Unless I’m mistaken, it sounds like they were running without human input, see last sentence:

AI avatars can sharply reduce costs since companies don’t need to hire a large production team or a studio to livestream. The digital avatars can also stream nonstop without needing breaks.

The phrasing is clunky, I’ll give you that, which I think is attributable to this being early days for the tech.

The spookyweird non-Ghibli one.

In terms of business decisions it may make sense, but honestly the very fact the show’s had additional seasons already seems to really kill the spirit of it. A spinoff would feel like sending that spirit to further depths of hell.

Not a fan of this application of AI, but I thought it was a little funny to read. It figures businesses would want to create artificial sales and marketing drones.

I guess on the plus side it may mean unlike real people you could more ethically and comfortably find ways to shut them down.

This is the kind of AI/machine learning I can get behind, especially given it may sort of help even out some of its energy use in the process. More of this application of the tech could be great if the results hold up.

Cool to see a brief example of how to make a pocket-sized zine, and smart thinking on their part for making a master copy with a separate page for the front & back covers. If you wanted to print the same zine with a variety of covers that’d be perfect.

Huh, already been 10 years…

It’s interesting that Rocket League didn’t seem to inspire many imitators given its success.

Sort of odd to see this again (from Vox as well, I think?). It seems to add more detail, but the bottom line remains the same: it’s largely because fewer people are trying to immigrate into the U.S. since the Trump admin entered office.

Trump might struggle to ramp up deportations along the border, as Obama did, simply because significantly fewer people are coming. In March, border apprehensions fell to 7,181, a 95 percent decrease from March 2024.

This all sucks, and another part that sucks about it is that as usual, in the absence of as many of the Republicans’/conservatives’ favorite scapegoats, they begin turning inward and grabbing anyone and everyone that remotely resembles those scapegoats to abuse and deport to appeal to their base. Without more pushback, and as those deportation numbers continue to dwindle, you can expect that they’ll begin more widely rounding up their detractors (or at least attempting to).

This timing is pretty amusing.

The other day I shared this video (Failure of Battlebit Remastered), which itself was uploaded by its creator only a week ago.

It’s great to see the devs coming back to it. Tbh I don’t think it’s my sort of game personally, but I typically prefer to see projects revisited and restored well instead of abandoned.

The section concerning dedicated servers potentially contributing to the decline in playerbase struck me as a kind of microcosm example of some of the difficulties federated social networks have been facing for years. Albeit unlike this game, there are still communicative software devs around here.

In a better world, this (or one of its forks) would have taken off instead of Mastodon. It makes a way better case for itself by its distinct features compared to Mastodon, which is too easy to ignore (by everyday people) as Nerd-Twitter.

This article also misses the point somewhat.

It has a similar issue as attempts to respond to criticisms of Mastodon (or other federated software), the people criticizing it and in this situation Bluesky, are clearly criticizing them as social media and don’t care about the technical foundations. They do not care if there’s other software using the protocol, and other apps to interact with the protocol to filter out what they don’t like.

If they cared enough, they might seek out that other software or those other apps, but either in what they’re saying or doing (e.g. returning to Twitter/X or switching over to group chats or something else instead), they indicate they don’t.

The real response to people’s disinterest or distaste for a social media platform isn’t anything easy to provide. Some of it can be moderation, clearer guidance around the interface to tailor your experience, more outreach to bring in a greater variety of conversation, and so on. However not much of it can be addressed by the underlying technology, because the vibes of social media are produced by the people there, and no amount of tech can ethically address that.

In the meantime, block and mute at will and stick to feeds you know you’ll enjoy to better avoid the worst that may emerge from the net.

There’s an extra treat buried in this article…

The diarist John Evelyn, whose 1661 treatise Fumifugium focused on London’s growing pollution problem, had no doubt that Parr’s death was caused by “the Aer, which plainly wither’d him”

Fumifugium is such a great title!

Honestly this article gets better as you go…We could use a modern medical series like the old “Anatomy of Quackery” to debunk the insidious nonsense still being spread today!

I’ve seen this band name before, but not sure if I’d heard them before so gave “Young Wicked” a listen. They definitely sound like some other bands I’ve heard before…Albeit with their own touches.

Not too bad, not something I’d listen to all the time, but when you want this kind of rock grit, I can see the appeal. Appreciate the track suggestions and recommendation!

Yeah! The last anime that I thought was as comfy was maybe Little Witch Academia.

I don’t know how I found myself watching Little Witch Academia, but it was a great choice. May have to rewatch it sometime…

Cryptocurrency orgs have done one job extremely well here, and that’s blatantly demonstrate that the best way to try to fast track legislation is Big Money.

It’s like how all the cryptocurrency screwups demonstrate why there are financial regulations to begin with, now they’re inadvertently helping demonstrate extremely clearly why we need to get money out of politics.

This caught my eye as I hadn’t read/heard of Ne Zha before, and while I imagine the video’s only scraping the surface, I thought it was a decent overview of the character and their background. It’s some cool insight into some ancient Chinese mythos/folklore.

“After forty years, we asked, what do the fans want? But instead we’re making this movie.”

The real satire would be for this to be a genuine, original story that’s just using the name and has nothing else to do with the first.

Spaceballs 2, or how Hollywood’s cowardly investors can only tolerate new, original material in an old suit.

As to more practical approaches to outreach:

• Look at some of what people chafe against with Reddit, e.g. karma requirements and ambiguous auto-moderation, to invite them over to communities around here.
• If you have an interest in something new and upcoming, post about it in the broader communities here and if the moderators there are cool with it*, use those posts to invite people to a specific community about it.
  • Create specific communities about new/trending stuff and invite people from elsewhere to discuss it here instead of Reddit.
• Whichever instance wants to take a shot at an Ask Me Anything community (as you’d want both admins and mods on-hand for this), consider it as these Q&As can draw attention to this space very well with the right people invited to ask about whatever.

* Moderators of these broader communities, if you’re okay with people inviting others to more specific communities around here, clarify that somewhere easy to find. People coming from elsewhere may assume it’s not and never ask due to their prior experiences.

Ultimately, have fun with it all! If you’re not having fun and enjoying things here, why would anyone else want to join?

Archive link: https://archive.ph/N8QBu

Is there anything else you want people to know about Bluesky?

This is a choose-your-own-adventure game. You can get in there and customize the experience as much as you want. If you’re not finding what you want within the Bluesky app, there might be another app within the protocol ecosystem that will give you what you want. If you can’t find it, you can build it. You don’t get this level of control anywhere else.

Emphasis added on last sentence. If nothing else tells you an interview is as much marketing as it is aiming to be genuinely informative, it should be statements like this.

That last sentence is basically a lie, as anyone across ActivityPub networks can tell you. I would say I don’t know why they would say this, but I do know at least one reason: marketing.

It can be argued ActivityPub doesn’t enable the same level of control, but the problem is that it’s so damn flexible that it’d be somewhat disingenuous to do so.

AuthTransfer has similar problems but of a different sort, primarily that too many people not using it don’t realize how it’s still rapidly changing and that already there are some independent and semi-independent platforms emerging built with it.

What remains important to keep an eye out for is if/when the AuthTransfer protocol is fully released from Bluesky’s ownership/control and becomes an open standard. I think that’s as important or more important than any fully independent “instance”, to put it in ActivityPub terms, built with it.