This is a real thing, though. Most mixed use in the US falls into one of two categories: either it was built before zoning codes (like most of the small apartments over businesses) or it’s large apartment/condo buildings. Mixed use has become a more popular concept in the past decade or so, but most residential zoning prevents the building of commercial buildings within the area and largely limits the size of dwellings to single family homes.

It’s also why 2 and 3 unit housing is a rarity as well. You mostly see either single family housing or large apartment buildings/condo complexes because it’s hard to get approved to build anything else - either through zoning laws themselves or NIMBYs killing any project.

You can thank Euclidian Zoning for that.

This is greed, pure and simple. At $60, the industry was more profitable than Hollywood, and they raised the base price of games to $70 just a few years ago before immediately talking about raising prices again.

They also said at one point that these guys were “corrupting the youth with their long hair.”

No, that’s basically it.

The reason for all this work is basically the concept of a currency that isn’t backed by and dependent upon governments while also being impossible to counterfeit, hence a lot of encryption because it fundamentally says that you can’t trust the other computers that you’re talking to. Everybody holds a ledger that says that you have $5, so you can’t suddenly say that you actually have $10. And all the math is to prevent inflation by limiting the amount of currency that exists at any time. The more currency there is from solving the math, the harder the math gets to slow down the creation of new money.

It all falls apart, though, because the only value that crypto has is what it’s worth in traditional fiat currency - the very thing that it’s supposed to replace.

So it’s just a bunch of computers doing a lot of math to make funny money that’s supposedly worth something because…of reasons?

I think it helps to reinforce how silly crypto is, though. Once you establish that fiat currency is basically magic paper we all agree is worth something because it’s backed by things like the government’s reliability and contract to uphold that value, and then you say, “and crypto, designed to replace fiat currency, is backed by fiat currency,” the whole thing falls apart like the house of cards that it is.

How can you justify a funny money that doesn’t do anything new in terms of cyber security, while burning vastly more resources to do it, and is only worth something because of the currency that it’s supposed to replace, and that value rapidly fluctuates from moment to moment.

In short, AI is useful when it’s improving workflow efficiency and not much else beyond that. People just unfortunately see it as a replacement for the worker entirely.

If you wanna get loose with your definition of “AI,” you can go all the way back to the MS Paint magic wand tool for art. It’s simply an algorithm for identifying pixels within a certain color tolerance of each other.

The issue has never been the tool itself, just the way that it’s made and/or how companies intend to use it.

Companies want to replace their entire software division, senior engineers included, with ChatGPT or equivalent because it’s cheaper, and they don’t value the skill of their employees at all. They don’t care how often it’s wrong, or how much more work the people that they didn’t replace have to do to fix what the AI breaks, so long as it’s “good enough.”

It’s the same in art. By the time somebody is working as an artist, they’re essentially at a senior software engineer level of technical knowledge and experience. But society doesn’t value that skill at all, and has tried to replace it with what is essentially a coding tool trained on code sourced from pirated software and sold on the cheap. A new market of cheap knockoffs on demand.

There’s a great story I heard from somebody who works at a movie studio where they tried hiring AI prompters for their art department. At first, things were great. The senior artist could ask the team for concept art of a forest, and the prompters would come back the next day with 15 different pictures of forests while your regular artists might have that many at the end of the week. However, if you said, “I like this one, but give me some versions without the people in them,” they’d come back the next day with 15 new pictures of forests, but not the original without the people. They simply could not iterate, only generate new images. They didn’t have any of the technical knowledge required to do the job because they depended completely on the AI to do it for them. Needless to say, the studio has put a ban on hiring AI prompters.

• This is likely the first major outage of the company since Musk took ownership in 2022.

Didn’t Twitter go down multiple times for similar periods of time not long after Musk fired everybody? Or am I just hallucinating wishful thinking.

Plug that random USB stick you found on the sidewalk directly into the server and open up Link_ParkFullAlbum-LimeWire.exe

I don’t know the 5 9s reference, but the two 8s is 88, a Nazi dog whistle for Heil Hitler, as H is the 8th letter of the alphabet.

