The weird thing is, they estimated these numbers based on the population and the per-capita birth rate. They didn’t even take the raw data, they took the corrected data and uncorrected it.

Isn’t this that map that Hank Green just made a video about? Don’t Trust Maps Like This

I think this is completely missing the point when it’s talking about “the minutiae of art”. It’s making two claims at the same time: art is better when you suffer for it and the art is good whether or not you suffered. But none of that is relevant.

When Wyeth made Christina’s World, I don’t know if he suffered or not when painting that grass. What I do know is that he was a human with limited time and the fact that he spent so much of his time detailing every blade of grass means that he’s saying something. That The Oatmeal doesn’t draw backgrounds might be because he’s lazy, but he also doesn’t need them. These are choices we make to put effort in one part and ignore some other part.

AI doesn’t make choices. It doesn’t need to. A detailed background is exactly the same amount of work as a plain one. And so a generated picture has this evenly distributed level of detail, no focus at all. You don’t really know where to look, what’s important, what the picture is trying to say. Because it’s not saying anything. It isn’t a rat with a big butt, it’s just a cloud of noise that happens to resemble a rat with a big butt.

Sorry about that, some people don’t know ani.social exists and create comms on the wrong instances. They’re supposed to show up in my local feed, but now they’re in yours and you don’t even appreciate them!

Most of these tiktoks don’t even add anything beyond the text or music, but the format makes it very easy (almost mandatory) for people to add their own head in there. I reaaaally don’t get the appeal, but I didn’t grow up in an era of the internet where putting your face everywhere was normalized.

Pizzacake is upholding the legacy of 90s webcomics, when the key to success was having an internet connection and a consistent schedule. See: Penny Arcade, who are probably out there right now making three panels without a punchline.

No one has ever seen a prolific memer and thought they would be fun to hang out with. Unless you like it when someone constantly shoves their phone in your face to show you a meme.

No, it’s relevant actually. I called them protestant, but the OG Lutherans aren’t a branch of Catholicism, so why would Pentecostals be a branch of protestantism? Yeah, they’re still anti-pope, but they also found enough problems with the established protestants to split off and start something else.

I don’t know if there’s a term for the wave of new denominations in the last century, if it’s even a single wave at all. Revivalism? And is there a common theme in that wave that leads to cults? Or should we say that the cults are a wave in themselves, caused by some other shift in the zeitgeist? Because as much as I’d like to blame pentecostalism for cultish beliefs (and I think I could make that argument), it could also be a general secularization that strips communities to their cultish cores.

Cultish practices vary from church to church, but there’s way more protestant cults than catholic ones.

And I mean proper cults, where they know how loony they seem, so they try to seem more normal to potential members. Then they love bomb newcomers, before inviting them to the special wednesday meetings where they promise supernatural powers if the newcomer is humiliated before the group and love bombed again when they’re most vulnerable. Last step is making them cut ties with non-believers and ostracizing any apostates.

Catholic King making infallible decrees is harmless compared to that.

Worse, it was when Twitter banned Trump. This is just like when the Savage John asked to be exiled from the World State but the Controller forces him to engage in society to torture him.

I also have to laugh when someone takes a very rough estimate (around a hundred miles) and converts it to metric with 4 significant figures (160.9 km). Even 160 is too precise when talking about a distance of 80-120 miles. If the original number has 1 sigfig, the conversion should too, even if that feels way off.

It won’t be as simple as that and the engineers who work on these systems can only think in terms of LLM and text classification, so they’d run your message through a classifier and end the conversation if it returns a “goodbye or thanks” score above 0.8, saving exactly 0 compute power.

Kanton München
Half of France

Gee, I wonder why no one tried this plan for ever-lasting peace in Europe.

Isn’t that Bugs’ sister from Albania?

Justwatch reliably tells me “this isn’t available for streaming in your region”. Sonarr tells me it’s an AMZN Webrip and I can Just Watch™

Edit: But like, no shade on Justwatch, it works as intended. It’s the streaming services who get worldwide licensing rights and then don’t bother targeting my little region.

If you liked every one of those shows, I can guarantee you that you’ll like the rest of B99. Early seasons focus a lot on Jake, Holt and Amy, but later seasons get more variety in leads and storylines. There’s a bunch of very good recurring concepts too, comparable to the Community paintball episodes. The series only gets stronger as it progresses imo.

What’s the situation with grocery stores in NYC that the mayor has to promise city owned grocery stores?

A society where no one has capital and the only way to get ahead is to provide more labour? And you call them steamed hams despite the fact they’re obviously grilled?

Why do you keep Gemini installed? Does it even work offline?

Plenty of people voted for Hillary Clinton, despite her being Hillary Clinton. I don’t think her being a woman was the issue there.