I’m not really familiar with Spotify, but at least for me — I don’t have a Spotify account — it only plays the first bit.

I think that this is the same song, but on YouTube Music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx3OirkhX0g

Sure, but they did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disumbrationism

Disumbrationism was a hoax masquerading as an art movement that was launched in 1924 by Paul Jordan-Smith, a novelist, Latin scholar, and authority on Robert Burton from Los Angeles, California.

Annoyed at the cold reception his wife Sarah Bixby Smith’s realistic still lifes had received from an art exhibition jury, Jordan-Smith sought revenge by styling himself as “Pavel Jerdanowitch” (Cyrillic: Па́вел Жердaнович), a variation on his own name. Never having picked up a paint brush in his life, he then painted Yes, we have no bananas, a blurry, badly painted picture of a Pacific islander woman holding a banana over her head, having just killed a man and putting his skull on a stick. In 1925, Smith entered the banana picture under a new title of Exaltation in New York’s “Exhibition” of the Independents at the Waldorf-Astoria. He made a suitably dark and brooding photograph of himself as Jerdanowitch, and submitted the work to the same group of critics as representative of the new school “Disumbrationism”. He explained Exaltation as a symbol of “breaking the shackles of womanhood”.[1] To his amusement, if not to his surprise, the Disumbrationist daub won praise from the critics who had belittled his wife’s realistic painting.

More Disumbrationist paintings followed: a composition of zig-zag lines and eyeballs he called Illumination; a garish picture of a black woman doing laundry that he called Aspiration, and which a critic praised as “a delightful jumble of Gauguin, Pop Hart and Negro minstrelsy, with a lot of Jerdanowitch individuality”;[2]: 111  Gination, an ugly, lopsided portrait; and a painting named Adoration, of a woman worshipping an immense phallic idol, which was exhibited in 1927.

https://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_disumbrationist_school_of_art/

Jordan-Smith did too, though, and his work doesn’t qualify. I think that one has to both do and maintain a straight face for the rest of one’s life.

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There is at least one company that does provide managed Lemmy services (which makes sense, since a lot of people might want to run their own instance, but don’t want to deal with security and updates and setting up x.509 certs and stuff).

kagis

Might be elest.io that I’m remembering.

https://discuss.jacen.moe/post/862

https://elest.io/open-source/lemmy

Hey dear community, we just launched today our fully managed hosting of Lemmy

We offer to do Deployment / Security / SSL / DNS / SMTP / Monitoring / Alerts / Backups / Automated updates / Handle migrations / Fully automated but with Human support :)

We deploy each instance on a dedicated VM, and we provide full root access as well if you want to customize anything.

Pricing start at $10/month (billed hourly, no contract)

Looks like there’s another one at least:

https://www.knthost.com/lemmy

Get Lemmy hosting that works for you

Only $11.25/mo. Risk-free with a 14-day money-back guarantee

Those are the ones that come up in a search. They’re probably hoping that the Threadiverse will grow; enough instances could make writing scripts and whatever pretty worthwhile.

I mean, I would imagine that they may well do that, but there are businesses that buy and sell social accounts. Like, the point is that a legitimate user accrues reputation. I mean, that’s an important element of how humans interact with each other — provide useful information, and I give your opinion more weight and stuff. Social media tends to try to leverage that too. But when someone doesn’t want their account any more for whatever reason, their reputation has value, and so it can be bought and sold.

kagis

https://redaccs.com/marketplace/

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Reddit Accounts for Sale

AccsMarket offers verified Reddit accounts for marketers, businesses, and automation engineers. They are useful for engaging in discussions, promoting content, running marketing campaigns, and managing multiple accounts for outreach or growth.

So they could develop their own “fake” accounts. Or they could just buy accounts from real, actual users, step into their skin and acquire their reputation. Or they could buy accounts from people who intentionally try to karma-farm — I imagine that that’s probably its own industry.

EDIT: Oh, sorry, maybe I misunderstood — you were quoting the astroturfing guy, using whatever his meaning was. I have no idea what he calls a “fake account”, and I don’t think that I’d consider him to be incredibly trustworthy in the first place. But he might mean that he doesn’t rely on an army of sockpuppet accounts to upvote his astroturfing, I suppose.

If there are enough people who wait until after a game has been out for some time to play it, there will be marketers targeting that group too.

