I worked there during this time, and this pretty much confirms what everyone feared when the merger was announced. Part of me wants to read this book, but I know it will make me really mad.

Just a little anecdote, we had a meeting shortly after where Frank Pierce told us that major changes would basically happen over Morhaime’s dead body. So when he left (and Pierce also) it was clear that it was over.

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.

Agreed, and there’s a good chance that log is full of one thing spamming over and over, and the devs would love to know what it is.

I really hate shit like the first quote because willows are incredible trees. They’ve also been super useful to humanity for tens of thousands of years, from everything from baskets to aspirin. You can chop off a willow branch and stick it in the ground and it grows a new tree. Try that with oak (although oaks are also cool).

Whoever wrote that knows nothing about trees. They just thought, “bendy weak not-bendy stronk.” Oh not a modern, commercial timber species, must suck. Drives me nuts they pretend to be “men of the land” then say some stupid bullshit like that. It doesn’t make them sound hard. A stone age man could make a fishing net out of that willow that would feed his family for a year. Fuck outta here.

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.

What’s the sound of Frank Oz clapping?

Yeah this is an extremely thin wrapper on GPT4All, literally just feeding in the above prompt. I’m not knocking the author for trying/sharing this but you’d probably be better off just installing GPT4All. That said, do you think this would have kept Ted out of prison?

You: The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

Model: Honestly, I think the whole Industrial Revolution thing has just been a total mess for humanity as a whole. Like, what was supposed to be some kind of progress or advancement ended up causing way more problems than it solved. And don’t even get me started on all the environmental and social issues that came with it… ugh, it’s like we took two steps forward but then tripped over our own feet and fell back a few paces.

The low men.

Hah, nope. Shrek was made in Glendale, so they probably had everything on site or right next door.

In the early 2000s I worked on an animated film. The studio was in the southern part of Orange County CA, and the final color grading / print (still not totally digital then) was done in LA. It was faster to courier a box of hard drives than to transfer electronically. We had to do it a bunch of times because of various notes/changes/fuck ups. Then the results got courier’d back because the director couldn’t be bothered to travel for the fucking million dollars he was making.

Same. I just watch StarCraft now. I was never that good to begin with, but playing now is likely to make my withered heart explode.

I just remember Jimmy Smits strapped into a big satellite dish, going fucking “Scanners” on some people.

Heh, you can buy it online, no need to even leave the house!

One of the reasons so many people are dying from it is American dealers buy it raw and then cut their products with it using the Magic Bullet Blender. But it turns out blenders are really bad at mixing dry powders, contrary to the old wives’ tales that drug dealers tell each other. So you get one pill with nothing and another pill with a fatal dose.

It’s been awhile since I read the book (maybe I should re-read) but from what I remember, while domestic production is possible (and probably still happens to a small degree), it mostly dried up because it’s soooo easy to import it to Mexico and truck it up. Or, in the case of the OP link, import the precursors, put it together in Mexico, and truck it up. Like, as a drug trafficker, you’d be a fool not to from a risk and financial perspective. It’s literally not illegal in China.

Whether this is an “opium war” is another question. We never would have had an opiate crisis in the first place if not for the Sackler’s aggressively pushing prescription opiates. Or if we had, you know, the social will and character to actually treat chronic pain and drug addiction.

You’re welcome, that book is actually the second in a series, the first being “Dreamland”. They were both great reads (and popular enough that I had no problem getting them at the library).

Wikipedia has an overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fentanyl#Synthesis

It’s not new. It was developed decades ago as a medical opiate by a renowned scientist. New, easier methods of synthesis have come around since, and abuse is exacerbated by the general opioid crisis in the USA, thanks essentially to the Sackler family.

From what I got reading The Least of Us the chemicals involved in the Gupta method are used in industry and essentially impossible to ban. There was some sort of breakthrough a few years ago that made this (relatively easy) method the standard way street fentanyl is made, although I don’t remember the details. Also until fairly recently it was straight-up legal to export fentanyl from China and from there import it into Mexico or have it drop shipped to basically anyone in the USA. Direct import into the USA was illegal but easy to do.

The same thing happened to me with a few memories:

• People turning into blocks and interlocking to form a city. It turned out to be Unico: Island of Magic.
• Some evil guy crawling into a painting, and something about hair growing. This was a fucked up movie called The Peanut Butter Solution. This one legit scared the shit out of me as a kid and I had nightmares about it.
• A guy being surrounded with evil looking puppets. This was a stage show called In Search of the Wow Wow Wibble Woggle Wazzie Woodle Woo. I didn’t remember this one until the youtube channel RedLetterMedia made fun of it.

These must have just been random VHS tapes my parents got in some bargain bin. I have no idea how we got them or what became of them.

This episode also has the most poorly acted sneeze ever put to film.

DisneyToon, BlueSky, Circle 7, Imagemovers Digital… could be a lot more doors.

Or I click a link to story about a cat stuck in a tree and it takes me to small, local newspaper I’ve never heard of called “The Sawfly Gazette - serving South Western Maine since 1975!”, then it immediately tells me I’ve hit my “article limit” and must subscribe for $14.95.