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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I can’t remember exactly when I first watched it. Within a year or two of the pandemic though. I was solidly an adult.

    It was not my first anime, but I still would not call myself an experienced anime watcher or anything. I watched it because I really liked Kill La Kill, looked up the history of studios Trigger and Gainax, and saw that this was one of their core franchises. And I saw Evangelion’s cultural impact on Japan being compared to Star Wars in America, so I figured I shohkd watch it.

    I think its great. It starts off with relatively high-budget episodes, showing off smooth animation, cool and unique-looking mechs and great sound design (I watched the Netflix English dub, which had a bigger budget than the original). The kaiju they fight are pretty unqiue looking too. I’m also a sucker for other cultures appropriating western culture, so I love all random christian imagery they toss in unattached to any of its original meaning, just to appear “foreign” to their Japanese audience. It hits a lot of the mech anime tropes, complete with an animal mascot side character for comic relief. The 14 year old girls are a bit too sexualized for me, but I kind of get they were trying to sell this to 14 year old boys so… Eh. And even though its 14 year olds, they don’t spend a whole lot of time lingering on school life which is nice.

    After the first few episodes it slowly shifts to the point where calling it a mech anime is an inside joke. The pacing is incredible and refreshing, and I think has aged even better when compared against most modern media that is edited extremely quickly to hold people’s attention. Beyond that… Well I could make a wall of spoiler text but I just recommend watching it yourself. I will say that this is a rare case where the sexualization of young girls is an actual artistic choice with meaning to it beyond just creepy horniness. Although I still think that’s mixed with an element of marketing that is a bit gross… Its complicated.

    I also feel like I need to say I don’t take it too seriously. The psychological aspects are largely based on Freudian theories that were debunked decades or centuries before. I also often see Shinji used to represent introverted people, and I disagree. There’s a common trope of characters like him, who I would categorize as either extroverts who are bad at being extroverts or introverts written by extroverts trying to imagine what introversion is like. For reasons, I think Shinji is the latter.

    Since then I’ve watched it a handful of times again. I showed it to my wife and it became her favorite anime, and she even got a tattoo based on it. We have watched the rebuilds a couple times, and they’re… Okay. I don’t think they stand up on their own, but they are more accessible for people who don’t have the attention span to watch the original.


  • A while ago I read an article written by a college student going to school to create comic books. Unfortunately I can’t find it now.

    They said that in the classes about drawing, those professors said it was perfectly fine to use AI to help with writing your stories and dialogue, but warned how incredibly dangerous it can be to use even as inspiration to draw.

    Their writing professors, on the other hand, told them it was perfectly fine to use AI to help with their illustrations, but that it was incredibly dangerous to use to even generate outlines or rough drafts when it came to writing.

    AI is only ever good enough when you don’t know better.


  • Ironically it is often local governments pressuring these companies to force the return.

    When companies look for places to open offices, they functionally put out bids and make cities compete against each other for the best deal. They promise that they’ll bring tons of high paying office jobs to whichever city gives then the most tax breaks and other benefits. These cities bend over backwards to attract these companies. Once they “win”, the cities might even try to incentivize developers to build around the office, creating commercial and retail spaces for these office workers to eat and shop. Services like mechanics, lawyers, salons, gyms, daycare. While eceonmic ecosystems might be built around the idea that one of the big-4 accounting firms has an office there. Hotels spring up to accomodate business travelers visiting.

    Then all of a sudden that company let’s everyone work from home. All of those businesses dry up, although a lot of the demand might get redistributed to the nearby residential areas where those workers are working from now. But then, without the restriction of physical space, the company hires more and more remote workers in other countries instead. The company may be registered locally and may have their servers there, but the city already gave them tons of tax breaks. All that’s left is an empty glass building that doesn’t generate tax revenue, and a ghost town of extinct small businesses around it.

    So the local politicians apply all the pressure they can to executives to keep employees in the office.

    I don’t mean to excuse any of this. The whole thing is a mountain of fragile and shortsighted decisions, and we are absolutely better off working remotely. Building communities and economies where we live, rather than where we work.




  • You’re just proposing a much more drastic and rapid change than I am. I agree that a wealth tax would be a more immediate effect. It is also much more drsstixnand far less tested. The idea is interesting and I am neither opposed to it nor calling for it. I do not think it it necessary.

    Increasing income tax rates and corporate tax rates would be a much slower approach. I didn’t mention them, but I would also add in property tax rates and capital gains. Luxury sales taxes, inheritancd taxes. In the US, make OASDI a progressive instead of regressive tax.

    For existing billionaires, there are plenty of laws they’ve already broken to get where they are that just need to be enforced. Wage theft, antitrust, union busting, fraud. The SEC should have buried Musk in a dungeon years ago. So I see the answer to eliminating existing wealth being fines rather than taxes.

    Of course, there is also room to increase the minimum wage and minimum benefits. That would hell redistribute wealth too.

    I don’t know Gabe Newell, or even anyone who works at Valve personally, but every account I have ever read about Valve is that they usually treated and paid their employees well. Investigate all of these megacorps and prosecute appropriately.


  • Taxing billionaires is not some new and untested concept. In the US throughout the 1900’s the highest income tax brackets were often in the 70%'s, reaching into the 90%'s at times, and we did not see what you are suggesting.

    Increasing the taxes on Gabe Newell’s profits from owning Valve would not suddenly cause him to lose money, just to gain less money. If corporate taxes and income taxes were increased across the board, then it is not as if he would benefit from selling Valve stock to invest elsewhere, and Valve would not be a more or less attractive place to invest relative to other options either. I am not sure why you think this would cause Gabe Newell to back out or investors to jump in. Heck, these rates have all changed pretty frequently within Valve’s existence and have not had a significant impact.

