Voodoo Dog

vegans:

Commercial agriculture: *develops certain GMOs and pesticides that kill keystone bug species, which disrupts the environment and kills many different animals up the food chain as a result*

Vegans:

Commercial agriculture: *destroys local ecosystems by ripping out native species and replacing them with massive farms of exotic monocultures, resulting in the deaths and endangerment of millions of species*

Vegans:

Inuit people: *live in an environment where growing plant based food is extremely difficult, and where grocery prices are inflated past affordability so they hunt a few large animals every year which feed their entire community*

Orange juice in my home town is 25$ minimum! We buy bread for special occasions! Something Southern people have on their dinner table 24/7 is something I would see only a few times a year!

Not to mention, we use AS MUCH OF THE ANIMAL AS POSSIBLE! Bones become plates, and silverware (or in some cases jewlery), fur and blubber becomes homes and clothing and beds. Teeth become combs. And we eat EVERYTHING! I’ve had brains, and eyeballs, and intestines. Anything that can be eaten, will be eaten. We DONT throw ANYTHING away. And if we have too much (which is rare but has happened before) we leave it for the suffering wild life!

Polar bears will come and gouge themselves on a whale we don’t finish, wolves will feast on some left over seal tails, foxes will devour caribou carcases!

Even now, we are curbing our hunting ideas. We DONT hunt as many whales as we used too, we used to hunt maybe five a year, but now we hunt one to three! Seals are also taken care of but use only hunting males, and older males at that! Caribou was my family’s main meal, and lemmings when they would come around.

If you are vegan, cool! More power too you! But you probably live in a place that can grow more than lichen, and grass. You live in an industrialized place, where everyone has a car, and house.

What's it for?

What's it for?

Why would anyone want this?

I sit in so many meetings and listen to genuinely very intelligent people talk until steam is rising off their skulls about genAI, and wonder how fast I'd get fired if I asked: do real people actually want this product, or are the only people excited about this technology the shareholders who want to see lines go up?

like you realize this is a bubble, right, guys? because nobody actually needs this? because it's not actually very good? normal people are excited by the novelty of it, and finance bro capitalists are wetting their shorts about it because they want to get rich quick off of the Next Big Thing In Tech, but the novelty will wear off and the bros will move on to something else and we'll just be left with billions and billions of dollars invested in technology that nobody wants.

and I don't say it, because I need my job. And I wonder how many other people sitting at the same table, in the same meeting, are also not saying it, because they need their jobs.

A metaphor I've been using lately is that being a tech-interested person and watching the AI hype is like if you had followed the development of blenders for years. You watched them go from prototypes that were basically just a spinning open blade all the way to a design that has the potential to be a consumer Vitamix! It's really cool! Blenders have come such a long way, and they're ready for prime time!

And then you turn on the news and see otherwise rational, intelligent people saying "gosh, imagine, soon we'll replace all of our chefs, and our surgeons, and our high school teachers with blenders!" and your friends and family all nod and agree and say things like "wow, blenders can basically do everything now!" And when you ask people "are you HIGH?!" they show you the new blender they bought, and how well it makes a smoothie, and then they act like that's evidence for a statement like "blenders will replace 90% of the workforce" not being utterly nonsensical and deranged.

"Scientists just have to fix the hallucination problem!" they say. When you ask what the hallucination problem is, they say "I'll show you" and then they put their unfinished math homework into the blender and hit pulse. "You see, I wanted it to solve those math problems, but it just shredded the paper. It must have hallucinated a world where the answer to 2+2 was puree." When you point out that it did exactly what it was designed to do, because a blender cannot do math and it will never do math and expecting it to be able to do math just because it can make both smoothies and soup is ludicrous and bizarre, they tell you that they're sure that blenders will be able to do math any day now, just you wait, "I mean, look how far they've come! A year ago I would have said that blenders could never be strong enough to blend ice into sorbet, but now they can. So who are you to say they'll never do math???"

The thing is, there are plenty of things that LLMs and generative AI are good for. OCR is still a vital need, and AI is excellent at it. Facial recognition is an area where AI has a lot of potential. It can be used as a screening step for the analysis of all sorts of large datasets. Better autocomplete on your phone is a real thing that real people want. There are a ton of problems that these tools genuinely do solve!

...But none of them are trillion dollar problems, and that's an issue, because no one wanted to pour a trillion dollars into "improved OCR" and "somewhat better autocomplete".

guess what? this is flash!

this is also flash!

THIS is puppet animation:

the funniest part is that most puppet animation isn’t even done in flash anymore. people use after effects instead because it has MUCH more sophisticated and useful tools meant specifically for puppet animation.

the technique can be used well, however. my little pony does it so fluidly it looks practically seamless.

homestar runner doesn’t focus nearly as much on fluidity, but instead on constructing strong, expressive key poses and making every frame really count.

puppet animation isn’t even limited to digital mediums. in fact, it’s not new at all.

the adventures of prince achmed is the world’s oldest surviving feature-length animated film - that’s right, predating snow white by over 10 years - and it was done entirely using puppet animation; black paper cutouts atop illuminated backgrounds. and it’s truly fucking breathtaking.