MetaFilter

It's a valid design decision to have NPCs lie, or not know what they're talking about. Dragon Quest XI has a preference setting that lets NPCs do just that. And it makes sense that the people in the villages might not even have a clue what's happening in the game world. Why would they know the evil wizard's evil plans for evil?

But that's a design choice. That's different from what "AIs" do. What an AI says has a null truth value: it just bullshits. NPCs… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 7:58 PM on May 18, 2024

As the ringleader of MST Club and watcher of every episode of MST3K at least three times, the jokes on Roger Corman, of course, lie thick on the ground there, despite the fact that they did fewer Roger Corman movies than you'd think, Bert I Gordon, who also recently left us did more MiSTed films.

Yet despite the jokes, it's obvious that the makers of the show have an affection for his work. The failed crowdfunding campaign for Season 14 would have seen… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 12:08 AM on May 12, 2024

Tonight at MST Club we showed three MST3K episodes with movies directed by Roger Corman, not produced by him, and all of them made in 1956. We watched SWAMP DIAMONDS, IT CONQUERED THE WORLD (with MST Club favorites Lee Van Cleef and Peter Graves) and GUNSLINGER. Beverly Garland was in both Swamp Diamonds and Gunslinger.

It's true, Corman sometimes caught flak from the stranded astronaut and his automated mocking devices, but ultimately I think the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 11:40 PM on May 16, 2024

Like humbug I've stuck with Mastodon and the wider Fediverse, even as the general buzz around it has died down (tech still adores it and that's what I mostly follow), but I've already spilled a whole lot of words on that subject so I'll just leave a reminder that mefi.social is still active, and as far as I know you can still MeMail Pronoiac for an invitation. I think it'd be great if Bluesky does as they've promised and opened their system to the Fediverse, but I also fear that this will be… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 10:53 AM on May 13, 2024

Yes, moderation on Mastodon is messy and fraught, but there is a sense that it's because moderation itself is messy and fraught. If moderation seems easy, it's probably because its being done badly.

The more I become familiar with and use the Fediverse, the more I'm convinced that it may represent a solution to many of the internet's current corporate ills. It tells us that the solution to the problem of providing a service without a big rich company backing it, and all… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 10:17 AM on May 16, 2024

martin q blank: Just have faith!
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 10:00 AM on May 16, 2024

The vacuum it leaves is going to be hard to fill.

Time until someone mentions Kagi: three... two... one... wait, damn, I was the one who mentioned it!

I think what might possibly help is self-hosted search? People have been doing web search for decades now, and helpful packages like BeautifulSoup exist. Imagine having a spare desktop machine spidering the web based off of a list of links you provided while… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 12:52 PM on April 23, 2024

I think I just discovered the plot of Hypnospace Outlaw 2!
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 1:07 PM on April 23, 2024

Artw: Everyone having an index of the entire web sounds a bit impractical, TBH.

Assuming this is replying to my suggestion about self-hosted search, that is generally true, but it needn't be the whole web. If you're seeding it from a list of pages of interest, you might be able to find a useful subset of the web, especially if some basic heuristic is applied to remove junksites. Just because Google feels like it needs to index ten thousand SEO sites doesn't mean we have to.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 9:21 PM on April 23, 2024

It kind of does. SEO sites are intentionally as difficult as possible for computers to distinguish from real sites.

This is a response to my comment above about self-hosted search, so I'll reply to it.

At the relatively small scale of search that I'm talking about, which is more about finding independent sites and blogs with interesting writing and voices than answering general knowledge questions or searching for info that's… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 2:51 PM on April 24, 2024

emptythought, the one bright point about all of this is that, for a long while, Google's benevolent stewardship made it seem like it might be possible to have a corporation that did mostly good things. Google made a strong case that techno-utopianism was not only possible, but viable.

It's been at least 14 years in coming (since the demise of Google Reader [puts a dollar in the Reader Lament Jar]), but it's now evident it's all fallen apart. And if freaking… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 8:51 PM on April 29, 2024

Oh god, read Artw's link. It's hideous what they're doing.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 5:06 PM on May 8, 2024

Ah, ArtW's link just got posted as a FPP.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 5:26 PM on May 9, 2024

Through Google, at least.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 10:30 PM on May 14, 2024

wym, I suspect it's similar to Windows.

1. Install Go from https://go.dev/
2. Download the source code from https://github.com/crgimenes/neko/archive/refs/heads/master.zip, unzip it and open the folder in the Terminal
3. Assuming Go got put on the path okay, the command line is go build main.go.
4. An executable should end in that folder. I don't know what form that'll take on a Mac, on Windows it'll be Main.exe.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 8:25 PM on May 14, 2024

I love that you're becoming so much of a connoisseur of the form to try to surface the videos that are less annoying, because frog knows there are some overly-cloying animal videos out there.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 10:51 AM on May 12, 2024

Right now, I'm having to deal with it having decided that I really really really like various covers of the Ween song Ocean Man. I didn't know there were so many! I'm not watching any of them! But it keeps insisting I must want one!

