‘Serving sizes’ are absolute nonsense. They are always wildly out of step with reality. Only reason they put it on there is so manufacturers can claim “our product isn’t bad, it only contains X calories per serving”.

Meanwhile, they put serving sizes fit for ants on packages that clearly aren’t meant to be shared and don’t reflect reasonable consumption. For example, a serving size of three jelly beans is silly by any stretch of the imagination. So is putting ‘serving sizes’ on a soda can. And a sleeve of Oreos? One cookie is a serving. Yeah, we all know that’s not how you eat Oreos…

Preferably out the back of a C130 just off the coast of Florida.

I don’t smell burnt toast, but clearly I’ve had a stroke if that’s supposed to be readable.

I actually do have WPE… it was in a bundle one time, so I got it for free. Tried it once, but I’m conceptually not a fan of running extra software on my gaming PC to run fancy wallpapers.

Supposedly it’s not TOO power hungry and can turn itself off when gaming. How’s your experience been with that?

I still have PTSD from the era of the ‘polyphonic ringtone’ hype. Those were the ‘fancier’ ringtones that weren’t just your usual beep or bell.

Usually you’d buy them by sending a text message to some expensive number and it would be sent to your phone. If you were dumb, you could get basically scammed into a ‘subscription’ so you’d get sent these expensive ringtones frequently. Many a teen got yelled at for that mistake in the late 90’s.

If you were a tech savvy lad, you could hook your phone up to your Windows PC and upload shitty ringtones yourself as well as wallpapers and such.

These days, who gives a shit? My iPhone ringtone is still the default ring. I honestly don’t care what it is, as it’s usually just annoying anyway.

Paying for ANY wallpaper is just silly, much less a subscription model.

The only time you should pay for one if it’s an artist you want to actively support and/or thank for that specific work.

Back in the Trump days I saw a documentary on YouTube about the rise in LGBTQ+ gun culture.

Basically, most of the interviewed folks reasoned: I’d rather not need or use a gun, but the people who want me dead all have them, so I want to protect myself. Obviously, there’s also just people in that community who enjoy guns regardless. Both are perfectly valid reasons.

Geez, you’d think Gemini would be better than it is if they spent that much on it…

He was (but not always, as I’ve learned). He first appeared in 1963 and had his own comic, Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Fury,_Agent_of_S.H.I.E.L.D.

And yes, agreed on Simmons and Jackman. Also, we obviously can’t forget RDJ as Tony Stark. An actor so perfectly cast, he basically launched the entire MCU. If it had been anyone else in that role, I feel confident in saying that it would’ve fizzled out long before we’d ever get to an Endgame.

TIL; thank you! I was aware enough of the comics to know of white Fury, but didn’t know there is, in fact, a black Fury.

Your boss is an idiot. I’m white as printer paper and would gladly let SLJ play me in a biopic. Because he’s awesome in every role he’s played. Good actors are good actors.

Correct. Nobody was bothered by Nick Fury’s change for example, even though he went from white to black. That was a wholly unknown character for most Marvel moviegoers. And Samuel L. Jackson is awesome in that role.

Well hello there!

This is definitely one of the most interesting attacks that’s ever happened. It certainly doesn’t look like an accident. If it was indeed Mossad: take a bow, you’ve earned it. That was a pretty slick move. That was probably a difficult op to pull off. Gotta respect the craft, even if you disagree on the method.

They actually raised it back in 2019.

http://11foot8.com/raising-11foot8/

It didn’t help much, obviously.

Well the new account was for the new streaming service which replaced the old one. And since that’s a different company… different TOS, obviously.

It was mildly annoying, but at least it means I can still use the radio I bought.

It’s really in the tech sector’s best interest to do that anyway. Because as a consumer, I’m now quite hesitant to buy a thing without knowing if it’s going to be properly supported.

We’ve all been burned before. My Sonos webradio lost functionality for a while after some backend streaming service was defunct. They did manage to fix that but it meant installing a new app, new account that sort of thing. It’s annoying- but at least the manufacturer did the right thing to keep it working. I can only imagine how frustrating it would’ve been if the entire thing stopped working with no support…

Basically, that experience is why I’m no longer willing to buy things that wholly depend on outside servers and the like to keep working. There’s too much risk of ending up with an expensive paperweight.

Exactly. I can’t control where other people find news, and if they choose poor sources, well, that’s on them. All I can do is be the best, most reliable source for them if they choose to read our news.

Our newspaper community is smaller than you might think. People frequently move around from company to company. I’ve worked in radio, TV news as well as newspapers for the past 20 years. I have a lot of former colleagues who work at other companies within our regional media. And us journalists are a gossipy bunch, as you can imagine. If someone actively tries to undermine my trust, they wouldn’t just be blackballed from the dozen or so regional newspapers that we publish, but also the larger national conglomerate that runs about 40. We take pride in good sources. Undermine that, and you’re not working for us.

The point I’m making isn’t really about the ability to fake specific angles or the tech side of it. It’s about levels of trust and independent sources.

It’s certainly possible for people to put up some fake accounts and tweet some fake images of seperate angles. But I’m not trusting random accounts on Twitter for that. We look at sources like AP, Reuters, AFP… if they all have the same news images from different angles, it’s trustworthy enough for me. On a smaller scale, we look at people and sources we trust and have vetted personally. People with longstanding relationships. It really does boil down to a ‘circle of trust’: if I don’t know a particular photographer, I’ll talk to someone who can vouch for them based on past experiences.

And if all else fails and it’s just too juicy not to run? We’d slap a big 'ole ‘this image has not been verified’ on it. Which we’ve never had to do so far, because we’re careful with our sources.

I can’t control where people find their information, that’s a fact. If people choose to find their news on unreliable, fake, agenda-driven, bot-infested social media, there’s very little I can do to stop that.

All I can do is be the best possible source for people who choose to find their news with us.

The ‘death of newspapers’ has been a theme throughout the decades. Radio is faster, it’s going to kill papers. TV is faster, it’s going to kill papers. The internet is faster, it’s going to kill newspapers… and yet, there’s still newspapers. And we’re evolving too. We’re not just a printed product, we also ARE an internet news source. The printed medium isn’t as fast, sure, but that’s also something that our actual readers like. The ability to sit down and read a properly sourced, well written story at a time and place of their choosing. A lot of them still prefer to read their paper saturday morning over a nice breakfast. Like any business, we adapt to the changing needs of consumers. Printed papers might not be as big as they once were, but they won’t be dying out any time soon.

Well again, multiple, independent sources that each have a level of trust go pretty far.

From my personal experience with AI though… I found it difficult to get it to generate consistent images. So if I’d ask it for different angles of the same thing, details on it would change. Can it be done? Sure. With good systems and a bit of photoshopping you could likely fake multiple angles of it.

But for the images we run? It wouldn’t really be worth the effort I imagine. We’re not talking iconic shots like the ones mentioned in the article.