Broadly correct. Franquin was a grassroots leftist by his peak in the '70s and even now a lot of his comics would generate a lot of “Gaston goes woke???” youtube thumbnails. His comics included a lot of overt anticapitalist & ecologist messaging in particular.

Idées Noires (apparently reedited as “Die Laughing” in English) has his most politically charged stuff and is what happened when Franquin didn’t try to draw for mass appeal:

I did however find some racist colonial stuff from his very early works (1950). I won’t like, it’s quite bad. However the 1950 stuff is ignorant & insensitive racist colonial fuckery from a then 26 year old author who later denounced it and tried to make up for it, while the 2023 stuff is very intentional dogwhistling to modern day racists from boomers who should really know better. It’s unfathomable that Dupuis would have greenlighted such backwards stuff in the modern age.

There is, though I can’t tell you how fun it is because I haven’t played it and never cared for the original games’ battle system.

Not a very hot take, only corpo bootlickers pretend that Nintendo isn’t squandering the franchise.

It’s supremely frustrating that franchises like these get enshittified to hell and there’s fuck-all anyone can do about it if they are not willing to work completely for free (i.e. fanfiction writers). Same with the Star Wars content mill which also went to shit while we’re forced to sit and watch or give up on the franchise entirely. Or LoTR which in the past 20 years only gave us The Hobbit (🤮) and the Amazon show (🤮🤮).
Human stories were meant to be evolved and expanded on; that’s how all of our ancestors built a rich tapestry of myths and folklore over generations, constantly retelling and updating stories. But we aren’t allowed to.

I’m Belgian. My grandparents, my parents, my cousins and my cousin’s children all grew up reading Belgian comics such as Tintin, Spirou&Fantasio, Lucky Luke, the Smurfs, etc, which were written in the mid-20th century. Yet if any of them publishes anything set in those universes they’ll get sued into the ground, so instead these important cultural works are left to rot and wither and be slowly forgotten by each subsequent generation while the Estate shits out a soulless (if not outright racist and sexist which shits on everything that Franquin ever stood for) reboot that no-one cares about every 15 years or so. Such a sad end for such important cultural landmarks that used to be the pride of our country.

Copyright should last 25 years, just like patents. That’s more than enough time to recoup your initial investment and doesn’t prevent you from making money after then, you’ll just have to compete for it on the marketplace of ideas. Isn’t that what capitalists should want?

Cobblemon is a pokémon mod for minecraft, and definitely has a charm to it and fits weirdly well into the minecraft-pixel-art-with-shaders esthetic IMO. Plus the “gotta catch em all” basic gameplay loop meshes well with Minecraft’s incentive to explore the world.

Of course it’s a free mod so it’s a bit rough around the edges and there doesn’t seem to be much to do beyond collect pokémon and build minecraft houses, but in my online circles it certainly has captured a lot more attention than any pokémon game released in the last forever. I would like to think Nintendo is taking notes, but we all know they Don’t Give A Fuck. They’ll pump out any asset flip and people will buy it because they’re nostalgic and Nintendo has a legally enforced monopoly on the franchise.

I have a hard time imagining anyone sticking to this same argument if the satire were directed towards someone they admired in a similar position of power

I have a hard time imagining a reasonable person being mad at satire of a politician. Like maybe it’s a cultural divide and I’m not American so I don’t view politics as team sports and my country has a stronger history of political satire than the often pathetically meek American political cartoons, but you can make a satirical deepfake of the politicians I voted in last election if you want.

If the deepfake was not obviously related to current political events or wasn’t obviously fake, the point could be arguable at least as a matter of good taste. As it stands, the satire is obvious, harmless, and topical. It is therefore terrifying that censoring it is even a question. How far the concept of free speech has fallen that it refers to Seig Heiling but a 2s gif of Trump sucking some toes apparently crosses a line.

