But probably not for long…

Initial optimism…

…crushed by correct parsing of the headline:

Microsoft and GitHub Preview New Tool That Identifies, Prioritizes, and Fixes Vulnerabilities With AI

I’m much more interested in “fixing AI vulnerabilities” than in “using AI to fix vulnerabilities”. It would be far more useful, and less frustrating for the poor suckers dealing with the mountain of hallucinated issues and gibberish pull requests.

Record Of Lodoss War, Louie, etc

An official English translation of the Sword World tabletop RPG is apparently on the way, says a tweet that doesn’t link to the publisher or their upcoming crowdfunding campaign.

TL/DR, the reason the Lodoss series has that title is that it was an Eighties thing in Japan to transcribe your RPG game and share the “replay” of your story; it literally started out as the record of the author’s campaign. The novels were cleaned up from that, and then he released his own game rules and setting. Later, the Rune Soldier novels were set on another continent in the same world; if you thought the anime felt like a classic RPG adventure, complete with a party consisting of a fighter, mage, thief, and wizard, correct!

In addition to the upcoming game release, the fan community has recently been cranking out fan-translations of the novels and manga. I read the first few Louie novels in Japanese way back when, first with OCRd scans and then with ripped Kindle editions, after running them through my assisted-reading scripts to add furigana and vocabulary lists. It was slow going, and I never finished the series, even though I got them all prepped. It’ll be interesting to see how the translators handled some of the lines that stumped me.

(actual recent fan-art, who’da thunkit?)

TL/DR or TL/AF?

Social media engagement-farming seems to be built on two premises: fraudbots pretending to be “just like you, only more extreme”, and manipulated sexypics designed to elicit a reflexive like/retweet. Neither seems to really work any more, even before this week’s proof that 99% of both groups are foreign-run bot farms; people were glancing at them and then moving on to the next rather than engaging.

Comments via Isso

Markdown formatting and simple HTML accepted.

Sometimes you have to double-click to enter text in the form (interaction between Isso and Bootstrap?). Tab is more reliable.