only one of these could be called a hero.

leon is at BEST a very dark shade of morally gray as a former child soldier who was raised to be a hitman by the mob.

and the dude is just the dude. he just wanted his damn rug back.

some additional relevant statistics

united states barely saw 1% growth year over year and are projecting that growth to continue to slow.

India has nearly 3x the users of the United States. the u.s. is still second because it’s the country it started in, but it’s not far ahead of the 3rd and 4th place countries. India is an extreme outlier.

unfortunately they don’t break down the age demographic by region, but I’d bet that if we specifically look at daily active users in the United States the age demo would skew much older.

so, it seems like it’s similar to what many fast food restaurants have been experiencing lately. the growth opportunities in the United States dried up so the decided to push like hell everywhere else. i bet the growth they saw in India over the last decade was explosive. probably bigger than anything they had ever seen before. bigger than when it was still growing in the u.s… meanwhile they project that over the next decade in the u.s. they’ll see maybe 8% user growth and that’s pretty optimistic.

so we probably won’t actually see much Facebook marketing in the u.s… the only way they can capture more u.s users is by buying more apps, like when they bought Instagram.

this does seem to imply that the part of the world where Facebook has become a fact of life is very specifically India. I’m sorry to hear that for them.

i primarily use lemmy these days, but still have to use a few other things.

I still browse reddit for this like episode discussion threads for amine and other tv. lemmy will have maybe 5 responses in the threads for the 3 biggest shows of a season. it’s just not there yet.

I’m also a videographer, in our modern age that means i NEED to be on Instagram, YouTube, and tiktok because those are the platforms everyone wants me to make things for. can’t know how to make things for a platform I don’t use, sadly. especially since “just make something good” doesn’t work on any of them. in fact making something that looks good is often more of a hinderence these days and it kills me.

i hate short form video. i hate every mainstream social media platform. i just want to make pretty videos and not have to deal with tiktok trends. I learned 10 ways to attach a lav mic secure and tidy in school. I must now hold the lav mic in my fingers because that’s what’s trendy and following the trends is the ONE thing that DEFINITELY works.

I hate what has come of my profession. at this point I’m just ready for the ai to take my job so i can blow my head off in peace.

it’s it’s gotta be something very difficult that no one has ever fund before.

the only reason to write that book would be for when i would inevitably get to post the “don’t create the torment nexus” meme for tons of social media impressions.

though knowing what impressions are pegs me as a creative who won’t get to post on social media from the mines.

the robots won’t be equipped to fix it. there will be no one left to tell they got it wrong.

same reason harlan ellison wrote i have no mouth and i must scream i suppose…

nah, it’s going to be the opposite.

if other computer technology has been anything to go off of then only those who lived through is adaption and watched it progress will know how to spot it. those who grow up with hard to spot ai will just accept that they can’t see it and think we’re weird for trying so hard to prove things are ai. they’ll also think we’re weird for caring.

our boomer trait will be doing art instead of asking ai to generate images and video, or wanting things made by people when the ai generated thing is “good enough”.

we’ll be getting eyerolls for gifting a nice art set or a camera to our niblings. we’ll embarrass our grandkids when we get upset at the ai point of sale system that mcdonalds starts using. “back in my day they had big touch screens where you could manually select your toppings on the burger, now you just yell into a box and MAYBE gets it right”

actually, if social media tech is anything to go on we won’t even have that much control. your order will be algorithm based. chosen for you based on your recent ad footprint. the ai obviously knows what you want better than you do. the kids won’t see it as weird. they’ll transition straight from their parents deciding their meals to corporations doing the same, but we’re going to hate it. the corps will push it anyway because it’s so massively profitable with the demographics that like it and every restaurant will be owned by like 2 companies. they’ll just force it on everyone else. we’ll bitch about it, but most people will still keep going.

edit: had more thoughts on this in the shower.

we’ll get to the point where we barely even have to pick a place to eat. there will be 2 apps. one owned by disneycokemcdonsldsalibaba, one owned by pepsifoxraytheonamazon. we will all be either a coke person or a Pepsi person and will likely just follow whichever brand our parents did. they’ll be inherently political and each have a sponsored candidate in every election. it will define the entire world you live in. when it’s time to eat you get a notification and the app orders you your meal.

it’ll start as a service for when you can’t decide what to eat then after it gets a critical mass of users it will start to enshitify into forcing what you eat before selling to the disney megacorp who will then push it into everything they own.

this is only for the rich people that these brands cater towards of course. we who would have once been creatives will be working manual labor at the camps for the underemployed. afterall, we’re better off with the structure. it helps us be productive towards society. it’s what’s best for us…

only because people never stopped asking it to be able to id birds.

they’re just both wearing their most expensive outfits.

it’s not a sign of quality, it’s a sign of what’s to come. these companies will keep putting out things that work. sadly these live action Disney remakes sell very well even though everyone seems to hate them. that’s what this tells us. if not for this info we’d all just be sitting around scratching our heads over why they keep doing them. this at least tells us why.

i just wish it wasn’t the general direction the industry had decided to push things.

it’s become the expected norm. it’s the performance metric games are optimized to hit now, and it’s far from prefect.

i was just playing red dead 2 yesterday with dlss and i was legitimately struggling to do some things due to the artifacting. like there are some small missions and challenges that require you to find and shoot specific tiny birds with a bow, but dlss struggles with small things flying across a dynamic background. the birds would literally fade in and out of existence.

same thing with trying to snipe distant heads. the little red fatal zone indicator would ghost like hell and fade in and out.

like, it may be better than needing to drop your resolution, but it still kind of sucks sometimes.

ah yes, ignoring that it should actuality be a polygon, implying a closed shape with straight sides much like this ignores the “weapon” and “used for thrusting or striking” parts of the definition.

not hard to make strange things fit a definition when you just ignore parts of it.

no no silly, that’s what the private prisons are for.

they don’t want to kill us, they want to enslave us.

free slaves are cheaper that rock breaking machines.

yeah, quick psa for passing readers.

never plant bamboo unless you either want to live in a full on bamboo forest and drown out every native plant around you or are ok With spending the rest of eternity fighting for you life to stop it from spreading.

they seem more common in places that are concerned about water usage. they’re basically the norm now in Colorado.

from Wikipedia: “The name “cockchafer”[22] derives from the late-17th-century usage of “cock”[23] (in the sense of expressing size or vigour) + “chafer”[24] which simply means an insect of this type, referring to its propensity for gnawing and damaging plants. The term “chafer” has its root in Old English ceafor or cefer, of Germanic origin and is related to the Dutch kever, all of which mean “gnawer” as it relates to the jaw. As such, the name “cockchafer” can be understood to mean “large plant-gnawing beetle” and is applicable to its history as a pest animal”

those normally come in a backpack of sorts. he could just put it back in the bag it likely came in. then it just looks like a bookbag with a tube coming out.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/images/images2500x2500/camelbak_62400_m_u_l_e_nv_12l_mountain_1197213.jpg

yeah that’s about it, but they call it as i spelled it, and they were huge.

https://www.jimmysgrotto.com/

i grew up near a place that had something they called a ponza rotta.

it was the pizza equivalent of a chimichanga. it was a deep fried calzone. my high school had a tradition of trying to run a ponza mile instead of a beer mile. last one to puke after eating a whole ponza and running a mile won. only ever knew one person to actually finish the mile.