And we have the tragic stats to prove it.

Heh. Ever developed film? Not trying to be snarky, just remembering some stuff I heard decades ago. This isn't exactly a fresh topic.

To me the threshold is fairly distinct and easy to see: Is the work being done on the pixels, or is it being done on the image? Are you looking at a curve of values and applying a transformation, or are you looking at a 2-dimensional set of pixels and re-positioning or re-constructing them?

Or.. in film terms- Are you playing with the intensities of light (or the balance of chemicals...) as you go through the developing process, or are you going over a photo with an airbrush and using your brain to put details back in?

There's a huge difference between an AI looking through a stack of exposures to blend in the most detailed one and pulling a stock photo of the moon and grafting it into the image. Splitting hairs does not change this even if the process does get crazy complicated an nuanced.

The specs on this machine were surprising! If my understanding of the timeline here isn't too inaccurate this was probably being developed as the game market was crashing. One of the reasons the NES loaded cartridges the way it did was to keep the product from looking too much like the big pile of shovelware that was suffocating Atari. Sega here went full "educate the kids!" in surprising ways. It doesn't surprise me that it failed, but wtf did the Sega AI surprise me in 2024 yet I've seen like four documentaries about the Nintendo CD?!

The Trump Administration DID take it. Then it was ruled unconstitutional because it was a revenge move over a prank against one of Trump's rallies.

I'd wager your choice of news sources never told you about that.

Uh huh. And when a wind farm goes up you bitch about lack of storage. Good thing guys like you come along so others have something to spend their mod points on, huh.

Someone is blissfully unaware that Hawaii has to import coal to keep the lights on.

Is it? I stopped going to malls because they stopped having shops I want to shop at in them. (arcades and hobby shops, for example) The story I heard was greed over how much the mall wanted from the shops for rent, not lack of foot traffic.

Uh huh. I shouldn't tell you this but your like-minded buddies are now switching tacts. Now it's "we shouldn't have done anything at all to address climate change.", because somehow doing things like improving mpg in cars made it worse. If you're convincing enough you can continue to play off your increasingly-foolish apathy as "i meant to do that".

I hate this defeatist logic because it's just silly. If they can slap a fee somewhere else they will do it right now.

coffee gatekeeping... how petty.

'Public safety' is the term you're dishonestly trying to shoo away.

Because you lot pull your chicken little act whenever gas prices change.

So?

I remember when I had an unlimited plan with AT&T mobile. They were throttling people without disclosing what the threshold was. I got into a spat with a CSR because they kept telilng me that it won't be a problem if I use wifi. "Of course I won't get throttled on it of I don't use it!" I think just remembering it is raising my blood pressure.

I *really* don't like being told not to use something I have paid for. I don't know if there's more nuance I'm missing here, but in general I do not have a lot of patience for ISPs playing games with the service to squeeze out a nickel. Not a single internet-consuming device in my possession was designed with data limits in mind and my ISPs profit margins are not something I am the slightest bit concerned with.

This year I got to see the finales of Doom Patrol, Disenchantment, and Loki, all were really good.

I really enjoyed Picard, too, but I feel like I was born just the right year for it.

Resident Alien is a bit older but I only discovered it this year and loved it. Twisted Metal was unexpectedly fun, too.