Is this considered porn? I am certainly, along with at least hundreds of millions of people, into shirtless Ryan Gosling. Specifically his pecs and abs.

Look, I am taking the piss, but not everything that might turn someone on for one reason or another is porn. The AI video of Trump is clearly satire and meant to disgust. What’s next, we can’t make satirical drawings of him grovelling at Putin’s feet because some people have a humiliation fetish?

There’s plenty of legal precedent for newsworthiness to supersede some rules in the name of the freedom of the Press. It makes sense that I’m not allowed (at least where I live) to post a non-consensual pictures of someone off the street. But it would not make sense if I was forbidden from posting a picture of the Prime Minister visiting a school for example. That’s newsworthy and therefore the public interest outweighs his right to privacy.

The AI video of Trump/Musk made a bunch of headlines because it was hacked onto a government building. On top of that it’s satire of public figures and – I can’t believe that needs saying – is clearly not meant to provide sexual gratification.

Corpos and bureaucracies would have you believe nuance doesn’t belong in moderation decisions, but that’s a fallacy and an flimsy shield to hide behind to justify making absolutely terrible braindead decisions at best, and political instrumentation of rules at worst. We should celebrate any time when moderators are given latitude to not stick to dumb rules (as long as this latitude is not being used for evil), and shame any company that censors legitimate satire of the elites based on bullshit rules meant to protect the little people.

All Russia did was give a nudge to the literal trillions of dollars in capital held by elites who wanted nothing more than full-blown fascism. All the Kremlin had to do was finance whoever could sow the most distrust in democratic institutions and wedge themselves in existing divides within the US. It’s the most boring coup in history, people voting for Hitler not because of Bolshevism of whatever but because they’re triggered by fucking vaccines and pronouns.

Conversely even if the EU went full hybrid warfare (which we aren’t because we can’t even do anything about the open fascists in our own Union), the counterplay is rebuilding trust which is harder by orders of magnitude than just buying up a social media, deleting moderation, and promoting the Nazi stuff.

Best we could hypothetically do is sanction y’all into autarchy and hope the subsequent recession/depression acts as an electroshock to the population, but you’re already doing it to yourselves and besides I see no reason why the two thirds of y’all who either don’t care or actively support fascism would change their minds. It will be just like Putin Orban or Erdogan, 15 years from now shit will be worse than ever for the 99 % but Republicans will still win elections without even needing to cheat much thanks to their complete control over state propaganda. Your democracy is dead, you should be moving through the stages of grief and planning your next move.

I’d love to be proven wrong but there’s too much historical precedent, and zero precedent to Americans being even remotely close to politically conscious enough to engage in “forceful” political change (unless the force is being exerted on Black people, then the “well regulated militia” comes out the woodwork). Hell, the videos from “protests” I’ve been seeing this week in your major cities look so pathetic it makes Denver look like a large village.

The EU stopped using increasing amounts of power around 2010 despite continued economic growth (yes, even if you account for imported goods).

Not that consumerism and the exploitation of the global south aren’t existential tragedies for our species, I’m just pointing out that while capitalism does require never-ending growth, it is interesting to note that it empirically doesn’t require ever-increasing power to do so.

Fascism is a byproduct of capitalism but unrelated to energy prices. Doesn’t matter if gas is 1€/L or 2€/L when Musk, Murdoch, or Bernard Arnault decide what gets voted, printed and shown on TV.

Grids work on economies of scale. The bigger the better. Ask anyone who lives on an isolated island for their power bill. That’s why it was such a big deal when the Baltics switched from the Russian grid to the EU one.

Bigger grid = more intertia&redundancy = less likelihood of failure, more options, lower costs.

Electricity isn’t like chicken eggs. Transporting it is for all intents and purposes free. The network is expensive, but whether your house is pulling 1 A or 5 A is a non-difference to your utility. So to think local generation is “better” is a complete fallacy. Unless your house is fully disconnected from the network (not “net zero”, disconnected) then it’s not helping to generate power locally. Like someone else said, it’s actually way more expensive per kWh than grid-scale solar.

