#Mobile Mapping Market

[marchewkastudios]

Marchewka Studios

Marchewka Studios is a local Marketing Agency based in Leeds. Our team consists of passionate individuals who work together to deliver digital solutions to our customers and help them achieve their business goals. Our innovative direct-to-consumer (DTC) digital solutions create effective connections with customers, assisting them to evolve and build their brands. Each team member has been specially selected based on their expertise to ensure we provide the best results for our customers. Our services span from initial strategy planning to mobile app development, website and web-app development, social media marketing, reputation management, search engine optimization, advanced data analytics and applied Artificial Intelligence.

Mobile App Build

[everythingwaschocolateandsugar]

The global LiDAR Market was valued at $960 million in 2019, and is projected to reach $5.35 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 16.9% from 2020 to 2030.

[jasaiklangoogletegal]

PUSAT LAYANAN | 0813-2903-9515 | Pusat Jasa Iklan Digital di Tegal

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[laiqverse]

How Google Maps has become an Essential Part of Our Daily Life

In today’s fast-paced world, Google Maps has become an indispensable tool that helps us navigate through our daily lives. With its accurate directions, real-time traffic updates, and a plethora of other features, Google Maps has made our lives much easier and more efficient. In this blog post, we will discuss the importance of Google Maps in our daily life and how it has revolutionized the way we…

[maned-dog]

Bored & hospitalized rn and ive been thinking a ton abt how underrated the entirety of gen 8 was

First off, the marketing and reveals were AMAZING. The nature cam for ponyta? I adored that. The scrambled up glitchy sirfetched was HYPE, and impidimp constantly teasing us in demos and small appearances without ever getting an official pre-release reveal was so fitting.

The designs in general of every single pokemon are so GOOD. Not only the original mons but also all the regionals were so charming and well spread out and arguably way better than alolan forms. Some of my favorite designs that never get talked about are Mr. Rime, galarian slowbro, and galarian darmanitan. Every new form and evo went into pokemon that ACTUALLY needed extra love and yet the community never talks abt em!!

Another thing i ADORE is all the small tiny features which imo should've stayed permanently! As much as i love the mobile PCs, the rotom PC with pokejobs and the loto feature was real cute and neat, the trainer cards and the amount of customization they had were SO GOOD and SO UNDERRATED!! The student cards or whatever in SV arent nearly as charming.

Also the region itself!! While yes it is LINEAR its still so gorgeous (aside feom the wild area) and, personally, id argue the DLCs did a way better job at an open world than SV did. The maps were pretty and every area was unique and had a use in the story unlike SV and its DLCs where half the map goes unused in the story or theres a ton of filler fields.

Anyway idc what anyone says alongside gen 3, gen 8 is my favorite to replay and go through. The dex is so diverse despite the natdex cut and while SV has better characters and story i still prefer SWSH and sll its unique charm

[silkflovvers-art]

Hi! I hope you’re doing well. May I ask how you would describe Arknights’ game and story?

Hi hi! I'll do my best but I've unfortunately got Covid (again ;;) so my brain is made of under-cooked scrambled eggs. This is also my art blog, so I don't normally answer these kinds of asks here, but honestly.. I haven't posted here in forever so it's probably fiiiiiine. Probably.

I want to preface by saying I'm incredibly behind on the main story, so I'm not the best person to ask for a summary about it. I can however offer a pretty good explanation that keeps heavy spoilers out of it because I'm so behind, though!

Throwing all of the explanation under a read more-

Arknights Gameplay:

Long time players, ignore how insane so many of my stats and all that are, I haven't had the braincells to play due to covid and traveling almost an entire month prior to getting it. This year has been.. really bad.

Arknights, at its core, is a mobile game that focuses on strategy and tower defense. You strategically place characters (referred to as Operators) down on a top-down, tile style map, keeping their unique classes, skills and talents in mind to protect your base or whatever counts as your "tower" for the specific stage/storyline.

You gain new Operators through a gacha/lottery system called Headhunting, or through a tag system called Recruitment.

Headhunting offers you a chance at the Rate Up high rarity Operators as well as a pool of lower rarity characters. The pool varies by banner. Older Operators have actually been moved to a separate Headhunting system called Kernel Headhunting to give newer players a better chance at obtaining the older Operators from a smaller pool of options. It also occasionally gives players the option to choose which Operators are on Rate Up. Recruitment allows players to narrow down what Operators they can get by selecting up to three tags that are randomly generated for each recruitment. Increasing the Recruitment time helps increase the likelihood of an Operator with the chosen tags being Recruited, but not always. The pool of possible operators a player can receive through recruitment is much smaller than that of the regular or Kernel Headhunting.

You can also get characters for free through events, main story chapters and from purchasing them from the shop using currency you naturally build up by completing daily missions and stages.

I actually consider Arknights to be one of the most F2P friendly live service gacha games I have ever encountered (This is coming from someone with luck so bad their life has been described as an unfortunate Looney Tunes skit by multiple completely unrelated people). In-game currency is also easy to obtain even if you don't have the high rarity "meta" Operators. This is not a game that requires the high rarity characters to play and enjoy. If it was, I wouldn't still be playing after 4 years. I've had to purchase almost all the "meta" characters from the shop just to have the chance at even getting them because they refuse to come home through the gacha system....

