Mothers, don’t let your babies grow up to be game devs…

AI generated art is everywhere now.

Edit: The ai comment is a joke because the postman has six fingers.

I cannot accept this spider as payment because it only has seven legs.

If he goes to the hotel, though, he will get to hear a great story from the owner of the hotel about a once beautiful but now decaying resort that includes a sweeping adventure involving a not-exactly-straight con man, an art theft that was not a theft, Willem Dafoe, and Tilda Swinton.

It has nothing to do with Islam in particular and everything to do with religious conservatism.

It feels like the pullback from the cable replication of needing to subscribe to ten different services is starting to feel pullback, judging from the layoffs and cancellations at other streaming services. Honestly, it was a great run for a bit, but then everyone wanted their own service and saw first party tv episode content as viewer lock in.

But then they started raising prices and cutting off family access, and I started cancelling services. I went from 12+ (because I’d sign up for them at $4.99 a month because they had a series or movie I wanted) to about 6 now and I’ll probably cut more. Although I might enjoy the show, I’m not changing my streaming setup for it. When money was cheap, they were throwing everything at the wall just to see what sticks. Now that it’s not and in the wake of community and talent revolts, they’re pulling it back in. I’m not saying we need to get back to Netflix having rights to everything, but I don’t see the room for dozens of subscription services making their own content. Even if household budgets are willing to (again) spend $100+ per month for subscriptions, there’s just not enough time in the week. It was great to just randomly decide to watch something and have it available, but at one point you have to realize you haven’t watched Showtime in two months.

Cool! There’s probably a small factor differentiating the two, but it’s not that noticeable.

I did a research project looking at (iirc) kinase cascades, in which we were using a molecule-by-molecule simulation to look at cascading signals in hypothetical signaling networks, and varied the levels of phosphorylation required for activation required at each tier, and showed how the different topologies/rules governed the relationship between input and output signals, and their relationship to noise tolerance (since chemical networks can be quite noisy). It was very abstract in that we weren’t reconstructing known networks, but rather using sandbox physics to explore the idea.

Exactly. For me, it’s been about creating mathematical and computational models of biological and ecological dynamics. There’s a researcher in what we could safely call computational sociology, which similarly tries to create a working model of social dynamics that exhibit/explore social processes (eg, altruism and contagion models). I e done a lot of work in that field too, because a lot of the math and systems theory is the same behind both.

I was in a freshman bio lab where an unbalanced centrifuge using glass test tubes sent blood and broken glass spraying over half the lab.

I hated lab courses so much I ended up just going into theoretical biology.

It strikes me as exactly the kind of engineering call that Elon has tended to make, time after time. With zero training in an area, he gets a solution in his head crufted up from some set of pre-existing notions or points of view and then pushes to have them implemented. He will also go on to fire anyone who disagrees with him. I spoke with an engineer who worked on the gull wing doors, which the team had objected to, and not only did he force them through, he burst in on one of the finalization meetings where they had finally reached a design consensus and insisted they change the hinge. Given similar reports on his behavior regarding other products (including especially twitter), I have no reason to disbelieve this person.

You really need a better LLM for making these posts. Are you even using any engagement metrics for feedback and tuning, or just cranking them out for your “social experiments?”

This is how biologists reproduce.

I think you’re a person who uses a script to generate inane content to create a flood of posts. I’m just not sure why you’d do so. You’re obviously looking for upvotes over engagement, because the majority of what you post either gets ignored or downvoted. Maybe 10-15% do well, but there’s been no selection or detectable curation. That’s what makes me suspect that the Alice account is a human-run bot.

So I just have to ask - how much of this account is a bot? There’s some material that I feel is probably human generated, but there’s just 90% inane crap that has to be autogenerated. Is this a person using a chatgpt kind of service for writing post topics and then occasionally replying in person?

I’m not sure I get the arguments based around better education quality. One of the primary controllable determinants of a child’s educational attainments is parental involvement. Spend a couple of hours with the kid going over their homework and helping them stay a chapter ahead, and I bet the kid would not only be academically successful but also socialized.

Also, a lot of school systems have a fast track learning program for gifted students. You might have to shop around for a school with one if you’re in a low population area, but I think that driving your kid for 45m to a STEM high school probably takes less time than lesson prep and teaching.

Here’s the thing. You said a “jackdaw is a crow.” Is it in the same family? Yes. No one’s arguing that. As someone who is a scientist who studies crows, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one calls jackdaws crows. If you want to be “specific” like you said, then you shouldn’t either. They’re not the same thing. If you’re saying “crow family” you’re referring to the taxonomic grouping of Corvidae, which includes things from nutcrackers to blue jays to ravens. So your reasoning for calling a jackdaw a crow is because random people “call the black ones crows?” Let’s get grackles and blackbirds in there, then, too. Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It’s not one or the other, that’s not how taxonomy works. They’re both. A jackdaw is a jackdaw and a member of the crow family. But that’s not what you said. You said a jackdaw is a crow, which is not true unless you’re okay with calling all members of the crow family crows, which means you’d call blue jays, ravens, and other birds crows, too. Which you said you don’t. It’s okay to just admit you’re wrong, you know?

In my opinion, nothing will beat the OG scene where the black hero in NotLD is killed by the white “rescuers.” I never got to meet Romero himself, but everything about that first movie was just brilliant.

I think the Dawn of the Dead remake was more fun than the original (the only remake with that distinction), but it somehow missed the mark on the cultural critique that the original had. The opening sequence with Johnny Cash was among the best opens ever shot, though.

Similarly, I think the opening - basically the first episode - of The Walking Dead was brilliant in an anti-Oz, anti-Willy Wonka kind of world transformation kind of intro to the series. It added a flavor of magical realism to the world/series that equaled if not surpassed 28 Days (if only because, as a series, they’d have more time to establish everything).

I think this is the same thing streaming media companies are realizing. When it was just pretty much Netflix, media companies would license them their content and Netflix would get their subscription fees. Then the media companies decided that they could earn more by cutting out the middleman and producing their own content.

This created a headwind where companies established departments for producing content for streaming and funded them generously. However, the fragmentation on the consumer end ended up splitting the market such that it became unprofitable to run at those levels - everyone wanted $10 per month to subscribe to their dedicated service, and looked to in house productions to drive consumer loyalty. That, predictably, fell apart and now they’re increasing fees, cutting down on family accounts, and cutting productions.

I think that the massive layoffs we are seeing in the gaming industry is a similar reaction. Game budgets have become bloated to the point of being unsustainable. I feel badly for the devs and staff affected by the contraction, and I remain impressed by the size of the game market overall, but at some point, like streaming media companies, you have to realize there’s only so much pie to go around. The size of the pie does grow, but the expectation of demand has significantly outpaced demand.

It can be difficult to tell ahead of time what will trigger a flashback or other reaction. Marvel movies, for example, include a significant level of guns and violence, but I have never experienced a reaction from them. Other movies, like Blackhawk Down, can send me into a spiral for a couple of days. I also cannot stand movies where the Army Man is the superhero as a result of his elite training - which was and remains a trope in many horror movies. Those don’t cause flashbacks, they just piss me off.

This was just a NSFW type flag for those folks who might be subject to that kind of reaction.

Just a recommendation - this might be one to skip if you have combat-related PTSD. The scenes from the trailer were quite realistic, and that was on my phone.