I was getting ready to take one look at these and write them off as looking just a little too sharp, but honestly, with how bleak the visionless hyperrealism of today is, the original design shines straight through. I might use this.
I played Grim Fandango about halfway through last year and I really liked it, although something else grabbed my attention.
Thursday is like this.
I literally cannot for the life of me explain why.
But خميس? The name of Thursday in my native Arabic?
Ah but Jeudi, the French name. Sun high in the sky. Very round.
I cannot even begin to explain.
I’ve commented about this before, but I do actually miss those first few generations of image generators. The first DeepDream style stuff was interesting but didn’t go very far, but this image in particular is a milestone for what came directly after.
I would love to run VQGAN+CLIP locally, for example, in some efficient way. It was fun to play with and to see how the model interpreted the input. And it wasn’t as scary as the tools we have now (especially when those are paired with the deep fake face swap stuff, for example)
I genuinely think slop is the perfect word for the current iteration of these image generators, both the image outputs themselves and the role they’re playing in the already-bleak digital media landscape.
I thought it was another one of those meme languages at first.
Will Wright took one look at this thing in an encyclopedia in 2001 and immediately started planning Spore.
Seriously, I wish I could just set up some kind of regex filter in iOS Shortcuts or something that would let me specify what notifications to show or block.
Doesn’t help that corporate social media apps will give you controls over every single notification type except for the ones they ram down your throat daily.
I have a very specific notification in mind: I’ve opened Instagram organically maybe eight times in the past decade, but I’ll open my messages if someone send me a message there. I can’t open their shitty platform on a browser as they hate VPNs on desktop. With all due respect to the meme posters on Lemmy, the fresh brainrot my friends send me on there is much easier humor to digest than whatever mix of Everett True, Star Trek, and den Döner-Mann nicht fragen warum er nur Bargeld nimmt the Lemmy All page has for me on most days. So I keep that malware on my phone. I want a notification when they send me a message. I want a notification when someone I meet wants to follow me. I’m squarely in the lower quantile of ages on Lemmy and a lot of people I want in my life will use that platform as their primary messenger, and while it’s not ideal, I do want those notifications. You know what notification I don’t want?
See some of today’s most watched reels!
Their stupid app sent me this notification, like clockwork, about once every 23 hours.
Check out some of today’s most watched reels!
I’ve never watched a reel in my fucking life. I still call them Stories and I haven’t watched them even when they were called that. They put the button for Reels right at the bottom where all the important stuff should be, so I’ll fat finger my way into the Reels section once every three years, and it’ll still be at the tutorial screen where it tells you to swipe and tap and whatever. You can’t seek through the videos of course - not interested.
They know I’ve left it on the tutorial screen for longer than 20% of their userbase has been alive. And yet —
Check out some of today’s most watched reels!
(This is mostly an exaggeration, it was like once a week, and I left notifications off until recently because I met a group of people who use it more than my usual crowd. I have not been bombarded by unfiltered notification sewage for a decade lol)
And they didn’t have a toggle for that notification either until pretty recently. Or maybe I didn’t look hard enough. Wish everyone would stop using these apps and try hacking together a terrible HTML website like the good old days. Computers are wasted on us all. Hosting video is expensive, it must be rapaciously profitable to be trying to get everyone hooked on it.
This being Lemmy, I’m going to politely ask people to leave me be with my locked down phone OS and corporate malware. Yes yes I know, the only phone really worth using has a bare metal OS, you gotta ask your relatives to resend the family photos as ascii art so you can see your niblings in the CLI, you gotta laser out your phone’s processor’s clock and replace it with a mechanical switch that you flick back and forth so you can be 100% sure the phone isn’t running when you don’t want it to. I get it, I hear you, I’m just generally content with this phone and I’ll probably get its overpriced underwhelming successor in 5 years when I need a new one. It’s fine. It’s not a PC. The only thing missing is a headphone jack really.
That’s without counting the extra money spent on replacing strings, I’m sure using this kind of thing regularly would seriously shorten their lifespan.
I wrote a similar comment under a similar post here.
I don’t know if it’s considered better to link or to quote an old comment.
Good lord this makes my blood boil. I’m still in awe of the support being shown by ordinary people around the world these last few months but I don’t think I’ll ever grasp how much hatred is required to keep the machine running.
To think that if history went differently I could just get on a cab and visit the Holy Land like my grandmother did as a kid. Instead I get to watch it get bombed to bits in real time with the excuse that there wasn’t anyone there and if there were any they’re terrorists.
Y axis: Empoisoned or Swumble’s Big Jumble X axis: Menus or Parkour
I think we are moving past the outdated genre system and finally finding a way to classify games properly
I’m so glad I nuked my Facebook a few years ago before these companies were paying this much attention to web automation.
I have to make a confession, my brain immediately parsed this image as a Linus tech tips thumbnail.
I remember people recommending decentraleyes for some time and then I remember there being an argument against it. I don’t remember what the problem was though.
I don’t think I’ve ever expressed this anywhere, but I don’t even consider that place to be a stopped clock. Always saw it as a random number generator with no brakes, which is why all the bad shit gets amplified when it wouldn’t breathing room elsewhere.
I used to like the musical discussions on there, way way back, and the conversations were pretty interesting.
Too bad vaguely gestures in every direction
One thing this recent ad injection debacle has me worried about is that I’ll open an archived download of a YouTube video and find ads in my files. I have hesitated to continue my personal archival project until I could be 100% sure my downloads are clean, because I can’t go through everything to make sure they didn’t inject a 5 second ad somewhere.
Oh, I’m well aware. Every few months I search online for used Classics in working condition in my area because that’s a project I’m interested in, but I haven’t committed to it yet. Maybe I should as they are apparently getting expensive and harder to find everywhere.
I don’t think I’ll ever be a Mac user but I’ve seen how fast these newer MacBooks edit video on battery power without breaking a sweat (and without eating through the battery).
People focus on “software magic” with Apple but the M chips are serious hardware that a lot of us don’t take seriously because the company that killed the iPod made them.
This kind of reminds me of older deep dream style images.
I miss those and the VQGAN images. I wonder if there’s a way to run those original old models and algorithms on newer hardware, faster. I feel like they were more interesting to probe around to see how the model works.
Not that the new stuff can’t be interesting to play with, it’s just that the older ones felt more like toys and less consequential.
It’s 9 am now and they’re still bombing. An entire section of the city has been turned into ashes and a lot of people were just sleeping on the sides of the road in safer areas this morning. I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like this in my lifetime.
I’ve been to some of these neighborhoods. They are very poor, the people there have been neglected by the authorities for generations, leading many of them to believe strongly in the alternative. I don’t see that as wrong.
I feel guilty for even having a fraction of opportunity more than these people, to just live in an area that people go to for safety. To be able to worry about infrastructure and the international response and not my life and the loss of loved ones and their lack of a proper burial.
At least I’m not one of the clowns defending this on Lemmy. I didn’t think our little network was worth the disinfo effort but here we are. I’m on this platform to get away from this shit.