still has Relays that act as the biggest point of failure to it all, and that will remain so even with independent ones.
A lot of Netflix's adult animated comedies. I glance at some of them and their art styles put me off, so I think, "That's probably not gonna get renewed..."
I check back awhile later and some of them are at like 4+ seasons.
Squid Game Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk Teases 'Possibility' of a Spinoff Ahead of Final Season ( people.com )
Netflix to Stream 2nd Mononoke Film on August 14 ( www.animenewsnetwork.com )
A wild bear enters Lithuania's capital. Hunters refuse a government request to shoot the animal | AP News ( apnews.com )
A young female bear caused a stir after wandering out of the forest and into the leafy suburbs of the Lithuanian capital. ...
AI avatars in China just proved they are better influencers. It only took a duo 7 hours to rake in more than $7 million | CNBC ( www.cnbc.com )
Avatars generated by artificial intelligence are now able to sell more than real people can, according to a collaboration between Chinese tech company Baidu and a popular livestreamer. ...
AI helps narrow 8,000 catalyst options down to one that supercharges green ammonia | Phys.org ( phys.org )
Scientists and engineers at UNSW Sydney, who previously developed a method for making green ammonia, have now turned to artificial intelligence and machine learning to make the process even more efficient. ...
Celebrate 10 Years of Aerials and Epic Saves in Rocket League Season 19! ( www.rocketleague.com )
ChatGPT Has Already Polluted the Internet So Badly That It's Hobbling Future AI Development ( share.google )
Inside The World's Most Unusual Fossil Site - The La Brea Tar Pits (Feat. Lindsay Nikole) [38:38] by Miniminuteman ( www.youtube.com )
An interesting look around the La Brea Tar Pits, including some behind the scenes of the facilities where they handle the recovered fossils.
Trump is deporting way fewer people than Obama did. Why? ( www.vox.com )
How We Designed the Soul Out of Everything [26:11] by Design Theory ( www.youtube.com )
Video essay on how the hyper-focus in design on convenience and concealing the inner workings of things in everything can influence people individually and society more broadly. ...
BattleBit - Operation Overhaul: Teaser Trailer ( www.youtube.com )
Holy shit, how long has it been? Everybody assumed the devs ran with the money, they silently disappeared and stopped updating the game despite being in early access.
Weather wigets for Android?
Hey all ...
The Failure of BattleBit Remastered [21:18] - TheYamiks with CAMIKAZE78 ( www.youtube.com )
Thought this was interesting primarily for the section on providing dedicated servers while winding down/removing official servers in some(all?) regions.
What's a niche fediverse software you like?
I'm a fan of wafrn (wafrn.net), its a tumblr-like thing.
Bluesky backlash misses the point | TechCrunch ( techcrunch.com )
If you like the rubber duck method of talking out problems, you might also enjoy journaling!
For those unfamiliar, the rubber duck method is more or less laying out a problem to something else (rubber duck, pet, whatever) to try to solve it. I've most often come across this as explicitly talking to the rubber duck, but apparently writing to them is also an approach? ...
I'm gonna talk about Chevelle for 20 minutes.
Welcome to my TED talk. I'm a massive Tool and A Perfect Circle fan, going into this. I knew of Chevelle, the lovechild of Deftones and Tool with a sprinkle of Korn, but I always felt they sounded derivative, but over the last week, I've found a band far deeper than a song about someone who gets angry. ...
Coinbase hires top political strategists as crypto industry shows off its newfound political might | AP News ( apnews.com )
A senior adviser to Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign is joining Coinbase’s global advisory council, which already includes several former U.S. senators and President Donald Trump’s ex-campaign manager, as the cryptocurrency exchange broadens its political reach. ...
Ne Zha: China's Symbol of Rebellion | Video Essay [17:13] by Accented Cinema ( www.youtube.com )
Komi Can't Communicate is such a nice show
Literally, the show is remarkably nice. Tadano is a great supportive character, flawed in his own ways but well-meaning through and through. ...
Why Outreach Matters
TL;DR: Integrity, or instance identity, and outreach are both important to help federated online spaces to continue to exist. ...
Spaceballs 2 | Announcement ( www.youtube.com )
The Old, Old, Very Old Man: Thomas Parr and the Longevity Trade ( publicdomainreview.org )
Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet ( www.wired.com )
Calling on lemmy.world to defederate from feddit.org
Feddit.org has chosen to support the Palestinian genocide and censor ALL speech against Israel or in support of Palestinians. ...
Ability to sync reddit account?
The interface on old Lemmy is perfect. If a post hot into the front page allowing for seamless connection from your reddit account to Lemmy this site would instantly get millions of new users and probably overtake reddit cause the fedverse is superior.
Bingeing, Weekly, or Batches? Is There a Right Way to Roll Out a Series on Streaming? ( www.indiewire.com )
Beyond sycophancy: DarkBench exposes six hidden ‘dark patterns’ lurking in today’s top LLMs | VentureBeat ( venturebeat.com )
Archive link: https://archive.ph/9FNHU ...
Trust me, it's a great read ( en.m.wikipedia.org )
Posts where every other word is a tag
Example: ...
Perfect explanation for the unmarried
Fred Luo from Outlaw Star, for those interested. Show's a tad dated in some respects, but there's still little else like it so far as I'm aware. ...
Why is almost everything on Lemmy political?
I joined Lemmy a few days ago and have been reading around. 90%+ of the content I see, even on non-politics related communities, is political in some way. I have no interest in that, so it’s tiring, especially when it’s inserted in the comments of completely unrelated posts.
What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called? ( piefed.social )
Context: I made a poll on PieFed about the new post flairs (so if you are one of the few hundred people who have a PieFed account, follow that link and answer there). Unfortunately Lemmy has neither polls nor post flairs, so this post is to open up the discussion to the wider Fediverse, or rather the subset of it that ...
Is there any way to bring back a section of the Internet to those of us who want it to stay in the 2003-2010 and before era?
Maybe this already exists. But couldn't one theoretically create a world within a world that is like the Net we all knew and loved before it was enshittified? I know the wayback machine exists, but I was thinking something that is still alive. IRC chats, forums, flash games (maybe not, with security concerns..), video sites ...
Worthwhile short (THE LAST BELLE - 20mins) ( thelastbelle.com )
Last night my SO and I were looking for something lighthearted to watch and we stumbled across The Last Belle. The animation is buttery smooth and contains a sequence by none other than Roy Naisbitt (The Thief and the Cobbler) which was IMMEDIATELY obvious. ...
Stitch It, Don’t Ditch It: Resisting Fast Fashion Through Visible Mending ( reasonstobecheerful.world )
Play with us!
Bluesky is down ( www.theverge.com )
What show are you surprised managed to finish, or get many seasons out of it at least, and avoid cancellation?