Lurker > Count_Drachma

adjl posted...

Most of the mods that had a problem with the new leadership have already dipped out. The rest, I guess, are just following along with the new rules because they hope Fandom's got the right idea for how to improve the community.

idk, can't be any worse than Red Ventures. RV set a very, very, very low bar, given their wacked-out CEO's directives.

If I take one more step from the shire, it'll be the furthest I've ever been.

Anyway, semi-loaded question depending on where "home" is. But, I guess, over 3,000 miles works.

GGuirao13 posted...

Literally a mass murderer who should be facing execution.

Literally nonsense from Guirao yet again. The only metric you might cite is the metric by which all presidents are guilty, and Trump is less guilty than many of them.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Antifanboyism is often just as sad as fanboyism.

idk, I feel like it's sadder because at least fanboys are happy about something.

It doesn't. There are too many other games I like better. It wouldn't be in my top 300.

Shoe - Reebok

Show - Seinfeld, because I don't view the Simpsons as just a 90s show despite it being one of the shows I think about the most.

Space Jam, followed by the Bulls logo, Chicago, and the 1992 Dream Team.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

You say that as if it wasn't already slowly dying for a decade before they even bought it.

I blame Red Line Media.

GGuirao13 posted...

Why bother? He can't win.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS2Bsq5PDmU

AltOmega2 posted...

its even funnier when the Fandom links they do give isn't to the actual game/movie/whatever you're looking for but some fanfiction fandom for that particular series

Yeah, it makes the whole thing even more confusing. Google seriously sucks.

Oh, right, I forgot all about this. When the news broke, I was surprised although I guess not terribly shocked.

Although I like some of the ICP's songs, I wouldn't want to hang out with Juggalos.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Most of the people I know who voted for Trump barely talk about Trump. As opposed to most of the anti-Trump people online who seem to find it utterly impossible to ever shut the fuck up about Trump.

This so hard, tbh.

Fandom is literally the worst. It was less terrible when it was wikia, but the fact that so many Google results put Fandom nonsense near the top -- when it's rarely useful -- is so fucking annoying.

Then again, Google doesn't like recommending useful shit.

Yeah, the toy decision is just baffling considering they could've done anything for the property and, as importantly, they were literally running that anime-themed promo they could've tied something into.

Probably, unless Biden finally decides to demonstrate some actual value and, on top of that, he kicks Kamala off the ballot because a vote for Biden might as well be a vote for a Kamala Harris presidency and a woman whose office knowingly suppressed evidence providing suspects' innocence and then whose office opposed early parole to "maintain the prison labor population" (ie, modern-day slavery) has no business being in office, let alone at the highest level.

Likewise, if Trump picks a VP as terrible as Kamala Harris, I'll probably just not bother voting. And, considering my state always skews Democrat, it doesn't really matter.

BUMPED2002 posted...

Well for those of us who know our history,

I love that you still pretend to know history while making comments that directly refute you knowing any history, often within the same sentence.

TheGuiltySpark posted...

I've asked this question before years ago and didn't get much response back then... But with the AI explosion into the public sphere, I think now's a good time to revisit.

So. At any point, can an AI become 'human'? If it identifies or wanted to be recognized as such?

I personally say "No. Never." The thought of that even being a possibility scares me.

It's a stupid question -- or, actually, two stupid questions

1) Does consciousness, awareness = life?

Consciousness/awareness =/= life

There are forms of life that lack higher functions like consciousness/awareness, especially outside animals. Instead, life is a biological function.

Could an AI be alive? It would need a body that replicated the biological functions associated with life.

TheGuiltySpark posted...

So. At any point, can an AI become 'human'? If it identifies or wanted to be recognized as such?

Also no. Even if it occupied a human body, it would technically be its own thing.

But, for the third, unstated question...

3) Could an AI become sentient? And would it deserve rights protecting its existence?

Technically yes, although qualifying sentience would be difficult.

Revelation34 posted...

"No, because humans are born, not made"

Would also apply to clones.

Clones can be born. It can be part of the process or, in a technical sense, the natural birth of a clone arguably carries some of that lineage.

BlackScythe0 posted...

