deleted by creator

Regarding how quickly Instagram started sending them personal stuff… Letting an app access your location, especially if it’s not a one-time authorisation, is basically telling it who you are.

There was a newspaper investigation recently on data brokers, they approached one to get a sample of their data. It was “anonymous” data, only in the sense it didn’t contain names. Using Apple’s advertiser ID, they had no problem building profiles from specific devices and could easily identify a lot of their own employees, simply because their routine around a location made it clear it was their workplace. And from there, it was not hard to find out on the data what their home address was.

It probably took only location for the burner phone Instagram to know that this is either the same person, or someone closely related to them.

Depends. Some of them don’t even believe in viruses at all.

That makes sense. To pokéworld humans, real eggs are just the ovoid shit pokémon use as a weapon or carry around for absolutely no discernable reason. Thus, the capsules they use to deliver new pokémon when they reproduce are “fake eggs”.

The most disturbing part IMO is that they often insist they’re not “real” eggs and nobody really knows how it works.

Now consider that apart from a slip here or there in early material, most pokémon canon assumes there are no non-pokémon animals in this universe. How the hell do they know what a “real egg” is?

Not sure, but I understood that comment to mean “it would be worth getting angry against YouTube if the videos they removed were about rufus”, not that rufus itself is wrong.

deleted by creator

I am not in that age group anymore and I can’t tell what war I was supposed to be obsessed with.

Ah, yeah, around that time, maybe Fire Emblem. This is the “Crimean war” I used to be obsessed with, until…

Fuck. I think I found the actual war. Definitely not something I’m enjoying, at all.

Imaginary numbers are a perfect example of that. It’s basically just “Okay, in the common number theory, you can’t get the square root of a negative number. What if you could?”. And what do you know, you can build a consistent theory where square root of -1 exists, and it has surprising properties.

Intuitively, good luck trying to make sense of it. But it doesn’t matter, it works, and it’s useful to build other stuff. That in turn can be used as modelling tools in physics and all.

The comparison doesn’t work. Maths are abstract, you don’t “believe” in it. You build a consistent theory with minimum assumptions (axioms) and if something stops being consistent, it means some of your assumptions don’t work and you need to change them to build a better theory. Maths is an abstract tool, not a representation of reality.

Infinity is just a concept you can define. There are tools to demonstrate something is true over an infinite space and obviously, you need those for a lot of basic maths. You’re not going to go anywhere in basic arithmetic or geometry if you can’t prove anything works over the infinite set of numbers or the infinite space.

“and you can buy that exact SD card model for the low, low price of $62.99 on Amazon RIGHT. NOW!!!”

That might not be the weirdest, most awkward product placement I ever saw, but close.

EDIT : for those not seeing it, yeah, the article actually mentions that price and has a direct link to Amazon.

Not sure I’d want pizza from beyond the veil.

I was watching a reaction streamer that does a lot of (mostly chill) social commentary, and he got a video from a Belgian investor guy in his playlist. It’s the kind of video they watch when they want to cringe for an hour.

The guy did basically nothing but buy full buildings to turn them into appartments. So he gets one, spends the whole video telling us how he will put walls everywhere to split it into the absolute maximum number of barely livable spaces. And the whole first two floors? no, those are not for real people to live in, it’ll be AirBnB, that’s where the money is. All friendly with a big smile but absolutely zero concern beyond making the most money.

I thought the comics was clumsy satire. Turns out it’s basically straight infographics at this point.

Great.

Friday’s what now?

It’s not about the concept of AI, it’s about current developments in generative AI, which is just one approach for it but has largely hijacked the term. This one could burst and disappear, hopefully replaced by something better, but the general field of AI would not.

Also, I’m not sure where you are going with that argument. Despite being the subject of stories for millennia, nobody has invented dragons yet.

A shinobue, a transverse flute made of bamboo (well, traditionally, mine is not too bad but it’s plastic. One day, maybe).

The game is Xenoblade Chronicles 3. The two protagonists play the shinobue as a ritual to send off people who have passed.

I like Okami too, and I believe Waka’s flute in that game is also a shinobue.

Yeah, I was going to say, unless there was a mysterious time period when grand pianos were a product of mass consumption, first panel is like the 0.01%.

And even then. I’m sure some people played music in the evening (including more accessible instruments). More than today, sure, maybe. Some might sing once in a while to, why not.

The full-on family choir around an instrument every evening, as a thing that happened widely, is where I’m calling bullshit.

I have a very mild case of that in that I bought a weird traditional flute from Japan a couple of months ago. It looked cool and a game character I like has one. A bit hard to play, but I’m getting there.

It’ll certainly be a lot more expensive, but I wish you a future crisis full of epic sax all the same.

I really doubt the first panel was representative of a random “evening at home” for most people, even in the 1900s.