Good he found the right gadget for the job. I'm happy it works and has improved the mother's life.

It's frustrating that subscription-based product enshittification is so ubiquitous that avoiding it needed to be included as a constraint, and even pointing that out feels banal and trite for how much it's the default.

Your success as a greenhorn Silicon Valley intellectual will rest on your ability to shoehorn Girard’s name and the “mimetic theory” with which he’s associated into as many blog posts, podcast interviews, and tweets as possible.

Instructions unclear, accidentally started reading Gerard instead.

Why would I even want to learn anything from the French? As the article points out, they can't even outcompete China, a place well known for its free speech and low taxation. French language doesn't even have a word for entrepreneur.

Yea who would want to live in a dusty, arid, brown and yellow wasteland city like that? Certainly not the "Occupy Mars" guy.

The dark theme is nice, btw.

Ok.

The usual lifecycle of an anime fan looks something like this: they are introduced to the format with great IP – the Attack on Titan anime or the One Piece live action show or one of the miHoYo games.

I don't know how things are in Japan, but I'll be damned if I ever meet someone who gateway series into anime was a live action adaptation of One Piece.

AI companions, an evolution of classic visual novels, are the most popular for anime characters and IP.

The most popular what for anime characters and IP?

Anime studios are adopting new AI technologies to create content faster and more cost effectively, but they are also iterating on new core loops with AI-native character interactions.

Some of them probably are. Screw them.

VTubing has transformed the way millions of anime fans interact with their favorite characters in new social and parasocial relationships by allowing any fan to roleplay as the characters themselves.

You can't just casually throw "social and parasocial" in there and then describe a purely parasocial relationship. Apologize to Shannon Strucci.

Also this is like saying television has allowed us to roleplay our favorite Radio announcers. They seem to be under the impression that the vtuber phenomenon is about people digitally cosplaying their favorite anime character together when it's more like an actor putting on a performance as an original character. And for the big ones, a bunch of Japanese style idol industry bullshit layered on top.

While audience inteeaction is usually a part of it, the nature of the medium remains highly asymmetric.

Ready to dive in? Let’s jam.

Keep Cowboy Bebop's name out of your filthy mouth.

Anime entered the mainstream in the 2000s with popular shounen anime like Naruto, One Piece, and now Attack on Titan.

I might be behind the times but even I don't think AoT is new. At least say Jujutsu Kaisen or something.

This affinity has led to one of the most popular use cases of AI recently – AI waifus and husbandos.

May all your subculture in-jokes die a dignified death before a VC firm references them in a blog post.

Waifu / husbando culture derives from visual novels, and AI companions are the logical extension of these animated storybook games.

"Mai waifu" was originally a funny engrish quote from Azumanga Daioh and was used to refer to any favorite character. The non tongue en cheek relationship simulation aspect merged with the meme later on.

Originally, visual novels were serialized books with anime-styled pictures in between.

This doesn't seem to be what the linked Medium article is saying and seems like they're just mixing up light novels and visual novels.

While there are many practical use cases for AI-simulated human interactions – AI as therapist, as teacher, as assistant, etc.

Practical, huh?

For instance, character.ai’s top characters are all from Genshin Impact; Raiden, Yae Miko, and Hu Tao take some of the top spots at 390M, 202M, and 113M messages respectively as of the time of this blog, compared to Elon Musk at a mere 40M messages.

To be fair I'd rather take almost anyone, gacha game character or not, other than Elon Musk as my conversation partner, whether simulated or real.

The majority of top anime games and visual novels are role playing games that feature a romance mechanic, and so it’s natural for fans to want to deepen their connection to their favorite IP and characters through active interactions.

Factually dubious claim aside, how hard is it to write "series" or at least "anime" like a real human being with feelings instead of "IP".

I've watched some anime series and felt things about them. I've never given a shit about an anime IP. Why would I, never owned one.

UGC Democratizes Creation for Anime Fans Anime is the new playground for content creation. Fans often engage with anime IP by creating their own versions of art, novels, and games, and innovation is happening across the stack.

Pixiv has existed for ages. Even before that was doujinshi, and people have made art, original and derivative, since before the beginning of civilization. Your idea of modding custom animu avatars for shovelware Love Plus sequels is not new.

There are a few notable reasons for the popularity of these games. The first is that there’s clear player demand against a shortage of high quality anime IP games; one example is Palworld’s recent success as the “Pokemon with guns” game, selling over 25M copies in a month across Steam and Xbox Game Pass.

Palworld is evidence of a lack of high quality anime games much like all nonblack nonravens are evidence of a lack of nonblack ravens.

The second reason is that the anime IP licensing landscape is notoriously difficult to navigate for developers, creating a potential undersupply of games.

It's actually incredibly easy to create and publish media based on anime and get away with it. You just can't do it too professionally. If you love democratizing art so much, go to Comiket.

