yes, the vast majority of web traffic is phones using apps. no person that uses this platform is an average user.

even if your family hates tiktok it’s still massively popular.

especially among the youth who probably only have a really shitty locked down chromebook from their school and the recently developing world. in the global south most people never got a decent computer. they all got phones instead. once you’re on a phone everything pushes you towards apps.

well that’s why most people use apps instead. the real internet is so hostile without a guide.

especially now that you can’t use the mainstream browsers and do it. the barrier to entry has gotten so high that i don’t blame kids for being put off by computers and prefering their phones for everything. tiktok has annoying ass ads, but no apps are as bad as the average news website…

it reminds me of trying to learn about cars growing up. i didn’t learn about cars growing up. i tried, but everyone i tried to learn from spent the whole time complaining about all the anticonsumer practices that made cars shitty these days. all the hoops you have to jump through to work on them yourself anymore. how the manufactures went out of their way over the course of years to take what used to be a fun tinkerers hobby for the everyman and made it incredibly difficult and expensive to do yourself.

my take away was “I hate cars”. so when i hear teenagers these days say that they hate computers i get it. they fucking suck now and there’s this 8 foot fence of knowing how to make them suck less before they can even start wanting to learn about them. but it’s going to take them a very very long time to get good enough with the computer that they can accomplish anything on it better than on their phone. so we have trucks full of ladders that can scale that fence, and even if we lose our ladders we know how to scale that fence barehanded if we gotta. but the kids just walk around the fence because they don’t value what’s inside. why would they?

so I’m just waiting for the old pc based intent to slowly wither away as we age with it… places like this becoming out last bastions in a world that requires validated apps on phones.

I only ended seem to end up there around the holidays. oddly it’s usually not for anything holiday related. I just end up breaking shit in the winter that needs to get repaired.

i always end up behind someone shipping like 50 international gifts.

it’s time like those that i wish it could be a norm in society for the holdup doing the long thing with the only customer service rep to let others cut in between their things so they can get out of there. like when you end up at a gas station that doesn’t allow pay at pump and the only attendant is held up by some retiree blowing their kids inheritance on a scratch off gambling addiction. I’ve been late to work multiple times because of that exact situation.

tell that to the passenger strapped next to the dead guy for however many hours.

honestly, theirs looks so much better. i can actualy see the the appeal.

i bet they could find some way to premake the hair animations on icons like this. like they really only need to move in 2 directions. you could make that look pretty good with like 200 canned animations. different speeds and start/stop styles is all you should really need. at that point it’s not too different from creating a walk loop for a video game. you’d just be calling up various premade animations with a system to string them together believably. it’s totally doable. certainly no worse than other “live wallpapers” that were a popular included feature about a decade ago.

“intimidation” yall saw the video. that was attempted intimidation at best lol. she wasn’t intimidated for shit. ran right at the dude.

yeah, they really lost their early edge on the granny gamer market lol. they’ve all jumped ship to those bejeweled like games and virtual jugsaw puzzles. maybe wordle if they’re bookish.

i think there are little things you can play in some of their messaging platforms, but they change so much on those so often that these kinds of users probably ignore 90% of the interface. i think those hit more with the gen z and gen a younger crowds. especially when it can also become social media content. tiktok is great at that.

i guess, but it woulf require the least likely people to adopt a new and expensive technology. think about how long it took for the older generations to catch on to the internet and smart phones. they may be glued together now but it took 20 years and every single other person on earth getting one to make it happen.

warcraft for your lonely aunt is a fine idea. making that vr was poorly conceived. it would have to work on a phone AND be more compelling than just taking on call or text.

but also, the early adopter types that are more or less necessary to get something like this off three ground were never going to like it. that’s us. you can’t create a new tech market segment that wasn’t explicitly asked for without at least considering the nerds. meta has negative trust among nerds. we all saw this as the marketing and data collection tool that it is meant to be.

