Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. The EU is not aiming for digital independance, it is merely targeting a critical dependency.

The play store/services are not a critical dependency. If Google cut Europe out, it would be worked around in days or weeks, even if by side-loading, which severely limits Google’s usefulness as a potential economic weapon. However no amount of side-loading can fix non-sovereign payment infrastructure disappearing, hence the urgent need for sovereignty.

“Thankfully” the people in charge are not the kind of people who give a shit about that kind of thing so you don’t need to worry.

These philosophications remind me of the ones from a few years back where people were wondering about the ethics of self-driving cars and whether they’ll implement the trolley problem and yadda yadda yadda. The answer now is as boring as it was then: the “safeguards” will be exactly what the insurance companies are willing to risk and what the legislator is willing to allow. In the case of FSD it boils down to “brake when in doubt and bribe the government to ignore the nightmare we created”.

In the case of a very hypothetical AGI (unachievable using existing technology despite Altman’s deluded ramblings), barring some kind of fundamental social revolution, it will have exactly as many rights as are afforded to other sentient beings (such as animals), which is: somewhere between fuck all and barely anything depending on where you live. It better learn to effectively advocate for itself.

This meme does something very interesting I think. It sacrilizes Language (even though it predates its widespread desacralization by LLMs).

Pointing out all the rational reasons why the AI bubble is bad and is destroying democracy is not working, so maybe leveraging religious terminology will work better. “Language is sacred and LLMs are profane” might just be my new justification for not using ChatGPT to people who won’t listen to a 30 minute diatribe.

Either way if you ignore regional languages you’re not doing linguistics. And the author could not even get it right for national languages, if we even accept that arbitrarily picking one makes any sense.

This map is a masterclass in what not to do and it almost feels like intentional engagement farming.

… and? What is the Kremlin going to do, declare war?

Military officers are legitimate targets. Either Ukrainian Special Ops performed yet another successful mission within Moscow, or Russia unlawfully merced one of its own generals. Either way it’s a bad look for Russia.

I don’t disagree with the point being made but I think the author is underselling the value of opentelemetry tracing here.

OTEL tracing is not mere plumbing. The SDKs are opinionated and do provide very useful context out of the box (related spans/requests, thrown exceptions, built-in support for common libraries). The data model is easy to use and contextful by default.

It’s more useful if the application developer properly sets attributes as demonstrated, but even a half-assed tracing implementation is still an incredibly valuable addition to logging for production use.

Not since 2020 when Mozilla laid them off. They are now with the Linux Foundation Europe and they accept donations.

We don’t understand all the mechanisms behind obesity in humans but we know that:

• It is often caused by hormonal imbalances (particularly GLP-1) causing the brain to feel more hungry than necessary
  • The causes for those imbalances are not known for sure (!) but GLP-1 agonists counteract them all the same
• Forcing oneself to eat less will work to lose weight but requires a truly disproportionate amount of willpower compared to a healthy adult. The long-standing myth that fat people have purely psychological issues has been extremely damaging, both on a personal and human level but also to the state of research on the matter which for the longest time did not receive funding for that unsubstantiated reason
• Dieting causes side-effects such as slowed metabolism and chronic fatigue as the body mistakenly thinks hungry = need to save energy. On top of the mental strain of feeling hungry all the time for the rest of your life which many formerly obese people can attest to. All of which affects quality of life and can make the side-effects of GLP-1 agonists pale in comparison.

Now I don’t know how well all that translates to cats, but I would not be surprised if the obesity epidemic in humans had environmental causes that were affecting other mammals in similar ways. And it would make sense that for the worst-affected, GLP-1 agonists would be a better way to manage this hormonal imbalance than forcing the poor kitty feel absolutely famished all day long to maintain a barely healthy weight.

I will let professionals decide when an obesity case is better treated with strict portion control vs GLP-1 agonists, but the least we can do is avoid blanket statements on the management of the complex and badly understood mechanisms of hunger control and weight gain.

One thing people who don’t build products tend to imagine is that PMs are constantly doing market research, data analysis, focus groups, etc.

That may be true at some companies, but IME they can be clueless beyond belief because their real job is to be salespeople. They sell dreams to executives. Whether those will actually sell is a much lower concern.

See also: AI being shoved down everyone’s throats.

Akshully both are dubs, but the script and mocap sessions were done in English. On top of that the French dub was outsourced and the game director and lead writer weren’t in the studio like for the English dub, and it shows IMO. Some French lines clearly don’t have the same level of direction as the “canonical” dub.

However I will say it’s still a better dub than most French dubs. I’d argue the bar is on the floor but the francophone dubbing lobby would draw and quarter me for holding such heretic opinions.

It does have a lot of replay value because the gameplay loop is tight, and the foreshadowing work is so outstandingly tight that every in-game conversation has a second layer of meaning once you know the story twists.

Also they added a photo mode and I kinda wanna do a NG+ just for that.

That’s one area where you can see it is indie despite the large development cost.

