Not as familiar with WordPress, but if that’s the case, yeah, I don’t have high hopes for this going well…

Not as drastic as the headline makes it out to be, or at least so they claim.

“We acquired Tumblr to benefit from its differences and strengths, not to water it down. We love Tumblr’s streamlined posting experience and its current product direction,” the post explained. “We’re not changing that. We’re talking about running Tumblr’s backend on WordPress. You won’t even notice a difference from the outside,” it noted.

We’ll see how that actually works out. Tumblr’s backend has always seemed rather… makeshift, so I’m curious to see how they manage to do that. Given Tumblr’s technical eccentricities, a backend migration could probably do a lot of good for the functionality of the site, if done properly. I have my doubts that WordPress’ engineers will be given the time and resources to do a full overhaul/refactor though, so I’m fully expecting even more janky, barely functional code stapling the two systems together.

Didn’t Obi-Wan order a drink at that bar that he and Anakin went through while chasing Zam Wessel in Episode 2?

It sure does.

The problem is that “keeping the government out of the church’s business” is not the goal of the religious right when it comes to gay marriage. They want theocratic rule and the criminalization of what they see as sin. If both sides agreed on the principle of separation of church and state, most battles over LGBTQ rights would’ve been over long ago.

Separating the legal concept of unions between individuals and the religious institution of marriage would be almost as unpalatable to many evangelicals as fully legal gay marriage, because they’d rather outlaw homosexuality altogether.

“Product Degradation” has been the modus operandi for nearly every online service for like 10-15 years now, but it’s the Gamepass price increase is what got the FTC’s attention? Where was the FTC when the movie/TV streaming service market balkanized itself in an arms race to reinvent cable?

Granted, I doubt the FTC could really do anything meaningful to stop enshittification given that corporations are effectively above the law these days, but it’s been blatantly obvious that this was going to be Gamepass’ strategy from day one. If this actually surprised anyone at the FTC, they really haven’t been paying attention.

Reminds me of when they started doing that thing where they pretended to be helpful by having the GPS voice call out the name of a business on the corner where your turn is - “Turn left after ‘business’ on the left” - but in reality those businesses were paying to inject their name into your driving directions.

When it started, I immediately suspected they were possibly paid sponsorships, which was all but confirmed when it told me to turn “after Bank of America, with drive-thru ATM, on the right.” Stealth advertising mid-navigation… insane.

Personally, I prefer release order, especially for first-time watchers, but whatever you do, don’t start with TPM. The prequels are a terrible introduction to Star Wars, and if they’re watched before the viewer has an emotional investment in the franchise, it can cause them to lose interest in continuing.

Almost entirely unrelated, but it’s interesting how enduring the “rebel scum” line has been, given that it was first said by some no-name imperial officer in the shield generator room on Endor, who was then promptly knocked into a pit when Han threw a box at him.

Edit: I looked up the original scene, and it seems I slightly misremembered the order of events, but the core of the point still stands

I hate that the focus of AI/ML development has become so fixated on generative AI - images, video, sound, text, and whatnot. It’s kind of crazy to me that AI can generate output with the degree of accuracy that it does, but honestly, I think that generative AI is, in a sense, barking up the wrong tree in terms of where AI’s true strengths lie.

AI can actually turn out to be really good at certain kinds of problem-solving, particularly when it comes to optimization problems. AI essentially “learns” by extremely rapid and complex trial-and-error, so when presented with a problem with many complex, interdependent variables in which an optimal solution needs to be found, a properly-trained AI model can achieve remarkably effective solutions far quicker than any human could, and could consider avenues of success that humans otherwise would miss. This is particularly applicable to a lot of engineering problems.

Honestly, I’d be very intrigued to see an AI model trained on average traffic data for a section of a city’s street grid, taken by observations from a series of cameras set up to observe various traffic patterns over the course of a few months, taking measurements on average number of cars passing through across various times of day, their average speed, and other such patterns, and then set on the task of optimizing stoplight timings to maximize traffic flow and minimize the amount of time cars spend waiting at red lights. If the model is set up carefully enough (including a data-collection plan that’s meticulous enough to properly model average traffic patterns, outlier disincentives to keep cars at little-used cross streets from having to wait 10 minutes for a green light, etc.), I feel that this sort of thing would be the perfect kind of problem for an AI model to solve.

AI should be used on complex, data-intensive problems that humans can’t solve on their own, or at least not without a huge amount of time and effort. Generative AI doesn’t actually solve any new problems. Why should we care if an AI can generate an image of an interracial couple or not? There are countless human artists who would happily take a commission to draw an interracial couple (or whatever else your heart desires) for you, without dealing with investing billions of dollars into developing increasingly complex models built on dubiously-sourced (at best) datasets that still don’t produce results as good as the real thing. Humans are already good at unscripted creativity, and computers are already good at massive volumes of complex calculations, so why force a square peg into a round hole?

I don’t think online resources are necessarily a replacement for in-person classroom instruction, and even if they were, it’s not a reason to take the option of home ec classes away from those who want it.

That said, I think it’s at least a good thing that so many good internet resources on cooking exist, and it helps mitigate the problem to some degree. Still, it takes time and energy to seek out those resources, learn from them, and put them into practice. Not easy to do for anyone who has been worked far past the point of burnout and are still just scraping by.

'90s-'00s McDonald’s primarily appealed to kids, as the colorful characters and Happy Meals were a big part of the draw.

'10s-'20s McDonalds has pivoted to marketing towards adults, in part because they had come under fire for marketing greasy, oversalted calorie bombs to children as the US obesity epidemic took off. The other reason is that mid-to-low income adults became a much more lucrative demographic after decades of wage stagnation basically created an entire generation that’s too tired and overworked to cook for themselves but too poor to go out to eat anywhere else.

For me that grabbed the link to the post which the NotTheOnion post was crossposting from - https://feddit.uk/post/9650395 - not the NotTheOnion post itself. Idk if that’s intended behavior for crossposts or if there’s another way to do it on crossposts in Jerboa.

Edit: Wait, I guess that is it? Since it was a feddit.uk link and NotTheOnion is hosted on lemmy.world I thought it wasn’t the right link, but it seems to go to the right place anyway. Guess I don’t quite grasp all the nuances of how the fediverse works…

https://lemmy.world/comment/8841989 2 days ago. (Linked to a comment because I can’t for the life of me figure out how to copy a link to the main Lemmy post itself on Jerboa.)

Upon zooming in, that doesn’t appear to be Darth Maul. The saber is also single-bladed and blue. I don’t know who exactly it is, though…

Tried it once. The flavor was alright, but it was barely carbonated to the point where it went completely flat before I even finished the can. I definitely don’t see the appeal.

And to think the GOP used to claim it believed in “small government…”

Well-put. Compare Bill Nye, who comes across as highly intelligent, yet still relatable and likable, in large part because his Science Guy character tends to be a bit of a goof, and, more importantly, because he never talks down to his audience.

You know, years ago, I used to really like Neil before he adopted this “Well, ackchually…” shtick over scientific inaccuracies in works of fiction. I find him absolutely insufferable now. It’s the same kind of brainworms as CinemaSins.

They meant they only found out the YMCA organization was real recently, they thought it was just a song at first.