See the beauty of doing this now is that khan has been improperly removed from her position at the FTC by the current administration, of course the court will not take up the case about her removal, just strike down rules on technicalities now that they won’t be resubmitted.

I’m sure that the super AI they’re gonna build will find more copper. Like if we just poor enough capital and resources in to it, it’ll start causing new copper deposits to appear using psychic powers it will develop after we let these companies monopolize all information and blow past every single emissions target.

It’s just like the Hittites, if they had just prayed a little harder, and built more bronze statues, then their gods would have surely secured the tin and copper trade.

That there is no guarantee that I will always have access to a game I like is really what kills it for me as a user. Like, I’m basically paying them the equivalent of the cost of a game every 3 months, but I could loose access to a game I like at any time because it’s no longer on game pass, so I’d be better off just buying games I like outright with that money every three months.

I’d rather my money go directly to studios making things I like, rather than fractionalized among who ever Microsoft decides deserves to make games.

I am very interested in Fairphone, when my current phone inevitably breaks it’ll definitely be my on my short list. Also considering the pine phone pro.

It’s really cool to see the phone space opening back up with meaningfully differentiated options. Like foldables are starting to have a good selection, red magic has one with a fan for active cooling, and we’ve got phones with repairability and maintenance in mind.

I’m also curious to see if RISC-V processors start making any serious inroads in to phones. I know Qualcomm was talking about it a while ago, and there is some amount of support for android on it.

There is legitimately interesting things going on again, and it’s so annoying to have all the oxygen sucked out of the room by the current hype cycle.

The wages do not come out of the profit.

Profit is revenue minus expenses. Wages are part of expenses.

Wages are used to ensure that people working there are able to keep working there, covering day day expenses of the workers.

Wages rarely reflect the real value of the effort put in by the people working at the company. They reflect the cost to the worker of choosing to work at the company.

I think that workers at a company should be payed some percentage of the profit of the company, with financiers and investors receiving some percentage of the profit in turn.

Unless the company is an ESOP, has some sort of profit sharing mechanism or is a co-op, they do not, they only get paid an hourly wage or a salary. If the company becomes more profitable, they do not see a consummate increase In their compensation. And they have no say on if the company is sold, and they are not compensated in anyway for the company they’ve contributed to being sold.

I don’t own a car.

But if I were to buy one, I’d like that every worker at the factory who assembled it got paid some percentage of the factories profits, and had some amount of input on the leadership of the company as a whole, not just an hourly wage.

Does it generally work like that? No, but doesn’t mean I don’t think that’s a better way to do things.

I think the larger issue is that so many studios get set up as things that can be sold by one or two people for the benefit of only one or two people. Like, the larger issue is that everyone who has been working at the studio should have some amount of say in if it should be sold or not. And if they do sell, you should be getting a cut of the truck of money.

Transneft is the largest oil pipeline company in Russia for context. It’s state controlled and moves about 80% of the crude and 30% of the oil products.

MORE SOULS ON THE ALTER OF THE AI GOD, you know, just a few more and it shall burst forth from the machine and solve all our problems.

Just keeeeeeep pouring resources and capital on to the fire, any day now. Don’t worry about the climate or housing prices, the inevitable AI god will solve all that, surely. All the ruined lives and destroyed careers will be worth it, promise.

Shame, exploitive studios that let the business idiots take over and then sell them to Microsoft.

Will be happy to support the people who used to work there that go on to make indie games.

it’s kind of terrifying how much power has been concentrated in the hands of people so eager to adopt such a flimsy ideological/religious cause.

You think the producer was trying to be an ass? Or like, are they just that deep in the cult that they think this is helpful advice?

they appear to be copying direct translations from chat GPT in to the subtitles, judging by the fact that one of the subtitles said “Chat GPT says:” and then the line in German. People who speak German also noticed that the grammar and sentence structure for many of these shows has been awful and nonsensical at times.

If anyone is doing any sort of oversight, they don’t appear to speak German them selves and are just betting that the output will be accurate and pasting it in.

Someone who spoke German and Japanese fluently enough to do competent oversight could probably translate faster than they could edit and rephrase the work of an LLM, which are notoriously bad at translating languages in a high context situation like dialog in a animated show. LLMs are also generally very bad with high context languages like Japanese, and even worse at translating between them and low context languages like German.

Residuals are standard in the American film/TV industry. They are paid a percent of ongoing profits of previous projects they’ve worked on.

Another fairly common practice is ESOPs where over time workers at a company receive shares in the company, and thus dividends.

The people who actually made the show, animators, voice actors, and writers do not get money based on your crunchy rolls subscription, and those production committees that do get money, didn’t make the shows, they just initially financed them.

Assuming the show is based on a manga or light novel, the original artist/writer might if they were lucky enough to negotiate shares in the production committee, but most are not in a position to do so.

For me, what matters, is that the people who made the art get compensated fairly, that they are able to live a good life. That people are encouraged to make art by my consumption of it, and the current system doesn’t do that. It’s a horrific exploitative machine where purchase reward further exploitation of the people who actually put work and effort in to make the art.

They’re buying them from production committees and other such organizations. Most anime is made on essentially “commission” basis, where a studio is payed a fixed upfront amount by a group of financiers and other interests, who then distribute the show, sell the merch, and license it internationally. Essentially studios and those who work there are payed no residuals or other profit sharing scheme like is common in the American film and television industry.

There is actually a bit of a cartel in that regard, with the third parties that purchase shows from studios having collaborated to suppress the cost of seasons for nearly 2 decades, leading to stagnant wages and rampant overworking of artists as the quality and quantity of work expected increases while the budget stays the same. Increasingly artists at the companies have had to fall back on gig work beyond their standard hours to make ends meet, getting payed by frame in their off hours to make a little extra money, effectively working 16 hour days through this additional work. There is some movement to change this as of late, but, this is still essentially the norm.

Like, they’re shooting them selves in the foot right now, this demand they’re trying to cut costs to keep up with, was artificially created by them!

Open AI is the largest single source of the demand, and they’re just redeeming credit Microsoft gave them in exchange for letting Microsoft use their models. Much of the rest of the demand is from users messing around with, or accidentally activating, the models from OpenAI that Microsoft has hastily welded on to anything they could. Microsoft could argue that’s bringing in money, but really Microsoft just raised the price of the office suite and didn’t make it clear that people could have kept the old price by switching to a new tier that didn’t have the features. Like, they could have just raised the price without the new features and pocketed the money without inducing demand or giving OpenAI free compute.

And now to pay for that unforced error, they’re going to let their games side fall even further behind. Like, it’s not happening yet, but, I think we’re quickly going to reach a point where Xbox has gone the way of the Dreamcast, and windows is no longer the default for PC games because it’s such a bloated mess.

That’s the core of the issue, crunchy roll has sat its self as a corporate middleman, buying the rights to distribute shows and then charging consumers a subscription for access.

But they can’t be bothered to do the only actual damn work their position would realistically demand, beyond renting server space; providing translations for the foreign media they’re distributing.

That’s without even discussing the fact that not a single penny users give them will end up in the hands of any of the exploited artists who actually made the shows, since the industry doesn’t work on residuals or any other kind of profit sharing, the licensing fees crunchy roll pays essentially going straight to financiers.

See that’s the kicker, for the longest time it was basically all fan translated subtitles, and only recently have payed for translation become the norm.

So it’s really quite pathetic for them to try and save a few bucks by replacing a proper translator with a LLM, given that there are still plenty of passionate fans who would have done it for free. Especially given that translating between Japanese and English in a cultural context heavy situation is something these LLMs are really bad at.