#Feedback Collection Software

[antrika]

How AI-Powered Automation Transforms Customer Feedback Collection Before the Product Launch?

Are you planning to launch your product? Do you want to ensure your product is optimized and ready for the market? Involving your early adopters or existing customers through automated, driven AI customer feedback systems can be your secret weapon. While putting your time and efforts into testing technical aspects, there’s no better way to get insights from the audience your product is designed for. We know you must be wondering how we can gather these insights. Thankfully, plenty of consumers are ready to share their reviews, utilizing Antrika’s AI customer feedback software.

As a product manager, you must seek AI customer feedback in the early stages of product development. AI Customer feedback through a review collection platform will help you identify factors that can be enhanced to deliver a better end product that seamlessly meets consumer needs. While collecting this feedback may take time, it can be a game-changer in successfully delivering a robust end product.

These tools can help you gather valuable insights and experiences, allowing you to refine your product before its big debut.

Leveraging AI and automation for feedback collection saves time and provides precise, real-time insights from the audience your product is designed for. Curious about how this works? Let’s dive into how automated feedback solutions can revolutionize your product development process.

Why is it important to Gather AI Customer feedback Before Product Launch?

With AI-powered tools like automated feedback software, you can streamline the collection of user reviews, identify patterns, and optimize your product’s features. Let’s explore how automated customer feedback systems can enhance your product before its launch:

Identify loopholes with Early Adopters

Using an AI customer feedback system to collect insights from your early adopters can automatically identify common pain points like bugs, design flaws, and usability issues. Automation ensures that real-time insights flow seamlessly into your system, highlighting what needs improvement. Minor tweaks based on automated analysis could drastically improve product appeal and usability, setting you up for a successful launch.

Additionally, AI can help you discover trends and consumer preferences that may have gone unnoticed, giving you a strategic edge over your competition. Automated feedback systems can even predict market opportunities, allowing you to tweak your product and marketing strategies effectively.

Discover What Your Team Couldn’t Identify

Beyond technical tests, AI can analyze user-generated data to highlight hidden problems your development team may not have anticipated. Machine learning algorithms can sift through customer interactions to provide an unbiased perspective on the product’s performance, flagging areas that need improvement. This way, AI serves as your extra set of eyes, helping you catch potential issues before they become deal-breakers.

Understand Users’ Perspectives Automatically

By enabling users to access a sample version of your software or product before launching it, AI customer feedback can track how people interact with it or use your product and at what action they face inconvenience. These systems can categorize feedback into meaningful data points, such as which features are most and least useful, and identify friction points in the user experience. AI automation streamlines this entire process, turning raw feedback into actionable insights that improve the user journey.

Read to know more: Feedback Management Tools: Your Secret to Understanding User Persona

Enables to Position Your Product — The Better Way

The product development team can test and validate the potential assumption by aligning with customer reviews collected through a feedback management tool.

Let’s say you have developed software for corporate businesses to manage attendance. You assumed that offering features like automated attendance records through log-in actions would simplify consumers’ jobs and reduce the time and effort for data management.

However, it is essential to check if consumers are able to access details from log-in actions and maintain the database seamlessly, or else your product is likely to fail. Hence, asking customers to review this area is essential; they can suggest more ideas to add value to their lives.

Top 3 Ways To Gather Feedback Before Launch

After determining the importance of collecting feedback before the product launch, we’re sure you’re wondering how we can collect these reviews. Don’t worry; we’ve got you covered!

Offer Free Sample

Whether you have a physical, virtual product, or software, you can offer a free sample to your existing customers. If you have a physical product, you can consider connecting with consumers via mail and requesting them to use it in real time and share their reviews. In the case of software and other products, you can share a link virtually, ask them to take specific actions, ask your users to share their reviews, identify potential issues, and more.

In the case of a physical product, contacting and sending samples to each consumer may consume time. Still, it is worth investing every minute as this approach will get realistic, practical suggestions from your loyal users directly.

Represent consumer reviews as Marketing Action

This approach is ideal for targeting new customers and explaining why your product benefits them. Showcasing videos, tweets, email threads or AI customer feedback software of you accepting existing consumers’ reviews will likely build trust in the long term for new arrivals.

Leverage AI for In-App Feedback Collection

In-app AI customer feedback solutions enable you to gather insights during the development phase. With real-time data analysis, these platforms collect, categorize, and present customer feedback through intuitive dashboards. Features like upvotes, comments, and automated surveys help teams pinpoint areas for improvement effortlessly.

AI customer feedback-based systems can also identify recurring themes, flagging critical issues before they snowball into larger problems. This streamlined approach makes the feedback process smoother for both users and product development teams.

How to Collect AI-Driven Customer Feedback Before Product Launch?

Do you still have concerns about the accurate path to getting feedback insights? How do we successfully gather feedback from existing customers? Don’t worry, it is simple and manageable. Below, we list a few methods for improving your comprehension.

1. Encourage Users to Share Feedback

Whether you are in the early stages of the development process or have already completed developing a product or software, consider offering a product demo or sample to consumers and asking them to share their suggestions right away!

This method can help you understand how your users are utilizing products to solve their problems. You can also closely examine their suggestions and try to align with market trends to enhance success rates. In addition, you can ask a few sets of questions during or after a demo. It can be via video, personal interviews, feedback management tools, or mail.

2. Leverage the Centralized AI Feedback Platform

Use AI customer feedback platforms like Antrika’s feedback software to ensure a seamless, concise, and accessible review process. These platforms allow consumers to share feedback in real-time, which is then automatically analyzed and categorized for your convenience.

By having this tool on your side, you can be assured that your customers will seamlessly share inputs without any disturbance. It allows users to interact with each other through votes and comments features. Organizations can save time by accessing insights with one tool.

3. Craft a Public Forum for Your Consumers

Whether it is a communication-based channel or another public forum, invite your customers through links shared on emails, websites, or more and focus on engaging with customers most intrinsically, getting to know them, and gathering feedback. This approach won’t feel like just another marketing campaign to consumers, and organizations will get a chance to access more insights from consumers in real time, which aids in building stronger relationships.

Additionally, when your customers see others sharing their inputs, it will encourage them to examine their experience closely, analyze factors, and share valuable feedback seamlessly. By adopting this method, you are positioning your brand focused on maintaining transparency and building great customer relationships, so it has multiple benefits with one action!

4. Conduct Quick Calls with Existing Customers

You may observe that a few pieces of AI collected through AI customer feedback software highlight features you didn’t consider or add changes that are different from your current product development theme.

In such scenarios, you can consider scheduling short calls with consumers with different reviews and understand their perspectives for in-depth analysis. However, make sure that you are prepared for each call and set a couple of questions dedicated to the feedback provided by the consumer to make the most of this meeting.

The key aspect of this method is listening to your customer and carrying out valuable conversations to make them feel that your brand values their thought process.

