Do you prefer ads or paywalls?
  • "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearJI
    jimmycrackcrack
    2d ago 100%

    This is the worst thing about it, they're only offering subscriptions. Newspapers kind of faded away from popular use before I was really old enough to be likely to get them, but I did used to buy some print magazines, they were great. If I had some time to kill or knew I'd be on a flight I could choose to buy ONE issue for one article, and by virtue of my tastes the rest of the magazine would be stuff I'd want to read as well and could come back and read anytime. They often had ads in then even though I'd paid and other than the fact that a proportion of the pages I'd paid for didn't have readable material, those were fine too, you just skipped past them. They were "relevant" in so far as they were paid for be advertisers who correctly presumed people who read this or that publication would probably be more interested in these products and services, but they didn't have any ability to literally spy on me in ways that frankly would and should have been illegal using equivalent tools to have done so at the time.

    I am not going to subscribe to your random website or online publication because I wanted to read about this one topic and I hate the damn ads that make reading it impossible and require deliberately allowing things that you should never allow on your device for the ads to work how the publisher wants them. This is difficult because it makes me part of the problem, as I'm blocking the ads and either bypassing paywalls or mentally deleting having even encountered the website that presented one to me and immediately closing the page.

    To actually help fund the service I'm going to need a way to make ultra small payments of a few cents for individual articles, (probably wouldn't work because of processing fees) or more likely something like a subscription but not to a publication, to a service that will allow access to a range of publications and doles out money to them based on which content I consumed over a time period. It's just no longer realistic, if it ever was, to expect me to want to religiously consume media from one specific publisher. This idea kind of sucks for media companies who are currently getting squeezed by social media and search giants and who sit between them and their audience and suck up all the ad revenue for the content they didn't even produce and now with my idea you'd have that and an additional third party sucking up subscription money they would have traditionally courted directly from the consumer but I don't realistically see much of a choice.

    4
  • Favorite Article of Clothing?
  • "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearJI
    jimmycrackcrack
    2w ago 100%

    I have a peacoat that I just really love, it's super warm and comfy and it makes me feel like a ship's captain. In fact, before I knew that sort of thing was called a peacoat I just referred to it as my captain's jacket.

    2
  • The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates
  • "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearJI
    jimmycrackcrack
    1mo ago 71%

    I'm confused exactly what you're saying here. It does seem from your experiment that if you specifically ask it to, Chat GPT can reproduce selected pieces of copyrighted creative works verbatim, but what's your point? You posted the screenshots underneath a quote about how AI systems extract patterns from works rather than copying them so I guess you want to show that it can at times in fact just copy things despite this seeming claim to the opposite, but the fact that you prompted the system to do it seems to kind of dilute this point a bit. In any case, it's not just reproducing the work, it's producing output that is relevant to your naturally phrased English language input, and selecting which particular passage in a way that is specifically relevant to the way your input was phrased and also adding additional output aside from the quoted passage which is also relevant and unique to the prompt.

    The developers make the analogy of a person being influenced by works in the creation of their own and that that is considered acceptable. If you asked Bob Dylan to cite a passage from a work by Hemingway and he successfully remembered such a passage and in the correct context recited it to you verbatim, followed by an explanation for why it's a good passage to have selected, you wouldn't take from that exchange that this was proof that Bob Dylan was not really actually 'influenced' by anything but was instead just cobbling together the work of others when he produces his music. If anything, it'd likely be regarded as a mark of how well read Bob Dylan must be that he could remember the passage so accurately and choose a passage that so successfully fits the brief of your request. I don't typically want to leap to the defence of these AI models that wholesale take in so much creative work and mechanistically re-assemble it without compensation nor input from the artist but I wouldn't pretend that it's not an issue with at least a little nuance to it and I can't see what these screenshots prove.

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  • Your TV set has become a digital billboard. And it’s only getting worse.
  • "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearJI
    jimmycrackcrack
    2mo ago 100%

    Kind of, I haven't had to buy a new tv to replace my dumb tv from 2014 but my understanding is that these awful smart TVs are at least cheaper because they're subsidised by all the ads. If that's the case, at least you didn't actually fully pay for the hardware and can hopefully afford to put your own on there without being out of pocket by too extreme an amount.

