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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: December 23rd, 2023

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  • It’s an interesting article, I couldn’t help but think of how “Pirate Speak” really comes from Robert Newton’s acting in a famous Disney movie. So while it predates big tech’s debasement of culture it’s still a “top down” artifact, in a way. I guess you could say it came from a creative decision of an artist (Newton adapting his native accent) and initially caught on for good fun rather than for profit. So far less cynical than the radioactive shit getting pumped out now, if for no other reason than in the 1950s Disney hadn’t figured that shit out yet.


  • Just spitballing but you’d have to align the desired shape somehow, perhaps with a singular value decomposition. Once its transform was normalized you could compare its shape, or perhaps its convex hull, with a database of banned shapes.

    The problem is this is pretty easy to defeat (by adding extra sprues and spikes to the object, breaking it into two shapes, etc) and the more aggressive you get with the check the more you risk false positives.

    An AI training set would involve creating a dataset of all the banned shapes, then generating tens of thousands of permutations of them however you believe people might try to trick it. Ultimately the AI would lock onto some small feature of the shape that scores it as positive, perhaps something trivial. That also leads to weird false positives. This also creates an arms race as people figure out what that feature is subvert it.

    This problem is much harder in 3D than in 2D (currency). Since you can also cut, file, and glue shit that comes out of a 3D printer later I don’t think this is a solvable problem. Like most gun control measures in the USA it appears to be aesthetics.

    You could also just aggressively go false positive all over the place and say “fuck the users”, with exceptions for cops. This is basically the USA’s approach to drones.




  • Repair forum version:

    • Here are the exact bolts you need to loosen: <dead photobucket link>
    • After that make sure you note this gasket: <another dead photobucket link>
    • The replacement part is very hard to find but they carry it here: <404>
    • You’ll find the torque spec here: <domain sold to online casino advertiser>

    Bonus points if the only schematic you can find is a 256 resolution jpg on pinterest that leads to a wordpress site were a bot only posts random schematics to farm pinterest engagement.


  • The article doesn’t really do Tim justice. He’s a bodger who is basically a genius for what I can only describe as Goblin technology. His projects are as much about fun and experimenting as having a result. In the first windmill video he acknowledged that he could just buy a small electric windmill, but that’s not the point.

    I mean, this is the dude who made a narrow gauge railroad and a compressed air locomotive to transport wood to his terrifying biochar chopper and crucible.




  • In cyan’s defense, every other point and click mystery/adventure game at the time was so much worse about this shit. Spacequest had stuff like if you forgot to do something in the first room you fail in the last room and can’t fix it. Even Nancy Drew, which was made for kids, had some bullshit (but at least a built-in hint system). Game design had come a long way. The new monkey island games are great.