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Monday, March 11

Geek

Daily News Stuff 11 March 2024

Bestidge's Law Edition

Top Story

  • Is the Reddit IPO worth your money.  Fuck no.  (Forbes)

    The article takes Reddit's current trajectory and calculates a realistic value of about 3% of the IPO valuation.  Reddit would have to reach Facebook levels of users for the IPO to be worthwhile.


Tech News


Disclaimer: How do you keep a comment section in suspense?

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Sunday, March 10

Geek

Daily News Stuff 10 March 2024

Weaselly Distinguished Edition

Top Story



Tech News

  • Watching the anime 16bit Sensation which is set (mostly) in a tiny third-rate game development studio during the nineties.

    The details are pretty good - the computers are recognisable models that were available in Japan at the time, and among the many PC-9801s there's even a Sharp X68000.

    The programmer is working in real X86 assembler, and while the paint software the artists use is fictional its features are real enough.  A bit lacking, really; I'm pretty sure automated dithering was a common feature by then.

    The anime itself is kind of silly, but if you like retro computers, or retro computer games, or, um, retro stories, you might want to check it out.

Disclaimer: Weasels are weaselly distinguished, while stoats are stoatally different.

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Saturday, March 09

Geek

Daily News Stuff 9 March 2024

Stoatally Different Edition

Top Story

Tech News



Disclaimer: I'm just surprised that it didn't catch fire.

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Friday, March 08

Geek

Daily News Stuff 8 March 2024

Looming Anime Drought Edition

Top Story

  • The worst person in the world just made a good point: EU Bookburner General Thierry Breton has confirmed his agency is investigating Apple over its decision to cancel Epic Games' developer account.  (Tech Crunch)

    Apple did this specifically to prevent Epic Games opening its own app store as is permitted under the new EU regulations.

    Breton pointed out that the regulations that force Google and Apple to open up their platforms also forbid those companies from using pretexts to keep their platforms effectively closed.

    As we've seen, the EU isn't shy about fining American companies billions of dollars, because for them it's free money.

    And it's reached a point where I don't blame them.  Watching one group of communist bleed another group of communists dry is better entertainment than you can find almost anywhere.


Tech News

All Tech Companies Suck Rant of the Day



I just bought a Moto G54 because (a) Motorola phones run a pretty clean version of Android, (b) it has a headphone jack and a microSD slot, (c) it has pretty good specs, with 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, an FHD+ screen, dual A78 cores and six A55 cores, and a 50 megapixel main camera with image stabilisation, and (d) it was dirt cheap at under $130 including sales tax and delivery.

Turns out they make you jump through hoops and void your warranty if you want to unlock the bootloader and install a fully open source operating system but with all the other nonsense going on I'm finding it hard to get outraged.  Yeah, it's sucky behaviour, but what am I going to do, pay four times as much for a three year old iPhone that is locked down harder than Motorola could ever dream of?


But Not as Much as a Certain Vtuber Company Video of the Day



Nijisanji's standard contract has leaked - the English language version, since it's a Japanese company - and though it's quite long it all boils down to two simple points:

1. We own you.
2. We owe you nothing.

There's a clause in there that if you are deemed to have "betrayed" the company, they can not only fire you without further notice but claw back everything they have paid you for the past twelve months.

There's another clause that they can force their vtubers to make appearances and issue press releases - which I suspect is what they used on Elira in the infamous hostage video - and another where they can force you to relocate at your own expense.

Oh, and there's another clause that they can change the contract at any time and the next time you stream you are automatically considered to have accepted the new terms.  Of course, streaming is the only way you can make money, but see points 1 and 2 above.

People still sign up for this because big vtubers make good money - solid six figures after YouTube and the agency take their cuts - but that's limited to Hololive (which has forty talents with over a million subscribers each) and a handful of others.  Smaller corporations and independent channels have a tough a hard time of it.


Secret Lives of Vegetables Video of the Day

Two of those handful of others are Filian - who hosted the annual vtuber awards recently - and Dokibird, who broke out of Nijisanji and kicked off much of the recent drama, both very successful independent vtubers.

Here Dokibird explains to Filian explain what is really going on.




Disclaimer: Nijisanji is basically a cat in corporate form.

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Thursday, March 07

Geek

Daily News Stuff 7 March 2023

Chimken Plot Pie Edition

Top Story



Tech News



Disclaimer: Don't eat brown snow either.

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Post contains 335 words, total size 4 kb.

Wednesday, March 06

Geek

Daily News Stuff 6 March 2024

Plotato Plancakes Edition

Top Story


Tech News

Disclaimer: Don't eat the yellow snow.

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Tuesday, March 05

Geek

Daily News Stuff 5 March 2024

Lemmingtons Edition

Top Story


Tech News



Disclaimer: You killed my hostage!

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Post contains 295 words, total size 3 kb.

