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These are amazing. I love the surprised face of Saturn, and the fact that the depiction of Christina from Christina's World is a little less butt-centric than the real thing.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 3:45 PM on May 14, 2024

Damn.

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posted to MetaFilter by whir at 12:04 PM on May 8, 2024

I was twice contacted by recruiters to apply for a position that was reporting to me

Triple your salary with this trick HR hates!
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 3:22 PM on May 7, 2024

I also got my start on an Apple ][+ (there were two versions, I had the cheaper one where it could only print uppercase characters, not lowercase ones). I had a magazine with code for a little game in it where you were a submarine (represented by an O) that was fighting sharks (represented by > and < characters), and then I would also write a lot of my own Choose Your Own Adventure style text games. But at some point the disk drive totally died, so I would only be able to play the games… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:36 PM on May 3, 2024

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posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:00 PM on May 3, 2024

I'll stand up for ClickHole, not to say they land every joke or that I always think what they're going for is particularly funny, but I've admired their willingness to stick by their brand of vaguely anti-comedy weirdness even after being consumed by a soulless capitalistic money-printing machine. I think they excel at creating weird little surrealist scenarios like this one. Maybe they'll be able to afford bylines now.

I'm excited about the AV Club under its new… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:20 PM on April 25, 2024

My all-time favorite ONN bit is probably 'Just Give Me The Damn Sepak Takraw Ball', which I often think of when a coworker starts getting into the minutiae of football.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:51 AM on April 26, 2024

Scott Tobias and Keith Phipps, two film critics from the AV Club's glory days and subsequently The Dissolve, have a joint substack, The Reveal. Much of it is paywalled, but reviews of current movies are generally free, and I find the writing to be generally pretty high-quality.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 7:10 PM on April 26, 2024

I'm another person who bounced off the first book, mostly because I found the writing style kind of dull and the characters poorly fleshed-out, but I also have friends who liked it a lot and have wanted to give it another shot. I guess getting the story through the series first might make me more inclined to give rereading it another go, assuming I like the story.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:14 PM on March 22, 2024

I'm wondering if the Dune civilization's emphasis on developing superhuman memory techniques post-Butlerian Jihad would slow down language change at all.

That seems like it would be a factor, and also you have the Bene Gesserit who can literally remember their ancestor's memories and so would retain knowledge of the spoken language as well, and who culturally have their claws into everything in the universe.

Chaksoba is a… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 7:50 PM on February 28, 2024

this is an exceptionally poorly-written piece

I couldn't agree more, and honestly if it didn't have the "segway" typo in it I would think it was LLM output.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:48 AM on February 28, 2024

It's too bad they weren't given more antipsychotics
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:32 AM on January 24, 2024

Maximum Rocknroll is still going strong, FWIW, and is far less doctrinaire about what types of music it covers than it was back in the days of Tim Yohannon and the print edition.

I had an intense, intense dislike of Pitchfork and its "Lester Bangs for the Starbucks set" posturing during its heyday, but I have to say I'll miss it now that it's going away. Part of the problem is that at the time there was a wealth of written music reviews,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:03 PM on January 19, 2024

The article indiexy linked is a very cogent (and infuriating) analysis of the financial resoning behind this move.

...both corporate alt rock radio and Conde Nast turn towards men as the audience that will supposedly rescue their tanking media format or vertical not because men are empirically a more reliable media audience, but because investors are more likely to buy it. The audience in question here isn’t listeners or readers, it’s INVESTORS (shareholders, VCs, etc.).

posted to MetaFilter by whir at 7:19 PM on January 19, 2024

This was fantastic, thanks. I actually just bought a copy of Lerner's latest book, The Lights, though I haven't cracked it open yet.

I think the reviewer's conclusion about the significance of the "ChatGPT" ending is wrong though.

