hmstx

Let's see. Yeah, the lighting is good - Location isn't quite right. The side gardens on the Champs de Mars are much wider than this. They're not in this style either :) - Melty coins, and keyboard.

What else?

- Bunch of visible shape inconsistencies: building window sizes and alignment, fence railing, rivets on the bench, coins, accordion features, perspective violations etc...

- Metal clips on the bottom and top edges of the carrying case are on different sides. Said clips look inconsistent.

- One of the case straps originates inside (from under the velvet, even), the further one originates outside. The carrying handle is oddly mis-centered (as with most things).

- I'm not sure that accordion, compressed, fits in that case. She can just about stand in it (diagonally, on one foot).

- It has weird folds that disappear partway through and turn into adjacent folds going the other way. Between this, the keyboards and the dots, I'm sure there are other things wrong with accordion anatomy.

- Awkward left hand: not sure what's going on with the metacarpal joints, and index finger appears to begin forking into two tips pressing into two (misshapen) buttons. Her right hand is getting there too.

- Weird hair midline. I haven't seen a "sub-midline" like this in the wild :)

- The burgundy coat clips through the bench under her right leg. It's like the front slat goes through a hole in the side of the coat.

- We don't usually have that side curling bar on each side of the sitting area. It looks like it's clipping through the flats next to the leather handbag

- Ill-placed buckle on that bag.

- The green metal fence on the right begins behind her for one vertical bar, next one disappears into the plants, no further vertical bars, no top horizontal railing. Actually, it appears to only have fencing on one side, that's not something I'd see often. On the side where it does have a top, its top rail has very irregular width.

- Sand looks like... breadcrumbs? Very repetitive coarse shapes, like it was poorly done with a clone stamp.

- Something weird about the leaves.

- The foremost lamp isn't sure whether it has flat sides or not.

- The other lamp emerges out of nowhere from behind one of the blob-people in the alley.

- A bunch of unfortunate tangents and occlusions which make you wonder whether the diffusion hallucinated detail out of bigger shapes, or if it's been trained on photos where the tangents were done on purpose.

ie. center bottom bar of the bench being exactly aligned with the gray edge tiles, side curly railing-not-present-on-our-real-benches fully formed on her right, almost completely foreshortened out of existence where the bench's perspective forbids it...

Most people are fooled by much cruder fakes though. This is a lot better but keeps plenty of tells for observant people (and most people aren't)

I was watching a friend stream a dead game lately.

That game was developed before generating images became widespread, and sunset as that "art form" started really taking off (game-as-a-service... probably partly reverse engineered and retooled with AI too). So during its lifetime, it was pretty much AI free.

I remember having been seduced by that game's art style at the time. It wasn't "the usual guys with futuristic guns and armor", it had some stylization as well, nice color...

Watching the stream, it occurred to me that it was in fact artwork from "the days before", in a way I hadn't been hit with until that point, even as a returning artist looking at pre-AI works.

"People came up with the concepts and developed and rendered them themselves", I thought to myself. Not in a "oh look, floppy disks. How quaint!" way, either.

Weird feeling.

Exactly this. "All this progress and they're back to miscounted fingers again?!"

I think it was an ad for Retrospect in an early 90s magazine that said "There are two categories of people: those who have lost files, and those who are going to."

This is reminiscent of the reasons why Technics (Panasonic) could and would not just do a reissue of the Technics 1200 turntable.

In the mid 2010s after some lobbying, they eventually invested into new tooling to build a successor.

The new models have a handful of components in common, yes, a possibly even better re-engineered direct drive motor (and I don't remember about the tonearm) - but of course the prices put them in the "too much" range, even the more streamlined versions aimed at the DJ booth.

And they have worse feedback than the classics.

/me pets his M3D/MK5s

"Why so many brands change their logos and look like everybody else".

In the past year(s) I have noticed a few icons in my Android phone turning into the same thing.

For a long time there was Uber, white on black. And then others thought white on black was the cool thing to join in on, making the reduced icons of the following look the same : Uber, Soundcloud (they kept their sigil at least), Swile, Qobuz, myNoise. I'm sure if I installed more junk I'd have seen more.

Even myNoise who goes against tech grain! To their credit, they added an orange circle background to it sometime this spring. Soundcloud execs woke up and went back to their trademark orange. But, heck.

Hey, just what you see, pal.

Anecdata: Every time over the years that my parents (now in their 70s) have purchased a new mac, software updates only ever happen if I run them. I don't visit all the time. They run outdated versions of everything until I hear "we need to buy a new mac because we can't use this website for some administrative thing", which is caused by not updating the os and the browser becoming unsupported over time.

Also account for i.e musicians (I hear there's a few of them in Apple-land) who seem to keep getting bitten by Apple somehow breaking compatibility with a bunch of audio software/equipment even with developer release, time and time again.

