Any streaming service with multi episode shows.

A dumpster fire, drama generation website comprised primarily of yapping narcissist sociopaths, simps, just-barely-not-pornstars, and insufferable v tubers…

…all of which is monetized and gamified as all hell, and aimed at mostly children and young adults…

…which consistently fails at defining and enforcing its code of conduct…

…all of this to be essentially a platform for advertisements.

Oh, did I mention they probably still are not even profitable?

If Bezos is brazen enough to tell WaPo to not endorse Kamala, its not much of a stretch to imagine this Amazon owned, giant corporate advertisement platform will soon be getting pared down and scaled back, further monetized/ad-infested, have much more draconian content regulation/censorship, and/or just shut down in the next year or so.

I don’t like capitalism.

I don’t like censorship.

But Twitch is basically a giant corpo run simulation of human interaction whose parasocial addicts users have the false impression that its some kind of staple, constant feature of their lives.

It isn’t, it is a failing business, and I really get the feeling that a whole lot of Twitch users are going to basically have their brains broken when it starts acting much more like a failing business.

Flight School.

The problem I am aware of is moreso that the number of programmers that know COBOL is vanishingly small, it … COBOL does not seem to really be taught anymore…

…so if something goes wrong at that level, you may be SOL if you cannot find an increasingly rare programmer that knows COBOL well.

DARPA has unironically been funding a tool that purports to translate C / C++ into Rust…

https://www.darpa.mil/program/translating-all-c-to-rust

… Are the Feds aware that the core systems that many, many older companies (and government agencies) use are still based on COBOL?

Is… is that not of any concern?

Its fanboy/girlism.

If you pirate content from their favorite author/artist/producer/whatever, basically all of their screeching comes down to a hysterical emotional response that you are hurting a person or group that they worship as God.

They just learn rhetoric to justify their emotions as a side effect, a consequence of wanting to be able to argue against the bad mean people that are hurting their favorite creatives.

They are naive, ignorant or misinformed, immature… usually believing in some kind ‘just world’ type worldview where everything is fair and square actually if you just follow the rules.

They don’t understand that the actual ‘losses’ from piracy are far, far smaller than whatever the RIAA or game studios say it is.

They don’t understand that the people who actually create or perform the art basically get paid a tiny fraction of what their labels or corporate overlords make.

They don’t understand that some people are actually poor, and the poor deserve art as well.

They don’t understand that when a reasonable cost forma product with reasonable ownership rights exist, a great, great many will prefer a streamlined but slightly costly method over a complex but monetarily costless method.

They don’t understand that you don’t really own anything which you can’t use or view or listen to as you please without relying on some proprietary other system which may just poof that ability out of existence one day, without refunding you.

Every single time I mention that Krita is basically an older version of photoshop, someone appears and says this.

I never said its a photoshop clone, as in it has parity with modern photoshop.

I said it can basically be used as one would have photoshop from a decade ago.

This is true, no matter whether or not it was ‘designed with drawing and digital media creation in mind.’

If you need something with more options and features than GiMP, or you don’t like GiMPs user interface… Krita works quite well.

Fucking incredible.

I’ve used Shotcut on PopOS.

Worked pretty well for doing something about as complex as a editing together a typical youtube video.

Hell I even managed to get it to support h.265 after some tinkering. h264 and hevc worked as well.

Also, in a similar vein… Krita is basically Photoshop from about a decade ago in terms of functionality, less outdated UI and more functional than GiMP, though its a bit chonkier (memory / CPU intensive).

Wonderful.

By ‘conservative commentator’ they mean former writer for Richard Spencer, well known um… yeah, fucking Nazi.

Hey, I appreciate your honesty and integrity!

I suppose it is still possible that the Concord themed Secret Level episode will still air…

I still doubt it.

I’m still willing to bet 2¢ it won’t air, haha.

But yeah… the marketing (the video presentations of staff and developers, their public statements etc) seemed to me to very much indicate that the whole plan was to create an entire Concord Expanded Universe.

The game was supposed to have weekly story/character progression updates like some older MMOs, they talked about being in many different media formats, they literally used the phrase Concord Universe or Universe of Concord.

When you go all in on a new IP and … its the biggest failure in the history of gaming… all your plans are done, kaput. You have to wait for people to forget about it and then ‘reimagine’ it a decade later if you even want to try to resurrect it.

From a game design standpoint… it wasn’t designed to work as a heavily MTX dependent game.

That’s actually a whole lot more development, more content, more UIs, more testing… and thus money you have to throw at it to get it to be that… and it already has failed, and been stupendously expensive to develop, has a horrific general reputation/perception.

But as to at least the Secret Level episode airing?

You do have good arguments that basically boil down to it already being completed or mostly complete, and the … who gets paid by what contract with who for what… that kind of set up … may lead to it making more business sense to just air it anyway.

But I would still counter that Sony wants to memory hole this IP from collective knowledge, and that they value that, as a means of improving their public perception, more than whatever they’d lose from breaking their contracts with Amazon.

Ok, fine, I’ll give everyone a nostalgia dose.

… just… nobody pick Oddjob.

Cradle (N64)

For England, James?

Bonus

Old World Blues basically made the metaphor literal.

IIRC, the main… antagonists? idiot people who think they are geniuses? … they are literally brains, in tanks, hooked up to computers or transplanted into robots…

And the actual name of the building they live in is ‘The Think Tank’.

https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/The_Think_Tank

If you’ve never played New Vegas or Old World Blues…I highly recommend it. Legitimately some of the funniest writing, dialogue options, and absurd situations I’ve seen in a game.

As in… building homes?

They already do that, in huge numbers.

… And Trump wants to get rid of them all, which will make housing construction costs go up even more, and # of new housing starts go down even more.

Wow 26,400!

What’s the estimated shortage of houses?

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/08/homes/housing-shortage/index.html

https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/estimating-national-housing-shortfall

https://www.npr.org/2024/04/23/1246623204/housing-experts-say-there-just-arent-enough-homes-in-the-u-s

… Somewhere between 4 to 7 million?

This announcement will result in more than 26,400 affordable housing units, including more than 25,600 rental units and more than 750 homeownership units. Since its establishment by the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, the Capital Magnet Fund has created over 63,000 affordable homes, including more than 55,600 rental housing units and 7,400 homeowner-occupied units.

This is a fucking joke.

Less than 100k homes in a decade and a half, as increasing home and rental costs are basically the primary driver of everyone who is not super wealthy’s financial woes… but don’t worry we bailed out all the businesses in 08 that are incapable of due diligence and all should have had their Boards go to fucking prison for fraud.

Not sure if you are joking but… it does not appear to be making anywhere near the amount of money that has been invested in it.

It costs a stupendous amount of money to develop the models, to train them, to rent out or just buy the hardware needed to do this, to pay for the electrical power to do this.

Shaka, when the walls fell.

Can I become a famous economist who goes on the news circuit if I just take the Laffer curve and change the axes to ‘work hours in a week’ and ‘actual productivity’?