“Data, stop. Data. Stop. Data, SHUT UP!”

Not to mention, even if you can accurately measure calories in a specific serving, companies produce thousands and thousands of servings per day. They can’t accurately measure all of them. And ironically, the more ‘natural’ the food is, the less accurately they can measure the nutritional value: protein paste is going to be a lot more predictable than pasture-raised chickens.

This is sort of implicitly true. You can’t get people’s money if they can’t figure out how to use your product/service.

At the same time… People are pretty dumb.

Yeah, I remember that being a real thing: one studio would get wind that another studio was working on a film with a particular theme, and they’d rush to put out an equivalent movie. Later on, it wasn’t even just cheap knockoffs: remember when Deep Impact came out right at the same time as Armageddon? And then like…The 13th Floor, eXistenZ, and The Matrix all came out in 1999. I wonder how much of that was strict copying, how much was scripts influencing one another, and how much was just the zeitgeist.

Lol, it seems like there was a whole category of films made to ride the coat tails of better, more famous films by sitting beside them on the shelf at Blockbuster, waiting to be picked up by clueless parents.

My sisters still give my dad a hard time about all the knock-off movies he brought home when we were kids. To this day, a Gordy is family short-hand for a disappointing knock-off: “Hey, wait, this isn’t brie, this is ‘cheese product’…you got the Gordy cheese!”

A while back, one of the image generation AIs (midjourney?) caught flack because the majority of the images it generated only contained white people. Like…over 90% of all images. And worse, if you asked for a “pretty girl” it generated uniformly white girls, but if you asked for an “ugly girl” you got a more racially-diverse sample. Wince.

But then there reaction was to just literally tack “…but diverse!” on the end of prompts or something. They literally just inserted stuff into the text of the prompt. This solved the immediate problem, and the resulting images were definitely more diverse…but it led straight to the sort of problems that Google is running into now.

Well, right, you’re dealing with statistics. It’s not impossible that Trump will quantum-teleport into the sun, physics allows for that possibility. It’s just incredibly unlikely. And the odds of some other person getting elected with no actual effort to make it happen before now is similarly basically zero. Theoretically possible is all very well, but we live in the real world.

Aww, why didn’t he stay the course? Things have been going so well!

I think one of the differences (at least when I watched anime way back in the early 00s) is that anime relies on a whole different set of tropes from Western movies and cartoons, and those tropes are unfamiliar (or were, anyway) to Western audiences.

When I started watching anime, it was hugely refreshing to be caught by surprise by plot twists and dialogue, and to see characters & themes that felt totally original.

But then you watch more anime, and realize…oh, they weren’t unique, they were totally stereotypical. You just didn’t know the stereotypes they were based on.

And before long you can see plot twists a mile away, the characters are predictable, and you can describe a new series as “basically X, but with some Y and monsters instead of robots”.

It’s the false promise of that initial discovery that makes the eventual realization that much more disappointing.

I think they claimed they’re not discriminating against browsers, they’re just better at identifying adblockers on Firefox or something.

Illegal to do…what? Not offer high-res videos? To have any delay before streaming videos? To refuse to serve you videos, even if doing so caused them to lose money? How would you enforce that on Google, much less on smaller startups? Would it apply to PeerTube instances?

Google sucks for doing this. It’ll drive people to competitors–hopefully even federated competitors. But laws to ‘fix’ the problem would be nearly impossible to craft–and would be counterproductive in the long term, because they’d cement the status quo. Let Google suck, so that people switch away from it.

Well, fair. But even in that case, they have every right to degrade your YouTube experience, as owners of YouTube. As ISP (I mean, assuming NN was still a thing) they couldn’t selectively degrade traffic, but YouTube has no obligation to you under net neutrality.

This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Google is not an ISP. With or without net neutrality, Google could fuck with YouTube users.

There’s an important difference, though, especially with Lemmy. You used XMPP to communicate with particular people. When Google convinced, whatever, 70% of users to use Talk and then slammed the door shut, the smaller instances were no longer viable. People on those instances lost contact with their friends. They aren’t going to just chat with whoever else happened to be left outside the walls.

But I don’t look for specific people on Reddit, or on Lemmy. Any large-enough instance is fine. Just like people moved from Reddit to Lemmy, they can move from one instance to another. A major rift could drop the quality of the experience, at least for a while, but the instances would still be viable. They’re not suddenly useless the way an isolated Jabber server was.

FTX stole from customers. Binance didn’t sufficiently spy on its customers. They are not the same.

You think Google was fishing for VC money?

H1B holders are chained to the employer (as are other visas), but green card holders are not. Source: green card holder.

That works if you’re dominant in the market, and you have companies rushing to make software for your platform. If you’re not, you end up as an also-ran platform with a handful of half-baked ports (like every “smart TV”).

You can label your devices. When formatting, do mkfs.ext4 -l my-descriptive-name /dev/whatever. Now, refer to it exclusively by /dev/disk/by-label/my-descriptive-name. Much harder to mix up home and swap than sdc2 and sdc3 (or, for that matter, two UUIDs).

Let’s be real, the Navy continued to stick with Windows XP…