Multiply by real world amounts of people.

Would be a good explanation...

> But some sneaky, cowardly bastards sucker-punch you with their dickbars only after you have started reading, and begin to scroll down the page.

Yeah, about that, news websites who want to sell me a subscription. I appreciate what you are trying to do, but can you please wait until I've read at least one or two sentences (let alone the short preview of your paywalled articles) BEFORE you dickoverslap me to consider subscribing?

By the time the thing comes up, I haven't even been able to tell whether your writer can form a coherent sentence. "Subscribe PLZ" at that point will make sure I barely even consider staying for the rest of it.

Dammit. I got an IdeaPad of similar price in december 2024. It didn't have one of the fancier displays from the era but still a decent option, it has 16Gb and I thought I'd try a Ryzen mobile thing that time. Wish I'd gone for the Thinkpad E series had I known about it then : that lower-end IdeaPad feels like trash.

SSD IO is sluggish, fans always spin when plugged in, audio crackles if I so much as scroll a page while a youtube video is playing, the keyboard might be the worst I've touched in many, many years, the 3.5mm audio jack wore out into intermittent connectivity within a couple of months. At least the display still looks good. Went through the windows optimization motions with it too. My x230 with an i5 still has lower and more stable DPC latency and has remained my DJ laptop.

Heh, haven't heard of this but as a frenchie who sometimes hears swedes over the internet, I find that the permanent snus makes it sound like the person can't stop keeping some gum in their mouth, refilling mid-sentence because they really, really can't help it and it's more important than your interaction.

And so, having grown up hearing "audible gum chewing is rude", that sometimes feels rude to me. And it's not even in person!

Looked at the headline, no prior knowledge of this. "New Mozilla product, okay. Must be... something AI?"

click

"Ah, of course it is."

In an interesting twist of fate, one of the master copyists featured prominently in the Scener section of that site has come back in the last few years to win graphics competitions again with both

- directly ripping newer, lesser known artists instead of the classic Vallejo/Sorayama from the 90s. https://ibb.co/GpDVf2r

- switching to midjourney from ~2023 to now, so the sources are near untraceable (this was also supposedly leaked).

It still takes some talent to do a good looking copy, but it's not the same talent - and very dishonest when such literal use of reference is not credited.

In fact it's been an issue in the 16bit demoscene with graphics (standalone and in demos) suddenly getting more plentiful, with subjects constructed and lit a lot better, etc. and people being called out for suspicious works (and usually getting away with it, "because the whole point was to support our insane image compression code with a ton of images" etc.)

Well that's a pompous headline from the author's PR dept. "Europe" as in, "The European Union", or just some marketing trick based on making you believe it is to give it more weight?

I'm european and can still easily confuse the "European Union" and "Europe the general area" when context is lacking, it's not a big stretch of the imagination for me that people _anywhere_ could construe this as "official" as well.

All that it looks like is backed by some emanation from the city of The Hague. No mention of the EU proper. It's european owned and backed, sure, but not EU owned and backed.

Tsh, marketing. (see Bill Hicks on marketing).

It doesn't. I "worked around" that by setting a 5 minute daily timer for youtube on my phone - just enough to mark a few regular videos as "Watch Later". Gives me an incentive to scroll past the shorts.

Funnily enough, from one engine with runtime portal culling to another :)

I have this on my backlog of Jams to go through, but peeked ahead hoping to see Alekswithak in there, and indeed, it's him. He's already scored a few great SP mods : Alkaline, Dwell, Dwell 2 - which should also be checked out - and some of his tracks have been featured in various map jams as well. He hasn't published the soundtrack for QBJ3 yet, but I assume he will eventually. Until then, enjoy the rest at https://alekswithak.bandcamp.com/

[Pre-Chorus]

I think of all the education that I missed

But then my homework was never quite like this

[Chorus]

Got it bad, got it bad, got it bad

I'm hot for teacher

Got it bad, sooo bad

I'm hot for teacher

Wow!

[Scorching guitar solo]

> Wish someone would try to create native MacOS classic on x86 hardware.

Apple worked on this themselves - and then they canned it.

https://lowendmac.com/2014/star-trek-apples-first-mac-os-on-...

Pioneer DJ, I mean AlphaTheta, probably don't even know MusicBrainz exists. They're too busy selling subscriptions for RekordBox. And they do nothing to help you with the metadata on your files, besides filtering in browser mode.

I can relate to the problem of revising genre or energy ratings over time. I've gone with custom genre tags for ages, ie "dub/house/techno" or "funk/disco/edits" with a sprinkling of extra qualifiers in the comment field and do bulk updates from MP3Tag/Foobar2k. The extras only really help when preparing "crates" for export to USB for outside use, or when just playing off the entire collection at home. I'm fast, but still not much time to read the comment fields when browsing on the players, much less input any words with the scroll wheel.

