miramarco

Happy Mean Girls day to all who celebrate

It is weird that, in the years before Christ, all the years are numbered in decreasing order, while their months and days still go from January 1st to December 31st.

I think we should flip flop everything in those year, with every year starting on December 31st and ending on January 1st, so everything is mirrored perfectly around Year 0, as it should be…

{I know Year 0 does not exist, and that calendar months were different back then. This is a joke, no need to fact-check this.}

I have been lurking in several online fandoms for quite some time, so let me say that the tendency to look for ulterior motives in media – pranks, easter eggs, secret messages, puzzles, ARGs, etc. – this type of meta-content hunt is kind of ruining how people consume media

I don’t mind people who misdial and call me instead of someone else. It’s an honest mistake.

One thing I noticed though in my experience is that fewer people will say something like “Sorry, wrong number”. They just end the conversation abruptly, as if they were too embarrassed or too proud to say those three words

The latest video by Stuart MacLean about the #Eurovision Song Contest is a good recap of what the current situation of the show is, especially on the EBU's attitude towards KAN, Israel's broadcaster, and how it affected the mood of this year's show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LViF45Ycdqo

Someone you know will probably download Meta Muse or any other agentic AI assistant and give them full access to their message history and emails – including the ones *you* have sent them

A couple of days ago I updated my collection of interesting Wikipedia articles: https://miramarco.weblog.lol/2024/01/a-collection-of-wikipedia-articles-for-the-curious-minds

New entries are marked with a star emoji ⭐️

I hope all the hype around “You Can See Everything” is deserved, the way they talk and market the movie makes it look like a successor to Orson Welles' “F for Fake”

It’s nice to see the “April 25th is the perfect date, not too hot and not too cold” joke, because here in Italy it’s Liberation Day, the anniversary of the day in which Nazis and Fascists got kicked out of the major Italian cities. Perfect date indeed

I’ve been holding an anti-AI stance for years. I’m not absolutist about it (if used responsibly and sparingly, I’ll make exceptions; kind of like I accept some level of car usage), but as more and more people around me go gung-ho about AI, I feel becoming resentful and bitter, eroding my tolerance and eventually stressing me out.

I’m looking for advice: How can I interiorize that I can stand my ground w.r.t. AI, while looking past other people’s love for it, just like I do for cars? :boost_ok:

RE: https://famichiki.jp/@unseenjapan/116564590949796833

I guess seeing black-and-white packaging on the supermarket shelves because colour ink is no longer available would be some kind of “oh shit” moment for a majority of buyers

This is the first time I see this on Wikipedia: The infobox displaying not just a screengrab for the movie the article is about, but embedding the full movie at the top of the infobox (presumably in the public domain now).

Watching the movies as the masters intended: In a little box on their Wikipedia pages

If I understand the Wikipedia article about the Hornbostel–Sachs classification method for musical instruments, all violins are lutes…?

Now many news outlets are interested in doing their version of mini crossword puzzles, and that reminds me that I used to create mini puzzles for my middle school class’ magazine (literally a few pages taped to the wall), and to this day I still create 6×6 themed puzzles when I’m bored.

Maybe one day I’ll find a way to share them with people who have the same interest. But those puzzles are in Italian, so they have a more limited, harder-to-find audience

It's tax season over here, which is also the time of the year in which I feel disappointed with my document archiving methods and my lack of rigour in organizing papers

Just watched the Smartypants Season 3 trailer. I was ready for Angela Giarratana and Amanda Lehan-Canto, but then I was like… :flan_aww: omg, is that Vivian Wilson!?!

#Dropout

Only today I saw a news outlet point out that the confirmed cases of hantavirus are limited to crew and passengers of the ship, and no confirmed transmission happened on planes. (I had to check Wikipedia in the days before to make sure of that.)

That seems like a crucial point to underline while covering the topic at the present time, and yet so many news sources miss that

• the prize jury said that they were not going to give a prize to any country that is carrying out crimes against humanity, and they got some flak for that

• so the whole prize jury decided to step down

• and now the Biennale is replacing those prizes with some sort of people's awards, voted by the attendants (basically they're unwittingly pulling a Eurovision)

• the Biennale starts this Saturday, probably with the Russian pavilion closed for some time

I am in a Discord server with people I don't really know much, and Discord tells me that one of them is listening to music right now. Not only that, but Discord also tells me what song they are listening to and how far into the song they are. I honestly don't need so much insight into what other people are doing

Smoking ban for people born after 2008 in the UK agreed: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn08jy6w0l5o

Am I forgetting previous cases, or is this a new form of ageism, in which young people are legally denied agency *even after they have become adults*?

In his latest newsletter,* Ryan Broderick wrote about his belief that the average video watcher “can no longer discern the difference” between legacy media productions, big-budget videos made by independent creators, and low-cost selfie-style videos. He argues that audiences now “want videos to feel like a friend with perfect media training casually FaceTiming them from a professional newsroom”.

Does it match your feelings? Did you notice this in other people?

* https://www.garbageday.email/p/there-s-nothing-to-watch-on-youtube-anymore

Ho scoperto che esiste un subreddit dedicato al Post (non ufficiale), e buona parte dei post hanno come primo commento qualcunə che dà del puntacazzista a OP.

Un subreddit così piccolo (ottomila lettori e lettrici) e ha già bisogno della versione circlejerk

Oh shit, they’re announcing this year’s Nobel Prizes next week. Let’s get ready for another round of big ego management

The funny thing about AI-designed menus is that I've never read a text-only menu and thought, “This need pictures”.

Like, I've always perceived pictures in menus as “tacky”, not “premium”