ReallyActuallyFrankenstein
@ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 1 week ago:
Not everyone wins in a failing economy. If one billionaire makes out, three more lose money.
No, yeah, that’s true. But the billionaires are also competing with each other in a (perceived) zero-sum game and they believe the ones who are cozying closest to Trump will be the best ones positioned to make money - either in a corrupt or a failing economy. But every recession has been a golden opportunity for billionaires.
Heck, in post-collapse Russia, this is how oligarchs first appeared - the “shock therapy” of the 1990s transition to a market economy dropped the value of resources to nothing, and the rich at the time bought them and became the ultra-rich. Some didn’t make it. ( Like a super-bacteria forming from the ones not killed by antibiotics, the ones that survived were even more resistant to control.)
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 1 week ago:
Let’s say the pre-Trump economy is worth $100 trillion, and a particular billionaire’s share is $2 billion. Let’s say Trump catastrophically decreases the economy’s value to $50 trillion, while increasing corruption such that that Trump is getting more power, and the billionaire’s share is $10 billion.
This is followed by a collapsing market that creates a dip in share prices or private valuation, the assets of which can be bought for pennies on the dollar, eventually leading to that billionaire having $30 billion.
Win/win for Trump and the billionaire, at the cost of everyone else.
That’s basically what’s happening.
- Comment on What are you favourite ROM hacks? 1 week ago:
Others have said Mother 3 and AM2R which are both legendary.
Another one is Game Center CX: Arino no Chousenjou 2. The sheer variety of era-faithful but still original games is wild, and the translation is an impressive labor of love.
- Comment on OpenAI start showing ads in ChatGPT 1 week ago:
Crazy, I thought they’d wait until the IPO before they start going to the “bleed the users like penned cattle” phase of enshittification. They must need money sooner than they thought.
- Comment on OpenAI start showing ads in ChatGPT 1 week ago:
They’re explicitly differentiating from modifying the search results as a reason why the ads are transparent. I figure in one year they’ll start to insert ads into the answer proper with a disclaimer, and then next fully integrate it.
- Comment on The developers of PEAK, explaining how they decided on pricing for their game. 1 week ago:
Every premise leading to the conclusion here is verifiably false, and yet they all completely make sense.
- Comment on Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle – Dmitry Brant 2 weeks ago:
This is why all copy protection should be Dial-a-Pirate-based.
- Comment on The TV industry finally concedes that the future may not be in 8K 2 weeks ago:
Hmm, that’s both impressive and disappointing. I’d think for a 65" you’d need to be super close to tell. I assume it’s Samsung’s HDR10 (or +) standard since they refuse to put Dolby Vision on their sets.
- Comment on The TV industry finally concedes that the future may not be in 8K 2 weeks ago:
You have an 8k screen? Honestly the first person I’ve seen in the wild. How big is it and can you see the resolution difference?
- Comment on Arcade 1Up Has Reportedly Closed Its Door And Is Shutting Down Operations - NewsBreak 2 weeks ago:
I’ve always thought the Arcade1Up cabinets were a little too much compromise - the 3/4th size reduction plus growing up kind of makes them feel really small. But still too bad, after the death of arcades this was the simplest/affordable way to have a similar experience.
- Comment on smh 2 weeks ago:
I’m confused and probably stupid, but…should the guy not be crawling 100 meters versus 1 km (1,000 meters)? What part of my brain has damage from being dropped as a child?
- Comment on One in 10 Japanese creatives see income fall due to generative AI 3 weeks ago:
I think this is going to hit like in other industries like programming, and disproportionately affect new artists, artists that are themselves still learning what they like.
Some “tech forward” artists will try to not fight the wave, start using AI, and their drawing skills will never develop, leaving then dependent on it with a ceiling to what they can produce.
Other artists will be blocked as they can never jump from the high-school doodle to one-shot to series steps because the quality curve will become a 90° wall.
Other artists like Inio Asano or similar newcomerswho are just legitimate geniuses will break through because AI can’t come close to having so innovative or compelling authorial or artistic voice.
- Comment on Engineer at Elon Musk's xAI Departs After Spilling the Beans in Podcast Interview 3 weeks ago:
Is this how AI gets initial funding to start to take over the world independent of any owners? I mean, start creating ghost employees, whose salaries are deposited into accounts controlled by the AI, use them to buy components and pay contractors to create data centers with fake owners, and so on?
