vaguerant

Return all the Alarmos to the sea from whence they came.

Even calling Trump’s election fraud claims “unproven” is lending them far too much weight. “Unsupported” is probably the most charitable way to describe them.

It makes sense when you realize they take “women’s health” to mean literally one thing only: access to abortions.

Things are looking up then, perhaps Kuhn will head straight to prison.

I get the argument, but email is also very different to the kind of open-web network that the fediverse resides in. There are problems the fediverse faces which email doesn’t like discoverability. The emails either come to you or they don’t. With federated social media, you have to find the content you’re looking for first. Maybe you use a search engine, or somebody gives you a business card with their handle and instance, whatever. Then you have to figure out how to view those posts from your home instance if you want to actually interact in any way. There’s browser extensions and stuff which try to make this easier, but that’s another thing that has to be explained and set up, plus not everyone is visiting from a web browser with extension support, or a web browser at all for that matter.

It’s not fundamentally impossible to understand the fediverse, but there’s more of a barrier than email, which can be explained in a single sentence like “Your email provider gives you a unique address that anybody else can send emails to and vice versa.” I don’t think convincing ourselves that the fediverse is actually very simple is going to convince people outside the bubble that that’s true.

Rotschy, which routinely hired teenage workers amid recent labor shortages, violated the law when supervisors assigned tasks known to be dangerous and prohibited for minors to perform.

L&I later issued significant fines against Rotschy for the incident, but has for years approved special “variances” for the company to hire minors despite its history of serious safety violations.

For their part, Derrik and his parents say they do not hold Rotschy responsible. It was a fluke, an unlucky break — not the company being neglectful, they said.

“I don’t think Rotschy failed my son in any way,” Derrik’s dad said. “All these events culminated into this accident.”

I hope they were paid very, very handsomely to say that.

This is a bit of an oversimplification. Generally, they would use the laughter from the actual audience in attendance. The stands were mic’d but the nature of filming anything is that it will often take multiple takes. Ideally, you get a perfect performance and response on the first take, but that’s not reality. Maybe you got a great laugh, but Jerry clinked a glass loudly over Jason’s line. So they cut and reset, Jerry does the joke again and there’s no mistakes, but the audience response is more muted because they just heard that joke.

The solution here is pretty obvious: grab the laugh from the first take and dub that over the performance from the second take. Technically, you’re misleading the audience at home because that laughter came from a different take, but it would also be misleading to show the home audience the tenth take and you hear the audience murmur awkwardly as if they hated it, when that’s just the response you’ll get from an audience ten takes deep into hearing the same joke.

There’s even the reverse case, where maybe some audience audio just isn’t usable. Nobody notices it on the day, but there was one take you got perfectly the first time, but in editing you hear some guy sneezing loudly while the rest of the crowd is giggling. You could just lose that scene or mute the audience for it, or crossfade into some similar audio you got from the previous scene, or whatever. Other times, your actors might continue a scene but the audience laughs over the next couple of lines, so you fade the crowd. In this way, the audience response is only as fake as the show itself is. Maybe Julia gave a funnier line read in take 3 but Jason hit a run on take 5, so you edit those together, making the best of the stuff you got on the day. Sometimes it was necessary to do the same for the laughs.

It was always preferable to get the real audience response to the actual current take, because if Michael does some physical bit to play off the crowd, you should hear them respond at the appropriate time, even in the middle of a longer laugh. But sometimes the pure documentary fact of what happened in the take that made it to air just isn’t the best version of the show. Ultimately, it’s not a scheme to trick people into thinking the audience responded differently. If anything, a joke that the audience didn’t respond to would get changed on-set rather than fixed in editing. You’d huddle with the writers and go “They don’t like this, what else have you got?” Then you’d feed your actors the new lines and see if they got a better reaction.

tl;dr: Crowd sound in any sitcom that is filmed before a live studio audience is mostly genuine.

For a post-script, even pre-taped outdoor scenes and stuff would be shown to the audience on large monitors so that a) they could follow the story and b) so their reactions could be recorded in the same session, with the same crowd, including the same guy with the staccato laugh so everything sounds consistent across the entire episode.

Sorry this is so long.

Somebody has fed you or you have invented bad information. Neither Yuzu nor Ryujinx, the two Switch emulators which recently ceased development due to intervention from Nintendo, included Nintendo’s code. The Yuzu settlement required those developers to acknowledge that

because our projects can circumvent Nintendo’s technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to extensive piracy.

There was never any mention of them stealing Nintendo code.

Ryujinx, we know even less about, because the agreement went down privately, but there’s literally zero indication of any stolen code. We know that Nintendo contacted the developer proposing that they cease offering Ryujinx and they did.

