Lemmy section starts at 9:31 if you just want to see that part.

Too bad she says she wait until more controversies occur before she considers adding the platform to her social media list.

Yeah, this is a shame. I don’t know the channel, but it seems like this video is more of an experiment in trying EU tech rather than actively recommending people move off US services. The creator is content (a content creator?) to stay on Reddit for now, so she’s not necessarily ideologically motivated to switch to an EU alternative, decentralized platform, etc.

The “too complicated” criticism is her main reason for not adding Lemmy to her list of accounts. She does talk about it in terms of “adding” rather than “replacing”, which is interesting. When I came over to kbin (RIP) in the APIcalypse, it coincided with leaving Reddit. I had no intention of using both. I can understand how treating Lemmy as an extra social media platform might change how you feel about it vs. dropping something else.

We almost always talk about fediverse platforms in terms of which centralized platform they’re an alternative to. Some proportion of people clearly don’t treat them that way. I wonder how you appeal to those groups. If they’re currently happy with an existing service, saying “It’s like that” isn’t necessarily going to get them to join the federated equivalent.

In short, are there any advantages of the fediverse for people who don’t have a problem with centralization?

High quality scan for anybody who wants to make memes or whatever: https://books.kolbe.org/cdn/shop/products/2116_The_Parables_of_Jesus_Text_Page_5.jpg

Not even fake, here’s a news story from 15 years ago featuring the same image: https://phys.org/news/2010-12-million-years-oxygen-drove-evolution.html

That’s eight years before Among Us was released. I checked archive.org as well because … well, it’s sus. But they have captures there too, it’s not a backdated modern post.

It does, yeah. I’m not sure if there’s any advantages to Floorp’s implementation or anything else that makes it preferable to upstream or a more shallow fork.

Yeah, it’s a Firefox floork where the main differentiator is vertical tabs, IIRC.

The last subheading in the article is “Who cares?”, by which they mean “Which chimpanzees within the social group are responsible for providing medical care?” I didn’t notice the final section initially, so I thought I had reached the end of the article then there was just an exasperated large print:

Who cares?

You could try something like a network filter that is out of the control of the user (e.g. on the router or something like a Raspberry Pi running Pihole), but you’d probably have to curate the blocklist manually, unless somebody else has published an anti-LLM list somewhere. And of course, it will only be as effective as the user’s ability to route around that blocklist dictates.

LLMs can also be run locally, so blocking all known network services that provide access still won’t prevent a dedicated user talking to an AI.

I wonder how Konami decided which of their licensed beat-'em-ups did or didn’t get console ports. In order of release, they go …

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989 arcade, 1990 NES)
• The Simpsons (1991 arcade)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time (1991 arcade, 1992 SNES)
• X-Men (1992 arcade)
• Asterix (1992 arcade)

Maybe the answer is just “TMNT was a juggernaut”? The Simpsons was extremely early in its run (mid-season 2) when the game launched. The X-Men cartoon hadn’t even started yet. Asterix is just aggressively European. The games probably all did well, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the TMNT titles eclipsed them in earnings.

I don’t think it’s a hardware capability thing, or we wouldn’t have console versions of the TMNT games, either. While the SNES hardware is obviously less capable than the original arcade cab, many consider the SNES port of Turtles in Time to be definitive. There’s no reason Simpsons couldn’t have been similar.

In a two-party system like the US, assuming all supporters of a particular candidate share their ideals is folly. There’s a major difference between being someone who actively describes themself as a “moderate” or “centrist” and somebody who just happens to be a voter in a flawed democracy.

Neat. 📸

Not mentioned in the article, but director and EP Rhys Thomas is also known for co-creating Documentary Now! with Fred Armisen, Bill Hader and Seth Meyers. And directing that MCU Hawkeye show on Disney+, which industry sources are telling me “exists.”

This is the episode that really made me realize that the show wasn’t just a comedy sci-fi spoof, that McFarlane was actually going to try and tackle moral issues.