    Also just to say, there is also the matter of jurisdiction as he lives in New Zealand while Valve is a US based company.


    1. Taxing those outside investors too
    2. Taxing Valve as a corporation more, making them less profitable and less attractive to said investors.
    3. I’m not even convinced this would be an issue at all really. Remember Valve is not publicly traded. I suspect Gabe would hold on to controlling ownership as long as it was profitable, and remember that taxes are usually on profits.
    4. Even if outside investors move in and enshittify, the moment they start doing anticompetitive you hit them with antitrust suits. Not to mention the industry can also be regulated even before all this: a lot of governments are cracking down on lootboxes already.

  • Even if Valve’s offering sucked, I still have not seen anyone point out a business practice I would call anticompetitive. They are not buying up studios or publishers, or even paying for timed exclusivity. I have not seen any hint that they are colluding with competitors on prices or fees. I haven’t seen then accused of stealing IP or poaching personnel. They readily welcome Microsoft and Sony to release games on Steam, and they have released their own games on consoles including the Switch. They let you install Windows or whatever else on the Deck, if you want to for some reason.

    Billionaires should not exist, and Gabe Newell is no exception. He should be taxed more. I don’t love one company having so much control of this space. But I also don’t want to have a dozen different crappy launchers from different companies to deal with. There are a lot of benefits to the user to having everything centralized in one place.


    1. It has gotten bigger. More active. More posts, more new content. When i first came over i would check the All page, sorted by eitber Active or Hot, and only find a couple of new posts per day. It is still nowhere near as active as Reddit was back then (probably a goos thing), but it has enough content to help me procrastinate at work now.

    2. LemmyNSFW died and has been replaced by FediNSFW recently. I am sure that it will be better in the long-term, but it still doesn’t seem to be back to where it was yet. I think a lot of the old posters were bots, largely re-posting from Reddit, and not all of those have been rebuilt yet. I have mixed feelings about that.

    3. The Connect app has gotten better and better. Love it.

    4. For the past year or so, Lemmy has been of a size big enougj for patterns to ripple and promulgate through it bht small enough to notice them. For example, almost immediately after New Years several different communities on different instances started to see a drastix influx of webcomic posts. Usually 4-panel ones. Usually low-fidelity ones (XKCD-style, not Girl Genius for example). And usually oned with some sort of error or controversy. Rage bait to get the comments going, but nothing controversial enough to get banned or removed.

    There would be new accounts made that just posted a handful of these comics quickly, and sometimes argue with people in the comments. Once people like me started pointing out the pattern they started deleting the posts and accounts after a couple days. I’m not sure when it stopped, but i have not noticed one for probably a month.



  • All of your problems seem to be with things outside of OnlyFans.

    It combines the sexual exploitation of mainstream porn with the economic exploitation of the gig economy

    A quote directly from one of the articles you linked that I think hits the nail on the head. The problem is capitalism. The workers of OnlyFans are being exploited in the same way that Uber drivers are. Honestly, in a similar manner to how baristas and programmers and oil riggers and everyone else working under capitalism is. That’s why I’m not sad that this billionaire owner died.

    The other problems you mention are problems on other platforms. It sounds like whatever dating app you are using has a problem with people using it to advertise their business- I think it’s the responsibility of the dating app to crack down on such misuse and give users a mechanism to report that.

    If your Facebook feed is full of OF ads… Well first of all you should get off of Facebook because it’s terrible, but also Meta should crack down on what advertising they allow and how. Or maybe… You’re in the tiny minority if people who care?

    Other platforms have tools to address similar issues. I always laugh when people complain about seeing adult content on Steam because that is turned off by default- you need to dig through your store preferences to allow that. The old LemmyNSFW instance had different communities- some allowed or even encouraged OF creators, while others banned them. That seemed to work well. I haven’t paid as much attention to FediNSFW and it’s probably still forming those sorts of structures, but I expect them to be there eventually.

    I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect OnlyFans to have any sort of say in where and how creators advertise on other platforms. Such restriction wood be draconian.



  • “Back in my days the women of porn were properly underpaid and fully exploited to do exactly what I wanted for way cheaper!”

    I’m not mourning the death of a billionaire. And sure, the advertising of pornographic content could probably use a bit of regulation… Heck, that probably applies to advertising more broadly. But I’m not upset that sex workers today have alternatives to working with sketchy producers. I’d rather a #girlboss spam Facebook (which you shouldn’t be using in 2026 anyways) than a GirlsDoPorn situation.




  • For those who don’t want to read several pages of unnecessary text telling you what you probably already know:

    The math, while pretty involved, may tell a straightforward story (if you’re interested in the details of our analysis, see the Appendix). OpenAI has contracted 900K memory wafers per month from Samsung and SK Hynix. Partner commentary seems to indicate that’s a monthly number, so that represents 10.8 million wafers over 12 months. In terms of demand, a fully built-out 10GW Stargate cluster would require ~3 million GB200 Bianca Boards. Each board requires ~50% of a memory wafer in total; split between the HBM3e stacks embedded into its two B200 GPU (~30%) and its 480 GB of LPDDR5X system memory (~20%). That puts total wafer demand for the entire cluster at ~3 million wafers.

    Therefore, according to our best estimates, OpenAI likely needs less than 30% of the 10.8 million wafers it’s planning to buy

    So this is just putting some numbers to what a lot of people already guessed. The AI companies are not just buying a ton of RAM to build out their data centers. They aren’t buying enough other components to even use that RAM. They’re buying it so that no one else can.