Echo Dot

I do not understand how people at these advertising agencies are so bad at their actual jobs.

I used to work in an advertising agency, the job is done by humans who go home and watch TV and play video games and generally interact with the rest of the human race on a fairly regular basis. There’s no way in hell that they failed to register the public’s dissatisfaction with AI. So how do they then sit in a pitch meeting and recommend its use?

I guarantee what happened here is that McDonald’s wanted things to be cheap and so wanted to use AI, and the advertising agency just wanted to get McDonald’s business so didn’t push back on it as hard as they should have done. And look it’s now done damage to their brand. They better come out with a statement real quick to clarify that it was McDonald’s decision and not theirs, otherwise clients are going to be concerned that they’re trying to cut corners.

Part of the job is to tell clients when they’re being unreasonable. There was a property developer that we worked with a lot and he was always trying to get us to do deceptive things such as using CGI shots of his housing estate rather than the actual shots because the properties didn’t look anything like what was being depicted in the CGI shots. I’m sure if we were doing it today he would be trying to use AI as well. Fortunately my boss was always able to talk him out of these decisions pointing out that it would simply result in him getting a reputation for dishonesty, and would in the long term hurt him.

Time travel movies either need to be not really about the time travel. Or all about the time travel.

In the first instance the time machine is basically just a plot device. So you can have the story set in mediaeval Europe or 5,000 years in the future or whatever. E.g. The Time Machine, Doctor Who, Bill and Ted’s excellent adventure. This is the most common depiction of time travel.

In the second case the time machine is almost a character, e.g. Primer, and the plot of the game Quantum Break. It allows people to have access to abilities that other people in the story do not have, and fundamentally changes what is possible for those characters.

But Tenant isn’t either of those two, it’s a third option which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before where the time machine basically just rewrites the rules of the universe. Everyone knows about the pseudo time travel, but not really time travel technology and so no one really has any advantage over anyone else. So it ends up just being a John Wick style action movie where everyone has access to time travel, so it kind of cancels itself out. It’s really unclear why the technology even needs to be in the story, or what it adds to the story.

Christopher Nolan has a bit of a tendency to make complicated movies, and he seems to think that that’s the same thing as making good movies. Sometimes that works like in Inception, and other times you get just a weird complicated mess that doesn’t really have anything to say for itself.

No Tenets problem is that you can’t hear it. So it’s somewhat complicated plot is even more difficult to follow.

My ex used to do this. We be watching a film, and then she’d start playing with her phone, then she would look up from her phone after about 10 minutes and say, “what’s happening”. I still maintain that there is no more of an aggravating personality trait.

Animals would be preferable. I reckon a chipmunk would be able to understand the instructions, it’s only humans that fuck it up that bad.

Because who else would raise a support ticket because the first name field doesn’t allow emoji? Or ask for a Braille language option, it’s still English Karen, it’s basically just a font, and there’s no point anyway without a braille output, just putting the dots on the screen isn’t helpful. That one got closed as it “won’t fix” since there’s no one in the organisation who’s blind and it’s mostly a hardware problem anyway.

Because otherwise someone might take fucking offence.

Actually I think the real reason it is people just do it automatically now, without thinking. This isn’t Reddit, no one cares (except lemmy.world, obviously).

What’s your point? =/= Isn’t the “not equals to” term, it’s !=

Just as ≥ isn’t available, so you have >= and ≈ is not on the keyboard, so we have ==

Formal logical operators require the you to press the alt key and enter a numerical sequence on the keypad. If I had to type the logical operators with alt codes it would slow me down.

No it’s because you can’t type the not equal symbol very easily. If you type it it won’t work because most compilers aren’t expecting it.

But you know your fact is nicer than the boring reality

To be honest you don’t need to either of them. You can just upload images to your own instance unless some instances have disabled image uploading?

That second paragraph might as well be written in Cyrillic for all the sense it made. Do I want to know what gone mild goblin girls look like, I feel like I don’t, but I’m also morbidly curious.

In a lot of countries it would be illegal.

In a lot of countries the unions became powerful enough to be governments, and implemented anti-union busting laws.

For some reason the United States seems to have skipped a bunch of the social development that went on in other countries. Unfortunately this is probably because of the American psyche and their obsession with the idea that rags to riches is possible, despite all the evidence. So nobody wants to limit their own potential wealth by giving away money to the workers, just in case one day they become the wealthy. The end result is that a bunch of people have to work for Amazon.

I know that this is what a lot of Americans think socialism is but it’s worth pointing out that socialism is not communism.

Communists want to take over with force and violence and overwhelming thought policing. Inevitably this pisses people off and ultimately doesn’t work. See literally every communist regime ever.

Socialists simply want to implement progressive policies and are generally happy to do that within the confines of current law (assuming the current law isn’t oppressive).

The US becoming socialist would simply be via a series of increasingly progressive policies over a period of several electoral cycles. It wouldn’t be violence in the streets.

What really works is when unions start being powerful enough to dictate governmental policy. That’s when things really improve. Of course the millionaires and billionaires will complain about interference, because it’s only good when they do it.

It costs you 700 now and it costs them an unknown amount in the future. They just don’t like it because they suspect it’ll be quite a lot more than the 700 that you’re paying to join. They’re right too.

But union dues are annoying in the moment, because when it happens all you see is a reduction in your pay and initially no change in working conditions. That’s why they have posters like that up, because even though intellectually people understand that being in a union will long-term result in better pay, in the short term it does effectively result in a temporary pay cut, which can be hard if you’re already not really very well paid.

If you’re joining an established union sometimes they will be smart and not charge members until they’ve renegotiated their salaries. But that only happens if you’re joining a already formed union.

That’s a really high quality photo for 2003. Most photographs from that time were early digital cameras and tended to max out about 720p resolution. It also doesn’t look like a scanned photograph because there’s no grain.

Ah yes you are displaying the kind of intelligence the US military favours in its recruits. Non at all.

What if you’re not a 15-year-old girl and therefore don’t have TikTok and Instagram are they going to arrest you? What a truly stupid country.

So does the US just want to totally kill its tourist industry because that seems to be the objective.

I’m not really up on the latest research into nuclear powered continental drift but I’m fairly certain that Australia is on course to collide with Indonesia in about 100 million years. So they’re going the wrong direction.

You’ll need to turn left and go around Africa, if you see Brazil you’ve gone too far.

I don’t know about you but I don’t think I’ve ever worn anything with an US flag on it. Or one that says “I ❤️ NY”