So… if Duolingo is just AI now, why would anyone pay for Duolingo? Just ask the AI for language lessons yourself.

No paint? Sure. No touchscreen? Good.

…No radio? That’s going to absolutely murder their sales.

What is this shady, unsubstantiated, posted yesterday ass random github repo trying to encourage people to compromise their email security and why is it worth posting?

Element really needs to get push to talk. It’s an incredibly basic feature to be missing, and for me personally and I’m sure others the lack of it is a deal breaker.

Hah, no. It’s in the felt art style, but not in your protruding eyeballs unix surrealism style (as much as I love it). Though I might throw in a reference or two somewhere if you’re up for it.

It’s a dialogue-centric RPG with a lot of retro point-and-click adventure influence. But it is post-apocalyptic, and it does include some post-human animal looking people and fantasy-creature-adjacent characters.

I would play the shit out of a Techno-Mage game, though.

Thanks! I’m making a game in the style, soooo at the moment I’m keeping the details a bit under wraps. But I’ll post about it here (on SDF and Lemmy in general) once it’s out and may be more forthcoming then!

GIMP is honestly fantastic. My workflow goes draw in GIMP, import to Inkscape to convert pieces to vector, then bring them into Godot where shaders get applied. I would rather draw in GIMP than any other program. I find drawing in Inkscape super awkward in comparison. GIMP is pretty no-frills, but it does the job. I prefer it over Photoshop. With Darktsble I’ve found it useful for importing high res raw images for textures too.

I don’t know why people hate on it so much. It’s all about using the tools you’re comfortable with.

Honestly, this is what blocking is for. Sure, it’s useful for toxic or obnoxious people, but it’s also useful for people who make a mess of your feed consistently.

That’s what I was thinking. Maybe they’re just Community fans.

… Should we be pinching our nipples at their AI?

I’m not sure that checks out. I mean, fair, I do think that someone being habitually cruel toward AI might not be the greatest indicator of their disposition in general, though I’d hesitate to make a hasty judgement on that. But if we take AI’s presentation as a person as fictional, does that extend to other fictional contexts? Would you consider an evil play-through in a video game to indicate an issue? Playing a hostile character in a roleplay setting? Writing horror fiction?

It seems to me that there are many contexts where exhibiting or creating simulated behavior in a fictional environment isn’t really equivalent to doing so with genuine individuals in non-imaginary circumstances. AI isn’t quite the same as a fictional setting, but it’s potentially closer to that than it is to dealing with a real person.

By the same token, if not being polite to an AI is problematic, is it equally problematic to repeatedly say things like “human” and “operator” to an automated phone system until you get a response? Both mimic human speech, while neither ostensibly have a legitimate understanding of what’s being said by either party.

Where does the line get drawn? Is it wrong to curse at fully inanimate objects that don’t even pretend to be people? Is verbally condemning a malfunctioning phone, refrigerator, or toaster equivalent to berating a hallucinating AI?

Thanks! Hooray!

As promised. One soft fish.

Okay. I’ll make it a soft fish.

One fish.

I still want to know what happened to Techno-Mage’s arm.

I know that when I’m playing cards in a dress that’s melted into my skin, with my favorite half-bracelet draped over my wrist, I love to intimidate my opponent by flashing them two face cards. Who wouldn’t be shaken by the Kinmb of Back of Card and the Quing of 21s? Especially when I’ve already played my oversized red card.

This is what happened with plastic bags in some stores in the US. We passed plastic bag bans and while in a lot of cases the result was a combination of low-quality paper bags and legitimately reusable plastic totes, in the past couple of years some places have started giving out plastic bags that are way thicker than the ones we used to have and just calling them reusable. Like, yeah, they’re strong enough to be reused, but that definitely doesn’t seem to be the norm. We just ended up with single-use plastic bags that literally use more plastic.

I picked up a projector on sale for $50 on Newegg, usually I think they’re like $80 or something. Only problem is, I don’t know how to get the dust out of the inside of the projector lens. I’ve tried spraying canned air into the cracks around it, but it didn’t work. I even took the thing apart intending to wipe it down myself, but I couldn’t figure out how to get to the back of the lens.

Still, for $50 it’s not too bad. The little bits of dust are kind of annoying, but they’re not in focus and it’s pretty alright for watching movies.

I’ve honestly had the same thought, but then I look at the attitudes of the people involved and their implementation of what they’re doing and it’s hard to assume anything other than stupidity and malice. I don’t think Trump or Elon are capable of that sort of strategy, and if they are they’re two of the best actors on the planet. I really don’t think they’re nearly that intelligent or talented at actual deception. They’re certainly reckless enough, but I don’t buy that they’re anything other than dangerously stupid.

I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if that’s been the motivation for some of their supporters, though. There may well be people in the world who feel that pulling the pendulum as far into a shitstorm as it will go will create enough of a counter-swing to be worth the immediate results, and that may well have affected their voting. It seems like a pretty foolish gambit for anyone who has to live through it, though, and pretty heartless to boot.

If, on the other hand, the acceleration and counterbalancing is just a natural occurrence? A way to get from point A to point B with the least possible action? That doesn’t sound totally crazy to me at all.

But, like, there doesn’t need to be someone sneakily manipulating politics and capitalism for that to happen. Hopefully we do learn from what’s happening and what’s already happened enough to make some of the same sort of societal improvements much of Western Europe and the United States saw after WWII, preferably sooner than they did with a lot less damage in the mean time.

We do seem to be in a similar situation and have a similar opportunity to change things as a result once people actually get the ball moving. Assuming we do actually get the ball moving.

Mozilla seems to be doing fine to me. Most of the people complaining about them don’t give any indication that they themselves are doing anything particularly helpful either.