nyan

@nyan@lemmy.cafe

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How the AI ‘bubble’ compares to history⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  They picked the wrong history, in my not so humble opinion. The AI situation looks more like the dot-com bubble, recycled.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anime Fall Season and 2025 Year-End Discussion [2026, Week 1]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Time for this season’s silly awards!

  • Most thorough product placement: Shuumatsu Touring. I really hope Honda paid them well for that episode.
  • Most disappointing: To Your Eternity. Not that it was bad, exactly, but it wasn’t up to the standards of the previous seasons. I’ve come to the conclusion that much of the problem is Mizuha and the heavy focus on her. While her situation is interesting, she is not an appealing character, and I really don’t want to spend any more time with her. Hopefully the second cours will return the primary focus to Fushi. (I also could have done without the rope bondage bit, which seemed to come out of left field in a manner more appropriate to Golden Kamuy.)
  • Stupidest smart person award: Towasa from Towa no Yuugure. Apparently she not only knew nothing about human nature, she also lacked fundamental knowledge about computer programming. All non-trivial software has bugs, and directly hooking up a human brain to the Internet with no method to block it again afterwards is so stupidly risky that I can’t even.
  • Biggest bait-and-switch: Towa no Yuugure again. The first couple of episodes are set up to look like plucky-band-of-misfits-against-SF-dystopia, but instead we end up getting SF relationship drama. If that was what they wanted to do, they should have toned down the evil-dystopia scenes.
  • Where-can-I-get-some-of-what-they-were-smoking award: Sanda. The last thing I saw that managed to be both this batshit and this thoughtful was maybe Sarazanmai (and that was from Kunihiko Ikuhara, who’s always that way). Come for the bizarre premise, stay for the fact that this thing is surprisingly good.
  • Best dragon award: May I Ask for One Final Thing? narrowly beat out the dragon from Pass the Monster Meat, Milady! begging for royal moodle. (Sorry, Bee, you’re just not dragonlike enough, and they tried too hard to make you cute. Gap moe works better with dragons.)
  • Most unexpectedly entertaining: Pass the Monster Meat, Milady! for a narrow win over a quite large field of candidates. (A Wild Last Boss Appears! might have won if I hadn’t given it a higher evaluation than the other based on pre-airing summaries.) Having the central plot be a romance is a tough sell for me in general, but this time it worked.

  ======

  My Christmas rewatch for this year was Suisei no Gargantia (Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet). It still holds up pretty well for the most part—the Gundam + Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind + Waterworld setting comes together (even though from that description, it really shouldn’t), and the character arcs, including the mecha’s, work. The thing that doesn’t hold up is the visuals. There is way too much 3D water that does not blend with the rest of the artwork at all, proving that sometimes trying to be more realistic causes problems rather than solving them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Are Cars Getting Rid Of Android Auto?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Lacking government regulation in the largest markets, proper separation will never be enforced, because it isn’t to the manufacturers’ benefits. And that probably isn’t going to happen until hacked infotainment systems kill enough people to draw attention, unfortunately.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can machines suffer?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Animals, including humans, have sensors for pain (nerve endings), and a series of routines in our brains to process the sensory data and treat it as an unpleasant stimulus. These are not optional systems, but innate ones.

  Machines not only lack the required sensor systems and processing routines, they can’t even interpret a stimulus as unpleasant. They can’t feel pain. If you need proof of that, hit a computer with a sledgehammer. I guarantee it won’t complain, or even notice before you damage it beyond functioning.