    4
  • The confirmation page says the order is confirmed but instead of providing tracking information, it has a button that says 'Download Shop to track package'. Obviously I'm not going to do that, but I do want to track my package. I thought I could at least click the link to see if somewhere in the chain of steps that would normally follow if one *were* going to download the app, I might glean the tracking number so I can track the package, but unfortunately, the shop app that I refuse to get on principal because of the shady tactics used to coerce people in to downloading it is even worse than I expected because it can't even scam people competently. The download button is supposed to generate some kind of QR code for you phone. I hoped this QR code might actually have embedded the tracking number in it, in which case I could just grab it that way, but it looks as though the QR code is failing to generate, instead I'm seeing what looks like a heavily zoomed in screencapture of a website with home search trolley and account icons and a sentence partially covered up by a swirly arrow logo. I thought it might have been my browser, but it's the same even on Chrome. I now can't even use the shop app even if I wanted to, because whether I allow it to be installed on my phone or not, there will be no means I can think of where the tracking number can be transmitted to it so, and because the online store hasn't provided a real tracking number I can't do things the normal way either. Anyone know how to get around this? Or at least force the QR code to actually generate so maybe I can extract something useful from it?

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    news
    News 3mo ago
    Jump
    Drag performance resembling Last Supper at Olympic opening ceremony rankles conservatives
  • "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearJI
    jimmycrackcrack
    3mo ago 95%

    Imagine you're the master race, confident and strong and then some people wear different clothes than you expected on TV and your whole world is just shattered lol.

    44
  • *Permanently Deleted*
  • "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearJI
    jimmycrackcrack
    3mo ago 100%

    I haven't been to the states but I can compare Burger King UK to Burger King (Hungry Jacks) Australia and also Hungry Jacks to any other burger place that isn't Mc Donald's (because that's just a tie). BK UK was significantly worse than the Aussie version but I nevertheless indulged quite a few times whilst there, ironically probably even more than here in Australia. Despite managing to be worse, it still occupies that very wide band between just under the threshold of good all the way down to just above actually inedible and usually if going for BK it's definitely because "it'll have to do" and it always does.

    Hungry Jacks (BK) compared to an actual good burger joint here in Australia stands no chance but it does fulfill its promise of a consistent standard, even if it's a low one and that's a good thing since you can find some awful shit here like a local cafe's burger or those Vietnamese lunch bars that have to offer a 'burger' on their otherwise nice menu. But of course the flipside is you can get good to great burgers easily as well as long as you go somewhere that's actually a burger place not somewhere that just has a burger option.

    1
  • Isn't "MAGA" an admission that currently, America is NOT great?
  • "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearJI
    jimmycrackcrack
    3mo ago 66%

    I think an important related aspect is that the 'unfortunate things' that happen make it only "not quite as great" but are definitely destined to make it "the worst". That way there's a sense of urgency that you wouldn't otherwise get from just "not quite as awesome as it could be, but still the best"

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  • How do you extract the individual stills from a pixel "MP" jpeg file?
  • "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearJI
    jimmycrackcrack
    4mo ago 100%

    They could be, but you'll likely notice they look significantly different and probably worse than the still you would see when examining the photo roll. The reason for this I've outlined in an EDIT to my question, but basically it's recording 1 video and 1 still. If you're seeing stills from a group belonging to a top shot, it might be that this ente.io is splitting the video in to stills, as Google expects you to do using the photos app which would be fine if video and image stills are the same thing, but video stills are much lower quality than image stills.

    2
  • Ironing
  • "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearJI
    jimmycrackcrack
    4mo ago 100%

    I still have to put up with it a little bit but I made it my life's mission to avoid it as much as possible whilst still being part of mainstream society. I'm so glad that this meme indicates that FINALLY other people are not only not doing it but also denouncing it as much as I have. I've had to hold back on bitching about how stupid and irritating it is because it was always something everyone else seemed to have viewed as a mundane, at worst neutral and at best good aspect of everyday life that wasn't that hard and gave you nice looking clothes. You can't complain at length about something that is considered in those terms because you just come off as a boring crank. But now finally, if only for a moment I can still feel normal whilst embracing my abiding hatred of the pointless and time wasting practice.

    FUCK ironing, and especially fuck whatever dipshit came up with it. Before this was invented wrinkled clothes would have to have been but a fact of life. I'm near certain whoever did come up with this was someone who knew they personally would never have had to do it. For centuries it would have been palmed off on the usual people that had to carry out the shitwork and now, in modern times, we didn't jettison the practice along with the sexism and classism that forced some to have to do it and not others, we just made it so that now we all have to do it. It delivers no benefit, it's so fucking stupid aaagghh! Because of the conventions and expectations that formed around it, I'm unfortunately forced to participate in it despite my misgivings, even if only on the bare minimum of occasions. If I have a job interview, or I'm going to a fancy event I have play in to this ridiculous farce that is noticeable only from its absence and help perpetuate it. I sincerely hope this generation really has managed to abolish it and it's only the remnants of my own upbringing and peers that mean I still have to occasionally do it because the world will be objectively better off if no one ever does this again.

