PhilipTheBucket
@PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
- Comment on Meta Invents New Way to Humiliate Users With Feed of People's Chats With AI 11 hours ago:
Everyone knows people on the internet always closely read the notifications they get about what is the nature of the interaction they’re having and what the risks are, and they take it seriously. They never just poke at buttons blindly like a cat with a jar on its head and start stream-of-consciousness typing, and doing random shit.
- Submitted 12 hours ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 3 comments
- Comment on Anon finally gets a gf 3 days ago:
You walk forward boldly with your lady into a more rewarding future
- Comment on CEOs Are Creating AI Copies of Themselves That Are Spouting Braindead Hallucinations to Their Confused Underlings 5 days ago:
“It’s common for people across the company to have questions for the CEO, but he doesn’t have time to answer them all,” Jean Yves Couput, senior advisor to footwear company Salomon CEO Guillaume Meyzenq, told The Information.
With the help of San-Francisco-based startup Personal AI, Meyzenq trained an AI chatbot to answer his staffers’ annoying questions about company culture, mission, and strategy, per Couput.
Where are The Yes Men? I feel like they did this.
Wait, what the fuck?
ww.fashionnetwork.com/…/Salomon-names-guillaume-m…
It’s real… I was sure that this was made up to sound out as “John is Kaput” and “Guy Amazing” or something. I cannot believe that there are real life humans who believe that all their underlings are dying to have a bit of their time, to ask them questions about company culture and mission. In all my experience the things I have wanted my boss’s time for are “did you look at that thing I sent you” and “can you make a decision about this and then enforce it afterwards please, any decision, literally any at all.”
- Comment on I hate Samsung and their dumb software design choices, and this is one of them. Why do I need a SIM card to enable a hotspot whereas every other phone works without one? 1 week ago:
- Because they want to know who you are
- Because what are you going to do about it? They’re going to make money regardless
One or the other
- Comment on YouTuber realizes sponsor might be an evil company mid-ad 1 week ago:
I love how sincere he is about really emphasizing how worthless the product is.
I would really encourage everyone to go to www.berries.com just to see that the same uncanny valley person who wrote the ad copy is still making images for the site.
Also, a hundred and nine dollars for twenty-four strawberries?
Bill was right, man. Spending over a hundred dollars on not very many strawberries to give to your father is definitely not going to make his heart swell with happiness to be your dad. He’s going to think “Jesus Christ I raised a person who can’t function.”
- Comment on YouTuber realizes sponsor might be an evil company mid-ad 1 week ago:
The genuine version of this: Shari’s Berries
- Comment on Ads when you’re pumping gas 1 week ago:
There’s usually one of the buttons you can hold down to mute the ads, near the bottom right in the little phalanx of buttons all around the screen.
If you find it, label it “MUTE” in market or something, spread the word.
- Comment on Anon reads between the lines 1 week ago:
Yeah, IDK, I don’t think it has enough replay value to be worth playing today. Tunic is good, probably a pretty close analogue of the overall feeling. Some games from the NES era hold up really surprisingly well (Contra, Life Force, Bionic Commando) but more what I was saying about Metal Gear was just that it was a pivotal part of the evolution of games and a fun game to play at the time (and has ten times more soul than whatever nonsense they’re slapping the label on in the modern day.)
- Comment on Anon reads between the lines 1 week ago:
You needed to play it as a little kid when it first came out.
We were just getting used to inventories. Stealth in games simply didn’t exist. The whole concept of key cards as far as I know didn’t exist, and even that whole structure of parts of the game that were blocked off behind abilities you didn’t have yet, or ways you hadn’t realized you could use your existing abilities, was still pretty brand new.
The thing I wish it had done, which Zelda 1 did very well but which very few games even up to the modern day have the balls / level design skill to do, is gate parts of the game behind combat that is just straight-up too hard for you yet. Almost always, the Metroidvania structure includes parts that are challenging, but everything you can reach is doable if you focus on it for a bit. And then, when you do them, you can unlock some more doable stuff. Zelda wasn’t like that. There were parts you could reach that would just outright murder you. You had whole parts of the game that were locked off behind enemies that were still too hard for you, for a long time, and so going into those areas felt like a for-real adventure. Once you got kitted up enough to be able to go hang out there, and explore it in detail and survive as long as you were alert, you feel super badass. It leads to this feeling of accomplishment that’s totally different from how it would feel if it was the exact same difficulty curve but all the stuff that was too hard for you gets locked away until you were ready for it.
