It’s impressive to see half a century of work building up institutional respect and influence be burnt up over the course of less than two years.

I wonder if the change and then quick reversion was due to someone up in the administration seeing the word “bisexual” and thought it was a euphemism for trans people. Like “bi sex? Two sexes? Are these people claiming to be male AND female?” and then ordered the term be removed, only to be informed “no that’s not what the word means” and it got reverted.

I wonder how much longer hegseth will last. He seems to be causing more problems for trump than he’s solving.

See the beauty of doing this now is that khan has been improperly removed from her position at the FTC by the current administration, of course the court will not take up the case about her removal, just strike down rules on technicalities now that they won’t be resubmitted.

I’m sure that the super AI they’re gonna build will find more copper. Like if we just poor enough capital and resources in to it, it’ll start causing new copper deposits to appear using psychic powers it will develop after we let these companies monopolize all information and blow past every single emissions target.

It’s just like the Hittites, if they had just prayed a little harder, and built more bronze statues, then their gods would have surely secured the tin and copper trade.

That there is no guarantee that I will always have access to a game I like is really what kills it for me as a user. Like, I’m basically paying them the equivalent of the cost of a game every 3 months, but I could loose access to a game I like at any time because it’s no longer on game pass, so I’d be better off just buying games I like outright with that money every three months.

I’d rather my money go directly to studios making things I like, rather than fractionalized among who ever Microsoft decides deserves to make games.

I am very interested in Fairphone, when my current phone inevitably breaks it’ll definitely be my on my short list. Also considering the pine phone pro.

It’s really cool to see the phone space opening back up with meaningfully differentiated options. Like foldables are starting to have a good selection, red magic has one with a fan for active cooling, and we’ve got phones with repairability and maintenance in mind.

I’m also curious to see if RISC-V processors start making any serious inroads in to phones. I know Qualcomm was talking about it a while ago, and there is some amount of support for android on it.

There is legitimately interesting things going on again, and it’s so annoying to have all the oxygen sucked out of the room by the current hype cycle.

I think the larger issue is that so many studios get set up as things that can be sold by one or two people for the benefit of only one or two people. Like, the larger issue is that everyone who has been working at the studio should have some amount of say in if it should be sold or not. And if they do sell, you should be getting a cut of the truck of money.

Transneft is the largest oil pipeline company in Russia for context. It’s state controlled and moves about 80% of the crude and 30% of the oil products.

MORE SOULS ON THE ALTER OF THE AI GOD, you know, just a few more and it shall burst forth from the machine and solve all our problems.

Just keeeeeeep pouring resources and capital on to the fire, any day now. Don’t worry about the climate or housing prices, the inevitable AI god will solve all that, surely. All the ruined lives and destroyed careers will be worth it, promise.

Shame, exploitive studios that let the business idiots take over and then sell them to Microsoft.

Will be happy to support the people who used to work there that go on to make indie games.

it’s kind of terrifying how much power has been concentrated in the hands of people so eager to adopt such a flimsy ideological/religious cause.

You think the producer was trying to be an ass? Or like, are they just that deep in the cult that they think this is helpful advice?

they appear to be copying direct translations from chat GPT in to the subtitles, judging by the fact that one of the subtitles said “Chat GPT says:” and then the line in German. People who speak German also noticed that the grammar and sentence structure for many of these shows has been awful and nonsensical at times.

If anyone is doing any sort of oversight, they don’t appear to speak German them selves and are just betting that the output will be accurate and pasting it in.

Someone who spoke German and Japanese fluently enough to do competent oversight could probably translate faster than they could edit and rephrase the work of an LLM, which are notoriously bad at translating languages in a high context situation like dialog in a animated show. LLMs are also generally very bad with high context languages like Japanese, and even worse at translating between them and low context languages like German.

Residuals are standard in the American film/TV industry. They are paid a percent of ongoing profits of previous projects they’ve worked on.

Another fairly common practice is ESOPs where over time workers at a company receive shares in the company, and thus dividends.

The people who actually made the show, animators, voice actors, and writers do not get money based on your crunchy rolls subscription, and those production committees that do get money, didn’t make the shows, they just initially financed them.

Assuming the show is based on a manga or light novel, the original artist/writer might if they were lucky enough to negotiate shares in the production committee, but most are not in a position to do so.

For me, what matters, is that the people who made the art get compensated fairly, that they are able to live a good life. That people are encouraged to make art by my consumption of it, and the current system doesn’t do that. It’s a horrific exploitative machine where purchase reward further exploitation of the people who actually put work and effort in to make the art.

China’s not exactly flush with cash to buy debt with at the moment, they’re having their own struggle party at the moment, although they tend to be less vocal about it. After all, their real estate market basically got massively over leveraged and a lot of capital disappeared and turned out wasted.

The Saudi’s too are having a bit of a liquidity problem at the moment, they’ve made a lot of commitments on weird mega projects and spent a lot of money trying to diversify their economy and repair their image, much of it with limited success.

They’re buying them from production committees and other such organizations. Most anime is made on essentially “commission” basis, where a studio is payed a fixed upfront amount by a group of financiers and other interests, who then distribute the show, sell the merch, and license it internationally. Essentially studios and those who work there are payed no residuals or other profit sharing scheme like is common in the American film and television industry.

There is actually a bit of a cartel in that regard, with the third parties that purchase shows from studios having collaborated to suppress the cost of seasons for nearly 2 decades, leading to stagnant wages and rampant overworking of artists as the quality and quantity of work expected increases while the budget stays the same. Increasingly artists at the companies have had to fall back on gig work beyond their standard hours to make ends meet, getting payed by frame in their off hours to make a little extra money, effectively working 16 hour days through this additional work. There is some movement to change this as of late, but, this is still essentially the norm.

Prices really haven’t come back to normal. Average prices is around 7 dollars a dozen, with lows around 5 dollars a dozen depending on area.

In 2019 it was between 1.30 and 2 dollars a dozen.

The H5 bird flu strain hasn’t been contained, and it probably never will be, it’s been rampant for nearly half a decade at this point and they’re still nowhere near containing it. It’s endemic in the migratory bird population. At this point the only flocks that won’t be routinely wiped by it are smaller flocks in better conditions.

Beyond the reality of higher turn over in flocks due to routine outbreaks, it also gives them an excuse to steadily press up prices to pad margins.

The prices are also still like 5X what they were before this bout of bird flue started over 5 years ago.