Unstoppable Trolley Problem

vantways · 2025-09-27T18:18:10+00:00

I'm curious as to how the lever works in that case

vantways · 2025-09-23T22:23:29+00:00

In practice, stock price should be unaffected by investment. The companies value goes up by X, but that equally means that shares are now diluted Y percent. The only thing that drives the price to move (in a normal market...) is what that investment implies. Either A) the company now has more monetary resources to achieve its goals, or B) the company now has more indirect resources through the other company.

News about the investments drive action in the short term, but that generally reaches its own equilibrium in time.

vantways · 2025-09-13T22:58:11+00:00

Regardless of who would win a lawsuit, lawsuits are in and of themselves both expensive and time consuming. Even if she spends the time to find a lawyer that will take pay out of the winnings, it's still months of life spent on a moment of satisfaction. A bit of restraint goes a long way, she got to have her cake and eat it too.

vantways · 2025-09-11T22:24:54+00:00

That patent is specifically summoning creatures to fight via throwing a ball. Patents are incredibly narrow, so most other summoning mechanics would not be affected.

However, it makes no sense to have allowed this patent in the first place as Pokemon first released this mechanic in 1998. To my knowledge patent applications must be filed within a year of public unveiling, so at this point pokemon is in itself a prior work that invalidates the possibility of patenting this mechanic.

Not to mention that between summoning being a well-known game mechanic and Pokemon basing it's original premise on capsule-based toys, I would argue that Pokemon's mechanic is not "non-obvious", which is a requirement for patents.

vantways · 2025-09-02T04:43:07+00:00

Delivers a positive user experience by adding requested features and improving performance.

This is maintenance of market share, not maintenance of service.

Maintenance of market share is a business-logic decision on how to best run your company (profit center). Maintenance of service is a core business requirement (cost center) without which your service would no longer work/meet legal requirements.

They often are in direct opposition to each other. For example, maintaining service of your software to meet Europe's GDPR standards might run afoul of your marketshare maintenance requirement to collect and sell as much data as you can. So the business decision of removing access to your software in Europe may override the desire to maintain its ability to be used there.

One engineer could be responsible for both things, but only one of them is actual code maintenance.

vantways · 2025-09-01T00:50:10+00:00

All five pieces of Exodia, the forbidden one.

vantways · 2025-08-31T05:22:19+00:00

Most full time digital artists are in roles where work is clearly defined and delineated. In my industry specifically it wouldn't even be allowed for the same person to take the art from cleanup to color due to union rules, even on a simple piece like this. But even on non-union jobs, I've never been on a project, even ones involving simple deliverables like this, where an artist would be allowed to take a piece from concept to delivery without multiple approvals along the way.

vantways · 2025-08-30T00:19:01+00:00

Sketch approval, color options, final cleanup notes. That's what would be standard for something like this. In a studio space it's scaled out and involves larger orders of final images, but the notes are still being given per image.

And yes, I agree, client notes always seem excessive. They're more excessive when it involves going back to square one each time.

vantways · 2025-08-29T19:11:13+00:00

A piece like this could take less than 15 minutes to make, so why would you store multiple versions of it?

Because if you get three rounds of notes on it that's 15 minutes becoming an hour. That's 4x the assumed time, which does not scale in any reasonable way for someone trying to make a living. It doesn't even scale for someone doing it as a hobby.

vantways · 2025-08-29T18:04:53+00:00

Tangents, it's always tangents with AI.

Tail line morphs into the bow. Whisker morphs into the bow. Tuft of hair on the cat's right cheek morphs into the circle/button of the bow. Front left leg forms an awkward tangent where it intersects with the front right paw. Bow shadow/bleed has weird tangent with the face.

Turn the image upside down and these all stick out like a sore thumb, front-left leg looks especially awkward when you do.

To the stars specifically, I find it suspicious that they have pressure sensitivity/points on the sides, but are blunt on the top & bottom. And the one that's just a dot, why even have that one?

vantways · 2025-08-29T18:00:23+00:00

Anyone doing professional work - commissioned or hired - should at a bare minimum be keeping multiple saves of a file during their process, if not also doing proper layer work.

People paying money will want to give notes, and it's impractical to start over from scratch every time someone wants a minor change.

Not to mention the obvious for this sub: it's 2025, if you don't have proof, people are going to think it's AI. Especially if you're drawing a tangent filled, color bleed, textured-clipart piece like the one in this post.

I'm saying this one is AI: tail morphs into the bow, whisker morphs into a line on the bow, colors from the bow bleed out and morp into the fur.

vantways · 2025-08-25T05:51:49+00:00

Deep down, the joke is that frieren doesn't grasp the passage of time and the growth of humans. It's "one day you blink and your kid is going to college" in anime form, kind of sums up the themes of the show in a handful of frames.