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  • How do you extract the individual stills from a pixel "MP" jpeg file?
  • "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearJI
    jimmycrackcrack
    4mo ago 100%

    yeh top shot. Though it's a moot point now because I've since discovered Top Shot is not just a burst mode with the images packaged in to one file like I thought.

    2
  • I'm backing up my photos from a trip to my computer and have just discovered how frustratingly difficult it seems to be to use a computer to make my selection of a single still from the image sequences the Pixel sometimes takes (forget what it calls them). I know you can you use the photos app but I want to use my computer (a mac). Preview just considers them stills, so it essentially picks one for me (I assume it's the last still in the sequence), that's usually what I want but they take up more space and if I can't choose a different still then it defeats the purpose. EDIT: As it turns out, Top shot (the Google name for these 'image sequences' I was referring to), doesn't do what I thought it did. I thought it was just fancy burst mode where the shots in the burst are treated as one file on storage, and where the decision to use burst or not is automated with clever 'AI'. That's not totally wrong except that it isn't an 'image' sequence in the sense that I know it. It records a *video* and a still when you take a top shot. I'm not exactly sure, but I think basically the last frame is a still and everything you see before is a 'video'. The distinction here is that the video is a video in the sense that it isn't comprised of still images in common stills formats nor at the resolution and other capabilities of the pixel's still cameras. The video is a video file recorded in a video format, using a video codec, at a lower resolution, minus HDR and with the compression techniques of video leading basically to just drastically lower quality images. In essence if you use the photos app as intended to select a still from the sequence recorded as a top shot, you can select between 1 photo of the best available quality (depending on your stills settings) and multiple useless video stills of poor quality. This explains why all the posts I found whilst researching my query were from people who wanted to extract a video and a still, which I thought was odd because surely you would want the constituent *stills* comprising the video with which you could do whatever you wanted including making a video from them for some reason if it floats your boat. Now I realise it's because there *is* only a video and a still inside the 'MP.jpg' files and they just want to split those 2 elements apart, in fact I think a lot of those asking were trying to split them apart so they could *delete* the useless video and save space. Not thrilled to learn this. Definitely switching off top shot from now on as it is both useless in almost ever scenario, but also, due to the automated nature of when its used, taking up greatly increased storage space whilst delivering so much less benefit than I had presumed. Icing on the cake, Google apparently introduced this top shot feature some time ago and *replaced* an existing burst mode that actually worked as one would expect so now I can't invoke an actually useful burst mode on demand when I want it as one would have done in the past because the function... doesn't exist anymore, *great*!

    23
    5
    On your own.
  • "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearJI
    jimmycrackcrack
    6mo ago 100%

    well that's sort of the point of this comic because the one thing you'd really want it to be good enough to do and would love to be able to trust something to do for you is the tax and all the other tasks in the comics are things you were pretty well able to do yourself before, probably wanted to do before, and if not exactly wanted, at least didn't want something else to displace you in by taking over doing that task from now onwards especially if it was your actual job before. If displacing human workers for those tasks was the only problem, it'd be a sad but familiar story of progress but the fact that AI, at least for now is incapable of doing the part we'd all really love to have done for us is just the diarrhea icing on the dog turd cake.

    4
  • Can you buy travel insurance (before leaving home) for one leg of a journey, where that leg takes place after visiting another country first?
  • "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearJI
    jimmycrackcrack
    6mo ago 100%

    I'm going to put this in an update as well but, the insurer said it was fine, the only effect they could foresee it having was if they could somehow trace back something I claim for to events happening in the first country visited, for example, if you have a medical problem in the 1st country, obviously they won't cover it, but if you have to pay for follow up medical services in country 2 for the same problem that started in country 1, they also won't cover that either. Otherwise though, not a problem where you departed from as long as you bought the insurance before leaving your home country.

    2
  • Has there ever been a political system where legislative votes were weighted by how many votes each legislator received?
  • "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearJI
    jimmycrackcrack
    6mo ago 100%

    The thing is now, manipulative tactics are used to persuade people to choose one option over another either for representatives, or in some cases like Brexit, directly for specific policies. In that scenario one might argue that those that successfully made the case for one side of the referendum did so by knowingly presenting the outcome of choosing one policy differently from what they knew to be the reality hence "manipulating" people.