  (They can, of course, make us feel pain. I just spent the last hour trying to get a udev rule to work . . .)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  For some people, recreating the form factor of a book is the point, regardless of its convenience or cost. I’m sure whoever put this thing together was quite aware of how mainstream e-readers are built and didn’t want that, or they would have bought a Kindle or a Kobo.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the longest anime episode of all time?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I vaguely remember that I did not watch the anime adaptation of Atelier Ryza because the first episode was 3x (4x?) normal length, which should be >60 min.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How VPNs really work: Protocols, safety and myth - Sentient Rant⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Attempting to defeat browser fingerprinting (you can never be 100% sure you’ve defeated everything) without TOR is kind of an advanced subject, yeah, and one of which I have only shallow knowledge. A lot of it is Javascript-dependent, so allowing Javascript only on a whitelist basis should help (but is too tedious for a lot of people). Deliberately pissing in the pool by varying prominent identifiers like the User-Agent string should help. Canvas poisoning. Specialist browser extensions, some of which may be more effective than others. Running the blandest default-settings browser possible in the blandest possible default-settings environment (a container or live media inside a VM) could conceivably cause you to vanish into the noise, but may be highly inconvenient.

  It’s worth considering who is likely to be interested in going to the trouble of browser fingerprinting in the first place. Small players have little use for the information and aren’t likely to accumulate enough to sell it for much money. So the problems are going to come from ad networks, large digital networks like Google and Meta/Facebook, possibly CDNs and service providers like Shopify if they think it’s worth their while, maybe some governments, and completely dishonest scam sites that think any money is good. Some of these can be avoided altogether if you work at it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How VPNs really work: Protocols, safety and myth - Sentient Rant⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It does, however, make a certain level of anonymity at least possible as long as you scrub your cookies regularly, never log into the same accounts over the VPN that you were using without it, and never buy anything over the VPN.

  In the end, you have to sit down and ask yourself what information you’re trying to protect from whom, and how much trouble protecting it is worth. You don’t want your nosy cousin who works at your ISP to know you look at furry porn, well, a VPN should be good enough for that (provided you don’t use the ISP’s DNS). If you’re trying to conceal your actions from a nation-state-level observer, you’ve got a lot more work to do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Winter Anime Season Preview Discussion and Thread Requests [2025, Week 52]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It could still be 3-2-2-2-2-2-overpriced special, though. I suppose we’ll see.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Winter Anime Season Preview Discussion and Thread Requests [2025, Week 52]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Is Gnosia continuing? Livechart doesn’t seem to think so. (If it is, I’m going to have even more work to do sorting out my schedule.)

  Things I know I’ll be sampling that no one seems to have mentioned yet:

  • Golden Kamuy
  • Fate/Strange Fake (finally!)
  • A Gentle Noble’s Vacation Recommendation (first volume of the manga was mildly entertaining)
  • Kaya-chan isn’t Scary (from the description, it should at least be different)
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did Microsoft do anything right in 2025? Wins, fails, and WTF moments⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I disagree. Doing so reduced the amount of diversity in rendering engines and reinforced the idea that lazy site owners don’t have to test against more than one browser. That’s a loss for the Web as a whole.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“Everything has become shallower.” Tokyo Godfathers, Lain producer says the Japanese corporate mindset is why 90% of anime just adapts existing works - AUTOMATON WEST⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I am falling, I am fading

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the main problem would be the controls. I mean, you could put a tiny bridle on the rat to steer, but how do you shoot? Pull the tail? (How you avoid being bitten while pulling the rat’s tail is a separate issue.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a step up from fish playing pokemon, anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No AI* Here - A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter - Waterfox Blog⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It is, but it’s so divergent these days that 90% of Mozilla patches won’t even apply to the codebase (and presumably vice-versa). My conclusion is that Pale Moon and Goanna are capable of surviving if Firefox development ceases.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [2025, Week 51]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not a Western thing, an Anglophone thing. English normally doesn’t end words with the “eh” sound, but French often does, and French words that get adopted into English tend to go through a similar sound change—for instance, “parfait” is pronounced “pahr-feh” (more or less) in French, but “par-fey” in English.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [2025, Week 51]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sanda seems cool, but I’ve only seen the first few episodes and I don’t think it’s on CR or Netflix.

