Conselheiro

Completely random, I know.

My main experience is with Tinder, and I find it interesting how it clearly recognises the shortcomings of the "Match" model, but uses it as a way to get money from users.

Want to signal to somebody that you are really into them? Pay for superlikes. Want to see people who liked you so you can see if it's worth giving them a chance? Pay for Tinder Gold. Are you not having much luck with matches? Pay to be shown more at the top of the queue. It's even worse if you are aware of the internal mechanics of how the queue prioritises people through likes that lead to matches, so you're incentivised to "economise" in your likes and constantly consider if handing out a like to somebody you're unsure about could reduce the amount of people you're shown to. And I'm not even getting into the whole gender imbalance issues or moderation.

I'm also wondering how one could develop an open source alternative, more so for reducing/removing the profit motive from the system design, than necessarily free software values. I think it would make a lot of sense to let people see who liked them as it's an effective self-selection tool, but also keep the shuffled queue as a "discovery" feature. A search feature based on self-assigned traits could be cool too, I guess. I also think a more radically different feature involving mutual friends would be cool, but I don't have anything concrete on that front yet.

Though it's a common excuse by corporations, I don't think giving more power to the users present any significant privacy concern. Everything in a Tinder profile is already public in some way, and security by obfuscation is never a good tactic.

And finally, I think the system should normalise unmatching. In real life, it's very common to find somebody, talk for a bit and lose interest before any dates. Tinder makes unmatching feel like a failure rather than just a normal part of the dating experience.

Edit: elaborating a bit on the open source bit, since it's more technical. Making the client open source but maintaining the exact same design and network architecture does not necessarily change either the maintenance costs (requiring some form of cash influx) nor the control (as the server API defines the available features). Originally I thought about making it self-hostable, but I'm now wondering if it'd be possible to connect users over a p2p protocol. One benefit is that inactive users would be filtered out automatically, but it'd be too dependent on either people being online, really good distributed caching, or a lot of background battery and network usage. I'm not well versed in mobile development or less mainstream networking to even provide an educated guess on the feasibility of this.

I remember when I finally played God of War III after years of replaying the first two and was immediately put off by all the light reflections going on in the game. The first boss fight with Poseidon seemed to be almost exclusively made to show off these graphical capabilities of the PS3, with wet surfaces and all, but I found it just noisy and hard to look at and tell what was going on. It didn't feel more "realistic", just more "photorealistic" like I was looking through badly focused and framed HD footage.

Same thing kinda annoyed me in Dark Souls III, specially when compared to Bloodborne which didn't look so greasy. I find the first Dark Souls incredibly beautiful, and never "upgraded" to the Remaster but all the pictures I've seen seem like they thought "this needs more light".

In the first one the grass and less important textures blend into the background, so you can focus more on important stuff like the character through the game's faded aesthetic. Old games also have this neat effect of having textures that are more detailed than the original resolution can handle, so I usually find that just upping the resolution on GameCube and Wii games already makes them prettier despite their "low graphics".

So when games like Cyberpunk 2077 came out, the internet was immediately flooded with astroturfed campaigns to exalt how "pretty" the game looks. But it looks like "I can't see shit" with all the lights, reflections, lens flares, glares and such. If that car didn't reflect, for example, I could way more easily admire the model.

This one is also a good example:

Then there's stuff like "Ray Tracing Mods" for games that were not aesthetically developed for that, like Minecraft.

As a point of comparison, here's a modern game with "low graphics" that I think handles lighting much better even though it's less "realistic", Metroid Dread.

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It's not natural, the light doesn't bleed into the environment as easily. Samus isn't lit up green by her little lights even though in real life she probably would given how strong they are. But the contrast makes scenes easier to read, and also I (subjectively) find them incredibly pretty. I also hate Breath of the Wild as a game, but it's similarly pretty in a way that I think all these "ray tracing mods" ruin.

Is this just a nostalgia thing for me? Are Ray Tracing and associated lighting techniques just marketing ploys to sell more modern GPUs in an era where old hardware is already sufficient? Do any of you prefer oiled-up GoW 3 Kratos over rubber GoW 2 Kratos? Should I get my eyes checked? Is there a whole essay somewhere about intentional lighting decisions and how IT companies are trying to replace subjective human artistic labour with objective automatic graphical processes for financial gain? idk, Journey is pretty I guess.

