I wish I had the source on hand, but you’ll just have to trust my word - after all, 47% of the time, it’s right 100% of the time!

Joking aside, I do wish I had the link to the study as it was cited in an article from earlier this year about AI making stuff up even when it cited sources (literally lying about what was in the sources it claimed it got the info from) and how the companies behind these AI collectively shrugged their shoulders and said “there’s nothing we can do about it” when asked what they intend to do about these “hallucinations,” as they call them.

Don’t feel bad. The part that sucks is that we have to even check nowadays whether or not our memes were ethically sourced.

I totally get that, I tried to make art a job and stopped drawing for a decade because of it. But we fall back into the issue of supporting corporate abuse for convenience when there’s plenty of other images of anime girls out there. AI art has the same issues as sweatshop labor but is much easier to avoid.

Plenty of images of anime girls online to make memes out of without supporting corporate abuse.

Also, talent is simply applied skill. The only thing keeping you from drawing like that is time and effort.

The green thing could be part of a stylized plant, but the most damning thing to me is that left eye where the reflective part of the iris is in the border around her eye.

Especially since the stats saying that they’re wrong about 53% of the time are right there.

The only way these “play to earn” games can work is as a pyramid scheme. Everybody wants more money out of the pot than they’re putting in, and the company sure as hell isn’t going to run at a loss. Many of them seem to only deal with currency through their own exchange (for fiat currency directly) or through markets backed by coins that are also backed by fiat currency, like bitcoin, for exactly the reasons that you laid out. Can’t make money if everybody is buying your funny money with other funny money that lost 99% of its value 3 months after it appeared.

The only other way somebody could make this work is if the players are the product, but at that point, why wouldn’t you just sell ad space on a website.

You’re right, that’s the more accurate definition. A state of change, moving from one state of being to a new one.

I think trans still works fine in this context because gender is a cultural label designated to you entirely based on what the doctor thought at the time of your birth and what society assumes from things like secondary sex characteristics and behavior, and the cis label was retroactively applied to describe “anybody who isn’t trans” after the trans label had been in use for decades. So there’s nothing really scientific behind the label beyond the concept of that state of change. Gender itself is a cultural concept instead of a state of being too (as well as a performance that we do every moment of our lives) and so falls more into an active event than a passive state.

I agree, but I think this usually comes from a place of Bugs Bunny being many trans women’s first introduction to something outside the gender norm, and so they project that back onto the character.

That, or they’re t4t and Bugs dressing up made them feel funny as kids in the same way that Robinhood from that one Disney movie did with furries.

Cis and trans are Latin prefixes and opposites of each other - cis basically translating out to “same” and trans being “different.” To be cis means to be the same gender that the doctor assigned you when you were born, while trans people transition to a gender different from their assigned gender. So you can’t be on a spectrum of more trans or less trans because you’re transitioning to x, y, or z.

There are spectrums that people choose from, though, if you want to get into some of the finer details. Some people use the prefix demi, meaning “partially” (like in demigod), to signify a gender that they most closely relate to but don’t feel properly identifies them. Like somebody who is a demigirl most closely relates to being a woman, but doesn’t feel like womanhood fits them. This is why the umbrella term non-binary exists, for people who feel like they fall somewhere outside the traditional designated roles of “man” or “woman” and more closely relate to a secret, third thing.

I think the first stat in the graph is the most important one and really speaks to the reason for the last one. I said this is another post about this article, but video games have become their own kind of third space. Going out with friends has become so expensive, whether you’re going to a movie or something else, and in a lot of places you can’t go to hang out without having to spend money anyways, so video games have become a replacement way to hang out with friends. And that’s before you start talking about stuff like friends who moved across the country for work or something.

nice shoe laces

Any interest in anything CAD related? Generally it’s engineering/mechanical focused, but I imagine IT knowledge would be very useful (I know Gcode is useful for 3d printing, at least).

Me, making a donut: “Honey? Where’d you put my UV unwrapper?”

I found a couple of interesting graphs:

I dont really like how this first one divided their different groups (there’s probably a fairly major difference between the lower end of “middle class” and the top which brings up their percentage) and the way percentages work really skews the scale, but it does paint a similar picture. This second one is the more interesting, I think, because it shows that income inequality is pretty similar across many countries - before taxes. Taxes seem to be the big equalizer in other countries, with France going from slightly worse than the US before taxes to roughly two times closer to “perfect equality,” according to the metric they used, which puts it nearly on par with Sweden, who is miles ahead of every other country before taxes. This alone doesn’t say anything about wealth inequality due to how the wealthy actually live and use their wealth, but it does paint a picture of how closing tax loopholes can work.

It’s Doritos all the way down?

Always has been.

There’s a difference between having Dorito dust on your fingers and having it massaged/injected into your skin via microneedling. It’s closer to “don’t tattoo yourself with Dorito dust” than it is “don’t let it get on you.”

I think this misses 2 possibilities. The first one being the unlikely scenario where a species’ space travel program outpaces the ecological collapse of their planet, necessitating a jump into an interplanetary civilization, and the second being the rarity of certain materials required for a technological civilization to continue to exist. The Rare Earth metals are so named because of their rarity on the planet, with most deposits being the result of meteorite impacts, and even things like iron only exist in finite quanities. There’s been talk for years now of capturing asteroids in orbit around the planet for mining purposes and atmospheric “scooping” to harvest gases from the gravity wells of other planets for gases such as hydrogen.

Unless a civilization achieves 100% efficiency in a closed cycle of material use, they will need to look to the stars by necessity eventually.

It’s impossible to tell from a single photo, but it looks like the fire was possibly localized to the wheel-well. I can’t think of anything that might ignite in there, though.

In its own way, I’d say. I saw a poll recently asking people when they made their account, and it seems that the majority of users have been on there since the 2010s. All the toxic users left for Twitter after the porn ban, and that seems to have really chilled out the site.

Modern Tumblr reminds me of Lemmy in a lot of ways. Less tech oriented, but would rather burn the site to the ground than see it become one of the modern corporate social media sites. “Become unmarketable” seems to have become the guiding motto there.