• 10 Posts
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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2024

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  • I do agree that developers should use their own software, but doing so on a smaller instance with strict active user limits is probably the right call – at least until you are certain the software has a “stable” version, but even then you probably will want to run a master branch instance that is much less stable and prone to errors. Until you can afford it, it’s probably not a good idea for developers to be spending a huge amount of time debugging in-progress features (which IIRC, firefish had a lot of those.)





  • I was on firefish’s previous instance, known as calckey, before I migrated back to Mastodon.

    There were definitely warning signs that the project was facing maintenance issues in those days as well, and it felt that the Firefish rebrand was an attempt to “start a new”.

    But just like my post on KBin’s demise, it should be a warning to those who want to make the software and host a “big” instance: Don’t do it. I think it’s smart to host your own mini instance for testing, but you should probably solely focus on the code development side of things to make sure that you aren’t over burdening yourself with managerial tasks. If your software is good, people will make spins inevitably. If people use it, then you will probably have enough people contributing that you can scale up your mini-instance if needed. But don’t jump in without the finances in place, because you’re essentially taking on two jobs.



  • This is a false equivalency.

    Google used to act as a directory for the internet along with other web search services. In court, they argued that the content they scrapped wasn’t easily accessible through the searches alone and had statistical proof that the search engine was helping bring people to more websites, not preventing them from going. At the time, they were right. This was the “good” era of Google, a different time period and company entirely.

    Since then, Google has parsed even more data, made that data easily available in the google search results pages directly (avoiding link click-throughs), increased the number of services they provide to the degree that they have a conflict of interest on the data they collect and a vested interest in keeping people “on google” and off the other parts of the web, and participated in the same bullshit policies that OpenAI started with their Gemini project. Whatever win they had in the 2000s against book publishers, it could be argued that the rights they were “afforded” back in those days were contingent on them being good-faith participants and not competitors. OpenAI and “summary” models that fail to reference sources with direct links, make hugely inaccurate statements, and generate “infinite content” by mashing together letters in the worlds most complicated markov chain fit in this category.

    It turns out, if you’re afforded the rights to something on a technicality, it’s actually pretty dumb to become brazen and assume that you can push these rights to the breaking point.








  • I’m surprised it hasn’t been mentioned yet, but there’s the entirety of Full Metal Alchemist’s first TV Series that starts pretty close but ends up diverging significantly. Many people find the ending of this original anime to be a huge disappointment – to the point where they completely redid the anime.

    Trigun manga and the original TV series diverged, but it’s really up to debate whether the TV show is “worse” as I really think the quality of the show is mostly good but starts to show rough edges on the occasional episode. The last episode is pretty fantastic though, so they stuck the landing IMO. I think the story of the most recent Trigun Stampede is quite a bit worse than both the manga and the original series, though I would say that even the manga made some of the same mistakes but in different ways if… that makes sense lol.

    Also, and this is a bit of a cop-out, but many of the Leiji Matsumoto manga projects are adapted completely differently with each movie / series / book having a completely isolated but similar continuity. This is an intentional design and is even true with all of his individual manga works. I’s part of his “Rings of Time” system, which allows characters to exist across multiple continuities and timelines. Anyway, while most of these projects resulted in some of the greatest shows and movies of anime legacy, there are also notably a few duds so it’s always worth reading reviews of a specific series / run and see whether people recommend a different series if you are interested in the characters.