Boost Product Launch Success with AI Customer Feedback Automation- Antrika

Using AI customer feedback automation tools can help you launch your product with confidence. You can bypass the weeks or months traditionally spent identifying potential product issues. Instead, let AI do the heavy lifting by analyzing AI customer feedback and flagging critical areas for improvement.

By sharing product demos with targeted customer groups and automating feedback collection, you’ll gain the insights needed to make impactful changes before launch. Automation and AI provide a solid foundation to ensure your product meets customer needs from day one.

Looking for more strategies on how AI customer feedback can enhance your product development and feedback processes?

We hope the varied aspects discussed in this blog turn out to help enhance your product development cycle. If you want to know more about product development tactics or AI customer feedback software, get in touch with us today!

[rhowena]

The core problem of Campaign 3's god debate is that the only real support offered by the anti-god side is "some people are mad at the gods" and no one -- in-universe or out -- seems to realize that the mere existence of people who dislike the gods isn't sufficient to make "should the gods stay or go?" into a hyper-complex morally grey debate, any more than the mere existence of global warming denialists is sufficient to make the factual reality of climate change into a hyper-complex scientific debate. "People who are mad at the gods exist, therefore the current system is broken somehow" is the mentality of people-pleasing: if someone is mad at you, it proves that you're a bad person who did something to make them mad, and you are now morally obligated to internalize everything they say about you and devote all your energy to appeasing them.

I am, personally, of the opinion that it is vitally important for people in positions of power to maintain a healthy awareness of their own fallibility and cultivate lines of feedback from lower down in the chain the way software developers provide bug report forms; however, the reality I encountered when I accepted a forum moderation position years ago is that, if you're an Authority Figure™ of any stripe, for every person with a good-faith criticism of a poor ruling you made while overtired or an outdated policy that needs to be revised, there are a dozen who shake their fists at you because they want someone to be mad at. And when you look at the actual substance of the complaints being made (nearly all of which display a fundamental refusal to grapple with the scale the gods operate on and how that affects their decision-making) and ask "what, if anything, could/should the gods have done differently?" and "is getting rid of the gods actually a viable solution to this problem?", they're all firmly in that latter category.

To go down the list:

Vecna: If we're treating "people who are mad at the gods" as a Marginalized Group™ whose grievances are Good Points™ and Worth Considering™ simply because they are grievances with The People in Power™, then Vecna is part of said Marginalized Group™, seeing as he holds a massive grudge against the gods who helped banish him beyond the Divine Gate and per the campaign books his ultimate goal is to eliminate the worship of all deities other than himself. One can only imagine how hard he's kicking himself for failing to find out about Predathos before his own ascension.

Ludinus: His parents will still be dead whether he succeeds or fails, and preventing the same thing from happening to others is what the Divine Gate is for. Killing the gods would not only not prevent similar tragedies, it would, at least in the short term, actively make things worse: assuming Tharizdun doesn't just eat everything, how does he expect Lesser Idols like Uk'otoa to react to a glorious new age where there are no gods to keep them in check and millions of newly deity-less clerics are stuck watching people die whom they could have saved if they still had their spells? Moreover, what happens when people discontented with his glorious new era swear vengeance on those they blame for taking their gods from them, as Ludinus swore vengeance on those he blames for his parents' deaths, or start idealizing the lost age of the gods and looking for ways to somehow bring them back, as Ashton does with the Titans? Does the perspective of people who like the gods then become Worth Considering™, if they've gone from being Privileged™ to being a Marginalized Group™ who have been collectively traumatized by the loss of something precious to them?

Aeor: One of the major takeaways from Downfall was that Aeor was extremely decadent, corrupt, stratified, and generally dystopian at its height. Their main reason for wanting the gods dead seems to be not liking the existence of anything more powerful than them, and anyone arguing that the gods are Too Powerful To Exist needs to explain why the tiny cabal of mages at the tippy-top of Aeor's societal pyramid, wielding power that 99.9% of Exandrians will never have access to, were not themselves Too Powerful To Exist, especially given their evident imperialist ambitions.

Dorian: I won't downplay the genuine grievance there, but a. Opal was victimized by one of the Betrayer Gods, and what to do about them is a question that Vespin Chloras and Cassida Previn, for all their hubris, approached with considerably more nuance, and b. per the post linked in the previous bullet point, if your ultimate goal is to prevent all ill-advised deals with powerful entities and the unpleasant consequences thereof, where exactly do you stop?

Tuldus and Hearthdell: Plenty of irreligious people across Exandria are living their best lives unmolested, so the whole "you must be religious OR ELSE" isn't something the gods themselves are demanding in a systemic way, and getting rid of them wouldn't prevent all oppression any more than it would prevent all cataclysms and mass deaths. (It might not even stop the oppression committed by those specific religious people; per 'personality predates ideology', the ones who are in it to bully others and feel righteous about it will simply look for a different excuse to do so if their current one is taken from them.) There's a genuine debate to be had about how much responsibility the gods bear for their followers' actions and one could, more reasonably, accuse them of having become too lax and needing to be more stringent about telling their priests to cut that kind of shit out (though that in turn opens the question of how much they can micromanage their followers' behavior before it becomes genuinely smothering and oppressive), but it runs counter to the "the gods have too much control" narrative the Vanguard is pushing.

Liliana: Every parroted accusation she levies at the Exandria's pantheon is something Predathos and its worshippers are far, FAR more guilty of, but Predathos doesn't present itself as a caring, benevolent entity in the same way the Prime Deities do, and she expects us to believe that it admitting that it's bad somehow makes it good. (There's a Slacktivist quote that I think sums up the underlying logic here: "Once you've decided that the Most Important Thing is to avoid the wolf in sheep's clothing, your safest course of action is to embrace the wolf in wolf's clothing.")

Ashton: Essentially blames the gods for refusing to micromanage reality on their behalf and, in focusing so much on his own pain, hasn't stopped to ask what the world would look like if the gods actually felt obligated to micromanage reality on behalf of everyone who petitioned them that way, not just him personally. My dad is an agnostic and specifically doesn't believe in a god who answers prayer because what's a god to do when there's a baseball game and both teams have fans praying for their victory (or when there's a war and both armies include adherents of a given faith)?

Bor'dor: It's one thing to say that the gods have certain obligations to their followers and quite another to say that that the gods are supposed to keep their followers swaddled in bubble wrap 24/7 and prevent them from experiencing any consequences for their own actions whatsoever, and arguing that the Wildmother should have somehow stopped Bor'dor's family's suicide charge from resulting in their deaths is the latter.

Vox Machina: Continue to hold a grudge against the Matron for taking Vax away and would like to believe her being gone would make him mortal again, but when you stop to think about Vax as a person with his own feelings and opinions about his relationship with the Matron, instead of as a passive object to be fought over, the "what if Predathos eats the Matron?" scenario looks a hell of a lot bleaker. There's also the question of whether or not Predathos would consider Vax himself edible; a mere celestial might be one of those half-crushed potato chip fragments at the bottom of the bag in comparison to a god, but when you've been trapped and starving for thousands of years...