It was never supposed to work. Only a moron would think "If we give all our money to the richest people in the nation they will use it wisely instead of just hoarding it"

Says the guy who thinks all rich people have a Scrooge McDuck money pit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLJrzfWTu9E

While the richest people don't necessarily use their money wisely, that money is often in use which is why the claims are about "wealth" instead of just "money." If you look at a list of the wealthiest people, you'll quickly see that wealth is either in ownership of companies, stocks, and other possessions rather than just cash. In fact, some of the "wealthiest" individuals have historically been cash-poor at times.

Technically, the concept works in multiple senses.

Broadly, though, "trickle-down" is handled as a meaningless talking point. And the idea of letting private citizens accumulate wealth has led to the success of every wealthy nation on the planet because, pragmatically speaking, the accumulation of wealth has traditionally been an incredible motivator. Likewise, wealth is needed to pursue greater wealth, which leads to investments. However, as with anything else, not everything is going to be productive -- which is why even when wealth is taken by the government to redistribute (minus what winds up in government's pockets, on the book or off it), it doesn't always lead to spending that benefits society.

Private enterprise will generally always outpace government development in most areas, mostly because you have a larger pool of people working on problems with a greater degree of autonomy. However, thanks to government creating perverse incentives, it's not a pure system.

But, broadly, private enterprise works first to the benefit of private enterprise while government works first to the benefit of government. Everybody else is, at best, a secondary consideration. That's even true in the case of non-profits, where very little money actually goes to benefit a cause... unless the objective is "raising awareness" which can be justified any number of ways.

Yellow posted...

The real metric is income inequality, which has skyrocketed since Reagan.

Income inequality is a questionable measure at best, meaningless at worst. The closer you get to perfect income/financial equality, the poorer societies tend to be. Likewise, as nations grow wealthier, inequality tends to increase.

That said, a large part of the rise in inequality has been owed to societal band-aids that've allowed us to avoid confronting actual issues. Credit/loans in particular have largely obfuscated what the real prices for things should be, stopping systems from adjusting so that products would be more affordable.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

If they are creating art, they are, by literal definition, an artist.

You could argue to which degree they influence the act of creation, but that's one mother of a slippery slope because every artist uses tools. There is a significant difference between someone who fingerpaints on a cave wall using self-crafted pigments and someone who draws on a computer tablet or manipulates a photograph in Photoshop, but they're all still artists.

Someone creating AI art still needs to have the skills necessary to tell it to create the image they're looking for, and to at least some degree they're still impressing their intentions and mental expectations onto the work. One could argue that there's a difference between someone who is micromanaging descriptions and commands versus someone who just types out a single short sentence, but there's also a difference between someone who spends months painting a masterpiece and someone who doodles on a napkin for 30 seconds.

People get hung up on the idea of the tool, but ultimately we're liking going to reach a point as the tech improves where the end product becomes almost indistinguishable from anything a human could create. Which can actually open doors for people to become more creative (like, say, someone who has ideas for a comic but lacks the skill to draw it, who can now potentially use the new tools to provide art - in exactly the same way most sprite-art comics allowed people who couldn't draw to still tell stories).

There are already AI that can write and perform songs you'd never realize wasn't composed by a human. The limiting factor isn't "technology bad, no human soul", the limiting factor is the tech is still in its infancy, and WILL improve. The future is coming whether people want it to or not.

For fun, go back and look at CGI animation in the early 90s and tell me if you think it had "soul" or would ever be anything other than a computer-generated abomination. Then think about the fact that nearly every cartoon today is animated via computer and hand-drawn cel-based animation is almost a dead art. Shit evolves.

By that logic, if I tell somebody to paint me something, I'm an artist.

The core concept behind AI art is functionally no different than an editor commissioning art. You make a request, you ask for amendments to the art, but by definition you are NOT the artist, you are merely the person having the art made for them. And the instructions for telling a real person to create art and for a machine to create art are very much the same thing. The AI is replacing the person who'd make the art. And, by the way, even THAT isn't a unique concept. Prior to AI, you'd have services that took commissions for art then subcontracted that work out to people paid pennies for their work.

adjl posted...

AI, however, does all the creation for you. Conceptually, it's identical to commissioning an artist to create something for you: You come up with an idea of what you want, you take that idea to somebody that has the skills needed to express that idea, and you work with what they've given you to fine-tune it to your needs/desires. The only real difference is that you don't have to pay for the commission because it's not a person doing it for you.