That's Youtube's algorithm, which is supposed to be magically capable of determining exactly what you like, but actually just takes whatever you've seen most recently and assumes you must want more of it.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 8:35 PM on May 12, 2024

Ah, based on forbiddencabinet's suggestion, I just now deleted my Youtube history. I turned it back on to see what kinds of suggestions I'd get after watching a couple of videos... and they pretty much matched the ones I had been getting before! Evidently their suggestions aren't just based on history, but some other form of profiling.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 12:56 PM on May 13, 2024

It upsets me that despite Elon seemingly doing everything he can to ruin Twitter (not calling it 'X'), a lot of people are still there, including many voices that should know better. Mastodon and Bluesky exist, you don't have to stay on the platform with the Musky odor.

I guess it just goes to show how fundamentally uninterested in changing sites many people are. Folks just want to learn one thing and never deviate from it. It's yet another argument against letting any… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 11:00 AM on May 12, 2024

I saw some of these and I was amused but I thought posting them to MetaFilter would lead to an argument.

Yep, you were right about there being an argument. I think it's an important argument though, and that fact doesn't reflect badly on the one who posts it. Some arguments are good to have.

I'm torn. I feel like these kinds of projects are made to serve as a trojan horse, to try to get the wider internet to accept all the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 7:45 AM on May 11, 2024

But aren't we on the verge of true text-to-video tools being opened up to the public? OpenAI has Sora, which is supposed to generate up to a minute of video, Google has announced Imagen, and Microsoft announced VASA-1.
Seems like it's a matter of time till we've got much more impressive AI video coming to regular users.

Maybe. When I see it, actually, not faked, and working for general cases, I will believe it, but not until then. I have… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 4:19 PM on May 11, 2024

To think I'd find a use for all that experimenting I did with the Commodore 64's sound chip back decades ago. I can tell a triangle and sawtooth wave apart by ear!
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 2:45 PM on May 11, 2024

I think the reaction comes because the arts are under particular attack right now, from multiple angles, but especially from generative "AI" companies seeking to destroy entire professions. From someone seeing their livelihood under that kind of technological threat, seeing a computer company gleefully destroying a huge pile of creative implements can seem like a personal assault, especially when those people are a market that Apple has long courted.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 10:54 AM on May 9, 2024

And you know what else, there's a fuck of a lot more "old pensioners" than there are "car mechanics", both literally and figuratively.

This is a derail, but.... Yes, but the old pensioners can get the car mechanics to help them with their stuff, or pay them to do it for a hell of a lot less than a new device costs. If the devices are locked down so you need a hot glue gun to open them*, or replacement parts won't operate unless… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 10:18 AM on May 10, 2024

(I'll admit, I'm the kind of person who watches Youtube videos where people take old computers apart and get them working again.)
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 10:20 AM on May 10, 2024

The raw hatred towards Apple has always been weird. It continues to be weird. And some of the comments here demonstrate why it's weird

There are people who are annoyed at Steve Jobs' lionization (like me! I'm annoyed by it). But in this case, it's probably because any company that gets to Apple's size is due a truckload of criticism, because its cultural attack surface is so vast. In a sense Apple is damned if it… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 8:02 AM on May 11, 2024

To EmpressCallipyos, I do see that, but I feel like I keep saying, to the point of annoying repetition, that it's still important for other people to be able to look inside their machines, and it's important for them in a way that indirectly helps even the people who could care less how it all operates. The ultimate benefits are great, even for those who won't ever care about jailbreaking their devices.

I'm sorry if it seems I'm piling on or that I'm particularly… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 2:41 PM on May 11, 2024

CW: Scaramucci
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 1:11 PM on May 10, 2024

I'm sorry, but what do you mean? Is Scott Adams involved with this?
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 5:23 PM on May 9, 2024

It's okay windowpaene, it's not the first time I failed to see sarcasm yay
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 6:36 PM on May 9, 2024

Yes, you can still do what you always could do, pay for a webstead somewhere, or else maybe make a small free site on a tilde or Neocities or some similar place. But will anyone read what you've written? How will they even find it?

The biggest difficulty with the internet has always been discovery. In a sense, it's why we're all here on Metafilter: we have things we've found that we want to share, and it's a convenient place both to tell people about… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 11:36 PM on May 7, 2024

I think a lot of the disdain BASIC has gotten over time is undeserved, the result of a cadre of Respected Developers trying to maintain their profession as a kind of mysterious priesthood.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with BASIC. Sure, indiscriminate use of GOTO produces hard to read code, but that's a style problem. Sometimes you just have to code an indefinite loop, and there's no real difference between doing it with GOTO or while(true).… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 1:31 PM on May 3, 2024

When people talk about BASIC lacking power, that's more the implementation than anything else. BASIC can be a compiled language just like anything else is. Its time may be past, but Python has picked up its torch admirably.

