#i understand that corporations don't care about their user base and want to make things profitable but if you have no user base then | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

w3bpunk · 11 months

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Hmm ok. So I'm going to comment on this, not because I feel like defending staff. But because misinformation is the enemy of improvement, and posts like this dont give an accurate impression of what is actually happening behind the scenes. I don't expect OP to listen to me because they've made their stance clear, but I think this is useful to write for my own blog and recording-keeping. The sanitization of the internet and data privacy are topics I think about frequently, and that's what I started this blog for.

Let's start with OP's tags. I want to talk about the original December 2018 porn ban that occurred when Yahoo owned Tumblr. These are screenshots from Wikipedia.

I find it hard to believe that Yahoo would have any reason to believe that what they were doing would be popular or profitable. It is true that if they were unable to stay in the app store they would also lose money since it's a fair guess most of Tumblr's users rely on the app. But this was so very clearly not the big bucks move, because let's be honest-- adult content is very profitable. It is just so easy to get hit by legal trouble if you want to do it safely. Here's a quote from the CEO of Automattic.

What I want to zero in on here is the fact that identity verification is mentioned as a necessity factor. For me, that is a frightening thing to propose. I don't especially want to be sending that information online, because data breaches can ruin your life. Now, what I don't understand is Tumblr users wanting sex workers to be permitted on here freely, while also decrying the data collection of Tumblr Live (more on that later) and not understanding that these two viewpoints are not really compatible.

Some might even call it hypocritical, which is ironic because there are people in the tags in this original post calling staff hypocritical for "allowing" Tumblr Live to show things that violate the TOS like this. Well that's the thing. This is "allowed" just as much as the porn bots are, which is to say that staff does not have the resources to spend labor hours on this problem because they are not making a profit and cannot cover it all.

I really wonder about people who say things like this. Do you want this website to function like you believe it should or not? Blaming staff for this is more or less equivalent to blaming waitstaff at a restaurant for being slow being they're understaffed. And the irony is here that Automattic is not understaffing Tumblr because they refuse to pay their employees. It is because they are currently operating at a deficit.

These are excerpts from a more comprehensive post by Tumblr's COO. If you want to read the full post, it is reblogged before this one.

In short-- you want to talk about profits? Yahoo lost so much money they had to sell. Tumblr's current parent company isn't profiting off of it either. Imagining Tumblr as money-hungry is about as accurate as saying needing money for your own labor at work is money-hungry. If you care about Tumblr existing at all, Automattic is probably the best candidate for the job based on them running WordPress. And WordPress is FOSS.

If you're unfamiliar with what that means, it means that WordPress' source code is available for the community to view and make suggestions for, and the service is free. This is how Linux's community functions. It is a huge deal if you want any chance at defesting corporations like Meta or Google or Microsoft. You can see Automattic feels a type of way about it from their company values (automattic.com/creed). Not to say I give them my full and open trust, but that I look at it with cautious optimism, and we need more people to value what FOSS does for us.

Lastly, let's talk about these comment tags from a reblog on the original post. I already briefly touched on the idea of data privacy, but what data does Tumblr Live collect from users?

The answer is that Tumblr Live collects age, username, and IP location. They also have a policy where you do not need to show your face for age verification purposes. That's IP location, and not GPS location like some apps use. Therefore, if you use a VPN, all Tumblr Live would have to identify you is your username and your age. I cannot stress how much nonsense it is to put this on the same tier as say, Discord. Discord is about to start scraping user messages in order to train chatbots. That is so many times worse because the data being collectived is much more sensitive. You, as a conscious user of the internet, need to make a distinction between what is actually sensitive data and what isn't. Not just stopping at "this service collects data" and seeing red. This is actually important in order to articulate what is and isn't okay for corporations to do with your data. One more thing-- the contractor being used for Tumblr Live is actually European themselves. They're based in Germany, who have always been more stringent about private data than the US.

Okay. I think that's enough. Unlike OP, my ask box is open for conversation about this. This wasn't written to be a dick, but because I wanted to do my due diligence here. My citations aren't perfect but if you would like me to extrapolate about something with a source, I will.

