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Stressing that the change in the product line was a necessary adjustment to keep apace in the digital age, snack food manufacturer Hostess announced Monday that it would discontinue physical Twinkies. “While we know fans have been collecting Twinkies for years, we believe that online-only snack cakes will help reduce physical clutter and allow for faster cream consumption without all the lengthy installations and updates,” said Hostess general manager Judd Freitag, adding that only 3% of the brand’s current customer base still purchases tangible sponge cakes.

A little tiny microscopic dragon, rotifers passing by.

Pond skater manhole cover

A family of core memories for me is playing with whatever the latest chatbot on the web was and they were all crap! Smartbot was useless! There was a Sony cross-promotional event with one of the James Bonds where you used an NLP bot to direct an agent through a simulated scenario and it would lose track of your meaning if you were even slightly indirect.

A language model that runs on your phone can, in a few seconds, translate an entire webpage. This is how Firefox translation works! It's not going to the cloud, it's like 300MB of machine learning model that lives on your phone and runs incredibly quickly. It takes them 15 days and a few thousand dollars to train a translator that beats any prior on device translation by a huge margin. Simply not possible to do it this well 10 years ago.

This is a small example, but I GM a D&D campaign over Zoom and we have auto-captions turned on, because some players find it difficult to keep track of live audio. The transcription used to be dogshit, but they've improved drastically over time. Here you can see:

Correctly using commas and hyphens to transcribe filler words

Adding a question mark for rising inflection at the end of a sentence

Capitalizing Vampire: the Masquerade, though it didn't get the :

Turns out you can roll a 7 on a d6