The Operator classes include: - Vanguard - Guard - Specialist - Defender - Sniper - Caster - Supporter - Medic

Most of these are pretty self explanatory, but the Arknights Terra Wiki explains them all in really organized simple terms and has clear descriptions of the subclasses!

Unlike another popular gacha game currently out there on the market, Arknights does not forever lock limited events behind their original run duration. Every limited event gets a rerun (roughly taking place between 1-2 years after it's original runtime) and then is later archived and made available forever, whether the player completed it or not. It is also possible to collect materials from stages from the late stages of the main story even if you haven't unlocked them yet thanks to events rewards and shops. Because of this, it's incredibly friendly to new and old players alike.

Over the years it has expanded its game modes and content to include rogue-likes, multi-player modes, and most recently a game mode that requires base construction, exploration, and high level resource gathering and management. Each new limited event and game mode introduces new game mechanics and gimmicks that keep the game play refreshing and challenging.

The other game modes require you to get through the tutorial of the game, which is pretty long and dialogue heavy, but the story is worth it in my opinion and I don't think it should be skipped. I'll pass on explaining those for now since they're relatively easy to look up, but if you're interested in learning more about them, look up: Contingency Contract, Integrated Strategies, Stationary Security Service, Trials for Navigator, or Reclamation Algorithm. The Arknights Terra Wiki is also a good resource for explanations on these game modes.

There's also a base you can build within the main game mode to help passively collect currency and character building materials. It's one of the few ways you're able to interact with other players in the early game. You can decorate the dormitories with different furniture sets, which is pretty cute.

Also the UI is beautiful and I love it and it's easy to understand as long as you DO NOT skip tutorials. Don't do that. For the love of god, you need to pay attention to the tutorials for this game.

Arknights Story:

I'm gonna be so real, I think I used up all my brain power on the game play explanation, so this may sound lackluster ><

Basically:

You play as an amnesiac scientist known as Doctor. The story begins with a rescue operation to retrieve your comatose body from a medical containment unit called a Sarcophagus. It has kept your body stable as well as healed you after an event unknown to you left you gravely injured. The rescue team consisting of Operators once under your command as well as a little Cautus (rabbit) girl named Amiya, pulls you out of the Sarcophagus in the middle of a civil war in the town of Chernobog in the country known as Ursus (you can think of it as an alternative universe USSR populated by a race of bear people also called Ursus).

Amiya quickly fills you in that you are the head researcher of a pharmaceutical company called Rhodes Island that researches and treats an illness known as Oripathy. Oripathy is caused by exposure to a mysterious mineral known as Originium. This mineral is used to fuel most of the machines and magic that exists in this world.

In order to continue research on this terrible and little understand, yet wide spread disease, the Doctor must face rebels, high ranking officials, corrupt governments, ancient beings, gods, and aquatic hiveminds.

The story is much more complex than that, but saying much more spoils quite a bit, so I hate to say much more. I just know that if world building is something you're really interested in and seeing real world connections and inspirations in a story, Arknights is a rich well of that. Many of the characters are based on real life people, events, and mythology/folklore. There are complex governments systems, well thought out civilizations, and unexpected connections between characters and story lines. Despite it's large cast of playable characters, Arknights tries to give each one a meaningful connection to the story, even if it takes years to get to them. The NPCs are memorable and lovable and often become playable if they have an important place in the story or are well received by fans.

There are a lot of really good story summary videos on youtube, but of course now that I'm looking for them, I'm struggling to find them.

All the characters also have profiles with extra info and cutscenes that tie into the main story, side story, or just give insight to how they tie into the world of Arknights.

My only complaint I have with the story is that certain cultures that are often victim of misrepresentation in games do unfortunately suffer a similar fate in Arknights. Arknights has a large cast, and there IS better representation in the character line up than in other games I will not name, but they aren't perfect and can't really be overlooked when compared to the existing characters that do represent their cultural inspirations well. Sargon is the region impacted the most and despite many of my favorite characters originating from this region due to their story and personalities, it's good to take the designs and story with a grain of salt.

Conclusion:

Arknights isn't a game for everyone, even though I do believe the recent additions allow it to be given enough time and effort.

If you're interested in the story and characters but don't want to bother with playing the game, the Arknights Terra Wiki, the Arknights Story Reader (and it's connected github site), Cutscene recordings from the main story and events on Youtube shared by fans, and the Arknights Anime all offer a lot of great info on the story, lore, and characters. I don't think this is a game you actually HAVE to play to properly enjoy the story if you don't want to. There's just A LOT of stuff going on, so it's a lot to keep up with.

Hope all of that made sense, somehow.

[caelwynn]

Caelwynn's Mod List for Stardew 1.6 - Gameplay/Quality of Life (pg 3)

Page 1. Page 2. Page 3.

Useable Community Center — allows you to make use of the appliances at the community center after its completion.

Activate Sprinklers — lets you activate sprinklers by right-clicking them.