Anyway, Metal Gear wasn’t like that. The combat was honestly pretty much just bad, even for the time period. But it introduced stealth and a new approach to big sprawling worlds, where you can’t even really make sense of the map because it is so non-Euclidean and you’re wandering through this bizarre and hostile environment. It’s like a Metroidvania where at any given time, you can only find 3 different gates, and they’re all locked, and so you have to go back over all your previous stuff and try to figure out what you missed. How all the different trucks move, what you can and can’t use your items for, finding new information or new frequencies for your radio, it was just this really surprisingly complex game that was still while the whole industry was shaking off the Atari era and trying to do real games. It was a new take on Metroidvania, all cramped corridors and locked doors and rooms that insta-kill you instead of open sprawling maps and inviting ledges you can’t reach yet.
It didn’t even have a plot, and it still had a massive coherent plot for the games of the time. It had a plot! I don’t know man. You can’t even really compare it to the “she breathes through her skin” era of Metal Gear because Metal Gear just defected from its original form into a totally different class of game, the Cinematic Bullshit-O-Rama With Occasional Gameplay At Times. It’s one of the modern AAA games industry’s favorite genres. But the old Metal Gear, for all its significant flaws, was a genuine and successful effort to move the medium forward.
Plus I was a little kid and I enjoyed playing it. I saw this magazine ad for it that was just this massive list of all the different items you can get, and it just wasn’t like anything I’d seen before. And, they followed through; they didn’t just pad out the list with weirdness, they actually thought of something you could do with everything. What about these cigarettes? Surely that’s just a little joke, right? No. The cigarettes are useful. You need them at one point. Of course you do. The empty cardboard box is useful. Everything is useful.
- Comment on Anon reads between the lines 1 week ago:
Because they are made by, and for, assholes.
None of the Metal Gear games after the original NES one did anything for me, so I didn’t really get it and wasn’t aware, but yes every time I learn something new about it (“she breathes through her skin that’s why she’s half naked all the time”) it just reinforces the original judgement.
- Comment on Anon reads between the lines 2 weeks ago:
The people who make video games are a bunch of weird assholes
- Comment on Anon reads between the lines 2 weeks ago:
You can also trigger a fairly bizarre cutscene where your character takes a shower with one of the female characters but she keeps all her clothes on, if you cultivate a certain level of unrepentant stink.
- Comment on Stupid question: how does one watch old movies? 2 weeks ago:
archive.org
tubitv.com
Probably there are others but it’s a little bit rare that I haven’t been able to find stuff on one or the other
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 0 comments
- Comment on And I was just about to register :/ 2 weeks ago:
I guess my question is, why would you be on the internet without an ad blocker at this point in the first place?
Not saying you’re wrong, it is just a weird position to even be in. Why?
- Comment on And I was just about to register :/ 3 weeks ago:
IDK dude, sounds like there might be something there but I can’t watch a 34 minute video to absorb why this web site is bad. I tried to paste the transcript to Claude, but Claude is busy eating its own dick right now, so no help there. I’ll take your word for it that they’re fucking it all up for reasons of their own but I’m not completely convinced that the problem cannot be solved with an ad blocker.
- Comment on Weapons trafficking 3 weeks ago:
npr.org/…/50-years-of-shrinking-union-membership-…
It doesn’t change overnight. Union membership was the plug holding all the money in the barrel, holding back the pressure of the bosses just taking whatever they could squeeze, gradually in a coordinated bloc, but not enough that people would jump ship from their specific operation and go to another place, but enough that every year there would be less and less, until now a majority of Americans can’t pay their expenses.
Maybe it wasn’t unions. You might be right. There are all these graphs pointing to something specific that happened in the 1970s that suddenly divorced productivity gains from wage gains, so maybe whatever it was that caused that finally began to have its real awful influence in the mid-1990s and finally really bear fruit in the late 2000s. Kevin’s dad didn’t buy that house in 1991. You get what I’m saying. There’s a delay. But, like I say, I have no real idea. I’m just guessing and throwing out random possibilities. Something fucked everything up. Probably a combination of things. Not having unions definitely couldn’t have helped.
- Comment on And I was just about to register :/ 3 weeks ago:
how unusable it is without ublock
I know an easy answer to this problem that will also improve a lot of your other internet browsing experience.
I have literally very little idea of what the internet is like without ublock now, but every time I accidentally experience it, I have a violent negative reaction. It’s awful. It’s really the worst. Have you been to YouTube without it? Jesus Christ man. No thank you.
What else? I don’t go to Fandom often or anything, but when I do visit it doesn’t bother me that there’s all sorts of awful stuff I am not seeing.
- Comment on And I was just about to register :/ 3 weeks ago:
What’s wrong with Fandom?
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 15 comments
- Comment on Weapons trafficking 3 weeks ago:
Yeah. The amount of fuckery is large, and varied.
- Comment on Weapons trafficking 3 weeks ago:
Hm, I’m not really all that expert on the topic, but I feel like people in union jobs making enough of a salary to buy a comfortable home is going to drive up wages for everyone, even the people who have nothing to do with it.