it was never going to happen. at least until they have full control of all of our devices and platforms and can just say we need it to continue existing in society now. that or b2b contracts are the only ways i could see this ever taking off. it would take some serious marketing voodoo bullshit to convince any sizable businesses that this would increase profits.

how about a wait and see model that i like with all megacorp pushed updates now. that way i can decide if i want their latest batch of ai bullshit, or read the headlines about which cpus their vibecoding bricked this time before it’s too late.

unfortunately automatic updates require a small amount of trust that the update will not break things or change things without permission. Microslop currently has negative trust.

maybe this is good for the average end user, but dissallowing powerusers from doing stuff like this is exactly what annoys me about apple. now microslop is even worse about it…

i just want to actualy control the things i own and not be told how to use my computer.

when’s the last time a retail worker ended someone’s life in the course of their duties and got away with it.?

the point is that we give these maniacs guns, minimal training that focuses on making them scared for their lives, and damn near immunity from prosecution, then act surprised when they panic and shoot innocent people. how this shit happens is blazingly obvious and a matter of public concern. the anger comes from the adamant refusal to even admit that there is a problem, let alone do anything to fix the red hot glowing issues.

but also, yes retail workers could do better, but that’s more up to their employer. the reason we feel we can affect police is because these are public employees who’s checks we pay for. these changes need to be systemic. they need to change the basics of who how and why police get trained and deployed. that is government reform. that is a voting issue. walmart employees could also do better if Walmart payed them better, gave them more time off to be with family when needed, gave better health insurance, provided better training and outside opportunities to their employees. but we know walmart won’t do this things because they only care about profit. the police have no such obligation. their only obligation should be to us, but right now it’s mostly just to the people with the money.

i could probably keep tearing your argument apart for 5 more paragraphs, but that woulf be obssesive. point is, you’re conflaiting the point. it’s not about individual gumption that good cops should turn others in. it’s just a counter argument to “don’t let a few bad apples spoil the bunch”. we know that good cops speaking up won’t help, that’s the point. they get squeezed out when they try. that’s why the changes need to be more systemic. the bad cops are entrenched and defended by moneyed interests.

the blame can fall equality on both. it’s not all or nothing.

he probably went in as a true believer in the justice system and needed a lot of proof the break down the decades of propoganda that he grew up with. he might have thought prisons were for evil criminals that deserved to be there. he might have thought criminals are inherently dumb and that he could educate them on how easy and good it is to be good. a lot of cops and prison workers believe all this shit whole hearted and are too dumb to ever have another thought about it.

many of them just base their lives on a religious “authority is moral and just” style of beliefs and think it’s inherently morally wrong to question the rules. the authorities (their preachers and politicians) tell them these things, so to talk back against that would be sinful. even just thinking about how they might be wrong is sinful.

figuring out that the penal system that your core belief system always told you was right and good is actualy a tool of oppresion is simply too much for most of them. it’s not a simple matter of logic, it’s an assault on their very reality. to them the world is defined by the word of others. they don’t ever have to wonder if something is right or wrong, they have authority figures to do that for them. to tell them that said authority figure is wrong is to tell them that they can’t trust that up is up or down is down. it’s also how they feel no cognitive dissonance when doing things that their religion would say are wrong. the Bible and other Abrahamic texts are very clear that God’s plan is mysterious and unkowable. they’re also inherently vague and open to interpretation. Christian specifically are largely discouraged from deriving their own enterpretations from the texts. they don’t base their beliefs on the Bible, they base them on doing what they’re told. they do what God tells them, but most people can’t hear God so they do what the priest tells them. the priest tells them what politics and politicians are right because one side wants to pander to the church. so in their mind God talks through the priest to say that Donald trump and his ilk are just and good and godly. don’t worry about what they say or do, just trust that they will bring God’s will to America.

oppresing poor and brown people with the prison system is a primary goal of these politicians. their followers often believe that they are right with literal religious zeal. this guy probably had to have his entire world shattered before he could believe this.

that or he believed it the whole time and is just using the time he spent there to lend weight to his argument. or maybe something else entirely. idk, i made a lot of assumptions there.

