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rook

rook@awful.systems
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Interesting article about netflix. I hadn’t really thought about the scale of their shitty forgettable movie generation, but there are apparently hundreds and hundreds of these things with big names attached and no-one watches them and no-one has heard of them and apparently Netflix doesn’t care about this because they can pitch magic numbers to their shareholders and everyone is happy.

“What are these movies?” the Hollywood producer asked me. “Are they successful movies? Are they not? They have famous people in them. They get put out by major studios. And yet because we don’t have any reliable numbers from the streamers, we actually don’t know how many people have watched them. So what are they? If no one knows about them, if no one saw them, are they just something that people who are in them can talk about in meetings to get other jobs? Are we all just trying to keep the ball rolling so we’re just getting paid and having jobs, but no one’s really watching any of this stuff? When does the bubble burst? No one has any fucking clue.”

What a colossal waste of money, brains, time and talent. I can see who the market for stuff like sora is, now.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/essays/casual-viewing/

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There’s nothing confused about his ideology. Anything to do with porn or sex work will get kicked to the curb without a second thought, but fascists and bigots will be defended up to the point where they try to restart sectarian violence in Ireland (which was the final act of kiwi farms, from recollection. Presumably even the ceo couldn’t defend them at that point, though I bet he tried).

Dude doesn’t give a shit about free speech, or lament the power he’s ended up with. He just really loves fascism.

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You can always use something like generational indices. They pop up a lot in ECS systems. A suitable container with an opaque index type prevents creation of invalid references, lets you check reference validity at runtime, and generational indices prevent reuse. The compiler can’t help with lifetime tracking, but that’s a problem with any shared reference type pointing to a resource with a lifetime that can only be known at runtime, eg. Arc.

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Sounds like the exordium device from the Revelation Space books.

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Didn’t Silicon Valley have them all flung into the abyss? Or maybe they were just a myth made up to annoy venture capitalists?

(But yes, I probably should have said “freelance” rather than just “professional”. I haven’t actually thought very hard about how commercial moderation is done, beyond reading horror stories about Facebook)

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Guess he’s still pretty shaken by the car-covered-in-hammers incident.

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Just take the same approach that mathstodon does with their latex formatting, to wit: just barf the probably-human-unreadable format strings out over activity pub, and shrug when people complain because what else are you gonna do?

It isn’t like inline images work any better over activitypub in general (and even markdown/html is tricky, in the face of various mediocre mastodon client apps, some of which I use) and doing server-side conversion of latex (or whatever)to mathml is a nonstarter because of it will just be filtered out by clients anyway as unsupported and possibly malicious.

The least bad option might be something like asciimath (which can be prettyprinted via mathjax client javascript in the web view of the site) as its raw form is less awful to read than latex, and so would be more suited to viewing via activitypub or in a lemmy app.

I wonder what proportion of awful.systems users view it via the web interface.

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And speaking of electronic ass-monitoring, I’m reminded of this gem from 10 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ

So little has changed since then!

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To my limited knowledge, no, for various values of “someone”. It is just a sort of malign beige juggernaut that’s shitty all by itself without needing external direction.

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