I agree, it seems pretty obvious (to me) that Lerner is taking a dig at ChatGPT here and we aren't meant to take this section at face value. When ChatGPT (or rather,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:54 PM on January 19, 2024

Yeah, everyone should act like Cynics, that's going to turn out great
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:53 PM on December 7, 2023

Meal Plan reminds me a bit of Pub Feed by Australian band The Chats (similar food themes and musical approach).
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 7:55 AM on November 15, 2023

Jezebel's founder, Anna Holmes, has an essay in the New Yorker reflecting on the site and "the question of women's anger."
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:48 PM on November 9, 2023

I like that you can use numbers as variable names:

const const 5 = 4!
print(2 + 2 === 5)! //true

In older versions of Python, True and False were just variables, and you could reassign their values (by accident, though in fairness the language didn't make it easy to do so) and then wind up in a state where "a" == False was true.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 7:27 AM on June 8, 2023

The impossible geography of The Shining, previously. The analysis is covered in Room 237, but without much detail and sort of smooshed into the other theories (I found Room 237 to be a little disappointing in terms of actually covering its various theories in any depth, it's ultimately more of a movie about the people who came up with them and a sort of obsessive film geek culture).

I'm going to go ahead and… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:48 PM on June 6, 2023

They're suing one former chapter and subjecting them to heavy legal bills. [...] Satan would be disappointed in them.

It seems unlikely that Satan would ever be disappointed in somebody hiring lawyers.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:58 PM on May 20, 2023

I'm fond of this terrifying beer commercial as well.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:35 PM on May 4, 2023

Tim Blake Nelson is in the new one, and though he doesn't have a character name attached he seems like a good bet for Fenring.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:16 AM on May 3, 2023

My favorite bit is maybe "AI surgeon tries to repair a human hand" (in the northwest section, near the Terminator).
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 12:00 AM on April 11, 2023

if I’m wrong the few survivors will be too busy hiding from the hunter-killer drones to come back here and call me out, so there’s not a lot of downside to making an upbeat prediction

I guess we can call this "Ryvar's wager."
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 4:16 PM on March 24, 2023

It could be very efficient at fact-checking stuff in real time

I mean, some kind of AI could be good at that, yes, but I don't think an LLM, which as we have all witnessed is hilariously bad at giving correct answers, and in either case is incapable of knowing whether its answers are true or not. What's needed, in fact, is the kind of AI that the YouTubes and FaceBooks of the world have already been investing vast resources into,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 4:25 PM on March 24, 2023

I have to say that I was impressed by the enterprise-level reportage about this exotic animal story, given the clickbait that I tend to see on local news sites.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:37 AM on March 20, 2023

I was just there last summer. Besides puffins, the town is known for having been partly destroyed in a volcanic eruption in the 1970s, and for a big youth music festival that they were just setting up for during my visit, which many Icelanders I met recalled going to in their youths. I took a boat tour around the island, which was mostly amazing but the operators made the questionable decision to blast the Game of Thrones soundtrack during some dramatic moments (like, c'mon,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:01 AM on March 20, 2023

Damn. RIP, T.V., and thanks for the music.

Along with being an amazing song, "Marquee Moon" has the virtue of being 10 minutes long, which was great back when I was young malcontent in a suburban pool hall and wanted to manage to get a few minutes of good music in between shitty glam rock while I played pool with my friends. It's incredible, but honestly my favorite Television song is the more compact but just as perfect "Days" from their second album Adventure.

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posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:02 PM on January 28, 2023

Wow, Spotify must have paid some of these artists hundreds of dollars!
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:05 PM on January 13, 2023

I wish there were links to ANYTHING in this article. What the hell, Polygon, this is a website, on the actual whole-ass internet, come the fuck on.

Seriously. They don't even link to their own pretty extensive pre-release coverage of a lot of these titles.