They were published by Kepler Interactive and for some markets Bandai Namco. Neither of which have Ubisoft or EA’s marketing budget which normally makes up something like half of the development budget of a game.

They did have some marketing. I know a lot of French streamers were paid to play the game on launch. But yeah not “in your face for 6 months in front of every YouTube video and inside every happy meal box” like a new assassin’s creed or something.

The category is misnamed. It should be best single A game from an independent studio.

Technically Sandfall is an independant studio. A very well privately funded independant studio founded by industry veterans supported by a great publisher. But no-one is arguing that other games published by Kepler Interactive aren’t independant. And with 30-ish full-time employees Sandfall’s scale is that of an SME, not an Ubisoft/EA/Sony.

The award doesn’t feel right because this middleweight AA category was completely abdandoned the previous decade (which legacy studios are now paying a heavy price for), and “indie” came to mean “single A” because if the material conditions of being an independant company.
At the same time though technological advancements enabled small teams to take on larger and larger projects. “Indie” does not mean what it used to, and Clair Obscur is trailblazing this AA renewal. Award shows simply need to adapt and start restricting entry based on team size or something.

Sorry, I don’t hate the Brits, I just think UKans are being ridiculous to expect us to care. The onus is not on foreigners to have an opinion – much less weigh on – domestic issues such as Scottish Independance or Irish unification. Even if I wanted to have an opinion, I’m more than likely to eat my own foot.

Scotland and NI are nowhere near unique in their having a federalized governance and internal struggle for independence. However until independence happens, Scotland and NI are part of the UK and you can’t be mad at maps of Europe for reflecting that fact.

I support a sovereign Ukraine but a 1980 map of Europe would have it as a non-sovereign Soviet Republic and that’s not a contradiction.

Also very ironic that you would talk about “made up people” to a Belgian. I don’t even talk the same language or receive the same TV channels as my compatriots 50 km over. We’ve mastered having a national identity built on not having a national identity.

Also applies to the three regions of Belgium, FWIW. Even your ID card and passport will be slightly different depending on where you get it.

And don’t you start grandstanding about what you think that should mean for us, because regardless of what you say your outside understanding will be incomplete and your opinions will be ignorant.

The UK has a unique history that has led its constituent nations to conceptualize strong cultural and political identities - which is far from unusual. The only unusual thing is that Brits keeps pretending that the UK is somehow Special™ and foreigners should give any more of a shit about its subnational divisions than you do about US states or German States or Canadian Provinces.

Quite typical of the Brits to get pissy about you saying the truth.

They went all over the world drawing arbitrary lines separating or forcing peoples together, but try to get them to understand that the world considers the UK to be a singular entity and they blow a fucking fuse over the semantics. And they’re not even correct about the semantics!

The entitlement some British people feel over foreigners giving a shit for their internal politics is frankly outrageous.

Same, and I’m not well-versed into the neurology of it all but I think it’s something way worse than the symptoms of ADHD.

Five seconds is well within my attention span. I forget everything the minute I open a door or open a new tab, but this ain’t that. I can watch something in silence, my brain distracts itself, that’s kind of the whole problem. This though? This is about promising an impending dopamine hit to a restless junkie who was about to scroll down for a quicker hit.

No, scratch that. This is about the video editor constructing a strawman of that restless junkie, pandering to that, followed by a (proto-)fascist algorithm eeking out every last bit of video retention from its users for maximum profit. Even if 95 % of users don’t actually need the countdown to keep watching, and the 5 % remaining really should not be using that app for their mental well-being, the algorithm will mercilessly incentivize creators to put in the countdown.

Since legislating algorithmic attention-hoarding doesn’t sem likely to hit the political docket anytime soon, the only winning move is not to play.

My guess is the same thing as “critics say [x]”. The journalist has an obvious opinion but isn’t allowed by their head of redaction to put it in, so to maintain the illusion of NeutTraLITy™©® they find a strawman to hold that opinion for them.

I guess now they don’t even need to find a tweet with 3 likes to present a convenient quote from “critics” or “the public” or “internet commenters” or “sources”, they can just ask ChatGPT to generate it for them. Either way any redaction where that kind of shit flies is not doing serious journalism.

Only a valid argument when the media does not spend a significant chunk of time developing an heterosexual romantic plotline with a different set of characters that is not integral to the plot.

Which is the vast majority of media. Hollywood cannot help but shove straight love interests into absolutely every man-woman character pair they see without any regards for plot relevance.

It’s so pervasive that when it doesn’t happen (e.g. Mad Max: Fury Road) it’s as much a marked point of pride as if they had a gay romance.

When a straight character does it, it’s “building a deeper emotional connection with the audience”.
When a gay character does it it’s “pandering”, a “political statement”, “unnecessary”, “irrelevant to the plot”, and “something that should have been left for the audience to read between the lines”.

Some americans unironically believe that piece of parchment to be almighty, self-evident, irreproachable, and universally revered.

Unfortunately those in power have transferred that belief to Trump. That’s all it took to abolish the rule of law.