Adjust Baby Chances — allows you to adjust the percentage chance your spouse(s) will ask for a baby.

Better Quarry Redux — improves the spawn rate of geodes, ore, and gems in the quarry.

Better Winter Star Gifts — reduces the number of 'dud' gifts at the Feast.

Farmers Market — turns the grange displays at the Stardew Valley Fair into a little farmers market.

Happy Home Designer — overhauls the catalogs and integrates Alternative Texture packs.

Heart Event Helper — shows how dialogue options impact friendship.

It's My Farm I'll Pass Out If I Want To — if you pass out on your farm, you no longer get hauled off to Harvey's. Allows you to configure consequences for passing out at home.

Last Day to Plant — puts up a little message on the last day you can plant something and still be able to harvest it.

Marnie's Auto-Petters — allows you to purchase auto-petters from Marnie.

Mobile Phone Continued — adds in a mobile phone that allows you to call NPCs/allow them to call you. Also lets you re-watch previous heart events.

Mobile Arcade Continued — adds the arcade games Prairie King and Junimo Kart to your phone.

Mobile Phone Themes — adds different background and one skin for your phone.

Mobile Television Continued — allows you to watch today's tv from your phone.

Precise Furniture — lets you adjust furniture pixel by pixel.

Reset Terrain Features — useful for if you add in a new map mid-save.

Smart Building — a more sims-style UI for placing fences, floors, furnaces, etc.

Stack Everything Redux — allows you to stack things that aren't normally stackable, such as furniture, tackles, and wallpaper.

The Return of Immersive Scarecrows — allows you to place scarecrows in and amongst your crops without taking up a tile.

The Return of Immersive Sprinklers — same as above, just with sprinklers.

Tree Spread — prevents trees from spreading on your farm.

World Maps Everywhere — allows you to access all of the world maps from the map window instead of just the current area.

CJB Item Spawner — allows you to spawn any item in the game. Useful for cheating for respawning an item that bugged.

Event Music Volume — allows you to set different volume levels for the music between heart events and regular gameplay. Never again miss out on hearing a concert cutscene because you had turned the music down for your own soundtrack.

The Masterpost for all of the mods is located here.

[alpaca-clouds]

Electric Cars Suck

There is some irony in how things turned out, right? Like eight years ago or so it was mostly the left who was like: "We need more electro mobility!" And the people on the right were like: "Noooo! We need our gas guzzlers that go VROOOOOM!" And somehow now the people on the right buy their stupid cybertrucks, while the people on the left have in large numbers converted to: "Actually, all cars fucking suck."

And hey, that's me. I am in that story. Because actually, all cars fucking suck!

But let's be a bit more serious: The main issue with cars is not even the CO2, the fine particles, or the microplastics they generate. (Yes, most microplastics in the environment originate with cars!) The main issue is, that we live in a car-centric society, that is so very much inaccessible for anyone who does not have a car.

And let's be honest here: In this regard I am complaining as someone with a lot of things going for me: I live in Germany and I live in a city here. We have actually somewhat working public transport, and even my physically disabled ass is capable of reaching the next super market, pharmacy, doctor's office and library within 5 minutes on foot. Sure, due to a lack of bus drivers (which again is due to a lack of proper payment for said bus drivers) they cut some of the bus lines here, making the time I need to get to the next hospital go up by a good chunk, but... What I am saying is: Hey, I am at least not living in the USA, where it is basically impossible to get around in a lot of places when you have no car, because the infrastructure is just so bloody car-centric.

And that is the reason why cars just suck so darn much. Because they need all that infrastructure that makes it harder for everyone to get around.

And the double issue with that is, that some people will still need cars no matter what, even if we try to improve that. I spoke about it before: Some disabled people will always need cars to get around, because they just do not have an alternative due to a variety of reasons. And some services (like ambulances, fire fighters and so on) will also just need cars. Which taken together means that we need to maintain some infrastructure.

Generally speaking I feel, a lot of folks within the Solarpunk scene do underestimate this issue, too. Especially in concern to the USA, Canada and some other colonizer cities in the global south, that have been created very much with cars in mind.

In Europe, most cities have been created with horse drawn carriages in mind and people who walk on foot. Sure, they have been retrofitted to allow for cars, but that retrofitting can easily be toned down in a way that would allow those cars that are needed to pass through, but allow the areas to be used otherwise. (I mean, we have several cities here were you can still see that the city originally has been build by Romans some 2000 years ago, because the city map features certain Roman city planning styles.) It is not really so hard to turn those cities into 15-minute-cities again.

But in the US? In the US a lot of the cities have always been constructed with the car in mind, and the entire street plan is organized around the car. Lots of wide streets. Lots of parking lots. Lots of other facilities that are needed for cars. Sure, you can reuse some of the space. But that does not negate the fact that everything has this wide sprawl that makes it a lot harder to get around. And that really is a problem if someone tried to make 15-minute-cities here. Because frankly... In some areas there just would not be another way but to just tear it all down to rethink city planning once more.

