I think the invention of engineering is what finally broke evolution, but there are a lot of factors we have that bootstrapped us to that point. Walking upright on two legs is more efficient at the price of raw power. Many creatures can outrun a human but no land animal can come close to our jogging range. A Cheetah can go 60 miles an hour for a minute or so but a human can go 10 miles per hour for 6 hours straight. It also frees our forelimbs, already made flexible, versatile and dexterous by our distant tree swinging ancestors, for tool use. Funnily enough, another ability that is unparalleled in nature is our ability to throw things with accuracy and power. You also need pretty good hands to master fire, and thus cooking, and thus unlocking extra nutrients from the food you catch, which provides for that very hungry brain of ours. A few millennia later and we've pretty much got control of the biosphere itself.

It already has.

For smaller boats, you throw an anchor with your hand like this.

Oh man "extensibility" in FreeCAD. The documentation is non-existent, is the main problem. It's just about impossible to understand how anything works, it's like trying to figure out how to run a battleship by turning cranks and seeing what they do.

Amazon certainly helped.

The stagnation of several anchor stores like Sears also helped. Sears was in serious decline well before Amazon became a major player in the market.

A jpeg image is designed to hold any photograph. It can potentially display millions of colors, and needs to contain that data for possibly millions of pixels of on-screen data. Jpeg image compression does save some space compared to a bitmap which is literally 3 bytes of color data for every pixel in the image, but there's only so optimized it can get before it can't be used to store any possible photograph.

The image above is 500x321 pixels with 32-bit ARGB color; so each pixel not only has independent red, green and blue data, but also 8 bits of transparency data.

Super Mario Bros runs on the Nintendo Entertainment System, which has a working resolution of 256 x240 pixels. It has the capability of displaying 25 colors on screen simultaneously out of a total possible palette of 54 usable colors. It draws the background and foreground layers as "tiles" so you can store whole tiles in memory and then repeat them, and then on top of that it can draw hardware sprites which is how things that move more on screen like Mario, enemies etc. are made.

Things like the animations of the question mark blocks which seem to shine or blink a bit, that's done by cycling the colors that the sprite is being drawn with. Big Mario and Fire Mario are the same sprite but color swapped. The bushes and the clouds are the same shape, but different colors. The super mushroom and power mushroom are the same sprite but different colors. The underworld levels are just different colors on the same sprites as the overworld.

The sound chip on the NES is very simple, it has five voice polyphony and can make two square waves, one triangle wave, one hiss-like noise, and one PCM sample sound (not used to my knowledge in SMB1; it's how the steel drum sounds in the SMB3 sound track were made) and so what is stored on the cartridge for audio is more like sheet music than recorded sound. An mp3 file of the Ground Theme would also likely be larger than the entire game.

SMB1 is also just...a VERY primitive game. It cannot scroll vertically (SMB2, the one that's Doki Doki Panic in Japan, it can scroll vertically OR horizontally but not both at the same time; SMB3 could do both at the same time as showcased by the raccoon tail powerup, but it required a RAM expansion built into the cartridge) It can't go backwards because it doesn't record the state of objects that have scrolled off the screen. It has no save system or even a password system.

Finally, the game was made in 6502 assembly with the specific hardware of the NES in mind; which saves a lot of resources compared to all the abstractions needed for higher level languages and their abstractions.

You know what both of those films are? Exactly what their creators set out to make.

Are you seriously going to try and pull some smug insufferable “everything is art” bullshit here?

No, I'm more saying that "art" has no useful or stable definition especially as you are trying to use the word, to contrast "just entertainment" from "real art." I don't believe a line can be meaningfully drawn between those because lots of creative works have found themselves on both sides of that line depending on when they are in time.

Using Shakespeare as an example, he and his actors thought they were making plays that would be enjoyed by the few hundred or maybe few thousand people who would show up to the Globe theatre during the few weeks they were performing a particular play, and then never again. They weren't setting out to make immortal classics for the ages and none of them lived to see that take place. When did Shakespeare's plays become "real art?"

I don't think JRR Tolkien intended people to take The Hobbit as seriously as they do today.

George Lucas didn't think he was making a century-defining masterpiece on the set of Star Wars.

There is nothing preventing a future where massively anachronistic misinterpretations of the shooting scripts for eight episodes of Two And A Half Men become required reading for all teenagers 200 years from now as time transcending, culture defining classics.

On the other hand, what brilliant works are forgotten because they failed to find an audience in their time, or they became a meme and burned out?

The only honest criteria you could present to me for what makes "real art" different from "just entertainment" is the court of public opinion, which is subject to change over time. I live in a world where huge budget movies are based on stories and characters that originated in pulp magazines and penny dreadfuls.

