SloanTheServal

joined 1 year ago
[–] SloanTheServal@pawb.social 3 points 1 month ago

Knowing how important the site is to the fandom, I'd be surprised if anyone lets it go under.

That being said, as a precaution, a PixelFed instance attached to pawb.fun and pawb.social might be nice to have.

[–] SloanTheServal@pawb.social 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The one way a company can avoid that is to not go publicly traded in the first place. Problem is there's a huge a mount of incentive to go publicly traded - specifically, it's a huge boost to cash-on-hand, which can be crucial for expanding a business - so most corporations will basically do so without batting an eyelash at it. It's a lot slower to build a company solely from net profits and private investors. But the cost of faster growth is a loss of control of the company.

[–] SloanTheServal@pawb.social 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

From a technological point, yes. That being said, there are some complications. The US runs double-stacked intermodal freight so clearance is a concern, first of all. It's doable, in fact India has many electrified lines that allow for double-stacked intermodal freight, but it does add a little to the cost and effort. The second issue is, unfortunately, cost, but not because it's outright "too expensive". Rather, it would eat too much into the short-term quarterlies of the various publicly traded rail companies that own a vast majority of the US's rail lines during the installation. And as publicly traded companies, even if one of the major rail companies wanted to spend the money to electrify, they would get sued by their shareholders for doing so because there's no immediate return on profits. And the final issue? NIMBYs already hate rail as-is, they'd hate the overhead lines even more.

So, yeah, a lot of challenges to electrification unique to the US, almost all of them political in nature. It would be really nice to put in electrified rail again (late PRR and New Haven were almost fully electrified but most of that was ripped out after the Penn Central merger. Seriously, everyone likes to rag on New Haven for screwing that up but honestly the evidence all points to the New York Central's management team being the real culprits).

[–] SloanTheServal@pawb.social 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Oh good. An AI search bot replaces... an AI search bot. 😒

Well, at least SearchGPT is open source. And the fact that it's operated by a nonprofit org rather than a big corporate entity could be the kicker here, there's no incentive to favor business partners or advertising clients. So I guess we might actually see an improvement here.

[–] SloanTheServal@pawb.social 1 points 1 month ago

They're tightly controlled corporate environments, but the people controlling them aren't always smart.

[–] SloanTheServal@pawb.social 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Could be something as simple as computers just being screwy sometimes. Or something as unlikely but still precedented as a bit-flip caused by an excited electron causing something important to actually be affected.

[–] SloanTheServal@pawb.social 7 points 6 months ago (2 children)

It's always big data, isn't it?

[–] SloanTheServal@pawb.social 6 points 6 months ago

A motion sensor would get tripped by anything that passes by, but even so, a basic image processing algorithm designed just to detect whether that thing is a human or not would be more than sufficient, there's no need to identify specific people by face.

[–] SloanTheServal@pawb.social 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I'm opposed to #4 on principle. ANY action taken against an account should ALWAYS be done by a person after direct review. It doesn't matter if it can be fixed afterwards or not, you're still potentially subjecting people to unfair treatment and profiling. You can have it notify moderators but the moderators should be the ones actually making the decision whether to limit an account for further investigation, not the auto-mod bot.

If you implement #4 as-is, I'm just flat-out not going to stick around.

EDIT: Also, I ran into an infinite loading bug when submitting this post.

[–] SloanTheServal@pawb.social 32 points 8 months ago (1 children)

To be fair, if Metaverse did integrate something like this they would definitely record telemetry data "for development purposes".

 

It me.

I mainly make DAZ renders using highly morphed and geografted figures. Sloan's model is a Sakura 8 with Catgirl Megapack assets, using morphs from the G8F Shapeshift morph pack and RawArt's Sphinx to turn the default figure into a male anthro serval.

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