Obviously, Nintendo was bothered in both of these cases because the emulators do facilitate piracy, but that’s not the same as them having infringed on Nintendo’s copyright by using their code which you are claiming. Both of these emulators were developed open-source; if they were built using stolen Nintendo code there would be receipts all over the place. That was never the problem.

I’m not going to check the whole archive, but going back to at least 2005, Nintendo was asking users to …

report ROM sites, emulators, Game Copiers, Counterfeit manufacturing, or other illegal activities

https://web.archive.org/web/20051124194318/http://www.nintendo.com/corp/faqs/legal.html

Here’s some more quotes from the same page where Nintendo is viciously anti-emulation:

The introduction of video game emulators represents the greatest threat to date to the intellectual property rights of video game developers. As is the case with any business or industry, when its products become available for free, the revenue stream supporting that industry is threatened. Such emulators have the potential to significantly damage a worldwide entertainment software industry which generates over $15 billion annually, and tens of thousands of jobs.

Distribution of a Nintendo emulator trades off of Nintendo’s goodwill and the millions of dollars invested in research & development and marketing by Nintendo and its licensees. Substantial damages are caused to Nintendo and its licensees. It is irrelevant whether or not someone profits from the distribution of an emulator. The emulator promotes the play of illegal ROMs , NOT authentic games. Thus, not only does it not lead to more sales, it has the opposite effect and purpose.

Personal Websites and/or Internet Content Providers sites That link to Nintendo ROMs, Nintendo emulators and/or illegal copying devices can be held liable for copyright and trademark violations, regardless of whether the illegal software and/or devices are on their site or whether they are linking to the sites where the illegal items are found.

I’d say it started on at least Nintendo 64. The original Japan-only Animal Crossing game for N64 had playable, emulated Famicom (NES) games. Nintendo even ran a special offer to get an N64 Controller Pak with Ice Climber pre-loaded which you could plug into your controller like a game cartridge and play inside Animal Crossing.

I do wonder whether the algorithm understands sarcasm. A while back, I watched a video about some movie bombing, something objectively bad like Morbius, and they joked that the movie wasn’t actually failing for all of the obvious reasons, but because it was “too woke”. They didn’t really believe that, they were just making fun of people who say that about movies. Still, for the next couple of weeks I had to keep marking channels as “Don’t recommend” because they were all unironic right-wing rage-bait about the woke agenda. I don’t know for certain that that’s why I suddenly got all those recommendations, but that was my best guess.

Yeah, this is pretty standard. Between the low production numbers and the fact that assembly is probably occurring in a country with stronger labor laws than wherever mass-producted hardware is made (mostly China), it’s going to cost more than something you can pick up on Amazon or AliExpress.

There have been a few cases where open-source hardware like this has enough demand to get picked up by a Chinese manufacturer who makes a cheaper version through some combo of unethical labor practices, production scale, employing cheaper or cloned parts and/or dropping features, so it’s not out of the question that a cheaper version comes along, as long as you don’t mind the compromises to get it.

US$249.99 ready-built, for anybody curious. Not saying it’s not worth that, but that will price a lot of people out of it.

This makes me wonder if there are any exceptions, things that brains didn’t name. Onomatopoeia seem like a good starting place (and maybe ending place). Did we name cats’ meows meows or just hear them and go “OK, that’s what that is then”? Cat brains didn’t name them that either, they weren’t thinking what they should call the sound they make, they just made it.

As far as things which name themselves, I can’t think of anything else but sounds.

On first reading I breezed right past that, going “Sure, they’re telling me the weights of the bears.”

Look, I absolutely hate to do the reading comprehension thing but you’ve misread both the article and my comment on it. The reporter who performed the rescue was Fox’s Bob Van Dillen. The person quoted, however, is Subramaniam Vincent, director of journalism and media ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. The writer of this AP article quoted Vincent who recounted the situation. The writer also added some additional context to Vincent’s remarks which serve to explain the concept of rescuing a person who is crying out for help.

So … sorry … no. I’m not asking that.

I dunno, it seems pretty safe to me. I’ve ridden the same carbon fiber bicycle for years and it has never imploded.

This article is weird. For one thing, the last sentence quoted is just confusing:

Van Dillen is then seen wading through the water with the woman on her back, carrying her to safety.

Who’s the “her” in that sentence? Anyway, the really confusing part is that they then consulted with an expert on journalistic ethics:

It’s clear that while he had a professional obligation to report the news, “there’s also someone whose potential life is at risk,” Vincent said. “So I think the call he made is a human call.”

Considering the rising waters and the woman’s cries for help, along with not knowing when help would arrive, “it’s a straightforward case of jumping in — a fellow citizen actually helping another,” Vincent said.

Why is the writer explaining this basic concept like I’m an alien? Sometimes, people stop doing their job for a few moments to save somebody’s life even though that’s not what their job entails. That’s interesting. Are the humans then punished for their dereliction of duty?