I have ~12 million listens across various streaming services

The great thing about bots is that they can listen to every song on file, 24/7/365, and you can spin up as many of them as you like. 12 million is nothing.

Same way they did it for the Mario live action movie 30 years ago, I imagine. Get Tim Burton on it and I’m sure he’ll give you some advice.

Empty Internet Theory but its just the “Recommended For You” stuff that Facebook shoehorns in between the pictures of my nieces that I occasionally drop in to look at.

Its funny. When you go into some of the early Facebook history, Zuckerberg is exploring monitization options. He floats the idea of turning it into the kind of intrusive, obnoxious, ads-everywhere experience that had shown up on local news websites and the worst kinds of forum spaces. He (supposedly) rejects it, in pursuit of a more sophisticated kind of mass marketing. The theory being that this kind of invasive content scares away users, and what we really want is to maximize the user base rather than to maximize the monetary value of each user.

But ten years later, we’re right back to a website that’s indistinguishable from eye-ball gouging Geocities crap. The “put ads everywhere to maximize revenue” folks won out in the end. Zuckerberg’s genius move was to simply hold them back until the website started hitting the post-one-billion user base load. But then this was always the end game. Just clickbait across everything, with a periodic pop-over ad demanding that you give the site money to save it from itself.

Personal complaints aside, the new Mario movie was reasonably good for adults and great for kids.

It was mid, until Jack Black’s Bowser hit the screen, and then it was top notch. He absolutely carried that film.

They also deserve better games than Minecraft IMO

One of the more pure-to-form sandbox games of the last generation? I’ll spot you all the shitty DLC and cosmetics have soured it considerably. But the baseline game is genuinely good. Same with classics like Fortnight.

They were quality products that got deluged with marketing gimmicks. But there are plenty of people running “Vanilla” Minecraft servers who are having a ton of fun.

Its proof-of-concept. They’re trying to get a movie out that’s entirely tied to the brand, without spending a meaningful amount of money on scripting, art direction, location scouting, or talent. This is the future of AI Movies in a nutshell.

Go back and watch one of the original trailers for the Phantom Menace. They cut that scene from the final movie and it gave him more lines than the entire rest of the movie.

At one point, Lucas admits to going back in to post-production and drastically recutting the movie to fit a more kid-friendly Disney-esque media market. Specifically, he was very excited to give Jar Jar Binks a bigger role. I’m convinced there’s actually an excellent film laying somewhere on the cutting room floor and Lucas’s own vanity was what stole it from us.

Also incidentally, the original New Hope screenplay was a total wreck. His first wife had to completely recut it before shooting began. She became good friends with Carrie Fisher, and Fisher learned the trade of script-doctoring from her masterfully. They both went on to work behind the scenes in a number of popular movies (Fisher even has a cameo in the first Austin Powers, where she tells Austin to quit all the silliness and get to the plot). There’s a good reason to believe that Marcia Lou Lucas was the hidden hand that made Star Wars a hit.

Phantom Menace was 2/3rds of a good movie and 1/3rd of just doing A New Hope again, but worse.

Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.

There are far better models out

I’ve heard this refrain a few times. Still waiting for it to pan out.

Android does the same shit, and I hate it.

My OnePlus has been solid for the last five years. Idk about the Pixel, though.

Not just the costumes. They green screened the fuck out of that scene. Wonder if they shot the whole thing on a sound stage and tried to AI in the entirety of the background? This has all the earmarks of a “Are you piggies willing to pay $20 a ticket for entrance to the slop show?”

Because as a consumer, I’m now quite hesitant to buy a thing without knowing if it’s going to be properly supported.

The end-game is to have every consumer appliance operate with a shelf-life. Yeah, you’ll have older models that don’t do this, but they will become increasingly rare (and, consequentially, expensive) while the mass produced disposables will saturate the market.

Basically, that experience is why I’m no longer willing to buy things that wholly depend on outside servers

What do you do when this becomes “Everything”?

Apple Mindset. I gave up on the iPhone after v3 bricked within a month of the v4 release.

What? Like some kind of primitive savage?

Are we talking 10% worse and 95% cheaper? Or 50% worse and 10% cheaper? Or 90% worse and 95% cheaper?

Because that last one is good enough for fiscal conservatives. Hell, the second one is good enough for fiscal conservatives.

It’s also pretty easy to tell the difference IMO.

Sounds like something a bot would say.

Lemmy is being overrun by brainwashed wankies more than anything.

It’s all the same people who comment on YouTube and post ForwardsFromGrandma on Facebook. Its not like there’s some secret reserve of “normal” people that are being diluted. Americans are going to American, whether they’re cheer leading our invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, freaking out over a gay couple trying to buy a wedding cake, or marching around Charlottesville with torches.

These assholes are everywhere. And when you call them on their bullshit, their knee-jerk response is “You’re anti-American! No aktuly you’re the extremist! You’re either with us or you’re with the Terrorists! You’re not even a real person, you must be an elaborate engineered computer program / insincere paid special agent specifically tasked with tricking me into questioning my preconceptions!”

Implying that folks are “brainwashed” assumes they had some better prior understanding of the world that was subsequently overwritten by a nefarious evil agent. But this baseline ultra-nationalism is the original conception we’re raised with. American Exceptionalism is the norm and believing in it is for normies.

They’re not the freaks and weirdos and wankies for adhering to this very cloistered understanding of the world. We’re the freaks for questioning it, for interrogating it, and god-fucking-help-us-all rejecting it.

It’s pretty obvious that a major Lemmy instance is literally a training ground for these recruits

Is there any evidence to substantiate this claim, or are we doing the “Everyone on the instance I don’t like is a Russian bot, because they disagree with me” line of reasoning?

“Blue MAGA” was a pretty obvious one they seemed to workshop on Lemmy.

Wasn’t this in response to the dead-end Biden guys who were growing increasingly hysterical as he tanked out in the polls? Lemmy’s gotten significantly more normal since Harris took the top of the ticket and the numbers have rebounded.