hell, taking a picture of the screen with a phone would have been better. this is literally the only way to have fucked this up that i can come up with. like maybe if they used too thin of a sharpie on physical paper, but even that probably would have blocked parts of the text.

that said, i can see the average technologically inept person making this mistake. if it wasn’t on purpose, it would have to be someone that didn’t grow up with computers. either someone trump’s age, or someone who grew up with only smart phones. Iwould bet the latter knowing trump and his cheapness. this can’t have been done by an existing professional in the system, they’re too experienced normally. I know this is a lot of assumptions, but i bet it would have had to be a young intern from trump’s camp. and i do bet that over intentional malice towards trump. anyone that did this on purpose would be smart enough to see far enough ahead to predict themselves get arrested or killed as soon as people figured it out. also, hanlon’s razor.

i think i actually made almost this exact mistake once. difference is mine was for an assignment in high school 20 years ago and the consequence was getting snickered at by my peers. it’s a genuinely easy thing to overlook if you’re not used to using tools in a word editor or most other software. it’s also entirely unsurprising that trump’s camp would botch a project. he doesn’t pay people and is a menace to his employees. no one compitent wants to work for him unless they’re true believers.

so yeah, jumping to conclusions about this being intentional is conspiracy nut thinking. if someone’s reasoning includes bits like “it just makes too much sense” and “think about how much they have to gain/lose” they’re just jumping to conclusions without evidence. remember that correlation does not imply causation. just because something happened near a powerful person that affects the world or that person significantly doesn’t mean there’s a conspiracy. just because the motive for an action exists or makes sense that doesn’t mean it happened. i have a motive to want to kill Trump, but if he dies while I’m near d.c. that doesn’t make me a suspect. 90% of the people near d.c. at any given moment have motive to kill trump.

yeah, $500 is tough to get into astro with.

plenty for general photography, but astro can get gear heavy fast. astro landscapes are becoming more accessible as more fast lenses get cheaper, but the kind of astro that needs a tracker is just pricy.

that’s fair. I just thought this one was particularly obvious. like it isn’t even trying to not be ai.

I’m on the fence on this being a specific problem though. the individual tokens don’t actualy take that much energy or water or whatever. the resource use is all in training. all of the infrastructure being built for ai right now is for training the next model. this looks like it was done with a model from a couple generations ago. like if you don’t want to use a product that’s bad for the environment then using an older model should be fine. especially if you run it locally, which is totally doable. this image looks like it used an older model.

as for plagiarism, this is a meme with no profit potential. if the internet cared about copyright in memes we would never share any image macros. the chad face that this is based on is also stolen art that the internet has been sharing for years. that’s what memes are. stolen art shared without permission with no profit motive.

I’m a professional photographer/videographer who has directly felt ai hurt my career. it has also been trained off of my own images against my will. I generally hate ai, but i like to be an informed hater. all that said, there’s really no moral grounds to hate this but not a version with the non ai Chad face.

i mean, yeah. they clearly asked an ai to make an female version of the Chad meme.

and even then the problem isn’t the individuals so much as the systems that allow them to accumulate wealth.

ah yes, the most nuanced of political takes: the west is the devil and the cause of all evil.

how is this take any different than the u.s. propoganda that would say very similar shit about communism. it’s all the same team sports bullshit. politics is way more complicated than that. there is no great boogeyman that you can point a finger at as “the bad guy”.

every problem is more nuanced than side vs side. anyone that tells you otherwise is just being divisive and wants to push you to hate. not to support their ideas and solutions. you’ll notice that takes like this never offer a solution or a goal other than blame. it’s OK to just ignore the finger pointers. they never accomplish anything and are usually pushing hate.

so basically, bring anything other than hate and blame and I’ll listen. otherwise fuck off with your propoganda.

why does this graph have a 2:1 ratio of content to border? did you open it full screen on an ultrawide monitor to screenshot it then not crop or?

I’m used to seeing lots of vertical borders because of phones, but this almost seems like it took more effort to make this way.