    However, with this proposed idea of being able to delegate your vote to other people or organisations, I'm concerned people will be manipulated into giving up their ability to vote on something one way or the other they don't even need to be convinced of the merits of something, just convinced to give it up. Seems like a small difference but I can imagine people being unknowingly disenfranchised thinking they're giving up something else, or possibly having to give up their vote even though they do want to use it because if they're offered some tangible immediate benefit in exchange, they might not be in a position to decline such an offer.

    In these cases the distortion of the democratic ideal is worse than in the Brexit scenario for example, because at least in that situation one could say (however disingenuously) that that vote more or less reflected how convincing the case was for the leave campaign and argue that anyone saying that leave voters were manipulated is just being patronizing to such voters by denying their agency in the decision. Of course that's a simplistic way to portray it, but there's an element of truth there. At the very least that referendum does tell you what most people decided to vote for even if the details of how the cases were presented might be dishonest. Delegated votes would more accurately be described as a reflection of who successfully obtained votes through whatever means, not who prosecuted a case the most convincingly.

    4
  • Has there ever been a political system where legislative votes were weighted by how many votes each legislator received?
  • "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearJI
    jimmycrackcrack
    6mo ago 100%

    I've heard of that idea but frankly I'd be frightened by how many people would be parted from their votes by manipulative tactics or people finding ways to buy such votes (even if explicitly disallowed, they'd find an indirect way). That second point in particular would be a big concern because the people who have little else to sell but their own vote would be the ones most likely to sell it and organizations buying such votes would likely be those with a vested interest in keeping the poor, poor which would now be even easier.

    17
  • Can you buy travel insurance (before leaving home) for one leg of a journey, where that leg takes place after visiting another country first?
  • "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearJI
    jimmycrackcrack
    6mo ago 100%

    Thank you. I guess such a chat would be in order. That's a shame. So far the full contract is only taking pains to point out that the insurance has to be purchased before we leave our home country but I'm definitely concerned that there is also a hidden requirement to begin the journey by departing the home country.

    1
  • Planning a trip to 2 countries. Want to buy travel insurance for the leg of the trip taking place in the second country, after the first. As far as I understand, this should be fine, I specify the dates of the trip to the insurance company from the day I arrive in the 2nd country to the day I leave it and if need be I'll be able provide proof that I was there (boarding passes, tickets, passport stamps) if needing to make a claim. I'd also buy the insurance *prior to leaving my home country*, which I know is important. It all sounds theoretically fine but I'm just worried there's going to be some unexpected gotcha in doing this. Obviously this will depend on the fine print of my specific chosen insurance and I'm reading through all 100+ pages of it, but nevertheless the ability for this to somehow contravene something in a counterintuitive or unexpected manner even if I don't see it explicitly spelled out worries me given how tricky insurance companies can be and I wondered if this was something generally known to be a problem. UPDATE: called the insurance company I was considering. They said there was no problem with this, as long as I bought the insurance prior to leaving my home country, which was always the plan anyway. Otherwise, it doesn't matter if the 'journey' as they define it begins after departing from a different country to my home country.

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    7

    Really as similar as possible but I guess the must haves for me are: * Dark theme * Swipe to type ability (I usually tap but definitely want swiping as well) * Searchable emoji's * Word suggestions Nice to have: * Text editing tools for moving cursor just one character at a time through button presses * Clipboard button * Copied text automatically becomes next suggested word the first time the keyboard is invoked after copying the text * Suggested _next_ word.

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    "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearAF
    After Effects jimmycrackcrack 1y ago 100%
    How would I go about simulating a top down perspective POURING transition

    I want a still image layer to come on to screen by seemingly having been poured on. This is a 2d image in a 2d composition so it's all flat as if looking straight down at the surface having liquid poured on to it. I have found a lot of liquid simulation tutorials that seem promising but they tend to look more like fairly realistic drips. What I want is for the image itself to initially become visible in a localised portion of the screen which would represent where the bottom of the stream of liquid poured off-camera from a height initially hits the solid 'surface' which in this case I guess would be the background of the composition and then for there to be disturbances like ripples radiating from this point and in their wake revealing and also displacing the image. I'd then have these ripples calm down and displace the revealed portions of the image less and less until I eventually have a fully revealed still image layer. The exact mechanics of how this water pouring effect exactly 'reveals' the layer I haven't quite worked out, but I think if I could at least simulate the pouring liquid, ignoring the actual still image that will use this as a transition, I'll at least be part of the way there. The tricky thing is creating that kind of corona effects that you get when pouring liquid first hits a surface with a wavy little crown from which traditional circular ripples begin to radiate out.

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