...damnit, I should've scrolled a bit further so I could see adjl beat me to it.

However, I would note that a lot of generative AI does have fees attached to the service, so you're often still paying something. But usually it's closer to the rates for the subcontracted work rather than the contracted work.

JOExHIGASHI posted...

I don't know how AI learning art works. Does it steal images or parts of images to create art?

Technically, it can do both. Because generative AI doesn't necessarily recognize elements, it can figures from a piece of artwork and put them as-is into another artwork (ie, no change to the figure itself).

In theory, it's creating new composition. In some cases, that involves recreating existing material and in other cases it might reuse it. However, there's so much content out there that it's tough to determine what belonged to what, outside of famous works.

ArctheLad13 posted...

I liked Strange World. I thought it was more successful in terms of world building and emotion than a lot of recent Disney movies, particularly Onward which I was very disappointed by.

Yeah, Onward was a massive letdown

adjl posted...

Are they not equivalent? Certainly, China's censorship of foreign media is on another level, but it's still the same principle of "we don't want other countries being able to influence our people." I have pretty much no faith that Amazon, Google, or Meta wouldn't sell the same info to China for a sufficient price, nor do I expect that the American government is any less likely to abuse whatever data they collect or use platforms within their control to manipulate people than China is. This is solely a matter of "I'm more comfortable with people that are ostensibly on my side doing these things than people that aren't."

While China's censorship is an issue -- and their control is more encompassing -- this isn't even a censorship issue with the app, it's a potential national security issue. And the reason other nations get a free pass (not all of them, but most) is because we literally don't have a government glaringly stealing secrets that's either used by their government or given to their companies.

The CCP's probably isn't just that it's an authoritarian regime with some appalling human rights issues -- including the continued use of slavery and allegations of illegal organ harvesting -- it's also a kleptocracy in the very broadest sense of the term. And the only thing that keeps people from calling them out on it is, hypocritically enough, actual racism because these same individuals wouldn't tolerate these behaviors from majority-white nations.

I prefer verbally correcting ridiculous grammatical mistakes. And, if those mistakes get bad enough, there might be a physical correction, too. =p

But I'm not the kind of guy who chides, "fewer," when somebody misuses "less"

If the 5-mile area was guaranteed to have everything I needed forever, I wouldn't see a huge issue.

Right now, my commute is bit longer than 5 miles and I've often thought, "Man, wouldn't it be nice if it was shorter?"

Granted, the 5-mile radius would have to pretty neat overall, too. Overall, being able to walk anywhere -- without being stuck in a city -- would be nice.

I feel like there's too much money on the table that TikTok won't divest from China to get around the ban, assuming the senate and president go through with it (which seems unlikely because TikTok is too big to fail)

ConfusedTorchic posted...

i have realized why they care about tiktok and not facebook/twitter, and it's because the us government is unable to actually solicit any information from tiktok like they can with facebook and twitter.

...lolwut? It's the opposite, China actively harvests data from China companies which makes TikTok a national security threat. This goes a lot further than the "maybe the US will" with American social media networks. That's not counting allegations that China manipulates the app to push state propaganda, which is far less of an issue.

Keep in mind that TikTok has seen restrictions throughout many nations at this point, but literally no other social media platform. This isn't just a US concern, it's a "anyplace-outside-China" concern.... well, overlooking that TikTok itself is banned in China. Instead, China has a pro-CCP sister version of the app.

I haven't seen most of them, but I'm leaning towards either Home on the Range or the Mulan LA remake.

Frozen 2 wasn't so much bad as it was mediocre, especially compared to the first film, and it had this weird thing where there technically wasn't an actual villain present.

WIRBTI wasn't *that* much worse than the first, although it was a bad film.

Meanwhile, there are a lot of films on that list I wouldn't want to see, although some are just off-brand for me (such as Planes, which is a spinoff of a franchise I didn't care about). Conversely, the Mulan remake is something I would ordinarily be interested in but they did a shit job on it. Actually, even though I want to say Home on the Range (because that might've been the first animated Disney film I just said "NOPE!" to (or did Emperor's New Groove come first?)), that still might be less a matter of the movie's quality being my issue.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Probably Strange World, but no one's going to vote for it because no one has actually seen it.

tbh, this. It's a movie so forgettable I've read the wiki and couldn't remember the fucking thing.