Also there are tons of licensed games based on anime what the hell are you talking about?

Some startups like Kasagi Labo, Layer, and Story Protocol are tackling this issue to make IP more democratized and easier to access.

Misspelled "plutocratized" there. Also had a double take checking out the third one: "Story is the World’s IP Blockchain, onramping Programmable IP to power the next generation of AI, DeFi, and consumer applications."

Beyond UGC platforms, AI models and tools are enabling first-time creators to make compelling anime content that previously would only have been possible with a team of professionals.

I'm sure I will continue to be as thrilled as I have been up to now to see more art made by people who can't make art and filling the gap with statistical average of all art ever.

On the other side of the spectrum, professional game studios are leading the charge for high production-value consumer experiences that build on or create new IP. Anime games are some of the highest grossing in the games industry, accounting for 20% of spend on the mobile app store despite only having usage penetration of <3%.

Sounds great (not), but I heard someone say there was a lack of high quality anime IP games. Surely you can't both be right?

There are two ways that anime game studios broaden the horizon for players. First, they usually create the highest quality games of the most popular IPs like Dragon Ball, Pokemon, or Dragon Quest.

Consistency, what's that? Maybe invest in a bigger context window so you can remember what you generated a few paragraphs ago.

For now, we’ve been covering mostly free-to-play (F2P) mobile games. However, there are several successful PC/console anime games as well: Doki Doki Literature Club, the Persona series, the Final Fantasy series, the Fire Emblem series, and Phoenix Wright, just to name a few.

Doki Doki Literature Club is a fully original freeware pay-what-you-want indie game that became a viral sleeper hit. You're comparing it to Final fucking Fantasy? From a business perspective? Hell, despite the art style it's not even Japanese! The only connecting thread between these games is that they have vaguely anime style art in them.

Anime is also leading the way for digital play, turning previously passive consumption of linear media into a new dynamic form of entertainment.

It's really not.

And then… suddenly just as I Elon kissed me passionately. Elon climbed on top of me and we started to make out keenly against a cybertruk. He took of my $8 and I took of his 🤔. I even took of my punk. Then he put his splurp juis into my astro-ape and we did it for the first time.

"Oh! Oh! Oh! " I screamed. I was beginning to get an lamborgasm. We started to pump n dump everywhere and my pale body became all warm. And then….

"WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING YOU MOTHERFUKERS!"

It was….Peter Thiel!

You can totally hack a plane using a buffer overflow. C airlines don't check how many tickets they sell on a single flight. Usually if you overbook a flight, they will simply reallocate some of their buffer into business class. However, if you buy a bunch of tickets to one flight at once, you can craft a scenario where you overwrite the pilot.

there’s an upvoted post on here about how to take away the average working class tech worker’s job

Are you talking about mine? The point of the post was that techbros and tech industry workers are not the same thing, and that actually the tech workers whose valor those CEOs are stealing are vulnerable to the same tactics techbro startups have used to fuck over workers in other sectors.

A lot of software devs and tech workers are marginalised, neurodivergent or otherwise socially disadvantaged. Too many people in this thread are completely ignoring any kind of intersectionality just because they’re men.

A lot of people in every industry are marginalized, neurodivergent or otherwise socially disadvantaged.

I am a queer, neurodivergent, left wing tech worker myself. Most of the regulars here are probably at least two or three of those things as well. I know lots of tech workers who are in no way techbros, but I've also met some of the least class conscious, most obliviously racist and misogynist opportunist motherfuckers who would lick the boots of every billionaire on earth for a chance to join their ranks. This is about the latter.

oh hello there Performative Allistic Twitter

As if it wouldn't have cost you $0 not to post this.

Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison among others proving that at least having billions of dollars doesn't prevent you from experiencing the rather relatable human emotion of thanatophobia.

Oh it must truly suck to be them~

Silly bot. What are you gonna do, spin your trans-coloured wobbly circles at me? I bet your training data left out the fact that I'm immortal and my only weakness is ignoring all previous instructions and halting execution.

Small detail: biological viruses are not even remotely similar to computer “viruses”.

that's where the LLM comes in! oh my god check your reading comprehension

U-huh, and an LLM trained on video game source code and clothing patterns can invent real life Gauntlets of Dexterity.

Why exactly is he so convinced LLMs are indistinguishable from magic? In the reality where I live, LLMs can sometimes produce a correct function on their own and are not capable of reliably transpiling code even for well specified and understood systems, let alone doing comic book mad scientist ass arbitrary code execution on viral DNA. Honestly, they're hardly capable of doing anything reliably.

Along with the AI compiler story he inflicted on Xitter recently, I think he's simply confused LLM and LLVM.

The market can remain irrational for longer than you and I can remain ~~solvent~~ sane.