Zathuda: Objects not to being told 'no' but to the existence of forces who could potentially tell him no, which to me reads as an asshole whining about how unfair and oppressive it is when people see his assholery and tell him to cut it the fuck out.

[sywritesstuff]

If you're like me, you bounce around a bunch of different platforms and applications in the writing process. My hot take is that this is totally fine. No one ever said the writing process is perfectly streamlined! That being said, I've shared some tools I use for different parts of my process. For the most part, I use them consistently for the purposes mentioned below:

→ Miro

I use Miro for my first pass of plot and character arc outlines. Miro is a free software that acts like a digital board, where you can arrange sticky notes and all sorts of features. I prefer using an online board as opposed to a physical one, because I’m constantly reworking my beats and moving things around, and it’s more efficient to do both digitally (in my opinion). I keep my plot outline separate from my character arc outline at the very early stages, because I’m essentially ideating how the two can be married. At the end of the day, I believe the most compelling stories always fall back on character emotions and motivations propelling the plot. Tools like Miro help me map the journey towards that end goal.

→ Notebook

My notebook contains my brain dump. I dedicate a single notebook to a project, and it basically becomes a collection of unfiltered thoughts. I’ll dump character tidbits, sequences for each chapter, feedback from my writing accountability buddy, and questions I want to address in the next iterations of my WIP. This is helpful for me, because I tend to struggle with rapid thoughts, so the notebook helps me focus on the idea itself. Later, I’ll always have the opportunity to categorize them in another platform as I’m writing.

→ Google Docs

In the past, I was writing chapters on Google Docs. This was helpful at the time, because it’s free, it tracks key metrics I care about (mainly word count), and it’s easy to share your work with anyone. But there are some drawbacks. The biggest one for me is having to format everything for a manuscript. This’ll be more relevant later down the line, but sometimes I get really bogged down by little things like spacing and indentation. It really distracts me from focusing on the sentences themselves. After seeing it pop up on Instagram a couple of times, I decided to purchase Scrivener for desktop. It is super functional, and I probably only use like 2% of its max capability right now. But it’s been super helpful for organizing my chapters and scenes, writing out little summary cards, color-coding progress status and POV, bullet pointing margin notes, and most importantly, pre-formatting my WIP as a manuscript. I definitely think Scrivener is worth the long-term investment if you find yourself writing and publishing multiple projects.

→ Scrivener

Even though I’ve transitioned to Scrivener for the actual manuscript, Google Docs still comes in handy for me. Right now, I mainly use it to 1) track feedback and revisions on a chapter-by-chapter basis, and 2) maintain a treatment of my novel. A treatment is essentially a full-length document that details everything that happens in your story from start to finish. They can be as short as 3 pages or as long as 50 pages. I could keep and maintain these documents in Scrivener, but I already had these written out on Docs, so I’m sticking to them. Later down the line, I’ll likely shift over to Google Sheets to track revisions.

What tools do y'all like using? Please feel free to recommend any! Tips on Scrivener are also welcomed!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

In defense of bureaucratic competence

Sure, sometimes it really does make sense to do your own research. There's times when you really do need to take personal responsibility for the way things are going. But there's limits. We live in a highly technical world, in which hundreds of esoteric, potentially lethal factors impinge on your life every day.

You can't "do your own research" to figure out whether all that stuff is safe and sound. Sure, you might be able to figure out whether a contractor's assurances about a new steel joist for your ceiling are credible, but after you do that, are you also going to independently audit the software in your car's antilock brakes?

How about the nutritional claims on your food and the sanitary conditions in the industrial kitchen it came out of? If those turn out to be inadequate, are you going to be able to validate the medical advice you get in the ER when you show up at 3AM with cholera? While you're trying to figure out the #HIPAAWaiver they stuck in your hand on the way in?

40 years ago, Ronald Reagan declared war on "the administrative state," and "government bureaucrats" have been the favored bogeyman of the American right ever since. Even if Steve Bannon hasn't managed to get you to froth about the "Deep State," there's a good chance that you've griped about red tape from time to time.

Not without reason, mind you. The fact that the government can make good rules doesn't mean it will. When we redid our kitchen this year, the city inspector added a bunch of arbitrary electrical outlets to the contractor's plans in places where neither we, nor any future owner, will every need them.

But the answer to bad regulation isn't no regulation. During the same kitchen reno, our contractor discovered that at some earlier time, someone had installed our kitchen windows without the accompanying vapor-barriers. In the decades since, the entire structure of our kitchen walls had rotted out. Not only was the entire front of our house one good earthquake away from collapsing – there were two half rotted verticals supporting the whole thing – but replacing the rotted walls added more than $10k to the project.

In other words, the problem isn't too much regulation, it's the wrong regulation. I want our city inspectors to make sure that contractors install vapor barriers, but to not demand superfluous electrical outlets.

Which raises the question: where do regulations come from? How do we get them right?

Regulation is, first and foremost, a truth-seeking exercise. There will never be one obvious answer to any sufficiently technical question. "Should this window have a vapor barrier?" is actually a complex question, needing to account for different window designs, different kinds of barriers, etc.

To make a regulation, regulators ask experts to weigh in. At the federal level, expert agencies like the DoT or the FCC or HHS will hold a "Notice of Inquiry," which is a way to say, "Hey, should we do something about this? If so, what should we do?"

Anyone can weigh in on these: independent technical experts, academics, large companies, lobbyists, industry associations, members of the public, hobbyist groups, and swivel-eyed loons. This produces a record from which the regulator crafts a draft regulation, which is published in something called a "Notice of Proposed Rulemaking."

The NPRM process looks a lot like the NOI process: the regulator publishes the rule, the public weighs in for a couple of rounds of comments, and the regulator then makes the rule (this is the federal process; state regulation and local ordinances vary, but they follow a similar template of collecting info, making a proposal, collecting feedback and finalizing the proposal).

These truth-seeking exercises need good input. Even very competent regulators won't know everything, and even the strongest theoretical foundation needs some evidence from the field. It's one thing to say, "Here's how your antilock braking software should work," but you also need to hear from mechanics who service cars, manufacturers, infosec specialists and drivers.

These people will disagree with each other, for good reasons and for bad ones. Some will be sincere but wrong. Some will want to make sure that their products or services are required – or that their competitors' products and services are prohibited.

It's the regulator's job to sort through these claims. But they don't have to go it alone: in an ideal world, the wrong people will be corrected by other parties in the docket, who will back up their claims with evidence.

So when the FCC proposes a Net Neutrality rule, the monopoly telcos and cable operators will pile in and insist that this is technically impossible, that there is no way to operate a functional ISP if the network management can't discriminate against traffic that is less profitable to the carrier. Now, this unity of perspective might reflect a bedrock truth ("Net Neutrality can't work") or a monopolists' convenient lie ("Net Neutrality is less profitable for us").

