hmstx

1 data point of Yep. I went to my local Monoprix to grab a few things during lunch break. For some reason they seemed to have suffered a fridge incident, good for me I didn't need anything from those aisles. I did wonder if it was just a recent problem or if a more sneaky malfunction had silently semi-spoiled some of the products I brought back days before, until it just blew over.

Let's see. Yeah, the lighting is good - Location isn't quite right. The side gardens on the Champs de Mars are much wider than this. They're not in this style either :) - Melty coins, and keyboard.

What else?

- Bunch of visible shape inconsistencies: building window sizes and alignment, fence railing, rivets on the bench, coins, accordion features, perspective violations etc...

- Metal clips on the bottom and top edges of the carrying case are on different sides. Said clips look inconsistent.

- One of the case straps originates inside (from under the velvet, even), the further one originates outside. The carrying handle is oddly mis-centered (as with most things).

- I'm not sure that accordion, compressed, fits in that case. She can just about stand in it (diagonally, on one foot).

- It has weird folds that disappear partway through and turn into adjacent folds going the other way. Between this, the keyboards and the dots, I'm sure there are other things wrong with accordion anatomy.

- Awkward left hand: not sure what's going on with the metacarpal joints, and index finger appears to begin forking into two tips pressing into two (misshapen) buttons. Her right hand is getting there too.

- Weird hair midline. I haven't seen a "sub-midline" like this in the wild :)

- The burgundy coat clips through the bench under her right leg. It's like the front slat goes through a hole in the side of the coat.

- We don't usually have that side curling bar on each side of the sitting area. It looks like it's clipping through the flats next to the leather handbag

- Ill-placed buckle on that bag.

- The green metal fence on the right begins behind her for one vertical bar, next one disappears into the plants, no further vertical bars, no top horizontal railing. Actually, it appears to only have fencing on one side, that's not something I'd see often. On the side where it does have a top, its top rail has very irregular width.

- Sand looks like... breadcrumbs? Very repetitive coarse shapes, like it was poorly done with a clone stamp.

- Something weird about the leaves.

- The foremost lamp isn't sure whether it has flat sides or not.

- The other lamp emerges out of nowhere from behind one of the blob-people in the alley.

- A bunch of unfortunate tangents and occlusions which make you wonder whether the diffusion hallucinated detail out of bigger shapes, or if it's been trained on photos where the tangents were done on purpose.

ie. center bottom bar of the bench being exactly aligned with the gray edge tiles, side curly railing-not-present-on-our-real-benches fully formed on her right, almost completely foreshortened out of existence where the bench's perspective forbids it...

Most people are fooled by much cruder fakes though. This is a lot better but keeps plenty of tells for observant people (and most people aren't)

I was watching a friend stream a dead game lately.

That game was developed before generating images became widespread, and sunset as that "art form" started really taking off (game-as-a-service... probably partly reverse engineered and retooled with AI too). So during its lifetime, it was pretty much AI free.

I remember having been seduced by that game's art style at the time. It wasn't "the usual guys with futuristic guns and armor", it had some stylization as well, nice color...

Watching the stream, it occurred to me that it was in fact artwork from "the days before", in a way I hadn't been hit with until that point, even as a returning artist looking at pre-AI works.

"People came up with the concepts and developed and rendered them themselves", I thought to myself. Not in a "oh look, floppy disks. How quaint!" way, either.

Weird feeling.

Exactly this. "All this progress and they're back to miscounted fingers again?!"

I think it was an ad for Retrospect in an early 90s magazine that said "There are two categories of people: those who have lost files, and those who are going to."

This is reminiscent of the reasons why Technics (Panasonic) could and would not just do a reissue of the Technics 1200 turntable.

In the mid 2010s after some lobbying, they eventually invested into new tooling to build a successor.

The new models have a handful of components in common, yes, a possibly even better re-engineered direct drive motor (and I don't remember about the tonearm) - but of course the prices put them in the "too much" range, even the more streamlined versions aimed at the DJ booth.

And they have worse feedback than the classics.

/me pets his M3D/MK5s

"Why so many brands change their logos and look like everybody else".

In the past year(s) I have noticed a few icons in my Android phone turning into the same thing.

For a long time there was Uber, white on black. And then others thought white on black was the cool thing to join in on, making the reduced icons of the following look the same : Uber, Soundcloud (they kept their sigil at least), Swile, Qobuz, myNoise. I'm sure if I installed more junk I'd have seen more.

Even myNoise who goes against tech grain! To their credit, they added an orange circle background to it sometime this spring. Soundcloud execs woke up and went back to their trademark orange. But, heck.

Hey, just what you see, pal.

Anecdata: Every time over the years that my parents (now in their 70s) have purchased a new mac, software updates only ever happen if I run them. I don't visit all the time. They run outdated versions of everything until I hear "we need to buy a new mac because we can't use this website for some administrative thing", which is caused by not updating the os and the browser becoming unsupported over time.

Also account for i.e musicians (I hear there's a few of them in Apple-land) who seem to keep getting bitten by Apple somehow breaking compatibility with a bunch of audio software/equipment even with developer release, time and time again.

Multiply by real world amounts of people.

Would be a good explanation...

> But some sneaky, cowardly bastards sucker-punch you with their dickbars only after you have started reading, and begin to scroll down the page.

Yeah, about that, news websites who want to sell me a subscription. I appreciate what you are trying to do, but can you please wait until I've read at least one or two sentences (let alone the short preview of your paywalled articles) BEFORE you dickoverslap me to consider subscribing?

By the time the thing comes up, I haven't even been able to tell whether your writer can form a coherent sentence. "Subscribe PLZ" at that point will make sure I barely even consider staying for the rest of it.

Dammit. I got an IdeaPad of similar price in december 2024. It didn't have one of the fancier displays from the era but still a decent option, it has 16Gb and I thought I'd try a Ryzen mobile thing that time. Wish I'd gone for the Thinkpad E series had I known about it then : that lower-end IdeaPad feels like trash.

SSD IO is sluggish, fans always spin when plugged in, audio crackles if I so much as scroll a page while a youtube video is playing, the keyboard might be the worst I've touched in many, many years, the 3.5mm audio jack wore out into intermittent connectivity within a couple of months. At least the display still looks good. Went through the windows optimization motions with it too. My x230 with an i5 still has lower and more stable DPC latency and has remained my DJ laptop.

Heh, haven't heard of this but as a frenchie who sometimes hears swedes over the internet, I find that the permanent snus makes it sound like the person can't stop keeping some gum in their mouth, refilling mid-sentence because they really, really can't help it and it's more important than your interaction.

And so, having grown up hearing "audible gum chewing is rude", that sometimes feels rude to me. And it's not even in person!

Looked at the headline, no prior knowledge of this. "New Mozilla product, okay. Must be... something AI?"

click

"Ah, of course it is."