It's literally the only movie on that list I didn't recognize as being a movie, even if a few of the others I didn't remember as being Disney.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Speaking as someone who has spent a ton of time in NYC, I would never trust the opinions of anyone from NYC.

As a person who lives close enough to NYC to meet a lot of NYCers and people who work there, I 100% agree.

captpackrat posted...

Of course you'll have a bad impression of New York if you only focus on the pimps and the CHUDs.

I usually think about the lack of bathrooms and over-abundance of crab juice (which still beats Mountain Dew)

adjl posted...

I don't even know what this is, nor does a video of accosting random strangers and asking their opinions on a picture tell me much.

I'd say the same to any "on the street" segments. Even taking everything off the table, somebody isn't likely to meet the best and brightest just out on the streets -- at best, it's the lower side of average people.

And in a city with a pronounced leaning, you also aren't likely to get as many genuine opinions, but instead what they think they can or should say.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I fully agree.

Just not for any of the reasons you've implied. And it started a looong time ago, not just recently.

Pretty much this.

There are more than you'd think. Dolph Lundgren, for example, has a masters in chemical engineering.

Meanwhile we don't have an obligatory liver disease juice PSA

wwinterj25 posted...

I miss smoking. Time to get really drunk.

tbh, while smoking is distasteful, at least it doesn't make people more criminal or violent.

$50? Just make it $300/hour! That'd solve everything!

adjl posted...

As a concept, a flat minimum wage will never work. It'll inevitably fall behind inflation,

More or less, especially since it has a role in driving inflation. And, as you mentioned, regionality is a huge thing. A $20 minimum wage in some areas would kill the region.

Plus, minimum wage is generally a band-aid on broader societal issues, which continue to fester, while exacerbating other social issues.

adjl posted...

That, or just do UBI and abandon the idea of minimum wage altogether. That's probably simpler, though it still runs into the issue that living wages are not universal and there'd need to be some regional variation there (with some kind of checks to make sure people don't just move to expensive neighbourhoods so they get more UBI).

The only problem with that plan is UBI doesn't work. Well, not as a replacement, anyway. The UBI pitch has been "Do this in lieu of everything else!" when in fact you'd still likely have some version of Section 8, some version of Medicaid, some version of SNAP, etc, supplementing it.

That and we aren't in a post-labor society where UBI could function.

adjl posted...

Fun fact: If you took away 99.99999% of a billionaire's net worth, they'd still have $10k left. Musk and Bezos would still be millionaires. A billion dollars really is a ludicrous amount of money.

Except net worth isn't billions of dollars that they have, it's holdings in companies where the valuation of the company's shares is volatile. While "okay, you're successful, we want to take a good chunk of your money" is questionable, suggesting "okay, you're successful, we want to take over your company" is straight-up Soviet.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

His both sides are bad shtick could tip the election in Trumps favor.

Oh lawdy.

Lokarin posted...

what'd he say recently that's a dumb?

I mean, I don't follow celebs much so IDK if he pulled a Rowling or something

Apparently not.

The classic Living Dead stuff is insane because it resurrects all dead things. There were kinda taxidermied animals in one, which were split in half, that got res'd.

But in the case of a real-world impact, I'm not sure the US government (or any government) would be able to work fast enough to stop the spread, given how quickly it happens. The nations seeing it happen to the US might be in better shape, particularly if they don't have land borders and can close down travel.

Zombies are intrinsically scary, since an outbreak can potentially end society in days. Granted, the kind that eventually starve are moderately less frightening because they can waited out, but their numbers are a huge deal, the difficulty in surviving because infrastructure collapses, etc, means they'd pose a larger danger than most other creatures.

Ogurisama posted...

custer's revenge

Damn it, was totally going to say that.

adjl posted...

As much as people like to insist that you couldn't get away with such an offensive game in today's climate, there's really no shortage of such games being created. They just all pretty much invariably end up languishing in obscurity because they generally don't have any substance beyond their edgy shock value. Custer's Revenge is notorious solely because it was one of the first examples of somebody trying to sell a game on that shock value and because later platform manufacturers screened out such content for the sake of cultivating a more wholesome image for their systems (the Nintendo Seal of Quality being one such screening measure). In comparison to any number of porn shovelware games crapped out on Steam every day, it's nothing special. A remake would sell only to a handful of people who wanted to "own the libs," each of which would probably not actually play it for more than a couple minutes.

