Barktic Fox

Still trying to figure out why "add this event someone mentioned in a text message to your calendar" requires a fucking large language model and not, y'know, the same basic text parsing and natural language processing that's been around for 30 years, Apple.

@kitana@meow.social Happy birthday! I could probably fit under the tip of your claw so I dunno how effective paw massages will be, but I'm still game!

I have evolved to the point where I don’t even have to open Minecraft during my two week Minecraft phase anymore.

RE: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@godotengine/116839550229253906 Godot stays winning yet again.

@azninsect@kind.social I'd be fascinated to discover how this impacts their claims in court that their use of copyrighted works is transformative, given that with this argument they seem to be saying that the book no longer needs to exist because they've retained their own copy of it.

@jake4480@c.im and also deregulation-enabled dysentery.

@UlrikNyman@mastodon.social @jaredwhite@indieweb.social "What is the main motivation for not using LLMs as part of the development process?" The same reason you're not supposed to read the Cliff's Notes when you're studying literature: it defeats the purpose entirely. Your students won't actually *learn* a damn thing if they just get it all from the plagiarism bot.

@RikerGoogling Trombonan

It's funny. The Ferry Terminal elevation illustration has people sketched into it, but it hadn't clicked just how *big* it is until I put an accurately-scaled (~2m) person into the scene next to it. They're the little pink dot standing on the horizontal plane.

@kirena_kaya@mastodon.art Oh! Handsome...

@devolute@mastodon.social @vampiress@eigenmagic.net The longer this mess rolls on, though, the more it seems like it's just all weaknesses.

@bagelcollie@woof.tech Aaaaa, cute! I love the little bee dangling off the bottom.

@Neotheta@toot.finfur.net This is sick as hell

@jackdaw_ruiz@normal.style Definitely not a first, the Carfax fox is an abomination.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44PT8XRZRGA Everything old is new again. It's all just fancier and fancier bump maps 😆. I really don't understand why this technique isn't used more often, honestly. Not only is it more efficient for the GPU and CPU to have simpler models to load and render, having the detail get baked into the texture means it's easier to iterate on, and you need fewer bespoke textures to handle AO, normals, etc. on knobbly surfaces. It's also WAY faster to do in general than sculpting all that detail into every single model, baking down to low-poly, going through Substance Painter, etc. You can do your detail work up-front on the material in Substance Designer or Material Maker, then use it on as many surfaces as you want. It's easier to break up tiling with extra random noise at different scales this way, too, which is trickier with baked-normal or tessellated-high-poly modular components.

@shana @arielmt It's entirely believable that it would take him another several weeks to re-prompt an entire website with a different product name, though.

RE: https://furries.club/@Redfuchs/116925132405553011 FaceID POV

I've seen more than one dev try and clap back at someone saying they won't buy their app if it was written with genAI by saying "oh, so you're going to quit using then too, right?" And like… no, probably not, because that's a pretty substantial and fundamental change to a bunch of workflows that entails a bunch of new software across multiple workflows, probably new hardware in some cases, and a ton of self re-training? Which does suck, because I'd love to not have to run *any* software co-written by the slop trough. But it is *shockingly* easy to just not buy your social media viewer or whatever, my dude. You do not have the high ground *or* the lock-in inertia you think you do in this situation.

@owashe@meow.social *wobbles your camera*

@animalshapes@mastodon.art You really captured the spread and vibrancy of the green there. It's truly gorgeous, and I love how much it comes through in this.

Me: *laying in bed trying to fall asleep* No one: Absolutely no one: Not a single person in the entire galaxy: My brain: ”Why does the song ‘Playing with the Big Boys Now’ in The Prince of Egypt include a command from the choir that Moses should ‘kow tow’ to the Egyptian priests? That’s such a weirdly anachronistic turn of phrase. I get that it rhymes but the song works just fine without it…” Me: My brain: Me: My brain: “What?”

I think it's hilarious that the only recognizable desktop computers available as Shortcuts icons are the three models of Mac Pro, none of which Apple still sells.

Ugh. Of course Robyn used genAI on the gatefold image in the new Riven soundtrack vinyl. Of course he did. I'm glad I didn't order it immediately now, but I'm also just severely disappointed.

Now I remember why I hate Unity so much... I wish I could quit you (literally).

RE: https://kind.social/@lrrbot/116889669230905365 More people should know this, tbh.

