And after the apocalypse is finished there’s probably gonna be Iike, jobs available, and plenty of empty real estate. Opportunities!

Cloudflare presumably don’t want to give away the identity of their customer.

Even if only 1% of people used adblock, then that’s 1% of millions of dollars of ad revenue. It’s easily enough to put several people on this as a full time job if they want to.

I’m sure Google saw it as only a minor issue at first, but the number of people using adblockers is presumably going up all the time.

The irony being of course that adblock usage is skyrocketing only because companies like Google have made the Internet so thoroughly ad-polluted it’s intolerable to go without one.

The real dress is actually blue and black, yes, but the illustration tries to show how the exact same colours can look different depending on lighting and context.

In the diagram, the dress on the left is strongly blue and black, while the dress on the right is strongly white and yellow.

And yet the connected parts of the dresses with the “pipes” between them show the exact same colour on one dress can look like a different color on the other. The “pipe” is there so you can follow it with your own eyes from one side to the other and observe that it is indeed the same colour on both sides, despite looking very different when observed as part of the whole image.

The point being, how our brains perceive colour is very situationally dependent, and some people assume a different situation than others, hence the differences in perception.

People tend to believe that vision is absolute, that we all have the same eyes and see the same things, but that’s absolutely not true. The dress phenomenon occurred because It’s not about what your “eyes” see in absolute terms, it’s about what your “brain” does with that information.

Put hummus in your sandwiches or something, it’s a great condiment.

Well yes that’s true.

The modern hobbyist resurgence is in vinyl, not cassette. I was only mentioning cassette to make the point that the same phenomenon occurs in other media too - of technologies getting worse over time. Especially true in cassette, in fact.

Good cassettes players are old ones.

I suppose it happened because from a mainstream perspective handhelds like the DS and PSP were far behind dedicated systems in terms of graphics, and so the expectation was never there to have “triple A” visuals - neither from consumers nor industry.

Made for very fertile ground in terms of games that had budget, but still had a long leash to go and get wacky.

Same thing happened with casette tapes and cassette mechanisms.

Most people think cassette tapes were terrible, because they remember the bargain basement iron tapes and no noise reduction. A top quality chrome casette when recorded well and played back on the right hardware is very difficult to tell apart from the digital original.

Similar story with VHS to be honest.

There’s a “minimum acceptable quality” which people were willing to tolerate, and manufacturers inevietably converge towards it in an effort to shave off a few cents here and there.

Audiophile now is very different, because it’s not a mass market consumer format any longer - it’s a niche hobby, and people are willing to pay top money for their hobbies.

The coffee story is quite a long way in, but it was an interesting read, thanks.

I guess the message is, things aren’t always good because they are objectively good. Sometimes things are good because of when we had them, and who we enjoyed them with. And that’s definitely true.

I’m two ways about this.

In recent years I’ve become quite a coffee lover. I’ve experimented with a lot of brewing methods, and got into small batch beans from independent roasters, with interesting qualities like being aged in whisky barrels (that one tastes and smells sooo good)

At the same time though I grew up in a family where the only coffee my parents ever drank was instant - a teaspoon of granules with some hot water and milk and maybe sugar. When I go over there to visit that’s what I’ll get, and I’m not going to turn my nose up at it. In some ways it’s got that taste of nostalgia lol.

“All publicity is good publicity” , maybe…

Yeah, I agree the bots are genuinely "more fleshy"and with skin and such - just saying where my imagination was at - which thanks to the wonder of books can be quite different for different people.

I wish we knew what the motivation was for choosing the actor. The cynic in me thinks they opted obviously male lead to reduce friction and claims of “wokeness” but without some inside insight we can’t know.

In my imagination, Murderbot looked kinda like the player character from the game ‘Citizen Sleeper’, pictured below.

Which is to say, very androgynous and very obviously cybernetic.

There’s quite a bit of character similarity between them too, because the titular Sleeper is a human consciousness in a cybernetic body that has a lot of biological parts, and they are kept loyal to the company who owns them by a drug that will cause their body to break down if they stop taking it. Same intent as the governor module, but a different approach.

I found Murderbot’s physical appearance an important aspect of the books, not just for surface plot reasons (everyone knows they are a bot etc) but because it’s a large part of what people need to overcome from the perspective of seeing past their prejudices.

I hope they drown the entire thing in ads, absolutely stuff it to the gills, because then I might be able to convince my extended family to finally move to something better.

Wow yeah. That must have been a really infuriating gameplay issue, no wonder players were upset with it.

A shame the game was so rushed or I’m sure the dev would have fixed that in code.

What was the bug and workaround? :)

Matrix org isn’t obligated to run a public instance at all - they could stick to developing the spec, and let other people run instances.

And honestly maybe they should, because then we wouldn’t have this huge consolidation problem on matrix.org in the first place.

They are incentivised because showing accurate results for what you asked for isn’t necessarily the best way to keep people on the platform.

By pushing certain types of videos, such as opinionated content or loud shouty videos for low attention spans, YouTube hopes to keep you engaged for longer than they would by being accurate.

There’s also a direct advertising reason to funnel certain types of video. YouTube creators earn different amounts of money for the same number of views depeding on what category (e.g. financial, gaming, writing advice, cookery etc) YT has auto-categorised your video as. We can infer from this that advertisers are willing to pay more money for ads in some categories than others, and therefore YT is directly incentivised to push those more lucrative categories in search results, even if they aren’t what you wanted.

Plenty of reasons why they want to mess with results.

Congrats on the new service.

I’m a UK user and unlike lemmy.zip, piefed.zip appears to be accessible to me.

I assume this is simply because you haven’t got around to geoblocking it yet?

Promoting that the nunber exists as a actual thing people should use is good, yeah. :)

The actual number isn’t so important, though. If ever needed to call the non-emergency number I’d search it up, which fortunately I can do given I’ve got loads of time because it’s not an emergency.