In a competitive market, there'd be lots of counterclaims with evidence from rivals: "Of course Net Neutrality is feasible, and here are our server logs to prove it!" But in a monopolized markets, those counterclaims come from micro-scale ISPs, or academics, or activists, or subscribers. These counterclaims are easy to dismiss ("what do you know about supporting 100 million users?"). That's doubly true when the regulator is motivated to give the monopolists what they want – either because they are hoping for a job in the industry after they quit government service, or because they came out of industry and plan to go back to it.

To make things worse, when an industry is heavily concentrated, it's easy for members of the ruling cartel – and their backers in government – to claim that the only people who truly understand the industry are its top insiders. Seen in that light, putting an industry veteran in charge of the industry's regulator isn't corrupt – it's sensible.

All of this leads to regulatory capture – when a regulator starts defending an industry from the public interest, instead of defending the public from the industry. The term "regulatory capture" has a checkered history. It comes out of a bizarre, far-right Chicago School ideology called "Public Choice Theory," whose goal is to eliminate regulation, not fix it.

In Public Choice Theory, the biggest companies in an industry have the strongest interest in capturing the regulator, and they will work harder – and have more resources – than anyone else, be they members of the public, workers, or smaller rivals. This inevitably leads to capture, where the state becomes an arm of the dominant companies, wielded by them to prevent competition:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

This is regulatory nihilism. It supposes that the only reason you weren't killed by your dinner, or your antilock brakes, or your collapsing roof, is that you just got lucky – and not because we have actual, good, sound regulations that use evidence to protect us from the endless lethal risks we face. These nihilists suppose that making good regulation is either a myth – like ancient Egyptian sorcery – or a lost art – like the secret to embalming Pharaohs.

But it's clearly possible to make good regulations – especially if you don't allow companies to form monopolies or cartels. What's more, failing to make public regulations isn't the same as getting rid of regulation. In the absence of public regulation, we get private regulation, run by companies themselves.

Think of Amazon. For decades, the DoJ and FTC sat idly by while Amazon assembled and fortified its monopoly. Today, Amazon is the de facto e-commerce regulator. The company charges its independent sellers 45-51% in junk fees to sell on the platform, including $31b/year in "advertising" to determine who gets top billing in your searches. Vendors raise their Amazon prices in order to stay profitable in the face of these massive fees, and if they don't raise their prices at every other store and site, Amazon downranks them to oblivion, putting them out of business.

This is the crux of the FTC's case against Amazon: that they are picking winners and setting prices across the entire economy, including at every other retailer:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

The same is true for Google/Facebook, who decide which news and views you encounter; for Apple/Google, who decide which apps you can use, and so on. The choice is never "government regulation" or "no regulation" – it's always "government regulation" or "corporate regulation." You either live by rules made in public by democratically accountable bureaucrats, or rules made in private by shareholder-accountable executives.

You just can't solve this by "voting with your wallet." Think about the problem of robocalls. Nobody likes these spam calls, and worse, they're a vector for all kinds of fraud. Robocalls are mostly a problem with federation. The phone system is a network-of-networks, and your carrier is interconnected with carriers all over the world, sometimes through intermediaries that make it hard to know which network a call originates on.

Some of these carriers are spam-friendly. They make money by selling access to spammers and scammers. Others don't like spam, but they have lax or inadequate security measures to prevent robocalls. Others will simply be targets of opportunity: so large and well-resourced that they are irresistible to bad actors, who continuously probe their defenses and exploit overlooked flaws, which are quickly patched.

To stem the robocall tide, your phone company will have to block calls from bad actors, put sloppy or lazy carriers on notice to shape up or face blocks, and also tell the difference between good companies and bad ones.

There's no way you can figure this out on your own. How can you know whether your carrier is doing a good job at this? And even if your carrier wants to do this, only the largest, most powerful companies can manage it. Rogue carriers won't give a damn if some tiny micro-phone-company threatens them with a block if they don't shape up.

This is something that a large, powerful government agency is best suited to addressing. And thankfully, we have such an agency. Two years ago, the FCC demanded that phone companies submit plans for "robocall mitigation." Now, it's taking action:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/10/telcos-filed-blank-robocall-plans-with-fcc-and-got-away-with-it-for-2-years/

Specifically, the FCC has identified carriers – in the US and abroad – with deficient plans. Some of these plans are very deficient. National Cloud Communications of Texas sent the FCC a Windows Printer Test Page. Evernex (Pakistan) sent the FCC its "taxpayer profile inquiry" from a Pakistani state website. Viettel (Vietnam) sent in a slide presentation entitled "Making Smart Cities Vision a Reality." Canada's Humbolt VoIP sent an "indiscernible object." DomainerSuite submitted a blank sheet of paper scrawled with the word "NOTHING."

The FCC has now notified these carriers – and others with less egregious but still deficient submissions – that they have 14 days to fix this or they'll be cut off from the US telephone network.

This is a problem you don't fix with your wallet, but with your ballot. Effective, public-interest-motivated FCC regulators are a political choice. Trump appointed the cartoonishly evil Ajit Pai to run the FCC, and he oversaw a program of neglect and malice. Pai – a former Verizon lawyer – dismantled Net Neutrality after receiving millions of obviously fraudulent comments from stolen identities, lying about it, and then obstructing the NY Attorney General's investigation into the matter:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/31/and-drown-it/#starve-the-beast

The Biden administration has a much better FCC – though not as good as it could be, thanks to Biden hanging Gigi Sohn out to dry in the face of a homophobic smear campaign that ultimately led one of the best qualified nominees for FCC commissioner to walk away from the process:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/#unrequited-love

Notwithstanding the tragic loss of Sohn's leadership in this vital agency, Biden's FCC – and its action on robocalls – illustrates the value of elections won with ballots, not wallets.

Self-regulation without state regulation inevitably devolves into farce. We're a quarter of a century into the commercial internet and the US still doesn't have a modern federal privacy law. The closest we've come is a disclosure rule, where companies can make up any policy they want, provided they describe it to you.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out how to cheat on this regulation. It's so simple, even a Meta lawyer can figure it out – which is why the Meta Quest VR headset has a privacy policy isn't merely awful, but long.

It will take you five hours to read the whole document and discover how badly you're being screwed. Go ahead, "do your own research":

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/annual-creep-o-meter/

The answer to bad regulation is good regulation, and the answer to incompetent regulators is competent ones. As Michael Lewis's Fifth Risk (published after Trump filled the administrative agencies with bootlickers, sociopaths and crooks) documented, these jobs demand competence:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/27/the-fifth-risk-michael-lewis-explains-how-the-deep-state-is-just-nerds-versus-grifters/

For example, Lewis describes how a Washington State nuclear waste facility created as part of the Manhattan Project endangers the Columbia River, the source of 8 million Americans' drinking water. The nuclear waste cleanup is projected to take 100 years and cost 100 billion dollars. With stakes that high, we need competent bureaucrats overseeing the job.

The hacky conservative jokes comparing every government agency to the DMV are not descriptive so much as prescriptive. By slashing funding, imposing miserable working conditions, and demonizing the people who show up for work anyway, neoliberals have chased away many good people, and hamstrung those who stayed.