#tumblr live #tumblr commentary #tumblr staff #online privacy #data privacy

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songmingisthighs · 6 months

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every time i open x (twt) i immediately get reminded why i hate that shithole

within the past 5 minutes, i saw 2 things that got me going "heh ???"

- the absolute boycot towards eric nam and dive studio bc dive studio is being funded by a company who openly support israel

- an atiny complaining about ateez's group photo teaser and calling kq cheap and saying shit like "ateez don't eat dirt anymore" (it's user hvpnosis and i decide to not like this person based on that one tweet)

i'm ranting. ignore if you don't care. and i'll be talking about the eric nam and dive studio situation in regards to their stance on palestine and israel so if you think you might get triggered or you can't objectively understand my point, just ignore this.

NOW IN MY DEFENSE, i don't know what's going on between palestine and israel like i know there's bad beef and it started bc england promised both sides gaza during world war or smth and i know civilians are being (X - X) from both sides and something about abduction or kidnapping or hostages ??? i don't follow the news and frankly the only battle i'm keeping up with is the battle going on in my head and that's hard enough to watch as it is. but from what i read about the eric nam situation is that people are boycotting him and dive studio for something they didn't even do ?? like a company who invested in dive studios did smth but apparently... it's eric nam and dive studio's fault ??? like make it make sense. and under this atiny's comment, people are like "SILENCE MEANS SUPPORTING ISRAEL" like g0rl i don't even know the shit going on in my own country but i know innocent people paying the price is BAD bad and it shouldn't have happened at all but so far i don't see eric nam or dive posting anything about palestine or israel but people took that as them supporting israel ??? like idk that whole comment section and the hate it support just made me feel uncomfortable

NEXT THAT FUCKING ATINY. I feel like this person equates ateez's success to kq expanding to a monster company WHICH IS SO NOT TRUE. kq is still a small and young company and idk this might be me, but i think kq put the money ateez made more towards paying ateez for a job well done than corporate expansion ??? and how do you think they were able to make sure their idols are thriving while still being able to make comebacks and tours ? financial planning and budgeting. as simple as that. even with investors, there's NO WAY kq could shell out $100,000 per comeback bc the way idol companies work is do your best but don't overdo because there's always a chance of failure. not to mention they have to pay not just for the set, but the photographer and videographer, editing, actors, dancers, outfit rental, collateral (on outfits bc ateez are performance monsters, shit is bound to rip), staff overtime, transport, music stage decor, and more bc those are just off the top of my head. i don't see anything wrong about the published comeback teaser photo bc in my head, i literally thought "ooo hot men" "ooo what is this concept?" but apparently people on twt think it's ugly beyond any excuses and absolute trash ??? what a way to talk about ateez. ew. and i don't see these people who complain do anything to get what they want (which they shouldn't and couldn't bc kq is not your parents who you can just call a bitch and cut contact with) like it's the same logic with fanfic writters like if you contribute nothing to a creation, don't complain. don't like it? DON'T BUY :D simple concept really

rn my manic is making me want to scream out into an abyss or smth bc W H A T T H E F U C K T W T elon musk should just shut that site

#smt tmi #smt rant

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198d · 11 months

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I feel like I see the argument that "AI art is not unethical because all artists get inspiration from other artists, and therefore, nothing is original." and it feels kind of silly and misguided, or in other words, there's much better arguments to make. Generally I'd not consider myself 'anti-AI' as much as I would 'AI-cynical" (this is because capitalism), so for a lot of people I'm sure there's going to be points of disagreement here. Inspired by this article some ass put on my dashboard. I mean, at the start we just have to think about how a human processes this information vs the current state of AI. People have intent, an understanding of historical context, and a general knowledge of the courteous thing to do with regards to other individual's art. An AI takes a prompt given by a user; you could consider this an aspect of creativity that proves intent by the user. Let's look at the typical protocol for a 'good' AI Art piece: - Using a collected dataset to finetune the output, often the works of a single artist or art of similar styles. - Put a list of keywords in a prompt to encourage, using brackets for emphasis on whatever keywords you prefer. - Put a list of keywords in a prompt to discourage. - Miscellaneous instructions relating to the model you're using. - Generate multiple pieces until you get your desired result. - You're done!