Microsoft's first product was a dialect of BASIC written by Bill Gates himself, for early kit computers. Even when Windows was on the rise they'd license it to companies who needed a pack-in language for microcomputers. QBASIC is possibly the final… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 9:58 PM on May 3, 2024

Long long long ago, in a chat room on the Compuserve Commodore 64 forum, I got to interview Jim Butterfield for the disk magazine LOADSTAR. I don't remember if it ever got published though. I barely knew who he was at the time. I really wish I could have asked him better questions, and that I had a copy of the transcript.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 6:12 PM on May 4, 2024

That's why all the cool kids used a version of BASIC that had a 'renum' command.

I spend my teenage years programming on a Commodore 64, instead of having a social life, or having fun, like normal kids, and I had no choice but to use Commodore BASIC 2.0, a.k.a. Microsoft BASIC: Abysmal Edition(TM).

It didn't have a renum command. In fact, it had no graphics or sound support AT ALL, a huge lack for a machine that was promoted… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 11:49 AM on May 5, 2024

That is interesting, because taking Pascal in college was the last time I feel like I really enjoyed programming. Not saying it's for everyone, or for you. I just kind of like Pascal.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 4:12 PM on May 7, 2024

"Survivor's Log, Day 1. No one knows what made them angry, what set them off. Instantly, every vehicle on the planet turned itself into a flesh-smashing missile. They shouldn't have nearly enough kinetic energy in their gas tanks for this, a violation of thermodynamics worthy of study if anyone could get close enough to one of these death machines to investigate. I saw a police officer try to pull one over and get bounced around like a pinball. I'm amazed the buildings are still standing.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 10:37 AM on May 6, 2024

This is great.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 2:17 PM on May 5, 2024

Is today Kermit day? I'm fine with it being Kermit day!
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 4:25 PM on May 2, 2024

What did the Muppets ever do to justify their sainted name being used to describe right-wing shills and trolls?
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 7:31 AM on May 3, 2024

I feel like we should make a list of all of these indie media projects that are funded through donations. I can name off the top of my head this one, of course, and: 404 Media, Defector, Aftermath and Second Wind.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 1:34 PM on May 1, 2024

Looking forward to future posts wherein MeFites will post workaround links to his Patreon videos and avoid paying him! That's how it works around here, isn't it?

I don't think so, no. I'm not one to speak for everyone, but I think you've misjudged the standard aggregate Metafilter opinion towards this sort of thing.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 1:37 PM on May 1, 2024

Yeah, subscriptions is a better word. My using "donations" was largely misspeaking (mistyping). An error.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 9:15 AM on May 2, 2024

(shhh... spoilers!)

Well it's been a while since the release now.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 3:13 AM on May 2, 2024

If this guy had spent half the effort he put into robberies and living in secret rooms into working a job and renting an apartment, he could have had the regular life he seemed to crave.

Maybe? I myself have never had what I'd call a real job. To some people, for whatever reason, traditional employment does not come easily.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 4:05 PM on April 30, 2024

It's surprising to me to hear that it was Steven Spielberg who pushed to make Freakazoid more zany. That was the time of the ascendance of Batman: The Animated Series, where grim serious superheroes were the rage. A more realistic take on Freakazoid might have been entertaining, sure, but would it be regarded so reverentially? I'm not sure at all.

A few years ago, Cartoon Network parasite series Teen Titans Go* did a crossover with Freakazoid, which was nice to see. It… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 9:53 AM on April 29, 2024

I discovered that creator tomosteen has many more stop-motion videos on his Youtube channel that don't involve Mr Bone, but that do have cooking with Lego, and dice. They're all pretty great!
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 5:37 AM on April 23, 2024

May I present the horror of Make Chocolate From Marbles.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 8:36 PM on April 26, 2024

Amazing how Lefties have developed such a taste for war.

I'm the fourth fifth person chiming in on this clueless statement now. But wow. You don't even have your political axis right. Left/right is not inherently pro/anti war. The left worldwide has been responsible for plenty of wars.

Wars tend to have two parties, but only one is at fault, and in this case that party is not Ukraine.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 1:04 PM on April 23, 2024

I am going to take this opportunity to express a minor pet peeve of mine, the thoughtless hyperbole that is saying "no one" does, or is, something, when the fact is that relatively few people do/are it. In this case "no one" obscures the fact that millions of books are sold, just not by many authors.

It is true that it's rhetorically appropriate, and by saying this I don't mean anything against dis_integration. It… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 5:29 AM on April 23, 2024