One of the most inspiring parts of the Biden administration is the large number of extremely competent, extremely principled agency personnel he appointed, and the speed and competence they've brought to their roles, to the great benefit of the American public:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

But leaders can only do so much – they also need staff. 40 years of attacks on US state capacity has left the administrative state in tatters, stretched paper-thin. In an excellent article, Noah Smith describes how a starveling American bureaucracy costs the American public a fortune:

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-bureaucracy

Even stripped of people and expertise, the US government still needs to get stuff done, so it outsources to nonprofits and consultancies. These are the source of much of the expense and delay in public projects. Take NYC's Second Avenue subway, a notoriously overbudget and late subway extension – "the most expensive mile of subway ever built." Consultants amounted to 20% of its costs, double what France or Italy would have spent. The MTA used to employ 1,600 project managers. Now it has 124 of them, overseeing $20b worth of projects. They hand that money to consultants, and even if they have the expertise to oversee the consultants' spending, they are stretched too thin to do a good job of it:

https://slate.com/business/2023/02/subway-costs-us-europe-public-transit-funds.html

When a public agency lacks competence, it ends up costing the public more. States with highly expert Departments of Transport order better projects, which need fewer changes, which adds up to massive costs savings and superior roads:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4522676

Other gaps in US regulation are plugged by nonprofits and citizen groups. Environmental rules like NEPA rely on the public to identify and object to environmental risks in public projects, from solar plants to new apartment complexes. NEPA and its state equivalents empower private actors to sue developers to block projects, even if they satisfy all environmental regulations, leading to years of expensive delay.

The answer to this isn't to dismantle environmental regulations – it's to create a robust expert bureaucracy that can enforce them instead of relying on NIMBYs. This is called "ministerial approval" – when skilled government workers oversee environmental compliance. Predictably, NIMBYs hate ministerial approval.

Which is not to say that there aren't problems with trusting public enforcers to ensure that big companies are following the law. Regulatory capture is real, and the more concentrated an industry is, the greater the risk of capture. We are living in a moment of shocking market concentration, thanks to 40 years of under-regulation:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Remember that five-hour privacy policy for a Meta VR headset? One answer to these eye-glazing garbage novellas presented as "privacy policies" is to simply ban certain privacy-invading activities. That way, you can skip the policy, knowing that clicking "I agree" won't expose you to undue risk.

This is the approach that Bennett Cyphers and I argue for in our EFF white-paper, "Privacy Without Monopoly":

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

After all, even the companies that claim to be good for privacy aren't actually very good for privacy. Apple blocked Facebook from spying on iPhone owners, then sneakily turned on their own mass surveillance system, and lied about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

But as the European experiment with the GDPR has shown, public administrators can't be trusted to have the final word on privacy, because of regulatory capture. Big Tech companies like Google, Apple and Facebook pretend to be headquartered in corporate crime havens like Ireland and Luxembourg, where the regulators decline to enforce the law:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

It's only because of the GPDR has a private right of action – the right of individuals to sue to enforce their rights – that we're finally seeing the beginning of the end of commercial surveillance in Europe:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/americans-deserve-more-current-american-data-privacy-protection-act

It's true that NIMBYs can abuse private rights of action, bringing bad faith cases to slow or halt good projects. But just as the answer to bad regulations is good ones, so too is the answer to bad private rights of action good ones. SLAPP laws have shown us how to balance vexatious litigation with the public interest:

https://www.rcfp.org/resources/anti-slapp-laws/

We must get over our reflexive cynicism towards public administration. In my book The Internet Con, I lay out a set of public policy proposals for dismantling Big Tech and putting users back in charge of their digital lives:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

The most common objection I've heard since publishing the book is, "Sure, Big Tech has enshittified everything great about the internet, but how can we trust the government to fix it?"

We've been conditioned to think that lawmakers are too old, too calcified and too corrupt, to grasp the technical nuances required to regulate the internet. But just because Congress isn't made up of computer scientists, it doesn't mean that they can't pass good laws relating to computers. Congress isn't full of microbiologists, but we still manage to have safe drinking water (most of the time).

You can't just "do the research" or "vote with your wallet" to fix the internet. Bad laws – like the DMCA, which bans most kinds of reverse engineering – can land you in prison just for reconfiguring your own devices to serve you, rather than the shareholders of the companies that made them. You can't fix that yourself – you need a responsive, good, expert, capable government to fix it.

We can have that kind of government. It'll take some doing, because these questions are intrinsically hard to get right even without monopolies trying to capture their regulators. Even a president as flawed as Biden can be pushed into nominating good administrative personnel and taking decisive, progressive action:

https://doctorow.medium.com/joe-biden-is-headed-to-a-uaw-picket-line-in-detroit-f80bd0b372ab?sk=f3abdfd3f26d2f615ad9d2f1839bcc07

Biden may not be doing enough to suit your taste. I'm certainly furious with aspects of his presidency. The point isn't to lionize Biden – it's to point out that even very flawed leaders can be pushed into producing benefit for the American people. Think of how much more we can get if we don't give up on politics but instead demand even better leaders.

My next novel is The Lost Cause, coming out on November 14. It's about a generation of people who've grown up under good government – a historically unprecedented presidency that has passed the laws and made the policies we'll need to save our species and planet from the climate emergency:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

The action opens after the pendulum has swung back, with a new far-right presidency and an insurgency led by white nationalist militias and their offshore backers – seagoing anarcho-capitalist billionaires.

In the book, these forces figure out how to turn good regulations against the people they were meant to help. They file hundreds of simultaneous environmental challenges to refugee housing projects across the country, blocking the infill building that is providing homes for the people whose homes have been burned up in wildfires, washed away in floods, or rendered uninhabitable by drought.

I don't want to spoil the book here, but it shows how the protagonists pursue a multipronged defense, mixing direct action, civil disobedience, mass protest, court challenges and political pressure to fight back. What they don't do is give up on state capacity. When the state is corrupted by wreckers, they claw back control, rather than giving up on the idea of a competent and benevolent public system.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/23/getting-stuff-done/#praxis

[alexandriaisburning]

+005: Tetris Forever is marketing disguised as a documentary

CANON FIRE is made possible by the generous contributions of readers like you. Support more writing like this on Patreon. Thank you!

The latest in Digital Eclipse’s game/documentary hybrids, Tetris Forever presents a view of history that omits so much it’s nearly historical revisionism. Ironically, for a documentary about a Soviet export, Tetris Forever is more concerned with its capitalist success than anything else. 

Multiple chapters are spent on the saga of Henk Rogers’ acquisition of the rights to the game, the business deals that led to its financial success, and the total ownership that the Tetris Company finally achieved.

Rogers talks about buying out the remains of the Soviet ministry of computer technology, shutting down a successful Tetris clone keychain, taking ownership of Bombliss from designer--and Pokemon founder--Tsunekazu Ishihara, and it's presented as if they were inspirational stories, not ruthless business decisions. He even adds that he paid Ishihara 100 Yen per unit, “because it was the right thing to do”, even though he legally didn’t need to.