Of course, UPS drivers are making $175k/yr right now, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot stopping other companies for paying people in milk for doing the exact same job. My feeling is that it’s an issue of critical mass, but like I say that’s more or less just a guess.
- California's Hummingbirds Have Changed Their Beaks in Response to Backyard Feeders, Study Findswww.smithsonianmag.com ↗Submitted 3 weeks ago to [deleted] | 1 comment
- Comment on Weapons trafficking 3 weeks ago:
You gotta read past the first sentence my man lol
- Comment on Weapons trafficking 3 weeks ago:
This is just how things worked back when unions were in the equation. If you sold TVs or drove a truck for a living, you got a house. If you had a good job, you had a house like this and basically everything you wanted.
We traded that life for a few hundred people having yachts instead.
- Comment on The number of manipulative, disinformation posts on lemmy is too damn high 4 weeks ago:
Hey everybody, this guy’s having fun
Get him out of here
- Comment on The number of manipulative, disinformation posts on lemmy is too damn high 4 weeks ago:
No one will know for certain, people will argue, those bots will argue, other bot accounts with the same agenda will argue, people will be manipulated, they will argue, and status quo returns…
Fair enough. I do think this happens. At the same time I don’t see that there’s a lot to be gained by being super sensitive about it, or deciding to freak out and abandon the topic because of some people arguing.
I would say that every so often, I wander into one of the lemmy.world political communities and I have exactly the reaction you are expressing here. It’s just random aggressive people, some of whom I think are deliberately trying to inflame conflict and prejudice, and they drown out anything useful. It’s a waste of time, so I don’t fuck with it. I guess the point that I’m trying to make is that not everything is that way. I would say the vast majority of things I observe on Lemmy are not that way.
Or, they’re not what I would describe that way. You seem like you’re maybe talking about something different, and accusing the conversations I like of being something deliberately designed to waste my time that I should be able to “rise above” or etc. But you also don’t want to give examples, so IDK, not much I can do with that.
So check out this example. I’ll give my take on it:
I think there are some people there who are just there to stir shit. But, I would say the great majority at least of what I was paying attention to is productive. I learned about some propaganda, learned the shape of the media landscape, from some previous interactions, and then in that thread we got to talk about some other issues related to that, and work some things out.
Yeah, if you focus on the idiots exclusively, then your interaction will be unproductive. I do definitely think that yes.
By talking about ‘anything of substance’ is being framed by the bot posts, repeatedly, to manipulate. But, take a step back and you’ll realise it really isn’t ‘anything of substance’ but something to distract.
If you feel strongly enough about this topic to be concerned that people are going to be taken in by it, give some examples. By being vague and evasive about what it is you’re talking about, you make it impossible for anyone to learn about what you’re saying if you have something of value to try to make a point about, and also impossible for them to make counterpoints if they disagree with you. It just all stays in waste-of-time-land. Which is, ironically, exactly the issue you are trying to raise.
If you’re concerned that people will disagree with your categorizations, and that’ll just be so upsetting that you can’t bear the thought of doing it as a result, I feel like this whole issue may be more of a you problem than a Lemmy problem.
As for the early internet, I think you’re thinking about early pre-banhammer-FBI-raid 4-chan.
Not even close. I was talking about Usenet, early BBS culture and anonymous FTP days, then the more modern era of Napster / Slashdot / Rotten.com / the little proliferation of forums and personal sites came after those “old days,” and 4chan was created a little bit after that.
Everyone is going to have different definitions of when “early” is, but “the internet” goes back quite a long way before 4chan. 4chan and Myspace were kind of the first iteration of the massive everyone-goes-to-the-same-place omni-site model that presaged the horrors to come.
- Comment on The number of manipulative, disinformation posts on lemmy is too damn high 4 weeks ago:
- It’s not clear exactly what you mean, what are some examples of posts that you think are being made by bots?
- IDK man, there is definitely a problem of misleading and disinformative posts and I will 100% agree with it as a problem, but just abandoning the idea of being able to talk about anything of substance because the disinfo is trying to fuck it up is not the answer, to me. I like being able to talk about politics / anti-capitalism / geopolitics / whatever. I don’t find it “stressful” or the way some people receive it. If they don’t want it presumably they are not subscribed to that stuff, but I really value being able to find out what’s going on in the world and talk with a wide variety and population of people about it.
- The early internet was wild. It was not for hobbies and betterment, it was for ludicrous conspiracy theories, arguments between creationism and evolution, far flung neo-Nazis finally being able to communicate with each other, and snuff videos. That was what made it awesome. I think you are thinking of early Facebook.
- Comment on Star Wars' Showcase of AI Special Effects Was a Complete Disaster 4 weeks ago:
Good lord. It’s very bad. I like how the presenter clearly knows that it sucks, too, but he’s required to go out and pretend it doesn’t and try to hype it up.
