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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • The main display that shows your speed,etc. randomly shutting down

    I know two people who had this exact issue with their new-gen Golf. First cause was the French language would crash the whole dash if you cycled the dashboard views (to my knowledge they never fixed the issue and the workaround is to set the car to English). Second cause was a malformed JPEG from a radio station would cause the dash to bootloop until you drove far enough from said radio station, which would allow the car to work long enough to disable that feature (IIRC).

    So yeah, QA is down the fucking drain with VW on their latest gen. They had a new CEO, and now a new one again I think? But the reputational damage has been done. Too bad, I really liked my '18 Polo.


  • The kind of farming that makes any money isn’t slow work.

    It is, however, tangible work with tangible results. Unlike spending months changing the polarity of nanoscopic silicon structure for the non-appreciation of an utterly clueless salesperson whose braindead ideas will have left the world in a worse state than you found it despite anyone’s best efforts.

    I should seriously get into woodworking. Kidding. Sorta.



  • The kind that rails on “anti authoritarianism”? Or do you have a charitable interpretation of “authoritarianism” that is somehow compatible with democracy?

    I also fail to see what any of that has to do with capitalism, which I have neither defended nor mentioned yet you brought up.

    Goddam arguing with tankies and their endless litany of non-sequiturs is such a pointless exercise.



  • Typical Stalinism/Maoism: Anyone who opposes my implementation of Marxism is an enemy of the proletariat and can be persecuted to any extent. These people agree with the mainstream idea that communism can’t be implemented democratically, but come to the conclusion that democracy must be abolished.

    This meme is an open dogwhistle to tankies and thankfully meaningless to anyone who hasn’t fallen into or interacted with this small subsection of the far-left.



  • It just occurred to me a reason TF3 can’t happen in a satisfying way.

    You couldn’t make TF3 with a different cast of “heroes”, right? It would just be unsettling and disrespectful. TF’s DNA is their lovable characters.

    Not a single TF playable character is a woman. That was on-par for the 2000s, but definitely not acceptable in the 2020s when your competitors are OW and Valorant which both have a diverse cast with (AFAIK) gender parity. Keeping the cast but adding 9 women and 2 enbies would feel extremely performative and like the new PCs are inferior “tack-on” characters.

    TF3 would either be problematic or desacralized. IMO making new IP is the right call.





  • You don’t need a data plan to call emergency services. Any protocol-compatible device can dial 911/112/etc. for free.

    This is why in remote areas your phone may say “Emergency Calls Only”. Your carrier isn’t available, but someone else’s is and they are legally obligated to route emergency calls.

    Of course if your car has a modem and a computer, adding a data plan isn’t a huge leap. But it’s a recurring expense and plenty of cars sold today do not have internet connectivity, at least on the cheaper side.




  • There is almost certainly internal communication that basically reads “hey let’s get an actress who sounds as close to ScarJo as possible”. There’s also the CEO tweeting “her” on the day of release.

    Is that legal? IANAL, but OpenAI’s reaction of immediately shutting that shit down leads me to believe they realized it is, in fact, illegal.

    Your comparison is also incorrect. You’re not getting a JEJ soundalike, you’re getting a JEJ soundalike to do a Darth Vader impersonation. Meaningfully different semantics. They don’t just want “white american woman who vaguely sounds like ScarJo I guess” they have proven beyond doubt that they want “The AI from the 2013 movie Her starring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson”.


    Also legality aside, it’s really fucking weird and ethically wrong. I don’t care if it’s legal or not, you shouldn’t be able to make an AI replicate someone’s voice without their consent.



  • One thing I’ve learned as a non-French francophone: whatever you think is going on with the relations between Paris and overseas France, it’s about 100x more complicated than you think.

    Generally these populations want (and in the case of Nouvelle Calédonie I believe have regularly and recently reaffirmed via referendum) to remain part of France. However, the socio-political situation of each of these overseas territories is unique, complex, and often tense and dividing even for the locals.

    For complete strangers to pass a harsh judgement such as “imperialist pigs” based on this article alone would be an ironic form of imperialism/paternalism. If the democratically-elected local government asks for national help, then I would very (!) cautiously agree that it makes sense that they would receive this help.