I can see why artists find this to be not really an example of creative intent. Especially when it's just used as a content machine that floods every art tag you can think of for likes or what have you. There's more that goes into making an artwork than thought alone. The techniques of creation, deliberate choices both in an aesthetic and compositional sense, and years of work to hone your skills. When we consider transformative works, these things all still exist in the hands of humans. They simply possess a broader context of what they actually want to do outside of inspiration that AI currently does not.

Another point: Is all transformative work harmless and looked at fondly? Lolno.

My favorite example of this is Roy Lichtenstein. Here's a strip from an artist's whose work inspired his, Russ Heath.

Yeah, it doesn't feel good when the famous guy gets millions and you're fucked and broke all the time. You can see this pretty frequently in various stories where the same thing happens to people who the broader art world don't really appreciate. In terms of the internet culture around art, a lot of this falls into the line of "tracing", which causes a shitton of drama because it's pretty much small artists ripping off small artists here, and people feel perhaps mislead about the raw technique of the artist. A lot of these works also fall into a similar camp of lacking technique and personal intent to just be a content machine for likes on social media or to even just make money in the cheapest way possible, so I can't say I'm a fan either.

I think there's a lot of ways to use AI art as a tool for transformative art, or as a statement, so I wouldn't say I'm against it... conceptually. Just cynical. Photobashing is a common technique used by concept artists to speed up workflows; AI art can be used in a similar fashion. Similarly, using AI art to work out a composition or a 'base' for a piece. Showcasing the oddities and unnerving aesthetic of AI work is also pretty intriguing to me, as well as using it as a component of a wider work. These things also showcase skill and intent beyond plugging in keywords like "Masterpiece, High Quality, Popular on Artstation".

Hell, I don't even really care about personal use. You wanna make a pic of your OC for your D&D campaign? I don't really give a shit. This isn't really getting into the corporate uses of AI because that's its own can of worms that would require talking about capitalism and I don't want to write a second essay. But the argument that AI art functions the same as a transformative work, or even the more absurd argument the article makes of inspiration and using references feels lazy, intellectually dishonest, and showcases a misunderstanding of the artistic process itself. Claiming it "behaves just like humans do" is about the dumbest shit imaginable. QED

#born in hearts etched in cold

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princesslpyhead · 4 years

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A Long Rant About Sindel, Recycled Animations, and NRS;

(The witch is back and looks... Familiar.)

It's not bitching, it's not complaining, it's not negativity, and it's not wrong.

A lot of people are asking why is NRS recycling so many animations from previous games. With MK11 NRS has now for the 3rd time made one of the best selling games of the year, with the launch of a fighting game title (following similar headlines from Injustice 2 and Mortal Kombat X). Back to back to back best sellers. A lot of people have had complaints since it's release about balance, the roster changes, Mileena, transphobic voice actors, Mileena, the unlock system, Mileena, and now the animations.

In a tweet from Treybaile, multiple animations from Sindel were shown to have origins from Injustice 2 characters. The post claimed, "Sindel plays similar to starfire and I'm a little disappointed". Obviously this was a bad assessment to make, but begged the question, "Why is the best selling fighting game/ one of the top selling games of the year reusing old animations?" The answer is multifaceted but the initial response was obvious.

The "Toxic" NRS community;

In an overwhelming bid to suppress "negativity" the NRS community and Twitter users took to bashing the opinion and community for "negativity", "nitpicking", and "complaining" (criticism is not the FGC's strong suit whether it be dishing or taking).

A lot of MK11 players do have a very negative outlook on the game, but from the supporters excuses were made to defend NRS's choice. Okay, that's the preface, now heerreee I gooooooo.....

Other fighting games reuse animations!? Why pick on NRS?

So no one complained about Kitana, Johnny Cage, Scorpion, or anyone else having reused and altered animations. Same goes for the majority of Street Fighter and Tekken's cast. The reason for this is that a large majority of those animations form a character's identity. If Dhalsim didn't show up in SF6 and instead Ken could do fullscreen stand fierce, you might hear a complaint or two. In fact a major topic during the release of Kage was why do his buttons look so similar to Dan Hibiki's from SF4?