Like, sure, in the city cores it is not that much of an issue. Turning Manhatten into a 15-minute-city is not the issue. But the wider area of New York city? Eh... And in other cities it is worse, of course.

And yeah, those issues - the stupid infrastructure cars need... It is still the same, no matter whether the car goes VROOOOOOM or BZZZT.

[fatehbaz]

Julius Scott’s legendary study tells [...] of the unrest of “masterless” communities, as he terms them, in the late eighteenth-century Caribbean and its implications for the Atlantic World. This unrest was undergirded by what he terms a “common wind” of seditious political news circulating through an increasingly mobile and interconnected region. He deftly sets the context [...] to imperial tensions that culminated in uprisings and revolutions within [...] the French, British, and Spanish Empires. [...] He builds what is this field-defining work from a triangulated analysis of three central hubs of the colonial Caribbean in terms of [...] prosperity in the plantation economy, and political importance to these aforementioned empires: Saint-Domingue [Haiti], Jamaica, and Cuba. But he also explores similar occurrences within [...] Martinique and Guadeloupe for the French, Venezuela and Trinidad for the Spanish, and Dominica and Grenada for the British. He also includes [...] the engagement of the newly formed United States in this network, reinforcing the broader Atlantic impact of the common wind’s radical currents.

---

Chapter 1 explores the upheaval afoot in the mid-1700s colonial Caribbean through a closer look at the movements of a range of actors including enslaved runaways, military deserters, contraband smugglers, free people of color, and poor whites hustling in the islands’ urban centers and surrounding countrysides.

A variety of settings - including the fringes of plantations, maroon settlements, town-based markets, taverns, hospitals, barracks, and wharves - might presumably, if read with the archival grain, illuminate the map of state control. Instead, in Scott’s analysis, these represent the contours of the working class’s unlawful movements and ultimately their fraying of the colonial order, anticipating what Stephanie M. H. Camp [...] would aptly name [...] the “rival geography” of slave society.

---

Chapter 2 shows how sailors’ illicit forms of mobility [...] blurred the bounds between land and sea in this narrative of popular dissent. Their movements [...] as social beings and political dissidents bled into and helped sustain similar kinds of illicit commerce and socializing [...]. Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate how the common wind consistently blew subversive ideas into and around the Caribbean, much to officials’ chagrin. Scott here homes in on the politically volatile era from the late 1770s through the late 1790s, which saw declarations of war, drastic changes in slavery policy [...] and the emergence of U.S., French, and, most significantly, Haitian revolutionary uprising. [...] [E]nslaved communities everywhere in the region followed as intently as they could as the campaign of the enslaved rebels in Saint-Domingue began in 1791. [...] Political news, no matter how hard officials in the colonies and the metropoles tried to block it, spilled into all levels of society [...]. What flowed through all of these channels animated questions about master-slave relations, mercantilist policy, individual rights [...]. Scott carefully traces the influence of the unfolding Haitian Revolution on well-planned but eventually thwarted uprisings of enslaved people in the Venezuelan port city Coro, the Dutch colony of Curaçao, and the parish of Pointe Coupee in then Spanish Louisiana, all in 1795. He also illuminates the multiple instances of inspiration in the 1790s evidenced in enslaved communities throughout the United States [...].

---

Essentially Scott reveals that the Age of Revolutions cannot be understood without comprehending black resistance in times of war and peace. The tale of Phebe, one of many enslaved Jamaican female runaways who became an itinerant higgler hiding in plain sight in urban spaces like Kingston, or the story of the 1790 mutiny of four enslaved sailors who overtook the Saint Kitts sloop the Nancy with respective origins in the Caribbean, West Africa, and the U.S. South, which Scott called a “microcosm” of the Atlantic, are but two of multiple narratives he includes to show that enslaved people [...] actively built and sustained those circuits via their multilingualism, their savvy, and above all their dedication to achieving a state of masterlessness [...].

This could be achieved not just through formal manumission processes, but through running away and re-creating new lives and livelihoods [...]. The [...] knowledge that these dissidents obtained in their labors allowed them to escape to lives not “off the grid,” but rather in the centers of commercial and state activity, ensconced in communities of opposition and poised to obtain news that prepared them well for their next moves in their albeit precarious existence. [...]

Scott complicates earlier framings of the oppositional working class as strictly of European origin [...]; [...] Scott’s unpublished dissertation [...] influenced the interventions made in Linebaugh and Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra [...] years later. [...] He centers enslaved people within the revolutionary Atlantic not just as workers [...] but also as strategic thinkers, and he does so long before it was popular to do so in this field of history. [...] [H]e demonstrates how so many ordinary enslaved women and men regularly engaged in quotidian forms of fugitivity across various imperial territories of the Caribbean [...]. The dissertation also came several years in advance of the still pivotal call advanced by Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s 1995 Silencing the Past, about the denied centrality of the Haitian Revolution to the Age of Revolutions in its time and in retrospect. Scott’s work undeniably influenced many Atlantic historians [...]; it is also a genuinely exciting read.