I keep every purchase around in FLAC, and the part I might realistically play out stays in AIFF, for minimum fiddling of tags (ie stars map a bit differently between Traktor and Rekordbox) - because of course Rekordbox will warn you you're exporting files you can't play anywhere, but won't do anything to transcode them.

Lossless whenever possible because I just want to give the sound quality as much of a chance as I can when recording sets, especially if they might get posted online and getting lossy-transcoded multiple times. I've tried the mp3 of mp3 thing, and you do hear it at home (out at a gig, most of the time, probably not).

I don't suffer from track bulimia, so the numbers work out - and disk space has gotten a lot cheaper in the last 20 years.

Most of the CDs we burned at home in the 1998-2005 era were still good in recent years, some DVDs in there too. Luck, I guess. No delamination or rot. Really, my main problems were figuring out file types without extentions (burned on classic Mac OS) and... appropriate programs to open them (old Painter limited edition from 1998 needs... the same thing, pretty much).

OTOH, some 12 years ago I worked IT at a newspaper and we were moving offices. The archivist got an intern in a room in our section of the building and together they spent a month or two scanning, then committing whatever physical media to burned CDs (maybe DVDs) before chucking the former to the bin. Maybe a year after the move, a ticket was opened and I went to check the disks. None of them worked, CRC failures all over. I don't think they even considered testing them, or burning duplicates, or maybe they used a really bad drive which would produce media unreadable by anything else - although I'm only aware that this is a thing with floppies for example.

> The best way to experience this is at one of the top festivals. The second best way is at a club.

I would respectfully disagree and swap these, unless the festival is something like Freerotation. Festivals tend to bring out the more consumer friendly, hands-in-the-air side, and more often than not, force everyone to condense their sets, losing a lot of the "storytelling", risk-taking and deeper cuts.

What remains of techno has largely rotted in the last 5+ years due to the high-visibility, high octane arms race "business techno" festival energy, for example.

> Elon Musk famously got an access denied there once.

Also wasted Richie Hawtin, IIRC. And of course, as I'm sure he asked, they knew who he was :D

Someone in a past thread here mentioned how they enjoyed the help of LLMs to generate all their PR marketing nonsense blurbs, because they looked just as good as the real thing. It might have been 2-3 years ago but I still joke about this with coworkers when the conversations shift to "AI".

Might be a Monty Python joke, as in "fetchez la vache!"

Seems like it's,

- "good job on the acquisition and maintaining some kind of product" - how many of these are users?

- "this is now dead and completely useless to me, I am switching to something FLOSS this instant" - I'm betting v2-decayed-for-a-couple-years still beats GIMP/Inkscape from the future in at least UX for example, and it certainly does now)

- some "it's all a scheme for AI training" which would be more of what I'd expect, although for the time being, appears to be FUD when it comes to local files (surely Lord Vader will change the terms further as well)

For me it took a bit of self-discipline watching the video announcement first, before checking any comments anywhere.

I'm glad I got my v2 licences a few years ago, they've allowed me to dabble in graphics again without losing my mind to other even more affortable products. The strings that come attached with this and the potential lack of options for some workflows later down the line bother me. Just hoping v2 doesn't get too much more unstable with time.

In retrospect, it seems almost nuts that appliances from the past came with not only a block diagram, but a schematic. Especially now that everything is not only too complex to be documented "for your own good", and even potential repair techs, and now with DMCA protected software locks.

I still sometimes use the old Scott amplifier my parents got 50 years ago, with manual - and it has everything you need for a repair (besides a list of modern day replacement for some of these, of course). Same with the ol' Amiga 500 in a box over at their house. A lot of tinkering you could scheme on your own without going online (my quartz oscillator overclocking replacement never materialized, but hey).

Never seen wire wrapped boards besides photos of this and maybe some other early micro. So of course I had to do a little search and one of the first results has Bil Herd from Commodore (Plus/4, C128...) explaining it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXvEDM-m9CE

Dale Luck (from the original team) is preserving it, apparently.

Q3test came out in 1999 - on the classic Mac OS he despised, even a bit before its final OS 9 incarnation. This was to get the biggest bugs ironed out on the most restricted hardware scope available as they were going HW accelerated only during a bit of a wild west period when it comes to that. We were all only reading about OSX in the press at the time - and when Q3 first made it to OSX proper, it was through a third-party (Omni Group).

JC did however switch to OSX as his primary development environment for some time when Apple was the first to ship the Geforce 3 in 2001, which was really the generation of hardware needed to do Doom 3 justice. A year later, it was all about ATI's new flagship card which pushed things further for his needs - back to windows, and I can't rembember from his .plan files whether he moved back before getting access to that hardware.