Tetris Forever’s narrative is not the story of Tetris, but the Tetris Company. It’s a story of great men doing great things, mythmaking for people who have very literally already bought in. You can see it in the collection’s roster of games, which only includes titles developed by Bullet Proof Software, games that Rogers had a hand in directly, and are outright owned by the Tetris Company.

For as much as they hype up the Game Boy as a key to the Tetris’ worldwide success, its absence leaves a gaping hole in what’s supposed to be a historical collection. Even if it's already well known to many, its absence makes it hard to take Tetris Forever seriously as a historical archive. 

Alongside Tengen Tetris, which they fought a protracted legal battle to bury, and NES Tetris, which has exploded in popularity recently with a number of world records, a growing competitive scene and a recreation in Tetris Effect, there’s several milestone releases that are not only not playable, but not given little focus in the documentary. 

The greatest of these omissions is easily SEGA Tetris. While Tetris dominated the console space in the West, SEGA’s arcade entry was highly influential in Japan, becoming the de facto representative of the series there, spinning off into competitive entries, and becoming the groundwork for several fan games of the time, and eventually Tetris the Grand Master. 

Together with TGM, SEGA Tetris would play a huge part in defining the “feel” of Tetris. Mechanics like lock delay, ghost pieces and wall kicks were created here, in arcades, then rolled into the official Tetris Guideline, the blueprint of what a modern Tetris game should look like. Rogers himself has said as much in other interviews. 

In leaving out those entries, Tetris Forever buries a slew of other stories. The stories of how a collaboration between ex-Street Fighter devs and Japanese comedians would change the series forever, how feedback from an office lady led to a game defining mechanic, and how the game would make an international name for itself years after its release due to streaming. 

Instead SEGA Tetris is limited to a single paragraph, a short video of Tetsuya Mizuguchi talking about watching it in arcades, and a summary basically saying “it’s influential” TGM and Arika are given even less, with the only comment being that TGM is known for its speed. It’s about the same level of attention as they give to the times they made Tetris cabinets that were REALLY BIG. 

And where are the stories of the NES game champions? THe ridiculous limitations that make the NES version uniquely difficulty to play, the absurd techniques that players developed to get around the physical limitations of the controller they play with? 

Where are the showcases of speedruns and high level competition? Why aren’t there interviews with the devs of different titles, like the experimental N64 entries from H2O Entertainment, or the composer of the CDI Tetris? Digital Eclipse had a chance to showcase the diversity of people and ideas that have touched Tetris, but all of that is barely mentioned, if at all. 

Licensing was surely a factor here, but as Tetris Forever points out, the Tetris Company has fought many battles over rights. Why stop when it's time to tell your story? 

Instead what we get itls historical revisionism by exclusion. A story canonizing what we already know, and leaving out the contributions of the many hands that have touched the game in the decades since its success. 

Tetris Forever would have you believe that's Tetris’ success is the story of Alexi Pajitnov discovering a diamond, and Henk Rogers convincing everyone it was valuable. But a gem's value isn't in its raw material but the refining process--something I'm sure the son of a gem merchant like Rogers would know.

Tetris’ refinements have come as a result of decades of community contributions. From fans making works in both official and unofficial capacities. Tetris is the story of a conversation between a game and its players. It's a cultural phenomenon built by many hands. 

Perhaps, comrades, that's the real legacy of what they once called THE SOVIET MIND GAME.

[hd-fan-fair]

Title: Spellbound Creator: Anonymous Prompt: #99 Muggle Theme: Muggle Magician Draco Malfoy Rating: Mature Warnings/Content Notes: Draco Malfoy in the Muggle World, Auror Harry Potter, Legilimency (Harry Potter), Clubbing, Non-sexual Consent Issues, Invasion of Privacy, Period-Typical Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Past Self-Harm, Harry Has a Palm Pilot, potentially unfair portrayal of enterprise software Summary: When Harry was sent to Las Vegas to investigate a report of Statute of Secrecy violation, he expected to give a stern talking to another pearl-clutching, middle-aged witch about wasting MACUSA resources. He certainly didn’t expect to see Draco Malfoy under the glittering lights of the stage, performing for hundreds of spellbound Muggles. Word Count: 22,682 Creator’s Notes: Thank you to the mods for all your hard work in running this fest!

Huge thanks also to my alpha and beta readers. R, your incredible comments helped turn this from a collection of scenes into a story. G, thank you for your helpful feedback on the opening scene. K, thank you for marshalling my commas into place. Your comments helped me fall in love with these two idiots all over again.

( Spellbound )

[thatstormygeek]

To be extremely blunt: Microsoft is asking its employees to draft their performance reviews based on the outputs of generative AI models — the same ones underpinning ChatGPT — that are prone to hallucination.  Microsoft is also — as I learned from an internal document I’ve reviewed — instructing managers to use it to summarize "their direct report's Connects, Perspectives and other feedback collected throughout the fiscal year as a basis to draft Rewards/promotion justifications in the Manage Rewards Tool (MRI)," which in plain English means "use a generative AI to read performance reviews that may or may not be written by generative AI, with the potential for hallucinations at every single step."

I find this whole situation utterly disgusting. The Growth Mindset is a poorly-defined and unscientific concept that Microsoft has adopted as gospel, sold through Satya Nadella's book and reams of internal training material, and it's a disgraceful thing to build an entire company upon, let alone one as important as Microsoft. Yet to actively encourage the company-wide dilution of performance reviews — and by extension the lives of Microsoft employees — by introducing generative AI is reprehensible. It shows that, at its core, Microsoft doesn't actually want to evaluate people's performance, but see how well it can hit the buttons that make managers and the Senior Leadership Team feel good, a masturbatory and specious culture built by a man — Satya Nadella — that doesn't know a fucking thing about the work being done at his company. This is the inevitable future of large companies that have simply given up on managing their people, sacrificing their culture — and ultimately their businesses — to as much automation as is possible, to the point that the people themselves are judged based on the whims of managers that don't do the actual work and the machines that they've found to do what little is required of them. Google now claims that 25% of its code is written by AI, and I anticipate Microsoft isn't far behind.

[bliow]

AGARTHA Aİ - DEVASA+ (4)

In an era where technology and creativity intertwine, AI design is revolutionizing the way we conceptualize and create across various industries. From the runway to retail, 3D fashion design is pushing boundaries, enabling designers to craft intricate garments with unparalleled precision. Likewise, 3D product design is transforming everything from gadgets to furniture, allowing for rapid prototyping and innovation. As we explore these exciting advancements, platforms like Agartha.ai are leading the charge in harnessing artificial intelligence to streamline the design process and inspire new ideas. 

AI design

Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized numerous industries, and the realm of design is no exception. By leveraging the power of machine learning and advanced algorithms, AI is transforming the way designers create, innovate, and deliver their products. AI-driven tools enable designers to harness vast amounts of data, allowing for more informed decision-making and streamlined workflows.