---

All text above by: Natasha Lightfoot. "The Common Wind: A Masterful Study of the Masterless Revolutionary Atlantic". The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 3, pages 926-930. June 2020. At: doi dot org slash 10.1093/ahr/rhaa230 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[quixoticanarchy]

what is the connectography book and why is it so terrible?

Sorry this took a while to collect my thoughts! where do I start.....

tl;dr it's a paean to enlisting every corner of the earth in the global neoliberal economy so that each can maximize their natural role in the supply chain and achieve Development™. All resources feasible to extract should be extracted, "connectivity" is the most important goal and value and metric in the world, supply chains matter more than nations, globalization is an inexorable force for good, we should focus on mass infrastructure projects to speed development (including a bizarre amount of fossil fuel infrastructure projects). yes there are downsides and yes there's a climate crisis going on but don't mind that, it'll actually be quite profitable

long answer under the cut:

Connectography is a book by Parag Khanna - CNN consultant, Brookings Institute guy, former Special Ops embed, National Intelligence Council advisor etc. So off the bat he’s quite embedded (so to speak) and aligned with the US military and national security apparatus, although the focus of the book is economic. The main arguments are that the world can no longer be thought of as a discrete set of countries setting and fighting over national policies, but an interconnected “supply chain world” where systems of production, transportation, and consumption drive policy and development in and of themselves. Consequently he argues for the diminishing importance of the nation-state and an increasing importance of smaller units of power geography like cities as well as broader ones like regions. He then argues that authority will and should devolve from centralized states to smaller units, and that global conflict would diminish or disappear if we could just give every tribal group its own state or at least autonomy within a larger state. Which is..... already quite a take.

His other main contention is that investing in mass infrastructure projects (oil pipelines, trains, highways, ports) is the best way to maximize "connectivity" and speedrun modernity and urbanization and development and industrial exploitation of poor countries. Demands that everyone and everything serve the market's invisible hand have become demands to bow to the needs of supply chains - which despite being quite based in the material world, are often invoked as something of a mystical force with their own whims and desires, uncoupled from human action.

In a way, there are principles that I also hold which show up in a strange twisted mirror version here. He isn't interested in preserving the nation-state as a form - but it's bc he prioritizes transnational supply chains and rule by corporatocracy. He would like to see a more borderless world - but he's also in favor of more borders (give every ethnic group a state, but also states don't matter anymore?), which counterintuitively he says would lead to a more interconnected and frictionless world. He's pro-immigration and freedom of mobility - but elsewhere it's made clear that he's also invested in blocking undesirable "flows" across borders, and is pro-mobility of people just as long as they enhance economic productivity. He makes some cogent critiques of maps and what is obscured by treating political maps of country borders as true and absolute, for instance - but the ways in which he would re-map the world are all to reflect and further the hyperconnected hypercapitalism he applauds. He would rather see structural adjustment programs prescribe infrastructure investments than austerity - but he still supports "developing" countries being forcibly drafted into the global economy and structured according to the (politely vague and innocuous-sounding) demands of supply chains.

The cheerleading for infrastructure projects, which might be mistaken for a benevolent interest in public spending, is much less "repair bridges so they won't collapse and kill people" and much more "repair and build more and bigger bridges so that more and bigger trucks can carry more cargo across them faster". His rather unoriginal instruction to "developing" countries is to accept globalization is inevitable so it's best to get yours where you can: start by selling off your resources and turning them over to private industry, open SEZs (Special Economic Zones, aka Free Trade Zones) and let the corporations use your cheap labor until you ‘develop’ enough to move up the value chain and those industries depart for cheaper and more lawless shores. He's really into SEZs. It's the classic race to the bottom, except he does not dwell whatsoever on that bottom and its conditions, nor its necessity - someone somewhere will always have to be the cheapest, the most exploitable, the most business-friendly. Instead we get, predictably, the argument that the race to the bottom actually lifts all boats bc corporate investment through SEZs teaches backwards countries how to develop faster and better.

Nothing makes me see red like considering how the version of the future which to me is a nightmare - a fully urbanized integrated modernized hypercapitalist corporate-run world of endless growth and consumption and extraction and waste mediated by advanced technology and surveillance, all consequences be damned - is seen as good and desirable and inevitable by various political and military leaders, economists, think tanks, corporations, etc.

It's also kind of sickening how incredibly out of touch all these visions are. There is no discussion of resource scarcity or limits. There is no discussion of waste. My guy Khanna's acknowledgments of climate change are so blasé and opportunistic I would rather he were a rabid climate denier. How do you acknowledge the destabilizing and deadly effects of climate crisis and yet promote and lionize policies that ensure more of those effects? How are mass scale infrastructure projects supposed to knit people together though lasting physical and supply chain interdependence when so fucking many of them are fossil fuel infrastructure projects?? I cannot emphasize enough how much he gushes over countries and companies building ever more oil pipelines, opening up new deposits for drilling (including in the arctic), and putting aside border disputes to transport oil faster and faster to the biggest consumers.

