Arantor

I do find it interesting that in all of these cases there is a dialogue, as in messages that flow both ways. Almost like explaining moderation actions is beneficial. Who’d’ve thought!

I am just rolling my eyes because it’s that time again, the online game War thunder had yet another incident of leaking actual technical manuals from actual military vehicles. You’d think this would be a rare event because, y’know, countries tend not to want the actual manuals from their actual tanks and planes getting onto a forum that basically anyone can visit. If I had a nickel every time it happened, I’d have nearly a dollar, though. I think we’re on leak number 18, this time of the Eurofighter jet.

The whole point of crypto was to avoid regulation in the first place. Even if you go back to Nakamoto’s white paper, the key point of avoiding a central trust authority is embedded at the core - if you have no central point of trust, you cannot regulate it centrally. That’s by design, not by accident.

If you're here, you're either running a community or looking to get into the game of running a community. That implies use of (phpBB/SMF/MyBB/XenForo/Woltlab/Invision/insert other forum platform here), and possibly something or somethings alongside it (WordPress being my obvious suspect) You probably encountered (and maybe still do encounter) things that frustrate you, that you can't do, or that you can do but it takes like 3x the effort you think it should. I would love to hear what problems these are, in as much gory detail as you feel comfortable talking about - ideally what platform it is specifically, and if you have some workaround for it that gets you part way, I'd like to hear about that too. What irks you about building your dream community (other than the other people, of course, can't fix that)?

The only downside of something like that is how big the files tend to get before they start to make pages slow (and Google will penalise it from an SEO perspective)

I will be honest, this is one of the things that bothers me immensely about the collective interactions: the anthropomorphisation of the thing. It doesn't 'stay friendly', because that would imply that it understood what friendly or unfriendly meant, or indeed that it actually understood anything actually said to it, rather than digesting the words down into statistical assessments to align it with statistical outcomes. I know it's tempting to attribute dice to being friendly or unfriendly (especially the b-----d dice that my D&D group of many years ago used to talk about) but there's nothing there behind the curtain.

I had a first hand look this week at someone using it... shall we say under less than ideal circumstances. My work had a 'Christmas quiz' where the questions were sourced from ChatGPT. More than one of the questions managed to have the answer in the question, and one of the questions about a fictional snowman managed to confuse which particular snowman it was 'thinking' of. I've also had to wrangle with other developers writing code using Copilot and Gemini where what they've got out of it is for much older versions of Laravel than we were using (e.g. Laravel 5.5 versions of code, on a Laravel 10 codebase) which was... frustrating. I haven't actually seen that many cases of it being a good tool, at least on its own, but as part of a larger workflow I could possibly see that... one day.

Game Maker's Tool-Kit discussion on the 'cursed design problem' of Balatro, a few 'reading out Reddit r/MaliciousCompliance posts', someone asking a AAA dev a few interesting questions, a video essay on games that requires wikis and whether this is a design choice or not, someone trying out the new QL core for the Spectrum Next. Right now I'm trying to find out what exactly the extended video modes do on a Spectrum Next between the 50hz and 60hz modes since it affects an idea I have for a game.

Compared to AI generated text, yes. But I'm also going off the physical history of the word 'elevate' in textual history - it had a substantial peak in literature in the 1850s and declined significantly over time. But since it has a significant presence historically - and not so much more recently - it's a statistical outlier and shows up disproportionately in AI generated text as a result because it has no understanding of the change of language, only the summation of all the text fed into it. (I have actually built very small scale AI projects.)

Sort of. The problem is that words like elevate are less used normally and when they are used, they're statistically 'more interesting'. AI in the GPT sense doesn't actually 'know' anything, it doesn't really have a 'dictionary' in as much as it knows that certain words statistically go together enough to form a meaningful correlation - and just regurgitates from there. Of course that's also not the whole story - the likes of Grammarly (which is also an AI product in the same vein) works off statistical relevance but in the opposite direction, when it talks about 'simplifying writing', it usually means trending towards what is statistically more common. The writing equivalent of writing elevator music vs a stunning concerto. Then we have AI art tools and that's where it gets reeeeeaaaaaaally complicated. Yes, if you use Midjourney it's generated and there's a fair bet that it will be visibly noticeable. Depending on what was generated this may be more or less relevant to your situation. But, if you use Photoshop with Context-Aware Fill... you're leaning on many of the same techniques under the hood, and Photoshop has any number of tools in newest versions that are really AI-led without advertising that they are such. I actually have a feeling that there's more marketing material out there that has AI at its heart than we currently realise because plenty of people will have started with ChatGPT and then sufficiently polished off the oddities to look close enough. That's the thing about the business world; people who can do something cheaper even if it's getting a computer to do 50% of the legwork first have an annoying habit of winning the race because the race is increasingly to the bottom.

Watching random YouTube videos.

I wish for ideas on how to invigorate the community building space in 2025 with what communities need but don't have today across the existing platforms.

I'm also curious how this will affect SEO (not positively, I'm immediately assuming)

Like you needed the proof, heh.

I’m an Elder Millennial, any belief that I would ever be able to afford to retire disappeared around the same time I got ousted from my former workplace at Lehman Brothers.

And now you just summed up why I have no investment vehicles.

It’s not about the risk/reward for me. It’s about the ethics and sustainability of the thing. See also how many crypto currencies are, and continue to be, active scam projects.

I didn't. I made a conscious choice not to get in on this in 2009 when I absolutely could have. The only mistake I made is assuming the bubble would get this big before the inevitable happens. This is why I don't use it for anything.

I ordered two mugs from Very British Problems as a cheeky Christmas present to myself.

I’d rather accept Monopoly money sent to me in the mail ahead of any crypto currency.

I’ve had emails just like that for XF and told them if they were legit they could buy it themselves and not need me!

James Bond has 25 official films, 2 direct knock-off films, and a litany of other media. It's never been entirely clear if it's the same person or not, but it's loosely implied both to have been, and not been, the same character. Then of course we have Doctor Who which is essentially 300+ stories featuring the title character across nearly 900 episodes. Superman has managed 4 OG films with Christopher Reeve, 1 with Brandon Routh (essentially a direct sequel in the form of Superman Returns), then the reboot with Henry Cavill encompassing Man of Steel/Batman vs Superman/Justice League. (There are other connections, e.g. Supergirl, Black Adam, but they're not primarily Superman movies.) Even Batman has more film appearances at this point than Superman does. (The 1966 movie, the 4 80s/90s movies, the 3 Nolan movies, BvS and Justice League, plus The Batman, and that's before we talk about crossovers and the 1940s serial movies.) Pretty sure there's also more Batman related TV stuff than Superman related TV stuff.

I will be controversial, I don't like it. I don't like where it's going for the obvious reason that it's still taking a leaf out of the MCU playbook. What I really want in a superhero movie, at this point, is the mood of something like Superman - the original 1978 movie. Where it's not about earth shattering stakes, and with a level of internal sincerity that inspires hope.

Google debuted in 1998, and by 2000 they'd already started doing their 'Google Doodle' stuff, I remember seeing a Dilbert one in 2000. And Google was a proper gamechanger in that era, compared to AltaVista etc. Though I remember some of the early attempts to fix the search engine landscape, with Dogpile and Ixquick that would search multiple search engines and collate the results.