I feel like the controls right now are more stringent than they were a decade or two ago, which makes selling offensive games harder. You cite Steam as an example, yet Steam has been removing titles.

I voted "gen 1" but technically it's gen 3 which had the great gen 1 remakes, on top of everything else.

But gen 1 had my overall favorite roster of Pokemon.

Gen 4 was when the gameplay started to get slower, etc, and the amount of lag in HGSS was insane.

Accrovideogames posted...

Does she support the genocide of the Palestinian people? If the answer is no, then yes she would be a better president than Biden who sponsors terrorism with taxpayer money.

That's some loony leftist thinking. Israel is literally fighting a government whose leadership has repeatedly called for the genocide of all Jews.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/10/hamas-covenant-israel-attack-war-genocide/675602/

No. She was a lackluster candidate with limited experience and some horrific worldviews, including suppressing evidence that would've exonerated wrongly-convicted prisoners and blocking early release to maintain the prison labor force, which is basically modern slave labor.

Kamala is literally Biden's Spiro Agnew.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

i think that biden has been doing a decent job at salvaging the mess the trump administration left him

roflmao. The only downturn was due to COVID, which was out of any president's control and Biden's handling of the vaccine rollout was EXACTLY Trump's plan -- just leaving it up to the states.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

but she would do better than both of them, yes. her being better than trump is no contest, and just by virtue of being much younger, she would also do better than biden

By that "logic," Taylor Swift would be a better president than Kamala because she's younger than her.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

japan is just what nihon translates to

Why would it need to translate?

What counts as a 100% for ALBW?

Shame that they haven't done more like it.

Babel

Exodus

Last Supper

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat wound up being a lot of fun, although I was always split on the original story.

As of now, either NYC (UN HQ) or Brussels (EU HQ). However, you could also make a good case for Washington DC, Moscow, or Beijing, given all three have an outsize influence on geopolitical affairs.

Other than MAYBE a major European city, I'm not sure there's a compelling case for any other location.

adjl posted...

If the earth tried to become one nation, fighting over where the capital should be would fragment it again.

PO, is that you?! Why'd you climb into adjl's body? And is it roomy in there?

streamofthesky posted...

The geographic center for the Earth's population would be in southern/eastern Asia, so the capital should be around there.

https://www.cntraveler.com/story/more-than-half-the-worlds-population-lives-inside-this-circle

Basically pick any major city inside that circle.
Don't know why the fuck Asia wasn't even an option when over half the world's population lives there.
"Other" when you had like 4 other spots for poll options, lol

tbh, I also scratched my head when I saw Asia wasn't listed, considering the influence of Russia and China.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Ironically, a significant number of people complaining are actual New Yorkers who wish it would go somewhere else.

Yeah, but most New Yorkers wish that most New Yorkers would go somewhere else, too... like Jersey.

GanonsSpirit posted...

Atlantis

That would be the most awesome choice.

No, because the poors can have it. In fact, a lot of poors do have it and some of their poorness comes from wasting time working out.

If most people can have something AND everybody can have it at the same time, it's not much of a status symbol.

No king, no king, la la la!

faramir77 posted...

I don't see Palworld having any impact on Pokemon's bottom line. The only impact it has had is that it started a larger dialogue about how ass Pokemon games have become, especially in the past 10 years.

Kinda this. How could it seriously impact Pokemon? It's catering to a very different audience and is a very different type of game.

Not to mention there've been a lot of Pokemon challengers over the years that fizzled out.

faramir77 posted...

The franchise deserves to be so much better than they are, but The Pokemon Company has decided it wants the games to be shovelware.

I mean... the kinda problem I have is the games keep trying to do all kinds of different, silly shit instead of offering something along the lines of older titles. But even going back to the beginning, Pokemon has always had a certain amount of well-designed, well-produced shovelware. Pokemon Snap was tiny for what it was, Pokemon Dash was ridiculously limited, the Pinballs weren't bad but kinda incomplete, the gamecube games were lousy, etc.

Pause.

(Although I am legit amused.)