Well, don’t worry - he’s got the climate-meltdown world all figured out. No mention of cutting emissions or keeping temperature rise down or even many mentions of "green" energy; it's still drill baby drill til we die. Most coastal cities will drown and most latitudes will become uninhabitable but it’s ok, Canada and Russia can become the breadbaskets of the world and we’ll tap all those good good arctic basin resources as the ice melts. Probably throw in some geoengineering too. Climate migrants can move north in their millions, and Canada and Russia will welcome them; really, it's convenient, bc they’re too sparsely populated up there anyway and could use some fresh blood.

There are many other ridiculous or appalling things here I could go into if this post weren't already too long - the statement that colonialism is over, inequality is inevitable and a worthy price to pay, antiglobalization activists are naïve and basically a dying breed anyway, the world has gotten so good at controlling desirable flows and preventing undesirable ones--in particular, we're soo good at controlling infectious disease these days (lol. lmao even), the discussion of Dubai and Doha as prime examples of interconnected hyperglobal cities without going into like. human trafficking, the mocking of countries that tried to choose a third way decades ago and were brutally punished, the disparaging of swana/african countries as weak and crisis-ridden (seemingly idiopathic idk. funny), the shameless extolling of the lovely resources found in war zones which sadly preclude their needful exploitation.. etc. Etc.

I hated this book and would only recommend as a know-thine-enemy exercise; I did get a fair bit out of it from that perspective, and it's worthwhile to consider the implications of the worldview that people like this espouse. But it's incredibly depressing and infuriating that the admitted endgame of all this really is to consume everything there is on this planet to squeeze out every drop of profit, and then flee to the poles when it all comes crashing down.

[softlyblues]

so in my dream narnia that has nothing to do with real narnia, there’s a city that clumps up beside cair paravel, because although i get the agrarian fantasy it’s just not realistic not to have a bustling city beside the docks!

the city is called pavilions in my head, because it’s built sort of clinging onto the cliff that the cair is built of, on these little raised platforms and pavilions. (hah!) and it starts as a sort of shanty town, because oreius and peter lead the army to the cair after the big battle and the coronation and hey! a lot of these people haven’t got homes to go to anymore, but they do have fuckloads of sturdy war tents!

so for the first year or so, they call it pavilions and wait for it to be deconstructed, but it never is. peter gets a bit worried and asks oreius if the army is waiting for any reason, but here’s the thing - when an army hangs around for longer than about nine months, it stops being an army and starts being a sort of mobile town. there are definitely babies. hell, oreius’s army has been around for a hundred years. there are KIDS raised in that warcamp, and they don’t particularly want to go back to long-defrosted burrows, no thank you!

so eventually lucy decides she needs a crusade, and she gets a whole pile of courtiers and hangers-on to make pavilions a bit more official. they make a main street (maybe it’s called broadway, or lions path, or something) and a few branching streets, mostly officialising what’s already there. some of the tents have already turned into wooden shacks, and so lucy and her badgers and beavers and otters and foxes and ducks and (weevils) do a bit of construction, get some of their dwarvish friends to quarry rock from the nearby deposits, and help build a lot of the central buildings. the pub, a few houses of dubious repute (ik its a childrens book but listen), a few market stalls get shoppified. 

lucy doesn’t commission them, but they crop up anyway. four statues, made of quartz-veined marble, and very admirable likenesses they are too, because narnia is full of craftsmen. but because pavilions is a piecemealy sort of city, there isn’t room for the four of them together, and they become squares and circles and gardens. queen lucy way. queen susan avenue. king peter road. the statue to edmund is beside a black dwarf bar on the outskirts of pavilions, and occasionally gets egged in the night, and edmund never goes to see it. there’s an official king edmund street, because lucy made the maps, but it’s more like an alley really, the back of a few market stalls and some crooked houses. 

[chickenleafs-world]

SPOILERS: vaguely mentions some events from chapters 56-68 of episode seven of Disney’s Twisted Wonderland

Reading the new twst ep. 7 story update reminded me of how much I love when games that don’t have as much time to explore the story on screen (like most mobile games) make time ambiguous sometimes. Like, I know the fanfiction girlies can do a lot with that off screen time and it lets the fandom explore so many unique creative avenues and points of view because there’s theoretically as much or as little time there as you want. A lot of time writers on mobile games don’t have the time, budget, or medium flexibility needed for some story beats, and frankly most of the time I prefer the fandom gets to fill it in with the time and talent they have instead of getting half-assed attempts at packing large timeframes into small story segments, or vice versa. With most mediums I prefer the author give us stuff over getting the fans to make it interesting, but with the way the mobile game market hamstrings creators, it’s more understandable there.

For example, in Twst ep. 7, the map makes it look like a long distance between the meeting Lillia and the original fort we were going for. Because of that, plus how time isn’t flowing right now and it’s implied we’re traveling by foot, it could’ve theoretically been weeks or months or more to us of fighting in this war with the Diasomnia boys. Think of the angst potential, after all, you’re traveling in a war zone together, there’s gotta be some trauma forming there eventually, and you’re the only ones who can talk each other through the big emotions of Bawl and Lillia too. Or the fluff of forming cuddle piles because these are the only familiar people around and the Dia boys and Yuu are still just kids. Of Yuu, Silver, and Sebek developing habits around the tense traveling of potential battlegrounds and relying on each other in a fight and to patch each other up.