  It’s on Amazon. Surprisingly thematically heavy when it isn’t being utterly batshit. I’ve been enjoying it, anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Guarding My Git Forge Against AI Scrapers - VulpineCitrus⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Rather like the proportion of spam to legitimate email.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Episode] Gnosia - Episode 9 discussion⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  We’ve already seen that Gnosia can voluntarily out themselves. I don’t really see much difference between that and betraying a teammate, but then a lot of the “rules” in this show don’t hold together when you look at them closely from the outside, anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Creative workers on the affects of AI on their jobs⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To be exact, there is a noun “affect” whose plural would presumably be “affects”, but it’s a term of art in psychology and absolutely not the word that is wanted here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [2025, Week 50]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Next up was one that I noticed back when it was first shown, but had since forgotten about and just happened to stumble across a couple of weeks ago - Kumo Desu ga, Nani ka? I thoroughly enjoyed it and especially liked the way they expanded such a simple concept into such an enormous and convoluted plot, but that enormous and convoluted plot was, as I began to suspect about halfway through, sort of a problem. It’s one of those light novel series adaptations that takes the route of telling its story in detail rather than condensing it, and that meant that it didn’t really manage to finish anything before it ran out of episodes. It even ended on multiple cliffhangers. I’m tempted to read the LN, just because I really did like the story and the worldbuilding, but unfortunately it’s probably more likely that I’ll just forget about it again.

  I’ve read part of it—not to the end, but well past the point that the anime got to. It just gets more convoluted, and the focus shifts away from Everyone’s Favourite Spider to a more ensemble-y situation, or at least that was my impression at the time. (We do find out why she ended up as a spider, specifically, though—it wasn’t random.)

  spoiler

  It’s been a while, but I think this was the story where a bunch of the characters were fighting an elf in a mecha at the point I left off, if that gives you some idea of the level of insanity involved.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon’s AI ‘Banana Fish’ Dubs Are Hilariously, Inexcusably Bad⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If Bing’s database isn’t good enough for you, Startpage supposedly uses Google’s database and doesn’t shoehorn AI into the results. You’ll want an adblocker, though. (My usual order of query is Duckduckgo, then Startpage, then Mojeek if the other two didn’t find anything useful.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Porsche Cars in Russia Shut Down After Satellite System Failure⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The “O” word, actually: oligarchs (or their relatives or best buddies). Chances are that at least some of them are under sanction in more civilized countries.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Episode] SANDA - Episode 9 discussion⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Fuyumura’s “what the heck are you going on about? What’s wrong with you? Give me back my friend!” experience is one regrettably familiar to many aro-aces. 🫤

  And apparently, if there’s such a thing as Evil!Santa, he dresses like he works for the Mafia.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Porsche Cars in Russia Shut Down After Satellite System Failure⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I doubt most owners of recent-model luxury-brand cars in Russia are average joes for which this is their only transport. I therefore find my sympathy to be somewhat limited.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Episode] Dusk Beyond the End of the World • Towa no Yuugure - Episode 10 discussion⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So I guess the “real” Akira was the guy standing beside Towasa in the flashback . . . The question now is “why?”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Framework stops selling separate DDR5 RAM modules to fight scalpers⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I didn’t think the horse was still intact enough that you could find any hide.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dead mosquito proboscis used for high-resolution 3D printing nozzle⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ugh. I hope that there being a use for the little bastards now doesn’t make people breed them on purpose.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Episode] A Gatherer's Adventure in Isekai • Sozai Saishuka no Isekai Ryokouki - Episode 9 discussion⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  . . . I’m now wondering whether Brolite’s shadow’s personal hygiene would be just as bad as hers, or the exact opposite. 😅

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shai-Hulud Returns: Over 300 NPM Packages Infected⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Python and Ruby have both had various repo issues too.

  I’ve never heard of anything similar with Perl, but that may partly be because applications for new developers who want to join CPAN still appear to be processed by humans, with up to a couple of weeks lag. The time inefficiency plus the language being less popular probably makes it an unattractive target.