The most annoying thing about opaque algorithms that provide options based on your past behavior is that sometimes, for whatever reason, they get stuck and there's no way to re-condition them. I once accidentally moved one of the internal team emails I get every day into the wrong folder. I had previously moved it to the correct folder dozens of times before without Mail ever thinking it should put that location in the quick-pick slot on the "move email" sheet, but ever since I slipped up that one time, it's recommended me the oops'd folder every time. I've manually selected the correct folder from the folder picker easily twice as many times as I had before the algorithm finally decided to set a suggested quick-move location option the one time I goofed up, but it still steadfastly refuses to update its recommendations. Short of just resetting my phone, I have no idea how to get it to reset its (incorrect) assumptions about where I want to put those emails.

@deech@mastodon.social Some heroes are still worth meeting.

I will never get over the fact that it used to be called Jabber but is now the infinitely less scrutable XMPP. In any same timeline, that move would have been in the opposite direction.

@punkonbuslives@trekkies.social The meta-gag poking fun at the "every other city cosplaying as New York or San Francisco" trope is still one of my favorite bits from that episode, honestly.

Pll Wops Are Bastards

In other news, I'm somewhat baffled by Roots' decision to ship Bedrock for WordPress with a Pint linter configuration that explicitly violates WordPress coding standards. WordPress doesn't use PER, why are you shipping your bootstrapping project with that as the default?

@nygl@aus.social @kalleboo@bitbang.social Oh the joys of trying to build a knowledge graph out of a next-word-generator. No fundamental structural failures here!

RE: https://mastodon.online/@mwichary/116952836351215165 It is once again time for the quarterly usage metrics gaming.

I am absolutely dumbstruck that dbrand didn't actually get Valve's permission to sell the companion cube Steam Machine wrapper. Leaving aside how stupid it is to spend 7 months and untold amounts of money on R&D and production hardware for a product that is literally someone else's exact IP without absolutely locking down a license to do so... I cannot *fathom* how they thought they could ever in a *million* years get away with the video they made to promote the thing without ever even mentioning the idea to Valve beforehand. (ICYMI, they had a JK Simmons sound-alike explicitly state that dbrand was acquiring Aperture Science's assets [and even had the Aperture Science logo *transform into* the dbrand logo], and in addition to the companion cube, they outright included GLaDOS (with vocals), the turrets (with vocals), and the portal gun (with portals) in the video to really, *really* make the point.) I'm pretty sure everyone thought it had to be legit because otherwise it was such a hilariously textbook case of copyright infringement that nobody in their right mind would think they could get away with it.

I noticed tonight while watching a musical breakdown of Hellfire that Frollo in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" and Tzekel-Kan (the priest) from "The Road to El Dorado" have very similar evil-face. Turns out, there is at least some overlap in the animation department between the two films (I'm guessing a bunch of Disney folks jumped ship to Dreamworks not long after Hunchback), including Kathy Zielinski, the supervising animator for both characters. There are also a few other Frollo animators credited on Tzekel-Kan too, according to IMDB.

In other news, I'm somewhat baffled by Bedrock's decision to ship with a Pint linter that explicitly violates WordPress coding standards. WordPress doesn't use PER, why are you shipping your bootstrapping project with that as the default?

@KayOhtie@blimps.xyz Robyn is (or at least, has been) pretty deep in the "it's a fun toy"/"it's a useful tool" camp since Midjourney first came out, and I don't think he's bothered to reexamine his priors since then either.

@azninsect@kind.social I can see *maybe* thinking they could get away with it on the down-low, but to go through the effort and expense of making a 3 minute commercial with sound-alike VAs and literally transforming the Aperture Science logo into the dbrand logo, I'd have thought *somebody* involved would have had the two neurons to rub together to maybe ask Valve first.

It's not *pixel* perfect in its tiling, but it's good enough for something that goes on the bottom of a shoe, and also if I stare at it any longer I may actually lose my mind, lol.

If the aesthetic of The Next Generation was "80s hotel in space", the aesthetic of Babylon 5 is more "Bryce 3D user interface. In space."

@hemisputnik@woof.tech Thanks! I suspect whoever designed the pattern for the shoe had the advantage of not needing to worry about it tiling perfectly inside of a square, haha! Most of the time I spent on this thing was wiggling the shape around trying to get it to be *just* the right dimensions to do that.