Or the bittersweet understanding upon coming back that these people have a bigger bond than before. Ace and Deuce realizing the sleepy kid and the loud kid from Diasomnia know Yuu almost better than they do. Malleus realizing his bff/crush/squish is now closer to his guards than to him because of *his* Overblot. Lillia feeling guilty about not waking up sooner and saving them from his dreams of war, when he was a man he no longer feels as fond for. Ortho feeling guilty about not waking them all up easier because maybe then his sensors wouldn’t see their heart rates and adrenaline rise when they heard clanging metal.

[everythingwaschocolateandsugar]

The global LiDAR Market was valued at $960 million in 2019, and is projected to reach $5.35 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 16.9% from 2020 to 2030.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google's chatbot panic

The really remarkable thing isn’t just that Microsoft has decided that the future of search isn’t links to relevant materials, but instead lengthy, florid paragraphs written by a chatbot who happens to be a habitual liar — even more remarkable is that Google agrees.

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/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Microsoft has nothing to lose. It’s spent billions on Bing, a search-engine no one voluntarily uses. Might as well try something so stupid it might just work. But why is Google, a monopolist who has a 90+% share of search worldwide, jumping off the same bridge as Microsoft?

There’s a delightful Mastodon thread about this, written by Dan Hon, where he compares the chatbot-enshittified front ends to Bing and Google to Tweedledee and Tweedledum:

https://mamot.fr/@danhon@dan.mastohon.com/109832788458972865

“At the front of the house, Alice found two curious characters, both search engines.

“‘I am Googl-E,’ said the one plastered in advertisements.

“‘And I am Bingle-Dum,’ said the other, who was the smaller of the two, and sported a pout, as to having fewer visitors and opportunity for conversation than the other.

“‘I know you,’ said Alice. ‘Are you to present me with a puzzle? Perhaps one of you tells the truth and the other lies?’

“‘Oh no,’ said Bingle-Dum.

“‘We both lie,’ added Googl-E.”

It just keeps getting better:

“‘This is truly an intolerable situation. If you both lie,’

“ — ‘And lie convincingly,’ added Bingle-Dum — 

“‘Yes, thank you. If that is so, then how am I to ever trust either of you?’

“Googl-E and Bingle-Dum turned to face each other and shrugged.”

Chatbot search is a terrible idea, especially in an era in which the web is likely to fill up with vast mountains of AI bullshit, the frozen gabble of stochastic parrots:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Google’s chatbot strategy shouldn’t be adding more madlibs to the internet — rather, they should be figuring out how to exclude (or, at a minimum, fact-check) the confident nonsense of the spammers and SEO creeps.

And yet, Google is going all-in on chatbots, with the company CEO ordering an all-hands scramble to cram chatbots into every part of the googleverse. Why on earth is the company racing Microsoft to see who can be first to leap off the peak of inflated expectations?

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

I just published a theory in The Atlantic, under the title “How Google Ran Out of Ideas,” where I turn to competition theory to explain Google’s sweaty insecurity, an anxiety complex that the company has been plagued by nearly since its inception:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/google-ai-chatbots-microsoft-bing-chatgpt/673052/

The core theory: a quarter of a century, the Google founders had one amazing idea — a better way to do search. The capital markets showered the company in money, and it hired the very best, brightest, most creative people it could find, but then it created a corporate culture that was incapable of capitalizing on their ideas.

Every single product Google made internally — except for its Hotmail clone — died. Some of those products were good, some were terrible, but it didn’t matter. Google — a company that cultivated the ballpit-in-the-lobby whimsy of a Willy Wonka factory — couldn’t “innovate” at all.

Every successful Google product except search and gmail is an acquisition: mobile, ad-tech, videos, server management, docs, calendaring, maps, you name it. The company desperately wants to be a “making things” company, but it’s actually a “buying things” company. Sure, it’s good at operationalizing and scaling products, but that’s table-stakes for any monopolist:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/technical-excellence-and-scale

The cognitive dissonance of a self-styled “creative genius” whose true genius is spending other people’s money to buy other people’s products and take credit for them drives people to do truly bonkers thing (as any Twitter user can attest).

Google has long exhibited this pathology. In the mid-2000s — after Google chased Yahoo into China and started censoring its search-results and collaborating on state surveillance — we used to say that the way to get Google to do something stupid and self-destructive was to get Yahoo to do it first.

This was quite a time. Yahoo was desperate and failing, a graveyard of promising acquisitions that were gutshot and left to bleed out right there on the public internet as the dueling princelings of Yahoo senior management performed a backstabbing Medici LARP that had them competing to see who could sabotage the others. Going into China was an act of desperation after the company was humiliated by Google’s vastly superior search. Watching Google copy Yahoo’s idiotic gambits was baffling.

Baffling at the time, that is. As time went by and Google slavishly copied other rivals, its pathology of insecurity revealed itself. Google repeatedly failed to make a popular “social” product, and as Facebook commanded an ever-larger share of the ad-market, Google made a full-court press to compete with it. The company made Google Plus integration a “key performance indictator” for every division, and the result was a bizarre morass of ill-starred “social” features in every Google product — products that billions of users relied on for high-stakes operations, which were suddenly festooned with “social” buttons that made no sense.