In the context of graphic design, AI can assist artists in generating ideas, creating unique visuals, and even automating repetitive tasks. For instance, programs powered by AI design can analyze trends and consumer preferences, producing designs that resonate with target audiences more effectively than traditional methods. This shift not only enhances creativity but also enables designers to focus on strategic thinking and ideation.

Moreover, AI is facilitating personalized design experiences. With the help of algorithms that analyze user behavior, products can be tailored to meet the specific needs and tastes of individuals. This level of customization fosters deeper connections between brands and consumers, ultimately driving customer satisfaction and loyalty in an increasingly competitive market.

3D fashion design

In recent years, 3D fashion design has revolutionized the way we create and visualize clothing. Using advanced software and tools, designers can create lifelike virtual garments that allow for innovative experimentation without the need for physical fabric. This trend has not only streamlined the design process but has also significantly reduced waste in the fashion industry.

Moreover, 3D fashion design enables designers to showcase their creations in a more interactive manner. By utilizing 3D modeling and rendering technologies, designers can present their collections in virtual environments, making it easier for clients and consumers to appreciate the nuances of each piece. This immersive experience also helps in gathering valuable feedback before producing the final product.

Furthermore, the integration of 3D fashion design with augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies is bringing a fresh perspective to the industry. Consumers can virtually try on clothes from the comfort of their homes, thereby enhancing the shopping experience. As this field continues to evolve, it promises to bridge the gap between creativity and technology, paving the way for a sustainable and forward-thinking fashion future.

3D product design

3D product design has revolutionized the way we conceptualize and create products. With advanced software tools and technologies, designers can now create highly detailed and realistic prototypes that are not only visually appealing but also functional. This process allows for a quicker iteration of ideas, enabling designers to experiment with various styles and functionalities before arriving at the final design.

One of the significant advantages of 3D product design is the ability to visualize products in a virtual environment. Designers can see how their creations would look in real life, which is essential for understanding aesthetics and usability. Additionally, this technology enables manufacturers to identify potential issues in the design phase, reducing costs associated with prototype development and rework.

Moreover, the rise of 3D printing has further enhanced the significance of 3D product design. Designers can swiftly turn their digital models into tangible products, allowing for rapid prototyping and small-batch manufacturing. This agility not only speeds up the time-to-market for new products but also paves the way for more innovative designs that were previously impossible to execute.

Agartha.ai

Agartha.ai is a revolutionary platform that merges artificial intelligence with innovative design, creating a new avenue for designers and creators alike. With the rapid advancements in technology, Agartha.ai leverages AI to streamline various design processes, enabling users to produce unique and captivating designs with ease.

The platform provides tools that empower both emerging and established designers to explore the possibilities of AI design. By utilizing intelligent algorithms, Agartha.ai can assist in generating design options, ensuring that creativity is not hindered but enhanced. This results in a more efficient workflow and allows designers to focus on the conceptual aspects of their projects.

One of the standout features of Agartha.ai is its ability to adapt to different design disciplines, such as 3D fashion design and 3D product design. By supporting a broad spectrum of design fields, it positions itself as a versatile tool that meets the evolving needs of today's creative professionals. Whether it's crafting intricate fashion pieces or developing innovative product designs, Agartha.ai is at the forefront of the design revolution.

[cardboardhyperfix-games]

DELUXE EDITION NOW AVAILABLE

Here's the original description of the game:

I like antique stores a lot. I've been going to flea markets my whole life. My dad collects junk, and honestly I probably collect a lot of junk too.

I'm also a big fan of robots and the end of capitalism. In this RPG, you play as a robot, a model that achieved sentience. You were also created by corporations, but now live in a world without corporations. These corporations, in their final years, created a wide and exhaustive range of products trying to capitalize on these newfound sentient robots making a living wage. Throwbacks, new software, utilities and tools, and anything else that you could or could not conceive of. 

As a robot, you try to find this junk. You want to collect these unique bits and parts because it is fun.

This game uses FATE/Fudge dice because I think they are neat. Let me know if you have any feedback! Rules are solo play focused, but can play with others in tandem if you want!

[totallynotabug]

I made a zine about protests! This was made for my government class and I need feedback to complete this project so if you’d give it a read and fill out the survey it would be a huge help! Survey under cut ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

[writingwithsnails]

I'm 500% guilty of letting WIPs sit on the shelf, collecting dust. If this sounds familiar, read on...

This community is focused on finishing your WIP and getting things done! You can share what your project is about, your word count goals, and that sort of thing but don't share excerpts, ask for critiques or feedback, etc. I'm taking a page from Finishing School by Cary Tennis and Danelle Morton.

The weekly "meeting" (exact times and dates will be decided via poll) will be a 90-minute window broken down like this:

:00 - the announcement post signals the start of the meeting, each person creates their own post that includes: your progress and/or setbacks, what you hope to accomplish next week, and (if you'd like) what you've been reading recently. :30 - sit down in your chair and start plotting, writing, editing, etc. :90 - reply/comment on the announcement post, you can simply say "DONE!" or you can include some information about what you got done, like your word count, page count, or if you used that time to reach a specific goal.

Writing sprints and other games are welcome.

Literary discussions are welcome along with all writing-related recommendations for software, tools, books, podcasts, etc.

Again, this community is about finishing and reaching our goals.

Membership is open to everyone and anyone, just hit the 'request' button! (Humans are welcome, spamb0ts are not.)

CHECK IT OUT AND JOIN!

[forthedancingandthethriving]

Got some fun ideas for a few things that could happen during the big battle of the Vacation arc;

-You remember that gauntlet Andrew made out of the Atl0s drone that's the breakout squad's ticket to not having to keep working for the Abyss while still making a break for it? Well, given that it was originally designed to collect DNA samples for the Omnitrix's database it has a lot of hardware and software in common with said device. So, during the chaos of the battle, he and Trixie end up running into each other (since Ben's crew came along) and the combination of Trixie's code being weird due to her origins, Andrew's modifications during the process of turning a flying camera into a glove with his bare hands, and the large overlap in the gauntlet and Omnitrix's designs makes the universe basically go "fuck it, why not" and give the gauntlet the features of an Omnitrix on top of. Fortunately he only gets a random set of ten starting out just like every Omnitrix wielder should. Specifically he starts out with ten of the many species that the drones have found so far in their explorations of the digital multiverse. So no actual canon Ben 10 aliens for him yet.

-Francis obviously goes after Meggy and Desti first, because he's a sadistic fuck like that, and is really excited about Desti's presence in particular. Not every day you get the opportunity to kill someone a second time after all. Too bad for him Saiko had the exact same thought when she realized he was there, and Kaizo and Whimpu are also here because why not. Whimpu being here is particularly interesting because you'd think he wouldn't be able to contribute much given his Whole Deal but apparently he's been studying the properties all the weird Spaghettis he, Mario and Bowser made during the Orange Spaghetti Saga and has found some actual uses for them. Including combat utility in some cases. This eventually results in Francis deciding to be opportunistic and snagging one of the spaghetti's with his tongue. Said spaghetti happens to be the blue one that turns people into Anime Girls. The combination of his two biggest obsessions (hot anime titties and himself) causes a horniness feedback loop that short-circuits his brain a-la Narcisus from Greek mythology. The breakout squad still makes sure to grab him on their way out since while they were scouting he mentioned having a place they could lay low if things went south.