They might promote the thing based on value or something other than what the latest flashy game crowd gets, but put enough wallets together and there’s an incentive for someone to go after them. The astroturfing guy’s shtick was that he was targeting individual communities with crafted material to try to appeal to them. PatientGamers is another community.

An outright confession of what sure sounds like blatant astroturfing—a deceptive marketing campaign that’s meant to look like natural, spontaneous conversation—is probably not the sharpest move for any company that wants to attract or keep new clients.

The clients are just fine with it. This guy was off talking about it to market his company; publishers that he attracted did so because of what he was doing.

The users being astroturfed are the ones who aren’t going to like it.

What the client is going to be pissed about is that the guy mentioned their actual game while trying to promote their astroturfing company:

Still, Beresnev did what he could to put space between War Robots developer My.Games and Trap Plan, telling Kotaku the intent “was to experiment with a more organic way of promoting games on Reddit—without using bots or fake accounts—and to build a new case study we could use in the future,” and that mentioning the game and studio by name was a mistake.

“This was entirely our initiative and not commissioned or endorsed by My.Games in any way,” Beresnev said. “We understand this was a mistake and have since removed the case study. We sincerely apologize to My.Games and the War Robots: Frontiers team for the misunderstanding and any confusion it may have caused.”

https://www.trapplan.com/about-us

Trap Plan by The Numbers

We sell thousands of copies of games a month, collaborate 
with thousands of creators, work on all platforms from Reddit to TickTok

2023 Trap Plan Founded

$10M+ Sold Games

20+ Clients in 2024

The marketer in the article — as with anyone else trying to do surreptitious marketing of this sort — is in the business of making hype that is hard to distinguish from buzz. If it were trivial to identify hype, he wouldn’t be in business.

Poem_for_your_sprog

https://old.reddit.com/user/Poem_for_your_sprog/

That account appears to have been inactive for the past seven months.

The clear blend of cynicism and resignation in replies to the Reddit thread about the deleted Trap Plan post clearly illustrate how widely pervasive these practices are perceived to be.

I mean, back when professional game reviewing was more of a thing, game publishers used to do things like take said reviewers on outings and stuff to influence them, give them free copies, whatever. Marketers trying to subvert information flow isn’t something that suddenly showed up with social media.

Welcome to the modern day. Everything is stupid, and intentionally designed for you to have a bad time.

To be fair, if you go back to the pre-Internet era, the OED was pretty expensive in print. Your library might have had a copy, but most people wouldn’t.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary

In 1933, the title The Oxford English Dictionary fully replaced the former name in all occurrences in its reprinting as 12 volumes with a one-volume supplement. More supplements came over the years until 1989, when the second edition was published, comprising 21,728 pages in 20 volumes.[1] Since 2000, compilation of a third edition of the dictionary has been underway, approximately half of which was complete by 2018.[1]

Most people don’t have a 20 volume dictionary floating around the house.

When I was growing up, our house used the Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary.

Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary is a large American dictionary, first published in 1966 as The Random House Dictionary of the English Language: The Unabridged Edition. Edited by Editor-in-chief Jess Stein, it contained 315,000 entries in 2256 pages, as well as 2400 illustrations.

That’s pretty beefy for a single book, but it’s a far smaller and less-costly dictionary than the OED.

Various libraries near me might have had an OED, but I don’t think I ever used it there, either.

My guess is that if you were gonna have a big set of reference books, you’d probably be more likely to have an encyclopedia set, maybe get Encyclopedia Britannica, not the Oxford English Dictionary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopædia_Britannica

The Encyclopædia Britannica (Latin for ‘British Encyclopaedia’) is a general-knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It has been published since 1768, and after several ownership changes is currently owned by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. The 2010 version of the 15th edition, which spans 32 volumes and 32,640 pages, was the last printed edition.[1] Since 2016, it has been published exclusively as an online encyclopaedia at the website Britannica.com.

We used the somewhat-smaller World Book Encyclopedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Book_Encyclopedia

The World Book Encyclopedia is an American encyclopedia.[1] World Book was first published in 1917. Since 1925, a new edition of the encyclopedia has been published annually.[1] Although published online in digital form for a number of years, World Book is currently the only American encyclopedia which also still provides a print edition.[2] The encyclopedia is designed to cover major areas of knowledge uniformly, but it shows particular strength in scientific, technical, historical and medical subjects.[3]

World Book, Inc. is based in Chicago, Illinois.[1] According to the company, the latest edition, World Book Encyclopedia 2024, contains more than 14,000 pages distributed along 22 volumes and also contains over 25,000 photographs.[4]

As of 2022, the only official sales outlet for the World Book Encyclopedia is the company’s website; the official list price is $1,199.