The G+ debacle was truly incredible: some G+ features and integrations were great and developed loyal followings, but these were overshadowed by the incoherent, top-down insistence of making Google a “social-first” company. When G+ collapsed, it totally imploded, and the useful parts of G+ that people had come to rely upon disappeared along with the stupid parts.

For anyone who lived through the G+ tragicomedy, Google’s pivot to Bard — a chatbot front-end for search results — is grimly familiar. It’s a real “die a hero or live long enough to become a villain moment.” Microsoft — the monopolist that was only stayed from strangling Google in its cradle by the trauma of its antitrust dragging — has transformed from a product-creation company to an acquisitions and operations company, and Google is right behind it.

Just last year, Google laid off 12,000 staffers to please a private-equity “activist investor” — in the same year, it declared a $70b stock buyback, extracting enough capital to pay those 12,000 Googlers’ salaries for the next 27 years. Google is a financial company with a sideline in adtech. It has to be: when your only successful path to growth requires access to the capital markets to fund anticompetitive acquisitions, you can’t afford to piss off the money-gods, even if you have a “dual share” structure that lets the founders outvote every other shareholder:

https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004-ipo-letter/

ChatGPT and its imitators have all the hallmarks of a tech fad, and are truly the successor to last season’s web3 and cryptocurrency pump-and-dumps. One of the clearest and most inspiring critiques of chatbots comes from science fiction writer Ted Chiang, whose instant-classsic critique was called “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web”:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

Chiang points out a key difference between the output of ChatGPT and human authors: a human author’s first draft is often an original idea, badly expressed, while the best ChatGPT can hope for is a competently expressed, unoriginal idea. ChatGPT is perfectly poised to improve on the SEO copypasta that legions of low-paid workers pump out in a bid to climb the Google search results.

Speaking of Chiang’s essay in this week’s episode of the This Machine Kills podcast, Jathan Sadowski expertly punctures the ChatGPT4 hype bubble, which holds that the next version of the chatbot will be so amazing that any critiques of the current technology will be rendered obsolete:

https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/232-400-hundred-years-of-capitalism-led-directly-to-microsoft-viva-sales

Sadowski notes that OpenAI’s engineers are going to enormous lengths to ensure that the next version won’t be trained on any of the output from ChatGPT3. This is a tell: if a large language model can produce materials that are as good as human-produced text, then why can’t the output of ChatGPT3 be used to create ChatGPT4?

Sadowski has a great term to describe this problem: “Habsburg AI.” Just as royal inbreeding produced a generation of supposed supermen who were incapable of reproducing themselves, so too will feeding a new model on the exhaust stream of the last one produce an ever-worsening gyre of tightly spiraling nonsense that eventually disappears up its own asshole.

This is the last day (Feb 17) of my Australian tour for my book Chokepoint Capitalism with my co-author, Rebecca Giblin. We’ll be in Canberra at the Australian Digital Alliance Copyright Forum.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: Tweedledee and Tweedledum, standing at the bottom of Humpty Dumpty's wall. Dee and Dum have the logos for Google and Bing on their chests. Humpty is about to fall and is being held up by a motley collection of panicking businessmen."]

[iqplatform]

Digital Marketing Course

What you will learn:

Learn Basic SEO with HTML (On page, Off page, Blogs, Content Optimization).

SEM, Pay per Click (PPC), Google AdWords, Yahoo & Bing Ad center.

Social Media Marketing (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn).

E-mall Campaigns & Affiliate Marketing.

Google Analytics, Google AdSense & Google Maps (Local SEO).

YouTube Video Advertisements, Mobile Apps Promotions.

[stevebattle]

Genus Home Personal Robot (1983) by Ray Raymond, World of Robots Corp. / Robotics International, Jackson, MI. “Robotics International, based in Jackson, Michigan, unveiled its domestic creature during the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in early January. In all its fiberglass glory, Genus stands 4 1/2 feet tall and 22 inches wide and weighs 120 pounds. It comes fully assembled with a CRT as its head. Company officials are still undecided about price but are hedging between $5000 and $8000. The first platoon of Genuses should be available at various computer stores by April. “A number of marketing studies show that home-computer users have expressed a need for a mobile platform, which, in essence, is a robot,” said Victor Pytko, Robotics International’s director of communications. The ultrasonic obstacle-avoidance mapping software alllows Genus to roam around the house, unattended, on its two casters, without bumping into furniture, the kids or the dog. When its 12-volt batteries get low, Genus zips over to one of the room’s electrical 110-volt outlets and recharges itself before it needs to juice up again. … “The basic Genus can be equipped to be a versatile, mobile, state-of-the-art robot capable of vacuuming, entertaining and providing home security without need for human monitoring,” said John Collins, Robotics International president.” – Genus – just what every happy li’l home needs by Kathy Chin, InfoWorld, vol.5, no.7, 14 Feb 1983, page 30.