Francis finding out there's a way to turn people into Waifus certainly won't have any consequences!

-The Goomba Who Sold The World is back again because of course he ended up in Computer Hell what did you expect. In order to make him actually, you know, useful (seeing as he's an ordinary Goomba and all, and a dead one at that) the Abyss turn him into a vessel for a portion of its power, resulting in a horrific transformation akin to the Smash Ultimate version of Marx.

-While a lot of the Abyss's army is the escapees, some of them given similar power boosts to the Goomba for similar reasons, the main bulk of it ends up being Black Arms, because when Black Doom got out of Computer Hell his connection to the hivemind got restored so he can summon his troops again.

-Also there's a build-your-own-rollercoaster attraction in the park and he's using it to make Biblically Accurate Radical Highway to cause problems for the heroes because of course he is.

-Mind-Controlled Full-Power Diana vs Fury Bowser vs hijacked movie-style Death Egg Robot (with Eggman stuck inside), courtesy of one of the more powerful inmates, with Lily, Bowser Jr. and Sage trying to save them (and save everyone else from them).

I'm beginning to think the Abyss needs to do a vetting process for people it decides to have join it..

But there are all great!! The last one is super intriguing to me because a mind-controlled Diana?? Fury Bowser?? Hijacked Death Egg?? That's a battle no one wants to be caught between..

[praxis-app]

Praxis is an open source social network packed with features for collaborative decision making, event planning, and more. Proposals take center stage, offering a diverse range of voting models, with consensus as the default.

With Praxis, you can create groups that empower members to collectively shape crucial aspects such as group name, settings, roles, or the planning of real world events. This flexibility allows for the creation of diverse and dynamic social structures tailored to meet the specific needs of your community as it evolves over time.

While the software is still in its early stages and not yet ready for serious use beyond testing and research purposes, we're seeking your help with testing and user feedback.

Join the Praxis Discord - Sign up - GitHub

[alexistudies]

thursday, may 16th 2024

updating my poster for the conference in a couple weeks! i can't believe i'm going to sweden soon, ahhh. i'm so excited!! i had to rerun some statistics and analysis for this poster, so i took this opportunity to start getting more familiar with JMP. i told myself in April that I needed to pick a statistical software thats point-and-click and one that's coding based, so JMP is my point-and-click for now. I plan on learning R over the summer and in the data science bootcamp I was accepted to yesterday.

today's to do list

data collection

workout

read feedback from PI & make manuscript edits

make some phone calls regarding vet stuff for my pupper

[throyalframes]

Masterpieces in Pixels: The Best of Digital Photo Artwork

When Technology Meets Imagination

Once, the masterpiece was born of brush and canvas. Today, some of the world's most breathtaking compositions begin with a stylus and screen. Welcome to the world of digital art painting, where creativity knows that there is no limit and pixels do not become poetry.

This article is a celebration of the digital renaissance - showing iconic digital photo artifacts, spotting impressive artists, and revealing how the technique is changing the visual stories.

The Rise of Digital Art: A New Chapter in Art History

The development of art has always been powered by equipment—stone, charcoal, oil, and acrylic. The digital era brought a new set of devices: graphic tablets, photo-editing software, and 3D rendering engines.

Why Digital Art Painting Deserves the Spotlight

Critics once rejected digital art as "less real," but the world of art has moved. Today, digital photo artwork is displayed in major galleries, collected as NFTs, and used in gaming, film, fashion, and advertising.

Here’s what makes it stand out:

 Versatility: From photorealism to essence, digital equipment suits every style.

 Efficiency: Premous, again, and layers use the experiment risk-free.

 Exception: Artists worldwide can cooperate, share, and sell their work.

Digital Masterpieces That Inspire

Let's dive into some standout examples that show the emotional and technical depth of digital art painting.

1. “Portrait of the Future” by Artgerm

A hyper-detailed science-fiction portrait that mixes Eastern aesthetics with the Western comic book effect. The signature of the artgerm is possible with the work of the complex layer in Photoshop.

2. “City of Light” by Beeple

One of the most famous digital artists of our time creates a dystopian world with quality like Bipal cinema. Their daily rendering leads the boundaries of digital storytelling.

3. “Dreams in Bloom” by Ross Tran

This colorful, chaotic, and joyful piece shows how digital equipment can reflect an artist's personality. Ross's bold brushstrokes and unique character design make their work immediately recognizable.

Behind the Scenes: How Digital Art Paintings Are Created

Creating a digital work includes more than just software. It is a process filled with vision, technology, and story.

Step-by-step Process:

Sketching the concept —just like traditional art.

Blocking in shapes and color —using layers for flexibility.

Adding depth and lighting—digital brushes simulate texture and light.

Refining details—highlights, shadows, effects, and final polish.

Meet the Masters: Influential Digital Artists

 Loish (Lois van Baarle)

Known for its dreamy characters and expressive brushwork, depiction and animation of bridges in a vibrant digital style.

 Feng Zhu

Concept artist for games like Star Wars and Transformers, Feng brings cinematic flair to every digital stroke.

 Magdalena Pagowska

Their fantasy-themed digital photo artifacts featured a mixture of realism and imagination, often accompanied by ethereal light and flowing texture.

How to Appreciate Digital Art

It is not certain how to read digital paintings. Here are things to see:

Brush technique: Is it painterly, smooth, or textured?

Lighting: Does it evoke a mood?

Composition: How are the elements balanced?

Emotion: What story is it telling?

Digital does not mean. In fact, with repetition and the ability to use it, digital art often captures deep emotional nuances.

Getting Started: Become a Digital Creator Yourself

Inspired? You can try your hand at digital art painting even as a beginner. Here’s how:

Beginner Tools: Try free apps like Krita or use an iPad with Procreate.

Learn the Basics: Study traditional drawing—digital is just a new medium.

Take Courses: Platforms like Skillshare, Udemy, and YouTube are goldmines.

Join the Community: Reddit, ArtStation, and Discord groups provide support and feedback.

The best way to improve? Just keep creating. Even the best artists started with stick figures.

The Digital Canvas: What's Next?

Technology leads the limits of creativity.

AI-assisted painting tools are helping artists generate ideas faster.

Augmented and virtual reality art is becoming more interactive.

NFTs and blockchain have created new art markets and collector experiences.

Celebrating Creativity in the Digital Age

Digital art painting is proof that artistry is not limited by medium. Whether it is painted on a canvas or prepared on a tablet, what matters is the story that tells it, and it is a feeling.

In Pixel, these works reflect the same passion, technology, and surprise that are hanging any oil painting in a museum. So next time you see a digital artwork, look closely - you can gaze into the future of art.