I’ve done a little bit of okay cleaning with a toothpick, then much better cleaning from the repair shop.

Target was one of few department stores I actually felt okay about. They hadn’t done anything particularly terrible, even what scandals I did find seemed to have nuance to them. Then they decided to wage war on minorities - sorry, “DEI”, and I called them to specifically say I’d never shop there again.

I didn’t bother to state “unless”, but I’d be okay with returning to them if they turn out to fire the people responsible for the move.

From how it sounds, especially with the actor’s permission, this seems like my preferred way of using AI-generated voices.

I’d really want to make sure any legal language around actor AI permissions is built to avoid coaxing though - like including it as an “industry standard” clause for infinite use when recording a single audition. Ideally, the voice would always “belong to” the actor it came from, and would only be licensed on specific uses, like “This NPC within this game mode, available for 8 weeks in summer of 2025”. No idea if that’s what they did here.

Much as Bernie will definitely continue to be the face of the movement, I have doubts he has many years left for politics. We’re in need of new faces for that same initiative.

I’m confident AOC could raise an impressive amount of campaigning money as a single senator. But, impressive enough to account for an entire party, taking seats in thousands of positions across hundreds of local districts? Much as I’d like it, I don’t see how it can happen.

I’d also like it if campaign money wasn’t necessary, but 99% of America doesn’t actively follow politics; it’s needed to bring it to their doorstep. We’ve been covering the gap in things like Elon Musk’s campaign funds via a lot of volunteer work, but that can only go so far.

I would really like a new age of social media that uses technology advances to monitor intent, not language.

Censoring someone from saying “I’ve made a lot of advances in my mental health since I was raped, but it feels like I’m hiding my whole struggle anytime I step out the door.” is ironically going to damage their mental health. Meanwhile, use of that word in many other sentences should obviously trigger a ban. And to go one further, many sentences with all “safe” words can be the most harmful.

I would even say that type of censorship leads people to falsely believe everything is fine in the world, and that causes like diversity initiatives or police reform are unnecessary.

What really sucks is how many times this conversation has started, only for the trans person to (very logically and understandably) react internally with “Ohhh boy, here we go, another one of these backwards bigots. I’m just going to yell to make myself feel better.”

Then the ignorant individual feels attacked, gets defensive, and feels satisfied in their belief that trans people are hysterical or something.

I don’t even blame anyone so much for that. Being patient with every single transphobe just in case they’re a reasonable person takes far more energy than I have.

I know a lot of people have been saying this, but we’ve seen some nice surprise Democrat election victories lately, mostly on smaller local elections for State judges/senators. There was also the recent attempt to overturn Justine Riggs election, which saw huge public outcry and failed.

It is reason to be optimistic, and the GOP has certainly had awareness of the importance of all those small local seats for a long time. So even if we presume they have some horrible, secret, nefarious way of manipulating results, I don’t think they can do that on enormous scales, or for every election.

Be cautious, but you don’t have to be pessimistic.

my girlfriend is 14

dials FBI

I feel like, with some work, NFTs could be used for decentralized ownership of digital content licenses? But, I sincerely doubt any such companies would care to set that up.

While I know most people would just prefer everything go DRM-free, I’ll admit I became interested in the practice when I learned town libraries can stock AAA console video games, but would have a hard time stocking indie/AA games that have only had digital releases - even if the game’s creator is a hipster that loves libraries, the only simple approach there is to give away infinite free copies of the game.

Well, same way Stormtroopers wear helmets. You can’t really individualize them or people start to appreciate them and root for them, like they do every villain.

I mean, given the fact that this affected Joe Biden up until this announcement, and no medical examiner announced it previously, it does seem plausible.

As a reminder, the claim that Hamas built a command center under Shifa Hospital comes solely from the IDF. They have rejected offers to have an international delegation of journalists freely roam the area to verify the claim.

Could we consider this to be a dilemma of preservation?

Let’s take something innocuous and specific, like a package of food. We want it to be airtight and safe from bacteria until a human tears it open and eats it. But once torn open, we want it to disintegrate.

Now, if we make this bacteria and allow it to spread, the same problem exists as if we were to package that food in a wooden container, or a paper container. The material is now “weak” to ambient attackers.

Thumbs down - this LLM still needs a bit of work to make its speech more human. Midway through it just seemed to be a rambling of words.

“Wrong direction” sums up my anger towards everything FromSoft.

Two Soulslike games I really enjoyed though, are Tunic, and Another Crab’s Treasure. Both are generally pretty rewarding of exploration, but also tightly guide you at the beginning. I honestly just don’t feel like FromSoft is very fair when it comes to early exploration. One path utterly destroys you and has no reward at the end.

My first PlayStation was a PS3, and thankfully, around then they were still releasing a number of ported “trilogies”.

Even though mine was not a backwards compatible model, I was also able to play digital versions of the Fatal Frame series, which is sadly now pretty much inaccessible.

I never played Jax, but I saw an analysis of its vector-based facial animation, where there were few enough vertices for animators to directly tweak; and it does feel like a nostalgic way to make cartoony, expressive faces.

Funny side topic:

Insurance doesn’t cover acts of terrorism. So, by the DOJ placing that label on recent Tesla vandalism, the insurance claims become invalid.

Peans: Not quite peas, not quite beans. But they’re somewhere inbetweens.

If you have a Netflix subscription, the app lets you install many games that aren’t looking for microtransactions within.

Most of the Ace Attorney games are on smartphones.

I’ve also been having a lot of fun with Zenless Zone Zero. F2P, combat is based around swapping between a team of three, and making use of parry / dodge frame effects.