Now this would all be a “you” problem, except the big problem with microgeneration is that current tech is “dumb”. It’s either pushing power on the network, or sometimes tripping if the voltage goes above 250V or so. Which actually happens in rich neighborhoods on very sunny days where everyone is pushing power.
What this means for the operators is that on very sunny days, they cannot do anything but account for the extra residential solar power. Which might mean they have to very quickly spin up or down alternative power generators which were not meant for this. Or they might be dealing with complex issues with current flowing the other way than designed and large voltage fluctuations on specific parts of the network that don’t have the necessary infrastructure to “dump” that extra solar somewhere else.

The end result is that, counter-intuitively, microgeneration is one of the many failures of the neoliberal electricity market. It’s more expensive and more disruptive for society than if those solar cells had been put to use in grid-scale solar production. They only end up where they are through political mismanagement and misaligned incentives (e.g. net metering which does not account for negative externalities).

Hell, pass init=/bin/yes and you’ll see even more greatly reduced RAM usage!

❯ ps aux | grep /usr/lib/sys | awk '{print $6}' | sed 's/$/+/' | tr -d '\n' | sed 's/+$/\n/' | bc
266516

So that’s 260 MiB of RSS (assuming no shared libs which is certainly false) for:

• Daemon manager
• Syslog daemon
• DNS daemon (which I need and would have to replace with dnsmasq if it did not exist)
• udev daemon
• network daemon
• login daemon
• VM daemon (ever hear of the principle of least privilege?)
• user daemon manager (I STG anyone who writes a user daemon by doing nohup & needs to be fired into the sun. pkill is not the tool I should have to use to manage my user’s daemons)

For comparison the web page I’m writing this on uses 117 MiB, about half. I’ll very gladly make the tradeoff of two sh.itjust.works tabs for one systemd suite. Or did you send that comment using curl because web browsers are bloated?

For another comparison 200 MiB of RAM is less than two dollars at current prices. I don’t value my time so low that I’ll avoid spending two bucks by spend hours debugging whatever bash scripting spaghetti hell other init systems cling onto to avoid “bloat”. I’ve done it, don’t miss it.

Yeah. What kind of GenAI would be so shitty to render something with so many artifacts, yet coherent enough to render 24 words that perfectly map to their direct French translation? But somehow the pictures are half jumbled to the point that the picture of a tail looks like a circle? Which is the opposite way GenAI normally jumbles things, text is always the first to become undecipherable.

The only way for this to be GenAI would be with close supervision, it’s not impossible but at that point it would have been much less effort for a much better result to edit English text onto an actual French children’s book.

Anyway who gives a shit but the superior attitude of the people here who think they are so clever pisses me off lol

On the one hand, deanonimization attacks are never entirely avoidable on unhardened targets and this one isn’t particularly sophisticated and leaks relatively little information.

On the other hand deanonimization attacks are always bad and it’s a good reminder to people of the risks they are taking. This is also slightly non-obvious behavior, even if it makes sense to the technically competent, as something like an IP grabber normally requires user interaction such as clicking a link. It’s also a vector that CF might be able to mitigate by patching the ability to query a given cache directly.

His anti-war stance such as… trying to incite a war with Iran, only failing to do so because his generals didn’t cooperate? Those same generals he now is going to get rid of because he hasn’t forgiven them for it? That anti-war stance?

The only times he’s anti-war is when it pisses off Obama and/or makes Putin happy.

1. Don’t infantilise him. He’s not attention-starved, he’s a Nazi.
2. Did everyone forget Trump already did that during his first term??? I am going absolutely insane. We know he will threaten to nuke anyone and everyone. And right now the odds aren’t looking good that he won’t actually do it. That’s my call. Nuclear war. People called me crazy in 2020 when I called Trump a fascist, and my worst predictions will be proven right again because everyone seems to be dead-set on downplaying the actions of these Nazi lunatics and acting surprised when they pull through with a Nazi promise which only emboldens them.

