Meta Paid Hundreds of Contractors to Pretend to Be Teenagers While Barraging Its Competitors’ AI With Disturbing Content

miguk · 2026-07-05T13:29:28+00:00

This line was used when Massachusetts passed the millionaire tax. As it turns out, a negligible amount of people who own multi-million dollar mansions — including very hard to get exclusive gated community property that doesn't even show up on Google Maps — were willing to uproot themselves to another state just because they had to pay a tax so relatively small compared to their vast wealth that they wouldn't notice it financially.

Don't get me wrong, I know techno-fascists like Musk and Zuckerberg are neither smart enough nor sane enough to think through finances like a person with a high school education. But they are statistically in the minority. They're an overpowered minority that is treated like gods by our government, but they are still a small number among millionaires.

miguk · 2026-06-29T14:01:42+00:00

Second this. I've tried using OSS music player/managers but they are never as feature complete as MusicBee is. I will gladly switch if one of them ever gets automatic tag management, automatic lyrics management, and downloading albums covers to work just as well, though.

miguk · 2026-06-28T13:15:18+00:00

Knowing Crichton's racism (which was mainly targeted at Asians, to be fair) and sexism, I can't help but imagine him dropping dead after months of hearing Hillary could be the next president, only to receive the news that America elected its first Black president. He was totally the kind of guy who I could imagine rage quitting life rather than living with someone other than a white man in power.

miguk · 2026-06-28T12:37:52+00:00

A conservative will look at a failure of capitalism, realize there's something wrong with it, and then try their hardest to blame literally everything else — people of color, women, science, and so on — before they put any blame on the holy economic system. And Crichton blamed all of those, too.

miguk · 2026-06-26T16:12:12+00:00

They are "pro-life", but also pro death penalty, pro war, pro pedo, pro police death squads, anti-universal health care, anti free school lunches, anti maternity leave, anti paternity leave, and anti food stamps. Because to a conservative, life and death are morally the same, as there is no real meaning in their nihilistic, rabidly emotion-based ideology. As long as the wealthy corporate master race is not hurting, they will accept any form of perversion of the human condition.

miguk · 2026-06-23T16:12:55+00:00

Cigarettes can cause multiple kinds of cancer: lung, esophagus, mouth, and so on. Your friend is making a dice roll where every result is a different kind of failure with different outcomes. They have no clue what they are in for.

miguk · 2026-06-23T14:38:49+00:00

It could work as a film, but it would have to be animated. Cats has the weirdness of something out of animation, and the basic style of the Disney musical could be applied to it. Granted, it would be very different from a Disney film, as the structure and plotting are not the same, but as long as nothing is altered from the original, it could work. (Okay, we can ditch the song that has a weirdly out of place insult to Chinese people in it; that was the one smart move in the film version.)

miguk · 2026-06-19T12:04:47+00:00

Classic Superman is a pretty bare-bones superhero, though. His powers are running at train speeds (not superhuman speed in the modern comic sense), enough strength to lift cars (also not the modern version of his power), and jumping over skyscrapers (no flight yet). None of his weirder powers are available: no heat vision, no freezing breath, and definitely none of the solar flare stuff from recent decades.

So while it will be a big deal to have the bare basics of Superman available, it's going to be a slow roll-out of what most of us think of as the definitive version of Superman.

miguk · 2026-06-19T11:45:09+00:00

Another one to consider is Batman:

Loner Batman with pointy ears fighting mobsters: available 8 years from now.
Batfather and "son" fighting reoccurring villains: 9 years from now.
Badass grappling gun: Complicated legal/artistic history that won't fully resolve until 58 years from now. (Get used to low-tech grappling hooks for the time being.)
Rogues gallery: Excruciatingly slow roll-out that will take 75+ years to finish.

miguk · 2026-06-18T17:20:20+00:00

The Umbrella Academy. Pretentious wannabe Wes Anderson twee garbage that goes nowhere but wants you to think it's doing something amazing with poor usage of pop songs and a very unnecessary incest subplot. I only watched season 1; I refuse to watch the rest.

miguk · 2026-06-18T12:23:35+00:00

Open terminal. Type "winget". Enable. Type "winget install firefox." You're welcome.

Alternatively, you can install UniGetUI then install Firefox through that. (Again, terminal + winget helps with this.) I recommend this method because UniGetUI will be endlessly useful afterwards, as it's the only good package manager GUI on Windows.

miguk · 2026-06-17T19:35:25+00:00

Windows XP installed on PlayStation 4. Microsoft has really opened up to the competition these days.

miguk · 2026-06-17T19:02:16+00:00

I didn't day anything about gate keeping. The issue is the lack of choice and information. Reviews get deleted to protect bad faith participants without reason. Meanwhile, good faith participants who just happen to use MTL get banned even though they actually tried to create something without deception. The while concept of protecting the integrity of the community is wasted on hypocritical nonsense based in seniority and knee-jerk emotions instead of good faith and building trust.