So much so. The last couple of weeks, I’ve been talking about how the show hadn’t won me over yet with the heavier comedy focus of those episodes. This is the one that made me go “Yes. I am going to keep watching this show.” This is that good stuff that I’ve been missing in a lot of modern sci-fi: these future society morality plays as commentary on present-day culture.

Obviously, all sci-fi is ultimately commenting on the present, but there’s something about this OG Trek issue-of-the-week presentation which allows a show to cover more ground than something where the narrative has one central theme with a singular message it wants to get across. I love this setup.

The fact that this episode ends on such a down beat, while obviously upsetting, from a presentation standpoint shows a degree of maturity in the writing that continues to be a great strength for the program over its three seasons. I do want to note some spoilers before continuing, for anybody watching this for the first time who struggles with the episode’s conclusion.

The episode was mostly very well received, but also faced criticism in terms of being a story essentially about transgender people told from the outside. Seth MacFarlane later appeared on Roddenberry Entertainment’s Mission Log: The Orville podcast where the subject of “About a Girl” was discussed briefly from about 15:57 onward. This episode came years after “About a Girl”, so I don’t recommend watching it now if you’re trying to avoid spoilers.

In the podcast, MacFarlane acknowledges both the welcoming and criticism that greeted the episode, saying (fairly nonspecifically) that there are things he would have done differently in the episode. This isn’t really a spoiler, it’s just several paragraphs long, so I’m putting it behind a spoiler for length reasons.

That’s a pretty good representation of The Orville both in- and out-of-universe. “Nobody’s perfect. But each time, you get a little better at it.”

For anybody who doesn’t want to scan a random unlabelled QR code, it decodes to the following link:

https://leavingmaga.org/

Are you sure? It’s streaming on Disney+ already in regions where they have the rights. The BBC web site has a “watch now” link.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002c5lx

It should be out at 8 AM on Saturdays, UK time. That was about three hours ago.

I like how the author says Google killed the Fitbit Sense so they could sell an inferior product without having to compete … then said author reluctantly buys and recommends that inferior product. I’m way pettier than that. I’d use anything else, even if it sucked, rather than directly reward a company for fucking me over.

That’s closer but rather than being a wrapper, it takes the original architecture’s instructions (MIPS in the case of N64) and generates a C/C++ function which implements that instruction. Then you call those functions in the same sequence as the original compiled machine code ran instructions.

That’s a relatively inefficient way to make a port, because you’re basically reimplementing the original CPU in software, hence why some have described it as emulation. At the same time though, most recompiled games are like 15-20 years old, so a bit of overhead on a modern PC isn’t going to hurt you too much.

But anyway, unlike WINE, the original binary is not used any more after recompilation. Instead, you have a native binary for the target platform, the translation having occurred at the time of recompilation (when you built the port binary).

Not really. The Ship of Harkinian ports are based on decompilations, which is where you reverse engineer some equivalent source code using the final binary as a reference point. Then, you can port that source code to anything else you can build for, like a PC, phone, Wii U or Dreamcast.

Recompilation, which is what this project is, is closer to (and some have gone as far as to say that it is) emulation. It’s taking the final binary and then, without actually working backward to get source code, translating the raw instructions directly into code that compiles for a different platform.

It’s kind of difficult to get across the difference without being familiar with what both are doing behind the scenes, because the result is obviously similar. Both require human intervention, but decompilation is the more labor-intensive approach, while recompilation is somewhat more automated.

The advantage of former is that you end up with a relatively human-readable codebase to work with, while the latter doesn’t bring you any closer to understanding how the game works internally. Both ultimately allow for porting the game to new platforms. Decompilation will almost certainly result in a more optimized final game, because it avoids the overhead of “emulating” the original architecture. However, for the same reason, recompilation can be generalized to other games that originally ran on the same hardware.

I know we’re not here to learn facts, but just in case.

https://checkyourfact.com/2021/08/06/fact-check-new-york-daily-news-article-woman-beheading-landlord-samurai-sword/

Ah, the learned helplessness<->weaponized incompetence spectrum.