HarkMahlberg

Which is still weird.

Alexander Sawchuk, then an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California ... along with a graduate student and the SIPI lab manager, was hurriedly searching the lab for a good image to scan for a colleague's conference paper. ... Just then, somebody happened to walk in with a recent issue of Playboy. The engineers tore away the top third of the centerfold so they could wrap it around the drum of their Muirhead wirephoto scanner...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

Everything about the story sounds like it was a rush job, a decision made on a whim, after exhausting their existing catalog of test images. And who bring a Playboy mag to their university's computer lab, and advertises their possession? They don't even say who it was, probably to protect them from any embarrassing professional consequences. To me, that's probably the strongest reason to retire it: it's unprofessional.

Well said.

I would say that the "positive vibes only" trait is part of it, but the far bigger problem was the character limit. Even when it was double from 140 to 280, that still doesn't not leave room for nuanced opinions. And then, the least nuanced opinions also become the most easily spreadable. Both traits really reward our worst instincts.

Wouldn't this enable, for example, Trump claiming he didn't make the "bloodbath" comment, calling it a deepfake, and telling Youtube to remove all the new coverage of it? I mean, more generally, what stops someone from abusing this system?

I'm kind of impressed by the amount of research they did to figure out why this guy's bill was so high, then immediately offered a resolution, and then immediately offered another avenue if the resolution wasn't good enough. Shout out to the customer service rep.

Ich bin ein kbinner?

The car or the account?

Por que no las dos?

Gonna shill for kbin's UI just a bit. I like how it handles cross-posted threads.

Poor Duolingo. Once upon a time I used it to learn Japanese, but by the time I could start reading kanji and noticed that duolingo was still constructing sentences entirely out of hiragana, I knew I had outgrown it and moved on to Anki.

Using AI to learn a new language has to be incredibly frustrating - you can either tell where's messing up, or you can't tell at all and then you learn incorrect information..

None? I don't debate that Blue Sky is corporate-owned while Bitcoin and the Fediverse aren't. Rather, I'm saying the thing they all have in common is that they like to think of themselves as "decentralized" federations of independent systems and users, but in reality they are all "centralized" systems with shared weaknesses. This is the "ideological contradiction" I thought you were referring to.

Venture Capital