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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • AI models that can perform well without sending everything off to the cloud to do so are going to be high on my wish list. Partly for privacy, partly for responsiveness, partly for resilience when the internet goes down. I’ve heard some rumors that this is a focus for the AI that will drive the next upgrade to Siri, and I hope that turns out to be true.














  • Holy shit that sounds like an absolute nightmare.

    Let’s ignore for the moment all the mega corporation and cloud data security implications of that (and there are MANY), let’s pretend it does all processing and storage locally and never needs to transmit any of those conversations offsite.

    That STILL sounds like an absolute nightmare. I could spy on the people who live with me in an extraordinarily efficient way. “Hey Siri, what did my wife talk about in the phone call over breakfast?” “Hey siri, is my daughter gay?” “Hey siri, summarize all the conversations you heard at this dinner party.”



  • I always feel like I’m in the minority when it comes to action sequences. They are 80% of the time the most boring part of a movie. Plot and character development don’t happen during them, and usually (especially for the big climactic fight scene) the outcome is certain.

    For me, the only exceptions are generally:

    Fights that the heroes might actually lose. (So usually, the fights earlier in the show)

    Fights where there are good character moments or development during it. (The Princess Bride sword fight scene is a classic for this)

    Fights with lots of good strategy/tactics in them. (Game of Thrones had a lot of this, at least prior to the last season)

    There are a very few fight scenes I’ll actually enjoy outside of these ones, and it feels like many action movies don’t bother with any of this.


  • One thing that definitely contributed to this: when these games were coming out, those of us who were reading the gaming magazines at the time were aware that Sony had taken the IP away from the original devs, Singletrac, between 2 and 3. So we went in skeptical, and then… the controls were squishy, the power ups all looked the same (replaced the 2D icons with 3D pickups in an age where that just did not work), the weapons didn’t pack as much visceral ppunch… it just didn’t feel right. And knowing that this was an entirely different dev team, “not feeling right” felt like a betrayal. So while 3 probably isn’t a massive downgrade from 2 in an objective sense, that feeling of betrayal turned mild disappointment into HAAAAATE.

    And then Rogue Trip came out, which was the new car combat game from Singletrac, and there was a collective “oh, this is what TM3 was supposed to feel like.” And that didn’t help matters.