I'm looking forward to Baldur's Gate, and I imagine Backpack Hero will be getting a release this year (but you should all totally play the Early Access version, it's… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:11 AM on January 3, 2023

no one develops games for Macs. No one ports games over

I feel your pain, having been on a Mac for most of the last 10-odd years and being a person who enjoys games. The thing is, it's only going to get worse in the future. Apple made a deliberate choice that led to this situation by pushing their Metal API in place of Vulkan. Whatever technical merits Metal might have, the only existing games that used it were iPad / iPhone games, and the obvious… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:08 AM on January 3, 2023

burst my balloon by letting me know they were generated imagery

I had kind of the same reaction by the end, despite thinking this was a fascinating essay. The first few sets of images (the ones with attribution) do seem to be genuine, but I found the way the author transitioned to using AI-generated images (the later ones, without attribution) and then talked about actual(?) artists whose described styles matched the generated images to be kind of… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:48 PM on December 15, 2022

(Still, I thought this was super interesting, thanks for sharing it Kattullus! This is exactly the kind of thing I hope to find on Metafilter.)
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:49 PM on December 15, 2022

Ok, well I found the salty essay where Varnelis cops to all of this being AI-generated (and also spent some time googling the sources in the attributions he initially uses, like the Germantown College Archives, which are obviously, in retrospect, fictional).

the above essays are better than what 95% of graduate students are capable of doing in an afternoon or, usually, a weekend. This should not be surprising as, while ChatGPT is incapable of original thought, so are 95%… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:59 PM on December 16, 2022

I am not the sort of person to think that end of human culture is nigh because some complex statistical models are getting better, but having played with ChatGPT for a while I do find some aspects of it a little worrying. It seems to excel at producing reasonable, well-worded non-answers, which are written in an educated style but mostly just contain a series of prolix equivocations. It's like a stonewalling machine, a sea-lion-o-matic, and I could easily see it being of great use for, say, a… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:18 PM on December 7, 2022

"I apologize if my response did not meet your expectations. As a large language model trained by OpenAI, I do not have the ability to attend open mic events or workshop my writing."
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:42 PM on December 7, 2022

This is an interesting reboot of JG Ballard's High-Rise but I think I prefer the original.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:34 PM on November 20, 2022

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posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:29 PM on November 20, 2022

O'Neil was discussed previously in 2010, but sadly the long interview linked in that post has fallen to bitrot.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:32 AM on November 11, 2022

Oh, good idea, thanks Artw. I found the interview in the wayback machine: parts one, two, three, four, five.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:53 AM on November 11, 2022

I liked this zinger from the article: Hire BETTER engineers! If a car can drive itself, surely a computer can understand fair use!
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:47 PM on November 3, 2022

Can we get Musk to purchase Facebook next?
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:05 PM on November 6, 2022

Damn, this one hurts. Low has been a life-long favorite for me, and Mimi Parker was so essential to them, and they all seemed like such decent, kind human beings. I had tickets to see them in Big Sur this October, but the show was canceled. I feel lucky to have seen them as many times as I did.

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posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:58 AM on November 6, 2022

I do miss this era of Onion video shorts, which includes such classics as 'Just Give Me The Damn Sepak Takraw Ball' and Are We Giving Robots Too Much Power?. The newer TikTok parodies and such don't pack the same zing for me, and I'm not sure what's up with that movie review stuff but it doesn't seem super funny.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:20 PM on October 18, 2022

It doesn't look like anything to me.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 3:33 PM on September 19, 2022

Yeah, this seems like a really bad idea to me, one that will definitely not serve to change anyone's minds, and the emissions from the inevitable tow truck that will show up and idle in the street while they reinflate the tires will more than offset any time the SUV is unable to drive.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:03 AM on September 8, 2022

I had a good experience with buying a car online from Carvana. It did involve doing a ton of research first to figure out exactly what make and model we wanted, then figure out the manufacturing years we were looking for and what the trim options were, but then it was mostly just watching the site to see if a car that fit came up. Once it did we reserved it and then scrambled a bit to finalize the insurance and financing with our credit union. They drove the car up from Florida to our apartment… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:31 AM on September 1, 2022

(I'll add that this was in the before times, right at the beginning of the pandemic, and spitbull's comment makes sense of me in terms of the relative value of buying a new car at the moment. We got a two year old model of a relatively expensive car and saved roughly 12K over what it would cost new, but I'm not sure that we could find that kind of deal today.)
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:40 AM on September 1, 2022

I think the bigger accomplishment here is that the the AI was able to generate a whole "Jason Allen" persona and fool a bunch of meatbags, including a Vice reporter, into thinking that a human being was behind the submission.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:57 PM on August 31, 2022