Sidenote:

I think the newspapers (including Haiti Liberté itself tbh) are doing a bad job of making this explicit in simple clear words, so let me try:

Since the 7th of February, Haiti's government has ceased to have any semblance of legal backing, from either its constitution, CARICOM or the UN. The Transitional Presidential Council never transitioned, the National Assembly is pretty much abolished and now "Prime Minister" Fils-Aimé wields total executive and legislative power despite never even being a member of the Assembly in the first place. The "government" is literally just some businessmen with a mercenary army, and for the USians out there who need to feel included to care, this is literally just a couple hundred miles off the coast of Florida.

Like imagine you suffer injuries in an armed robbery, or from a hurricane or other severe climactic event. Do the hospitals still expect you to pay money even in those cases? I imagine it also applies to police brutality.

I ask because an acquaintance got a broken leg from being ran over by police in a protest recently and, naturally, everybody just called an ambulance and they got to the hospital and that was that, because free healthcare here is a universal right (even if severely underfunded). But then with the recent protests in the US I realised even getting a broken finger from being handcuffed could actually cost people real money.

Lots of rambling and maybe you'll find it unimportant, but I just gotta get this out of my head.

So cats are these adorable and quirky animals. They've been a mainstay in the internet since bandwidth allowed for sharing pictures and videos. I'm a certified cat person, so I've consumed my fair share of cat content online. I also deal a lot with stray cats IRL.

And now for some reason all these scrolly-short-video apps are littered with so many AI videos of cats. A very small minority of them are amusing due to being so unrealistic.

But the vast majority is this. AI videos of cats doing completely ordinary and realistic cat things. In a vacuum the question is obvious: why would anybody waste their energy creating fake videos cats doing things we already have so much real footage online? And the answer is that this thrash is both a profitable business for low effort content mills who already only repost others' videos, and also is being intentionally promoted by the hosting platforms who have a stake in AI slop production.

But the worst part is that some videos are obviously fake to anybody, like this one (there's a third white cat that phases out of existence), but there are many that are obviously fake to me – a cat person who has to either watch out for their body language or have to take antibiotics – but not to many people commenting and sharing the video. The way the cats move is simply "wrong" in subtle ways that most can't tell while scrolling. And the fact that so many people watch that, think it's real and move on fills me with a strange dread.

Imagine how many people who don't have contact with cats will learn their body language wrong. Now imagine how many other way less represented animals might be completely misunderstood due to viral AI videos. Do you know how a Maned Wolf moves? Neither do I. But in the future when you search "Maned Wolf" you might find more fake videos than real ones.

And yes, this applies to way more critical stuff like political happenings, but that's sort of the problem. Because a lot of people will put in an effort to debunking fake political videos. But who's gonna bother debunking mundane videos of tamarins in which they walk weirdly like chimps? How much of the cultural image of mundane aspects of reality is going to be affected by mindlessly generated slop? Have you ever seen a horse IRL? If not, would you trust your intuition of how horses move and communicate through body language from watching videos?

The internet enabled this cool thing where, if you really wanted to learn about something, you could just look it up and dig into it not only through free pirated books but also through images. Now I think I trust people's understanding of basic shit like "why cats meow" even less if their knowledge comes from the internet. I hope every "AI" CEO gets bit by a cat.

Cool video. Her channel is rather small, so I thought it'd be nice to share it.

This is a very specific question. Basically the lyrics seem to me very much like a light critique of reunification through a marriage metaphor ("you have asked me and I said nothing", "do you want to be together until death do us apart? No!" And the whole "du hasst mich" thing), and also I think some band members are Easterners but I've had many Rammstein fan friends tell me it's literally just about unhappy marriage.

Am I tripping here? Is there any evidence either for or against it? I find it hard to believe a song with such shallow theme could've become that famous, and it's not like Rammstein is afraid of getting "political" given their other famous songs.

Brownshirts get doxxed

I'm usually a "Sane Trump Theory" supporter, but I see no outcome where the US achieves strategic gains in this one. Even with successful leadership assassination and significant damage to Iran's current nuclear capabilities, it'll just be kicking the can down the road and galvanising even more the Iranian people against the US. There's no way an outright occupation of Iran will happen.

But most NATO substrates have also designated the IRGC as a terrorist org, which I think would imply that the offensive is somehow strategically important. I don't like the whole depoliticising "distraction from Epstein" narrative, but I'm struggling to come up with alternatives here.