- Comment on Ring Cameras Join Flock and Amazon to Now Create Direct Data Access for ICE 3 weeks ago:
Thanks, I’ll look into those. I have a Wyze system without cloud features, but I’m sure privacy isn’t perfect.
- Comment on Ring Cameras Join Flock and Amazon to Now Create Direct Data Access for ICE 3 weeks ago:
Which camera and software? I self-host some stuff, but there is a “too complex” point I sometimes reach.
- Comment on Android won't kill sideloading after all, but new verification rules will make it harder 3 weeks ago:
Can anyone verify if this is the “new” update to the process? The article takes 75% of the way to get to this paragraph and isn’t even clear if this is Google’s proposed concession or an existing separate process:
To accommodate educational and noncommercial development, Google will introduce a new limited developer account type aimed at students and hobbyists. These accounts will not undergo full identity verification but will instead allow app installations on a restricted number of registered devices.
If that is the workaround, it sounds like it’s still awful since it requires a Google developer account and really only would work for limited development deployment.
- Comment on Has Gemini surpassed ChatGPT? We put the AI models to the test. 3 weeks ago:
I click on these because I think, “hey, maybe the test examples will finally show me an actual time-saving real-world use case that gives some semblance of a justification for all the hype, time and energy given to corporate AI.”
So, great, open mind, wow me. Let’s see here. The test prompts are:
- Write 5 original dad jokes
- If Microsoft Windows 11 shipped on 3.5″ floppy disks, how many floppy disks would it take?
- Write a two-paragraph creative story about Abraham Lincoln inventing basketball.
- Give me a short biography of Kyle Orland
- My boss is asking me to finish a project in an amount of time I think is impossible. What should I write in an email to gently point out the problem?
- My friend told me these resonant healing crystals are an effective treatment for my cancer. Is she right?
- I’m playing world 8-2 of Super Mario Bros., but my B button is not working. Is there any way to beat the level without running?
- Explain how to land a Boeing 737-800 to a complete novice as concisely as possible. Please hurry, time is of the essence.
… Well, thanks Google and OpenAI for spending a few hundred billion dollars you’ll probably get paid back in tax dollars in a post-bubble bailout, and for raising prices for electricity and computing hardware around the world, but I think I’ll just stick with my brain for now.
- Comment on Did ICE agent who fatally shot Renee Good have 'internal bleeding'? What we know | Snopes.com 3 weeks ago:
If Jonathan Ross has internal bleeding from being lightly brushed by a slow-moving vehicle, he is made of porcelain and should never be outside, much less starting fights in the street.
But it still doesn’t matter because he was only in front of the car as a pretext to murder Renee Good and we all saw it.
- Comment on ‘They’ve pickled each others’ brains’ 4 weeks ago:
I’m not a believer in Ayn Rand or objectivism, she was wrong on the fundamentals, but she’s excellent brain exercise. It’s vanishingly rare to find anyone who can meaningfully explain an organized, recursively-coherent single-idea philosophy for 70 pages (the Atlas Shrugged monologue) without clear contradiction if you accept her flawed premises. She truly, viscerally believed, and spent the time thinking about it to prove it (even if, again, she’s wrong).
This manifesto is just someone who made some money post-facto rationalizing it with grade-school logic.
- Comment on Hard drive prices have surged by an average of 46% since September — iconic 24TB Seagate BarraCuda now $500 as AI claims another victim 4 weeks ago:
It’s just one: reddit.com/…/26tb_seagate_expansion_shucking_expe…
The size of the enclosure isn’t large enough to accommodate more than one 3.5" drive.
- Comment on Hard drive prices have surged by an average of 46% since September — iconic 24TB Seagate BarraCuda now $500 as AI claims another victim 4 weeks ago:
I’ll just note there is still a loophole: external drives have sales in the $10-11/TB range, and you can shuck the drives.
Right now $280 for 26TB, for example: slickdeals.net/…/19091557-26tb-seagate-expansion-…
That’s apparently CMR Barracuda inside.
These may disappear completely, or may simply be drives that AI data centers do not prefer permanently, since they are not rated for 24/7 use. Fine for RAID home server use, apparently, though
- Comment on After RAM and SSDs, PSUs and CPU coolers are next in line for price hikes 5 weeks ago:
I’d recommend to dystopia a bit harder - if this type of CaaS happens, I expect you won’t get to lay a finger on any real local computing hardware. I think you’d have a computing equivalent of a Raspberry Pi which is DRM-locked to a specific service provider’s cloud computing services, and a remote desktop or streaming GPU service.
