azertyfun

joined 2 years ago
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[–] azertyfun 6 points 1 day ago (3 children)
  • Eventually Company decides "agile will fix things"
  • Developers are told to work agile but the only stakeholder they talk to is the PO, who talks to PM, who talks to Sales, who talks to Customers
  • PM&Sales don't want to deliver an unfinished/unpolished product so they give a review every sprint, by themselves, based on what they think the customer wants (they are Very Clever)
  • A year or two later the project is delivered and the customer is predictably unhappy.
  • Management says "how could this have happened!" and does it all over again.
[–] azertyfun 2 points 3 days ago

And defaulting to mixed-use zoning in residential neighborhoods to lower the demand for such parking lots in front of corner stores? Right anakin? And surely you'll be outlawing concrete slab driveways in favor of semipermeable parking surfaces? Right Anakin??

Narrator: "flood protection" was in fact yet another transparent excuse to keep building the most soulless and uniform shit imaginable in the name of racism and classism.

[–] azertyfun 13 points 3 days ago

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:

A lady and a man meeting and kissing on a public bench, then turns into the man VERY gruesomely and graphically eating her and saying "Hmmm, I really have to learn to control my appetite..."

Businessmen proudly and literally walking over a line of downtrodden people, suitcase in hand

Depiction of awful factoring farming with a cheerful businessman

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.

[–] azertyfun 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] azertyfun 57 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

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?

[–] azertyfun 33 points 3 days ago (5 children)

Screenshot from Cobblemon

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.

[–] azertyfun 7 points 5 days ago

It was with Biden, in 2021. He truly went dark Brandon on that one, Macron and the entire French government learned about it through the news.

Though the Australians did stiff themselves spectacularly. They will have to pay billions to the French with nothing to show for it, then billions more to the Americans for nuclear submarines which they could have gotten from the French if they hadn't told them to design a diesel submarine based on their own nuclear design!! Except now Australia is tied to American nuclear fuel and maintenance, further vassalizing themselves. 5000 IQ move.

Plus now the project is in the hands of Trump and his fox news host of a defense minister so uh good luck with that. By the 2040s I project they'll have been officially integrated in the Russian chain of command and the submarines will be delivered to Australia in the form of perfect replicas of the Moskva.

[–] azertyfun 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

You're thinking about it in-universe. But Batman wasn't revealed to the world through an act of God. His nature, his limitations, his friends and enemies, his entire city were all constructed to enable the fundamental narrative of a billionaire in a suit indulging in violent vigilante power fantasies.

Of course you're right that within that particular framework "giving away all his money" doesn't make narrative sense. That's the frustrating part; not that a character is arguably acting "irrationally" (that happens all the time), but that the stated reasons for their irrationality are convoluted and clearly backtracked from "well without it the story doesn't work".

The end result is that Batman is basically John Wick but depicted as a hero which I've always personally found very gross. This criticism is applicable to most superheroes but the dissonance is especially strong with Batman.

[–] azertyfun 1 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] azertyfun 8 points 1 week ago

Ryan Gosling as Ken, semi-shirtless

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?

[–] azertyfun 11 points 1 week ago (5 children)

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.

[–] azertyfun 1 points 1 week ago

I've mostly got experience with Battlefield in that genre but if you're getting repeatedly killed by "campers" you're playing the game wrong, aka aiming for KDR instead of PTFO.

Believe it or not devs are aware of the mechanical advantages of long-range weapons, so in-game objectives are intentionally littered with crates and boxes and walls to provide cover from "camping spots". The ones getting repeatedly killed are noobs who keep walking around the objective, in the open, because they are scared of all the cover positions which might hide an enemy.

Well too fucking bad sugarlips, stop being a little bitch and rush in. Better to die clearing out the cover spots for your teammates to capture the objective than to a useless game of skeet that doesn't generate any benefit for either team. I don't care that you have a KDR of 1.2 and "you would have gotten more if it wasn't for the campers", you captured exactly zero flags and so as far as I'm concerned you're dead weight.

... Wow sorry about that, I guess I got post-traumatic gamer rage on this topic lol

 

Hi!

Kagi had a rough couple months on the PR side, and a comment from another Lemmy user arguing that they aren't using Google's index set me off... because I had just read a couple weeks ago on their own websites that they primarily use Google's search index.

Lo and behold, that user was "right": No mention of Google whatsoever on Kagi's Search Sources page. If that's all you had to go off of, you'd be excused for thinking they are only using their internal index to power their web search since that's what they now strongly imply. The only "reference" to external indexes is this nebulous sentence:

Our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information [...]

... Unless one goes to check that pesky Wayback Machine. Here is the same page from March 2024, which I will copy/paste here for posterity:

Search Sources

You can think of Kagi as a "search client," working like an email client that connects to various indexes and sources, including ours, to find relevant results and package them into a superior, secure, and privacy-respecting search experience, all happening automatically and in a split-second for you.

External

Our data includes anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek and Brave, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information like Wolfram Alpha, Apple, Wikipedia, Open Meteo, Yelp, TripAdvisor and other APIs. Typically every search query on Kagi will call a number of different sources at the same time, all with the purpose of bringing the best possible search results to the user.

For example, when you search for images in Kagi, we use 7 different sources of information (including non-typical sources such as Flickr and Wikipedia Commons), trying to surface the very best image results for your query. The same is also the case for Kagi's Video/News/Podcasts results.

Internal

But most importantly, we are known for our unique results, coming from our web index (internal name - Teclis) and news index (internal name - TinyGem). Kagi's indexes provide unique results that help you discover non-commercial websites and "small web" discussions surrounding a particular topic. Kagi's Teclis and TinyGem indexes are both available as an API.

We do not stop there and we are always trying new things to surface relevant, high-quality results. For example, we recently launched the Kagi Small Web initiative which platforms content from personal blogs and discussions around the web. Discovering high quality content written without the motive of financial gain, gives Kagi's search results a unique flavor and makes it feel more humane to use.


Of course, running an index is crazy expensive. By their own admission, Teclis is narrowly focused on "non-commercial websites and 'small web' discussions". Mojeek indexes nowhere near enough things to meaningfully compete with Google, and Yandex specializes in the Russosphere. Bing (Google's only meaningful direct indexing competitor) is not named so I assume they don't use it. So it's not a leap to say that Google powers most of English-speaking web searches, just like Bing powers almost all search alternatives such as DDG.

I don't personally mind that they use Google as an index (it makes the most sense and it's still the highest-quality one out there IMO, and Kagi can't compete with Google's sheer capital on the indexing front). But I do mind a lot that they aren't being transparent about it anymore. This is very shady and misleading, which is a shame because Kagi otherwise provides a valuable and higher quality service than Google's free search does.

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