Monday, March 04

Geek

Daily News Stuff 4 March 2024

Prismatic Edition

Top Story


Tech News

  • Are datacenters drinking all of Arizona's water?  No.  (MSN)

    Takes a lot of scrolling, but one of Microsoft's massive datacenters uses as much water as, uh, 670 families.  Say 2500 people.

    Based on that, all the datacenters in the world might use 0.25% of what is used domestically, which in turn is a small fraction of what is used in agriculture and industry, or, in California, flushed straight out to sea because planning is bad.


  • Researchers have created the first AI worms.  (Ars Technica)

    These use "prompt engineering" to trick LLMs into violating their own rules and generate emails that can, in turn, infect other LLMs.

    Everything old is new again.  We went through a whole decade of this with buffer overflows; this is the same thing except a thousand times more expensive.


Google Doesn't Work Anymore Music Video of the Day



Disclaimer: If you're evil, be evil all the way.

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Sunday, March 03

Geek

Daily News Stuff 3 March 2024

Squeak Squeak Squeaker Edition

Top Story

Tech News



Not At All Tech News

  • Most of the talents from the soon-to-be defunct Prism Project have confirmed they will be continuing as indie vtubers.

    Sara Nagare plans to quit her part time job to focus on it full time, since without corporate backing she'll have to do all her own management - and will also make twice as much money.

    Kou Tsubame is the only one so far that will be suspending streaming after the end of March.


  • Can I offer you a Banpire in these trying times?  Hololive's Yozora Mel is returning to her personal channel in about an hour.

    She was fired earlier this year for an NDA violation; basically she discussed her job with a trusted friend...  Who turned out to be not at all trustworthy.


Why Do They Do It Video of the Day

Two of the talents from Prism Generation 7 mentioned in streams today that there were three thousand people auditioning for just three spots in their small vtuber agency.

Why do it?  Why try so hard?

Because if you do make it into the big leagues, stuff like this can happen:



Mumei offered to hand-draw the avatars of anyone who sent in a donation of $50 or more.  (After YouTube and Hololive, but before taxes, she keeps about a third of that.)

She opened donations for one minute.

She got $27,000.


Disclaimer: And RSI after 40 hours of drawing.

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Saturday, March 02

Geek

Daily News Stuff 33 February 2024

All Dates Approximate Edition

Top Story

  • A tale of two tales: Elon Musk sues OpenAI and Sam Altman over "betrayal" of nonprofit AI mission.  (Tech Crunch)

    OpenAI was founded specifically as a nonprofit, chartered with a mission to produce AI for the public good.

    This was the source of the drama last year when Sam Altman was removed by the board - the board was trying to return OpenAI to something closer to its original mission.  But money talked, and Altman was soon restored as chief bullshitter.

    Musk's suit hinges on how much of the nonprofit's charter and statements made at the time can be held as legally binding - since he provided much of the original funding.


  • Speaking of chief bullshitters here's The Verge's terrible take on the story.  (The Verge)

    That's not reporting, it's propaganda.


Tech News

  • This takes major talent.  (MSN)

    Home brand and budget soft drinks (as in soda/pop) and mineral water have disappeared from supermarket shelves in Australia due to - I am not making this up - a shortage of carbon dioxide.

    Supplies are expected to resume by the end of the year, maybe.


  • Apropos of nothing, I just bought a SodaStream.


  • Apple is un-killing persistent web apps in the EU.  (Apple Insider)

    "This has nothing to do with the EU investigation," said an Apple spokesman on conditions of anonymity.  "We listened to our users.  Lol.  Don't print that."


  • Here's an 8.8" tablet with a 2560x1600 screen, a fast CPU, 16GB of RAM, and upgradeable storage.  (Hot Hardware)

    Only problem is it's a chunky monkey and runs Windows and costs about three times as much as Lenovo's Android-based Legion Y700.

    Only problem with the Y700 is you can't officially buy it outside China.


  • JPEG XL and the Pareto Front.  (Cloudinary)

    A very, very, very detailed look at recent improvements to the JPEG XL library, showing off performance improvements, resource reductions, and quality advantages over JPEG.

    When you over-compress JPEG it gets blocky and ugly, but JPEG XL just gets overly smooth.


Not At All Tech News

  • Vtuber agency Prism Project is ending.  (Twitter)

    I've been watching Prism since 2021; it's been my second favourite agency, though it has never made huge numbers.  Sony Music acquired the company in 2022, and launched three new generations of talents last year, but it looks like it's fallen victim to cost-cutting by the corporate parent.

    Update: Prism talents have now said specifically that this is not related to recent layoffs at Sony, though they can't go into a lot of detail.

    But in a masterclass of how to do things right, Sony is transferring all rights to the character models, existing content, and online accounts to the individual talents, so they can all continue as independent channels.

    It's a stark contrast to Nijisanji, which bullied Selen Tatsuki into a suicide attempt, seized control of her online accounts while she was hospitalised, fired her, defamed her, and deleted three years of content.


Disclaimer: How bad do you have to be to make Sony look good?

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