I haven’t travelled to either province mainly on principle - I don’t think I could stomach it - so I cant speak on that. Though, many other locations if not the whole country, have similar history, and treatment of local minorities, culture and language.

Stick close to her and trusted family and friends. Though cash must be accepted legally , its hardly used. Getting a simcard requires registering with your passport now. If you’re okay with that, a cheap burner phone with wechat for payments and comms and standard phone number yo get hold of your family back home. Needless to say you wont be anonymous so my attitude when visiting there was kind of just accept that, and don’t do/say anything stupid. i.e assimilate temporarily with that way of life. All of these concerns are only a small part of life and of course a billion or so people are living with it. You are totally right that the place is full of interesting and amazing history, culture, food and really friendly and hospitable people despite the bs they have to put up with.

How do you know what is or isn’t of benefit to NZ unless it is disclosed? If that takes effort, then thats one of the many costs of having a (always tenuous) democracy.

Cool thing about this is they could assemble these bundles into parallel live streams we could simply flick between to find what we prefer to watch. If they run into a problem of people flicking away when ads run then just align the ads to run at the same time on each “channel” if I can call them that ?

That was a trope of real tv shows especially , and also a way to fill time with less filmed content i.e cost cutting. Often you’d see many shots 5-7 times throughout the show. Opening montage , before ad tease, after ad recap, thr event itself, end of show montage summary etc. Also drives me nuts. Even back when ads were between. “Yes I know what happened two minutes ago!”. And then there were so many shows you could tell the edit project file was a template and they just replaced the footage. Same exact structure every episode.

Technicalities probably, but much like computery things in general these tools don’t make all things easier necessarily. If pure making and playing of music is the goal, then just pickup an instrument. Record it with a nice preamp and microphone in an appropriate space. These tools allow many more and different options however. Of course I can approximate an orchestra good enough for low budget projects if not tv shows, without needing to hire an actual orchestra. And apply convolution reverb of the sistene chapel, or my bathroom. No complaints about the massive world of possibilities at our finger tips. But if I could hire a local school orchestra, the recording gear, and have an afternoon on such a project , it would be alot more fun than scrolling for hours for the right picollo flute sample, wrestling with licences (including cost) , upgrade hassles, and other tech headaches of this digital age. Back to my banjo. Saying all that I prefer when the tools mature into instruments and methods in their own right. e.g mpc sampling and performance, ableton live magic , and more. Plus its not all mutually exclusive. Do whats right for the art at the given time.

SAAS your shit up…

Great phraseology, and have experienced it with Arlo.

I was fretting over Doctor Specials, season numbers, eras and naming a few weeks back. In fairness it has been running since black and white times so not too bad considering. Whats a filebot by the way and whats a good one?

Great to hear! I’ve perservered despite this as it’s great for me in all other respects.

Yeh theres a danger in that I can see. The Machine is learning from our dissent.

My main prob with viewtube has been its flakey resolution auto or manual selection. The UI with it is weird and i basicially have to randomly click unclick autoselect , and switch between resolutions before it somehow lands on 1080 . Might be my browser and OS combo - macOS librewolf. Hosted on kde locally. Otherwise love it. But I dont use much other than search and watch. I use metube if I want to keep anything.

If your’e telling the deglazers to giveup because we will never stop glazing ourselves then I agree.

indeed, which is a bad thing. Those with less visibility and less resources (money) are open to exploitation by these tech industries who seem to believe content which others have invested their own labour to cultivate and develop - including celebrities who I myself am also cynical of for other less relevant reasons - are a free resource to plunder for their own profit at a net loss to society. Sam had a boner for the film with her voice in it - interestingly theres plenty to be critical of with film industry’s treatment of labour and talent also, but even that industry manages to arrive at a compromise where the celebrity actor applies her skill to the process and her celebrity helps sell the product. So an industry with less moral fibre than the arguably corrupt virtually mafia like film industry is running what some fear may be an existential threat (eventually) to human life? Yikes. OpenAI attempted to pilfer it for free after being denied in the first place. so imagine the disdain they must have for individuals such as you and I. The strange thing is I generally don’t believe in copyright , or the gatekeeping of intellectual property. This is not really the issue here - it only touches on and indicates a larger one.

Tone deaf mega cringe, or savy meme generation ? Not mutually exclusive I guess, but I’ll keep steering clear of Canva.

I’d agree about waiting personally. Not to defend it of course, but isn’t this already happening? Probably not at the banking side other than for their internal benefit (I presume as they’re fairly regulated) , but at the retail , POS , even accounting system sides? Theres also all other data collection and harvesting sources - internet use basically, location data etc - but thats all known. This is likely to be a more consolidated competitor in that space I guess. All speculation. I’m more curious so fishing for knowledge

Then Hire cheap human intelligence to correct the AIs hallucinatory trash, trained from actual human generated content in the first place which the original intended audience did understand the nuanced context and meaning of in the first place. Wow more like theyve shovelled a bucket of horse manure on the pizza as well as the glue. Added value to the advertisers. AI my arse. I think calling these things language models is being generous. More like energy and data hungry vomitrons.

They fooled me into thinking it was likely to be terrible with their ad / trailer in that case. I’ll give it a go sometime when time. Or were you sent by google to make up for their bad AI ? ;) are you good AI guy ?

As a long time google despiser and someone who almost puked when I was involuntarily subjected to the trailer for that terrible looking movie, this is fantastic.

Edit: forgot to mention a further box is ticked as someone fascinated but horrified with the corporate failures of Boeing.

Why would we believe the promises of the ones who ruined the primary utility of their core product in the first place, and convinced or blackmailed the rest of the internet to take part in the ruination ? An advertising corporation will tell us to put cyanide on our pizza if it makes them an extra buck this quarter, and google is worse than that. Profit despite the social costs is doing no evil /s

Yeh she effectively chose an ethical position with no downside I can think of. Unless they made her sign an NDA / MOU which they clearly didn’t. Their sketchiness is enhanced if anything. Makes me wonder if they made some low level threat at that last minute approach. e.g we are using your voice anyway, now’s your chance to get onboard the gravy train or look bad. Just speculation of course. She wasnt aware apparently. Also the fact they want to mimic the “her” ai is just weird. They are worse than the cautionary fiction.