There was somebody crazy enough to make an entire game in Blender, I don’t doubt that somebody has at least tried to make a soundtrack in Blender.

I refer to this as the Wind Waker effect.

Before Wind Waker was announced, Nintendo did a reel showing off the power of the GameCube that included a “realistic” (for the time) fight scene between Link and Ganondorf. So when they announced a new Zelda game, people were hyped for a gritty realistic Zelda, and when the first trailers appeared, people hated it.

For years after its release, Wind Waker’s art style was dragged on by people, but today, it’s remembered as one of the most iconic Zelda games from that time period and a major influence on the aesthetic of many Zelda games after it.

Today, its art style looks just as good as it did when the game first launched, while most other games from that time period - especially those that went for high fidelity and realistic graphics - look outdated.

A good art style is timeless and will always age better than trying to push the envelope on graphical fidelity or realism.

I used to work at a fish market, and one of the fishermen we dealt with once won a large sum of money from a big fishing tournament. When they asked him what he was gonna do with the money, his response was, “Keep fishing until it’s all gone.”

As my dad would say, “A boat is a hole in the water you throw money into.” Boats are cool and fun if you like to sail, but between maintenance costs, mooring fees, the cost to take it out of the water and store it at a boat yard once the season is over, scrape the barnacles off, repaint it, etc. it’s not a cheap endeavor.

I actually based my comment on some stories that I’ve heard from vets dealing with the office of veterans’ affairs (I think that’s what it’s called), specifically an artist I followed on Tumblr years ago who had to have surgery on his hand and physical therapy related to an injury he got in the military and got turned down because the injury had become a chronic issue after he got out and therefore “wasn’t service related” despite it being directly caused by an injury he received while in the military. Kept him from being able to draw and really solidified my opinion on how the government takes care of its people. That, and the percentage of homeless people who are veterans/the percentage of veterans who end up homeless.

Except she’s a woman, so very likely to be sexually assaulted in the military (and that’s if she even gets in, DEI and all that), and vets get shafted as well. Her losing a leg to an IED will be ruled “not service related,” and she will be denied any funds related to care or issues resulting from said injury after she leaves the military.

Yep, the vaccine is recent enough that if you were born in the 90s or before, the vaccine wasn’t available when you were of the right age to get it. I didn’t even know we had a vaccine until probably 5 years ago.

I’m not sure exactly what you mean by why this stuff matters, but the stuff that you’d be generating with AI for a game wouldn’t be a loading screen or something - it would be assets. Character models, weapons, buildings, textures, voices, that’s the kind of stuff that companies want to generate with AI. Right now, you can buy stock assets to use, and that’s where all the garbage asset flips come from, but companies want to replace employees with software that makes their own assets for them for cheap. Replace the people who make games with software that spits out gacha products. But if they aren’t protected under copyright, then any asset flipper can use your main character - taking the model right from your AAA game - and throw it into their 99-cent asset flip scam, and you can’t do anything about it.

I believe Steam has the policy on AI that they do both because of public opinion about the use of AI (and the way it’s being used to steal from creators) and because AI generated games tend to fall into the same category of outright scams that NFT games do, and games containing NFTs are straight up banned from Steam.

Edit: Going back and reading through the article, I see that they were straight up putting in AI generated images into the game as skins and loading screens and stuff. These also fall under the asset flip thing, especially if they’re so obvious that they have six fingers like the zombie Santa. The same goes for their social media promotional material. You can just straight up use CoD’s ads for your own game and they can’t do anything about it.

People are upset by the use of it because of the poor quality, and, as I said, these companies want to replace the people who make games with software that churns out slop to consume. They think of gamers as pigs at a trough and developers as leeches stealing their hard earned profits.

Unless they’re into that.

But this isn’t about kink shaming foot fetishists - it’s about the power dynamic and bruising Trump’s ego. It’s about as NSFW as you can get without getting into major trouble. Showing dommy mommy fElon in latex holding a leash and Trump on his knees wearing a pup mask on TVs in a government office would be hilarious and amazing, but I don’t know if you’d survive long enough to laugh about it.

The War Thunder community has entered the chat and leaked a classified document