I think that the idea of a large, expensive, many-volume print home reference work is probably fading into the past with the Internet, but it used to really be something of a norm.

The OED in print today costs $1,215, and you can still get the thing. So that’s pretty comparable to the pre-Internet past.

They also sell online subscriptions for $100/year. I think that most people with a home set likely didn’t bother to replace their encyclopedia or dictionary and just let it get out of date, so they probably didn’t get an OED set and replace it every 12 years (well, discount the cost of financing there) so online access would cost more…but it’s probably not wildly worse.

$100/year is definitely not worth it for me for OED access, but, then, neither is the print edition, and that’s been the long-run norm for what someone would get if they wanted the OED.

Honestly…considers I don’t think that I actually even have a print dictionary. I used to have a little vest-pocket dictionary that was floating around somewhere, but not a standard bookshelf reference. Just too many freely-available online ones. If I bought one, I probably would not buy the OED.

I do think that the paywall will make the OED less-relevant relative to other dictionaries.

But I don’t think that the world is worse off now than it was when one had to go buy a large print book (or a 20-volume set of books, if that’s how you swung) and then go haul it off the bookshelf when you wanted to reference it.

Merriam-Webster isn’t paywalled.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/

Looks like there’s a new definitive standard for the English language!

I don’t know if I’d call baking bread a huge financial win, but it does let you experiment with styles that you like, whereas store-bought bread, even at a store with a lot of selection, is only gonna have so many options. I like throwing poppy seeds and extra vital wheat gluten (more chewy/stretchy) and olive oil into my bread.

And fresh yeast bread just out of the oven smells really good.

I virtually never did it when I had to knead bread by hand — it’s not just that the kneading is a lot of work, but it makes a mess — but I do make use of a bread machine, and that reduced the effort involved enough for me to do it on a semi-regular basis, though come to think of it, I haven’t made any loaves in a while.

I assumed it was set in the United States until the main character went to London.

I’d assume that London was a city on the Thames bridged by Blackfriars Bridge in the UK.

But you never know, because it might be that London was a city on the Thames bridged by Blackfriars Bridge in Canada.

I don’t know if (a) it’s real and (b) it’ll be like the original Steam Controller, but if so, the point is that it’s the most-viable mouse alternative that you can have in a gamepad form factor.

If a game can be played with a traditional gamepad, then sure, there are a bunch of good options. But not all games are like that.

The original was useful for someone who wants to play a mouse-based game on the couch.

Fallout 5. Kenshi 2.

You can add git subcommands by adding stuff somewhere in your PATH. Just create a git-leg binary or script or whatever.

https://opensource.com/article/22/4/customize-git-subcommands

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I will say that cleaning does seem to make me feel upbeat afterwards too. I should probably do it more…

Hmm. While I don’t know what their QA workflow is, my own experience is that working with QA people to design a QA procedure for a given feature tends to require familiarity with the feature in the context of real-world knowledge and possible problems, and that human-validating a feature isn’t usually something done at massive scale, where you’d get a lot of benefit from heavy automation.

It’s possible that one might be able to use LLMs to help write test code — reliability and security considerations there are normally less-critical than in front-line code. Worst case is getting a false positive, and if you can get more test cases covered, I imagine that might pay off.

Square does an MMO, among their other stuff. If they can train a model to produce AI-driven characters that act sufficiently like human players, where they can theoretically log training data from human players, that might be sufficient to populate an MMO “experimental” deployment so that they can see if anything breaks prior to moving code to production.

“Because I would love to be able to start up 10,000 instances of a game in the cloud, so there’s 10,000 copies of the game running, deploy an AI bot to spend all night testing that game, then in the morning we get a report. Because that would be transformational.”

I think that the problem is that you’re likely going to need more-advanced AI than an LLM, if you want them to just explore and try out new features.

One former Respawn employee who worked in a senior QA role told Business Insider that he believes one of the reasons he was among 100 colleagues laid off this past spring is because AI was reviewing and summarising feedback from play testers, a job he usually did.

We can do a reasonable job of summarizing human language with LLMs today. I think that that might be a viable application.