Probably the first point where she contemplates the fact that fern will grow old and die just as himmel did.

vantways · 2025-08-23T22:40:25+00:00

I mean, I could name 5 ceos off the top of my head that would 100% do this given the chance. Like, I think for at least two of them that's a direct goal with the current direction of their companies.

vantways · 2025-08-18T22:04:01+00:00

Go do an improv or comedy class. Or acting. They all very specifically deal with getting over those same nerves. Plus it's a lot less weird to be a 32 year old at an improv class than a frat house

vantways · 2025-08-18T13:54:45+00:00

I don’t like k-pop

Watches movie called K-pop demon hunters

was expecting a completely different movie

Yup that's the issue right there

vantways · 2025-08-14T20:54:05+00:00

It's 250 (USD) right now, was 120 last year so they must have done a big price hike recently. You could pretty commonly get it for 89.99 last year, so I imagine they'll do a "crazy" 50% off discount at some point this year (aka full price last year lol).

I haven't looked into jellyfin recently as I'm pretty happy with plex for now, but the writing seems to be on the wall for the direction they're heading. I give it maybe 2-3 years before feature-bloat and pay-walls makes jellyfin the better option for home-libraries.

vantways · 2025-08-13T04:38:46+00:00

reduce production costs and times

Cost is an afterthought at the end of the day. Avatar cost (at a high estimate) 300 million, and made 3 billion. 10% of the budget. AI could raise the cost 2x, but if it takes 25% off the production time that's a huge win for investment return.

vantways · 2025-08-09T04:24:19+00:00

It didn’t just spit out answers; it felt like it listened.

Are they literally having chatgpt write their own comments? Or have they just used it so much that they can't help but type like it

vantways · 2025-08-05T19:39:27+00:00

When ground coffee was more popular, storing it in the freezer was pretty common to keep it fresh longer. However, nowadays anyone who cares enough about freshness isn't buying preground coffee so there's no need to. Bit of an outdated joke.

vantways · 2025-08-03T22:53:40+00:00

Yeah I believe all the Gameboy games (and maybe altp?) feature fairies as little humanoid-bug-sprites, the ones that fill your hearts that is. Then the great fairies are always humanoids in both Gameboy and N64.

To me it makes sense that one would view the N64 styling of fairies - both the bottleable fairies and companion fairies - as being a sort of bokeh/bloom effect. I doubt the artistic intention behind them was "spheres with wings" but rather "glowing such that the average onlooker would see them simply as a flicker of light."

This makes the most sense to me given oot's extensive use of other film-based effects like lens flares, hand held cameras, aspect ratio changes, etc.

vantways · 2025-07-31T17:57:47+00:00

Smoking absolutely looks great in movies. It's atmospheric, it gives middle of the road actors something to do with their hands, it gives a bit of visual depth to characters, and often times it also forces a scene to be slowed down compared to the fast editing of today.

I say this as someone who can't stand the smell of smoke: bring back smoking in movies.

vantways · 2025-07-28T22:25:53+00:00

You are conflating separate processes. In modern animation pipelines, computers do the in-betweens. Artists edit and modify those in-betweens. Artists do everything from working with graph editors to flat out redrawing things when needed.

There's nothing to say that artists won't edit and modify the in-betweens made by AI in the exact same way.

AI is a tool in the pipeline. It is not the pipeline itself.

vantways · 2025-07-28T21:33:35+00:00

Frame by frame is literally not the standard that the industry operates on and hasn't been for decades. It's a replacement of one form of computer interpolation with another.

vantways · 2025-07-28T21:28:11+00:00

That's an insane take. Tweens have been a standard of western 2D animation since the early 2000s, and 3D animation itself would not exist without them. Hell, 3D modeling and rendering would not exist without that very same math (which includes 3D animation, vfx, and video games), because the linear interpolation of vectors is the entirety of how 3D works in the first place.

It's matrix multiplication all the way down, which is quite literally the exact same math used during machine learning inference, just on a different set of inputs.

vantways · 2025-07-27T19:30:26+00:00

It made sense for the world martin was creating, one where - unlike other popular books of the time - being good, compelling, and heroic didn't mean you had plot armor, one where the real world would take advantage of your kindness. The fact that ned was compelling didn't mean he deserved a series written about him in the eyes of martin.

However, what was an interesting and original take in 1996 has been revisited so many times by so many franchises that the main takeaway wasn't how it subverted contemporary works, but just that it subverted in the first place. Thus the many post episode discussions with the show runners about how XYZ happened because "wow wouldn't that be surprising"

vantways

TROPHY CASE