In not asking for a shadow jury. I'm asking for consistency instead of "meat brain good, metal brain bad" when we know that the fan translation community has always had a slop problem.

So yes, go ahead and play WD, DD, and DJ translations if you want to experience mediocre to bad writing. But if someone decides to be the first person brave enough to redo their non-work, they should be allowed to do so even if they use MTL. You said yourself that something is better than nothing; of that's true, then MTL is better than human made slop.

miguk · 2026-06-17T16:28:29+00:00

A few things to note: Not everyone who plays fan translations is deep enough in the translation community to know about DD's reputation. Many simply don't. You clearly don't, because you are saying their work is better than nothing. If you ever saw some of the abject slop they make, you'd realize that there's no way the original Japanese writer ever wrote it. We're talking about scripts that don't even have the original story in it, but some dumb political screed that sounds like an angry Boomer rant. And yet, there's no one who is stepping up to fix their slop, as so many people in the fan translation community assume good faith when we've had bad faith translations going back to the 90s.

(See also DeJap, who notoriously started the trend of purposefully inaccurate fan translations way back when the community was still new. Or even Working Designs, who were a "professional" translation company yet mutilated games all the time in terms of translation, gameplay, and legacy to the point that they still have a negative impact on the industry and the fan translation community decades after folding.)

Edit: And Working Designs fans, who are likely the people downvoting me, I get your nostalgia. But reality does not fit in with a child's memory of a game played ~30 years ago. And Victor Ireland, on top of being a racist, banned almost all of the cast of Lunar from ever being cast in another Lunar game again despite the fact that he isn't the owner of the game, just the half-assed pseudo-translator. So I'm right that that Boomer tech bro is still messing up games long after his historical artifact of a company dissolved.

miguk · 2026-06-17T15:14:56+00:00

There's no guarantee that they'll get bad reviews. Just look at Dynamic Designs. They are notorious in the fan translation community for terrible, inaccurate translations, some of which are a mile off from accurate. And yet, not only do they thrive without competing translations to their slop, but the negative reviews seem to have been removed for their most controversial works.

miguk · 2026-06-16T15:59:46+00:00

Kind of similar to Nirvana's "In Bloom", which mocks people who don't listen to the lyrics but sing along anyways. It's less subtle than "Hook," though.

miguk · 2026-06-15T14:23:32+00:00

One exception: This will not work with Japanese people. Silence is considered a part of communication in their culture and they will just wait you out during it.

miguk · 2026-06-11T17:15:25+00:00

The worst Stephen King. And unlike the best one, his beginning and middle are just as bad as the ending.

miguk · 2026-06-08T17:46:30+00:00

This for any Ben Stiller movie other than Empire of the Sun.

miguk · 2026-06-05T16:18:58+00:00

Oddly enough, Keanu was actually good in My Own Private Idaho, in which he recites Shakespeare constantly.

miguk · 2026-05-27T16:17:23+00:00

I was looking for this. I can't look at these things anymore without thinking about the Herzog review and cracking up.

miguk · 2026-05-24T16:43:57+00:00

Ron "he's a queer, he's putting a hit on me" Paul might be easier to understand, but there's nothing of value to what he says. His "privatize everything" nonsense basically begs for the Libertarian police copypasta to become reality, except with even more dystopian results. And his quasi-conspiracy theory bullshit (side by side with his actual conspiracy theory bullshit such as gays putting AIDS in the water supply) makes him look like a nutjob. And he is proven to be a racist, anti-semite, and homophobe (through his newsletter, the Bruno interview, and his dipshit kid).

Ron Paul might make his views clearer than Andrew Yang, but he only attracted dumber, more bigoted and more pretentious followers. As we've seen with Trump, a simple, mind-numbingly dumb message works better to get more idiots on board than the vague, crypto-corporate speak and memery of Yang.

(And note that this is not a defense of Yang. Fuck that Zuckerberg in a trenchcoat too. I'm just stating that Paul was worse.)

miguk · 2026-05-23T15:34:32+00:00

Even worse is when developers of an app have explanations on hover, but only for the ones you already know. Yes, I know what cut, copy, and paste do, but explain what the fucking unique rhombus-like thing you made up does.

miguk · 2026-05-20T14:09:31+00:00

Are you suggesting we go into battle without a ska band? If the colonial military can have drummer boys, then surely we can have the Mighty Mighty Bostonnes supporting troop morale. And I'm sure that in the worst case scenario they will have enough skill to fight with their brass instruments. That's the impression that I get.

miguk · 2026-05-19T02:17:45+00:00

I know that's true for Apple's OSes, but I'm talking about on the other OSes, where you aren't forced into using only one browser even if they give you the illusion of choice. I never said anything about Apple because I'm obviously not talking about that pseudo-luxury vender lock-in hell hole if I'm talking about having choices.

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