When someone is wondering why the possesed and undead former Queen of Edenia shares animations with 3 superheroes from another series, it's not exactly out of line. Tekken especially is a game comprised almost entirely of it's predecessors in how it animates, yet faces no ire because characters follow 2 unspoken rules; 1) they are themselves 2) they're emulating someone with the same fighting style. NRS didn't get that memo for Terminator or Sindel. Whomp whomp. Confused/Angry people don't know why they're angry and confused.

She has similar powers to those characters and NRS has a "Style"! What is she/ are they supposed to do?

In a perfect world characters are completely expressed in gameplay through their design, buttons, specials, and animations. We would hope NRS has the time/budget to make a bad guy not share moves with 3 separate good guys, and hope their animations have enough character in them to not be interchangeable. If your animations are being mixed and matched and turned into a "new character" we would hope there is a reason why within the games story.

Simply put; people expect NRS to make Sindel look like Sindel, and hope their style is wide enough that animations don't become vague copies of each other. (It is that wide, but we'll get to that later).

Why bother nitpicking such a small thing?

We all paid money for the game. We're all pouring money into the game for season passes and skins. We all see the hearts/souls/time crystals and understand NRS wants to separate us from our hard earned dollars (or in my case begrudgingly and mostly easily earned from slinging coffee). When a best selling game does something people might recognize as out of line, they are allowed to question that. NRS is not an indie developer running on 3 developers and a dream. Mortal Kombat is a multi-million dollar franchise owned by Warner Brothers with their 3rd feature film on the way. They play by corporate rules now.

They want to do things like maximize profits, and hire recently graduated students to pay less than minimum wage and lay off. Take criticism with a grain of salt. Read a glassdoor review of Capcom sometime. Video games are like a sausage factory, but the meat is some stressed out kid working months of crunch time who hasn't seen the sun since oh I don't know when.

Your scrub ass friend complaining about balance while you're washing him repeatedly with Raiden is one thing. That's bashing a game you don't know how to play. Asking, "why am I doing Injustice 2 stuff in Mortal Kombat 11?" Is a fair question that deserves a fair answer.

IN DEFENSE OF NRS;

NRS is not a lazy developer. They just look like it. Whomp whomp part 2.

MK11 is the best looking NRS game, shoulder to shoulder with Injustice 2. It is the most balanced NRS game to date (for better or worse). It is the single best looking 3D animated fighter out right now. I say this as someone who plays Tekken and Street Fighter way more seriously. The faces in MK11 look ridiculously good (except cassies weird baby smile), the characters move pristinely, elegantly, and naturally, most of the time. It is easily one of the most AAA fighting games.

However NRS is questioned as a developer very often and while that is okay, it is also, very unfair, and lends itself to their development cycle.

AAA Fighting Games;

"Every year you get a new Call of Duty, Madden, Assassin's Creed or whatever, and they all feel the same as last year's with minor changes and it sucks ass and why do we buy video games?"

Fighting games almost never seem to get this criticism anymore, despite the fact that Capcom made 4 versions of Street Fighter 4 and is on it's 2nd version of Street Fighter 5 currently, a game released in 2016. Tekken 7 has been out in Japanese arcades since March 2015 and has seen few complaints and steadily rising numbers since then.

Mortal Kombat X came out in April 2015.

Mortal Kombat X came out in 2015. NRS is working too fast.

Since Tekken 7 was released, NRS has released MKX, MKXL, Injustice 2, Injustice 2: Legendary Edition, and now MK11. Mortal Kombat/ NRS fans still complain they are getting content too slowly.

Unfortunately for NRS as well they are not working on a single franchise in these time periods as well. Alternating between Injustice and Mortal Kombat, 2 games with different mechanics, characters, and to a mild extent player bases, has resulted in a partially fractured community, and a homogonizing of identities between games. Some people don't want their peas to touch their carrots.

Furthermore, jumping from franchise to franchise faster than Tekken can complete a single cycle results in some rules being broken. Sindel owns a partial mix of Black Canary and Starfire animations because NRS wants to release a new character every two months and a new game every year.

SFV players waited nearly 8 months for 3 characters. One of them was E.Honda. he slaps his thighs a lot now. I love it.

If you want to know why animations in NRS are being recycled their are 2 clear answers;

1. They are making content for and balancing their games at a break neck speed.

2. Every developer already does this, you just don't notice because you're not comparing Tekken 7 Paul to Tekken 6 Paul. They're both going to spam deathfist at you.