I'm not interested in trying to draw a line between "this is just entertainment, feel free to view this in whatever abridged format you like" and "This is real art, so I demand you undergo whatever effort is necessary to experience it in what I consider to be the original and correct format, I don't care what your priorities are or how much time and effort you can budget to this project." I don't see a functional difference between an individual reading a version of a classic book that has been abridged by AI and watching the relevant episode of Wishbone. There's someone alive today who only knows The Tempest or Cyrano De Bergerac as the version with a Jack Russell terrier in it. Who are you to say "No that's not good enough"?

As long as the original works continue to be available I have no problem with any method of abridging them, and I don't believe any work is above consuming in abridged format for whatever reason especially on accessibility grounds.

Also is this an AI making a dumb blonde joke?

Having a pool doesn't make it easier to hang dong, just marginally more plausible.

See at some point this discussion starts to feel kind of up itself. @roscoe@roscoe@lemmy.dbzer0.com casually created a dividing line between "books that are for entertainment" and "real literature" but balked at marking the location of that line. "Don't be obtuse."

I genuinely don't think that line exists. Shakespeare was the Netflix Original of his day, and his day was some 400 years ago. A lot of "real literature" is labeled as such basically on the authority of generations of pretentious twats, at least a few of whom basically think "old = good and new = bad."

We translate works from one language to another all the time, you think the precise nuances always make it through that process? We also adapt novels to film or television as a matter of routine. The original post uses the example of The Great Gatsby, which has at least one film adaptation. Is that a perfect 1 to 1 transfer of the author's intent? Then you have retell

Beyond this, if I understand correctly, this could be used interactively. Say you're using this on an e-reader, you could have the original text in the book, and then have a "what the fuck does that mean" button you can push to get an AI powered simplification if a sentence is too complicated for you or you don't understand a particular idiom or something. I bet there's someone out there who reads English as a second language generally well enough for The Great Gatsby, but doesn't get the colloquialism "turning it over in my mind." Hell, I'm a native English speaker and I could use something like that for a lot of works over 100 years old that use obsolete language I'm not familiar with.

Or...there's this book called Congressional Anecdotes by Paul Boller, who writes in a style that is trying to be more clever than he is. Instead of saying something like "Senator Grug from Montana called Senator Flub from Wyoming an idiot, and that made Senator Flub angry" he instead writes "The esteemed member from the Gold and Silver state referred to his colleague Flub as a man of dubious intelligence. This didn't sit well with the senator from Wyoming in the slightest measure." I got just far enough into that book before giving up on it to recognize when an author on Cracked.com basically plagiarized it for an article. I mentioned it in the comments and the author messaged me like "Hahaha shutthefuckup" That book needs an AI simplification like I need a good night sleep.

The oldest functioning system I have is an Atari 2600. it was originally my mother's.

Who is the judge of what "real literature" is?

Transcript of me examining this picture:

"Okay, face looks okay, jacket makes sense, let's look at the hands. Looks like four fingers on her left hand there, the right hand, thumb's a little screwy, is that a stick or is she part tarsier? Something's kind of screwy there. Boots look about right, there's even a pretty decent depth of field on the sho-THE FIRE IS IN THE TENT.

What do you think of the Voice of America broadcasting news in Simplified English?

I'm alright with this sort of thing for use by ESL folks who read at a 4th grade level in English, would like to practice reading in English, but don't want to read a literal children's book.

It is my understanding that OUTATIME from Back to the Future is or was one too many characters for a California license plate.

That's my plan with the doctor that failed to diagnose my appendicitis. He was easily in his 60's, I was 19. I'm gonna actuarial table his ass.

Fat bottom tombs they make the rockin world go round.

He has published his audio book about the airship R101 under a creative commons license, if you haven't seen that yet I'd check it out.

You could say the same thing of the NES. The crash of '83 had as much to do with the mountains of shovelware on the market for the early consoles and microcomputers that might not even load and run. You got a lot of knockoffs, branded merchandise, and other low effort crap the programmer didn't actually give a shit about flooding the market, which inflated the bubble, then it burst.

A large part of Nintendo's strategy for entering a crashed market was to address this with their Seal Of Quality. Using anything from the design patent of the cartridge shell to security chips, they enforced a monopoly on manufacturing cartridges for their systems; Nintendo was the only manufacturer of Nintendo cartridges. And their Seal Of Quality meant they had inspected the game and made sure it is functional software, that it loads and runs without crashing. They don't guarantee the game is fun, which is why Superman 64 was allowed to be published. It's a garbage game but it doesn't crash an N64.

Other platforms aren't as strict with their libraries, which means there's more and cheaper games out there for it. The extreme example is Steam on PC, where their algorithm is "publish whatever is submitted and pull it down if someone raises a legitimate complaint." There's a lot of great games on Steam, there's a lot of Unity tutorial projects on Steam. Their excellent refund policies make this acceptable.