It can either work very well or terribly I think.

It would have been terrible in TW3. There are too many damn quests to keep track of; when you get to Novigrad you spend the first couple hours being bombarded by quest hooks, some of which are not supposed to be resolved until Geralt gains 10 more levels (for instance Hattori’s quest line). Having to turn down a quest hook or fail a quest because of time constraints would be punishing through no fault of the player and therefore bad game design. Book Geralt would ignore all the side-quests and focus on finding Ciri, but that’d make for a very different game. Also 75 % of the quest hooks where you’re supposed to meet someone “at the docks tonight” are just a narrative shortcut. In real-life you’d say “sorry I already have a nightwraith contract, can you do tomorrow night instead?”.

If the reasons why you have to turn down a quest are well integrated to the narration and the player can only fail a quest because of actual time mismanagement, then it makes sense. IMO this seems most doable in a game with a reduced scope, up to 20 hours of content, where every quest is distinct and meaningful and can be kept in mind. Which I’m very down for because I don’t have much time for 100+ hour main story games anymore.

Honestly the metro design language didn’t look particularly attractive for touch screens either. I knew someone with a Nokia Windows Phone, the interface seemed… clunky. Quirky but not in the right ways.

It has to cater to mice and fingers, and so ends up with the lowest common denominator. Can’t have information density because of the butter fingers, can’t have neat swiping gestures because of the mice and especially trackpads. So, big squares and huge buttons, repeat ad nauseum. Like a DUPLO set.

Surely the UI/UX designers and Microsoft knew this, but I guess Ballmer had his way. Meanwhile Valve didn’t have to contend with cranky executives, so they just slapped Big Picture on top of KDE and let use decide when to switch between console mode and desktop mode.

Ooooh but with Starfield they called it “Creation Engine TWO”, you see.

The least well-kept industry “secret” is that the major version number of a hidden technical component literally doesn’t matter as soon as you hear it because the marketing people will get their grubby little hands on it and force an update whenever they need to capitalize on some kind of wow effect.

“CE2” is clearly barely any better or different than skyrim or fallout’s CE; in fact as far as I can tell the script extender dropped pretty much immediately after the game’s release, which clearly indicates no major architectural change to work around. Also if Bethesda really did enough work to warrant a “version 2” why the hell are there loading screens everywhere like it’s 2008.

Skyrim 32 bit to Skyrim 64 bit was probably a much bigger generational leap than anything Bethesda has done since then.

As a developer I believe “just rewrite it from scratch” is a cardinal sin and a beginner’s mistake in 95 % of cases. Creation Engine though? They are clearly carrying around technical debt that was already very dated 15 years ago, like the constant loading screens. Now the loading screen look soooo bad it’s a complete meme yet they don’t seem capable of fixing that. At least apparently they managed to get rid of the FPS lock with Starfield? Only 20 years too late.

Don’t worry.

It won’t take a century for Florida to sink.

Any source on any significant amount of children wasting time talking to AIs, or just anecdotes and a bad case of “youth these days”?

The whole concept smells like fringe NEET 4chan-adjacent behavior. LLMs aren’t capable of maintaining an even remotely convincing simulacrum of human connection, and anyone who would project companionship onto these soulless computer programs obviously has preexisting and severe mental issues (relying on AIs to fill a void in human connection is certainly unhealthy but a symptom, not the root cause).

The potential market for these AIs will never be any bigger than the market for anime waifu body pillows, because it’s same audience, different decade. Literally everyone else thinks AI girlfriends and body pillow waifus are weird as all hell, and that’s not going to change because neurotypical people want and need human connection and can tell the difference between a rock with googly eyes and a friend.

Also arguably a rock with googly eyes has more charm and personality than Zuck’s horror show.