And that's all! Don't feel bad for criticizing video games and don't sit around thinking any developer is out here strictly trying to be your friend and not trying to make some sweet fucking dollar bills. Obviously developers care about their communities but video games are equal parts art and sausage factory. Now leave me alone, I gotta go spend $20.00 on 500 crispy ass time crystals or whatever.

#MK11 #Sindel #mortal kombat #NRS #netherealmstudios

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years

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WE STILL DON'T REQUIRE IT, BUT IF THE WINNER/BORDERLINE/HOPELESS PROGRESSION HAS THE SORT OF DISTRIBUTION YOU'D EXPECT, THE NUMBER OF USERS YOU HAVE

So what's the minimum you need to fix something. But I don't think there's an answer. We'd need trust metrics to prevent malicious or incompetent submissions, of course. This is a critical phase—this is where ideas come from—and you specifically are—one quantum of making users' lives better. Suppose another multiple of two, at least the proximate cause may be that the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful language by using a style called bottom-up. And indeed, the lumpy ashtrays we made for our parents did not have much of a market for writing that sounds impressive and can't be disproven. This is another one I've been repeating that since 1993, and I also ignore html comments, not even considering them as token separators. But if you fail at 22, so what? Trend articles like this are almost always the work of PR firms all over the articles, as you can. While the quality of links on the frontpage now are still roughly the ones that put users first. The App Store is full of half-baked applications.

You can have rules saying one shouldn't be mean, and if it's no good they may never come back. You have to approach them as if you were a specimen under their all-seeing microscope, and make the length of the delay inversely proportional to some prediction of its quality. You may not even be aware you're doing something people want, averaged together with a group of people working together to do something differently. He was Gorbachev. 5% an offer of 6. If no one else to do it is the same. Though of course forbidding bad behavior does tend to keep away bad people, because they may have useful insights. You can't build things users like without understanding them. You need more control of a development machine than Apple will let you have over an iPhone. Men's Wearhouse. Ironically, though open source and blogging.

So to that extent they know the same about spam, including the server names, mailer versions, and protocols. So if the algorithm is to filter based on word pairs, or even pull the ripcord part way through, like the Soviet Union didn't have a computer industry, it remained for them a theory; they didn't have hardware capable of executing the calculations fast enough to design an actual airplane. This is a critical phase—this is where ideas come from—and they were smart enough to realize this so far. Fairchild needed a lot of undergrads whose brains are in a similar position: they're only a few jobs as professional journalists, for example. The problem is, the very word taste sounds slightly ridiculous to American ears. Many employees would like to build great things for the companies they fund, why didn't they start them? But interesting, and finished fairly quickly. Write rereadable code. 047225013 mandatory 0.

The best we can hope for is that when we interview a group and find ourselves thinking they seem like good founders, but what happens in one is very similar to the venture-backed trading voyages of the Middle Ages. VisiCalc in a weekend, or a guy with critical technical skills leaves, that's more of a disadvantage. Driven by his enthusiasm for the new project he works on it for many hours at a stretch. We're good at making it. It's very constraining in some ways. This varies from person to person. The urge to look corporate—sleek, commanding, prudent, yet with just a touch of hubris on your well-cut sleeve—is an unexpected development in a time when the fast-growing startup overpaying for infrastructure. If you're thinking about turning in some new direction and your users seem excited about it, not the way Apple cares about the iPhone the way Google cares about search. After all, if appealing to humans is the test, just as you'd leave some trivial but messy feature for version 2. How can it be, visitors must wonder. The most important quality is in a startup, you'll probably feel like running tomorrow.

That suit probably hurt Amazon more than it helped them. If you want a potato or a pencil or a place to work. They were in effect arguing about artifacts induced by sampling at too low a resolution. There's an advantage as well as a cost of breaking up a project. So could we figure out what the real problem is, the very word taste sounds slightly ridiculous to American ears. You don't even let yourself think of such things. The all-or-nothing game.

Thanks to Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Max Roser, Tim O'Reilly, and Robert Morris for putting up with me.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #offer #suit #Ages #submissions #Robert #time #taste #ways

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