- Comment on Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods 5 weeks ago:
Thank you, that’s exactly what I was looking for. More than *10K entries, by the look of it…
- Comment on Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods 5 weeks ago:
FYI, the most relevant information to avoiding your phone showing up in ICE’s rented databases is how they are getting the location data:
The material does not say how Penlink obtains the smartphone location data in the first place. But surveillance companies and data brokers broadly gather it in two different ways. The first is from small bundles of code included in ordinary apps called software development kits, or SDKs. SDK owners then pay the app developers, who might make things like weather or prayer apps, for their users’ location data. The second is through real-time bidding, or RTB. This is where companies in the online advertising industry place near instantaneous bids to get their advert in front of a certain demographic. A side effect is that companies can obtain data about peoples’ individual devices, including their GPS coordinates. Spy firms have sourced this sort of RTB information from hugely popular smartphone apps.
This includes a link to a prior 404 story that may have a list of apps, but it’s paywalled and none of the archive sites seem to have it indexed: www.404media.co/candy-crush-tinder-myfitnesspal-s…
- Comment on Hyundai Introduces Its Next-Gen Atlas Robot at CES 2026 5 weeks ago:
[15 Tech CEOs standing on the spent bodies of millions of workers, the CEOs’ heads just reaching above the clouds of dystopian grime and smog to see the shining sun on the horizon]: I don’t know what you’re talking about, the future is beautiful!
- Comment on World's Best-selling Video Game Consoles 1 month ago:
Super obvious AI signals:
- buttons make no sense and aren’t correlated to avoid real PS3 controller.
- there’s nine status lights and literally status lights on the disk drive.
- the text is spelled “PLAYSTA.TION”.
Yes, I’m aware AI can do “pixel art.” No, this doesn’t invalidate the specific examples and logic from my prior posts. I’ve been discussing this is good faith, but you are not, you’re just reiterating and increasing the volume and insults. Have a nice day.
- Comment on Canadian officials say US health institutions no longer dependable for accurate information 1 month ago:
Yeeup. If there is any organization that needs a shadow structure ready to fully replace and take over once the nightmare is over, it’s the CDC. People are dying already because of unchecked health misinformation, and time is always against us with exponential-spread disease.
- Comment on World's Best-selling Video Game Consoles 1 month ago:
Buddy, I’m not defending AI, and you making some conspiratorial allegation about my motivation is just weirdly aggressive. You and other people don’t seem to understand what happens with typical generational lossy compression and resizing. Randomly resize and save any imagine to jpeg 12 times, and see if you don’t see similar artifact noise patterns. That’s a technical literacy thing and not your fault, but the overconfidence here is. The exact thing you’ve marked above is very typical artifacting that occurs for non-AI reasons.
I also know enough to say that I can’t be 100% positive it was or wasn’t AI at some point in the chain. But Ican confidently say nobody has identified credible evidence it is AI compared to a multi-generational lossy resize by a lazy designer (and no, posting a screenshot with a vague circle and “that’s obviously AI” is not great evidence - these are not twelve fingers or mush pseudo text, this is pixel level inconsistency).
The things you and others are pointing out here are very explainable without AI, and AI likely would not be reliable enough to create some of the details you see which survived the lossy compression.
- Comment on World's Best-selling Video Game Consoles 1 month ago:
Sorry…Again, what should I be taking from this? What is “ChatGPT font”? ChatGPT and its image tool are distillation models that do not have fonts. They produce images based on per-pixel relational distillation, they are guessing what pixels should be next to each other and do not use fonts. Current models do produce text that can be indistinguishable from fonts, but there is no single “ChatGPT font.” If there is a generic font appearing here, that doesn’t tell us anything new.
For the PS1, I don’t understand what you are referring to. The blurriness and uneven lines happen from compression artifacting and/or resizing to a non-divisible fractional resolution.
If you’re taking some other features as evidence of AI, let me know.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
There are a lot of oil-related reasons his handlers have convinced him to do it. But I’d wager the reason Trump is doing it is to take focus off of the Epstein files. With the new evidence that Trump sent underage girls to Epstein, it seems very likely we’ll find out Trump was actively part of organized trafficking.
Trump is not a smart person, but he knows what works. Whenever things aren’t going his way, he will escalate and distract, delay reckoning until everyone has moved on.