I got completely stuck, tries various word solvers, but they seemed to be for cross words or anagrams, but they were no help.
But an actual dictionary / word list unlocked it.
Not sure if using a dictionary goes against the spirit of the game or is expected.
Without it it seems incredibly difficult.
> Singing -> ever heard of vocaloids? They’ve existed for at least a decade or two
That it was technically already possible does not mean there isn't benefit from improved quality. In fact, Vocaloid itself has been improving and now uses AI.
Would also add making movies, podcasts, news broadcasts, etc. available automatically in a huge range of languages. You wouldn't want movies dubbed by Microsoft Sam (beyond initial comedic effect).
> You wouldn't want movies dubbed by Microsoft Sam (beyond initial comedic effect).
You'd be surprised how common something like this used to be in Poland, though admittedly we used an Ivona voice for this, which was a lot more pleasant.
Having a single narrator narrate the entire movie, overlaying the original audio track, is already common here, much more so than dubbing or subtitles. This is for historic reasons, in the communist era, obtaining the raw audio tracks for dubbing was often impossible, all the translators often had was a normal copy of the movie in its original language.
In the early 2000's, we had a lot of early / unofficial pirate releases, and they had to be translated into Polish somehow. Subtitles were certainly one method, but as we're all used to the single-narrator style, many people didn't mind listening to a somewhat decent synthetic voice instead.
(Disclaimer: no special insights into what Microsoft was doing at the time; I merely lived in the same era.)
I'd call it an artifact of only having 16 colours to work with when SETUP boots. Obviously, most machines at the time had more to work with than that, but VGA - which is to say, 16 colors at 640x480 - was the baseline. And remember that Windows 95 could be installed from _floppies_; looking fancy is good, but you don't want to gratuitously use disk space. No multiple versions of the same image for you!
Let's take this fancy "Mac with some other random shit on a desk" image from Unsplash:
(I know, the images are small on a modern display! Each square is full-size, because we're VGA.)
Top left is the original, obviously. Top right is what happens if you just reduce it to 16 colours; it looks like nothing in particular, and it weighs in at 153K (exported in a modern graphics editor), or more than a tenth of a 3.5" floppy disk. Bottom left is what happens if you do it with dithering; you can make it look like you have more colours than you actually do, but it also weighs 153K.
And bottom right is SETUP.BMP. It only uses _two_ colours from the palette ("0, 0, 255" blue and black). That's 1-bit colour which means my SETUP.BMP when exported to an actual BMP only takes up 38.5 kilobytes.
So the answer to your question, I suppose, is "use as few colours as possible and don't waste disk space" or "dithering" or "the 90s", but often the technical limitations of a period plus time become an aesthetic.
If you refer to the color and not the composition, it's called halftone. Unlike analog halftones, you calculate where to place the dots in a way that minimizes visual error, called dithering.
Functionally it's good - adapts to both light and dark background, adapts to both 256 and truecolor terminals. I think I miss some of the color even if bright color in light background themes is often detrimental. Only real dislike is the too gray tinted background. Should be more towards white for light background, to be more neutral.
you might want to try linking @variable to Identifier, i think the original author decided to keep @variable unhighlighted to keep the color diff between having `termguicolors` on/off to a minimum (Identifier assumes `termguicolors` is enabled, but for default colorscheme it's likely not always the case).
We shouldn't have to have ads everywhere. Ad-free societies can exist. Granted, the only one I've seen do it successfully was North Korea, and if that's what's required to get rid of ads, maybe it's not worth it... But man, videos of people just walking around in the city are crazy. Not an ad up anywhere, not a billboard on the skyline, not a logo on a building. Just that aspect of a complete lack of ads seems very peaceful.
> Ad-free societies can exist. Granted, the only one I've seen do it successfully was North Korea,
I don't think you could call North Korea ad free when it's wall to wall propaganda. Just because there's only one "product" allowed to advertise, that doesn't mean people aren't being constantly manipulated by advertising.
It's crazy the extent to which targeted ads have been normalized as "a part of life"... to the point where we have people defending targeting children, with "Well they get targeted with ads elsewhere, too." We are in one of the more terrible universes in the multiverse.
The crazier twist is that a good majority of the people on this site depend on targeted ads for their livelihoods, with a reasonable portion directly contributing to the number of ads.
It is crazy that mobile devices have some fucked up ad ID. An operating system you can trust would shield you from receiving any ad in everyway possible and treat it as the malware that it is.
iOS allows blocking ad ID [1] and advertisers hate it [2].
> If you choose Ask App Not to Track, the app developer can’t access the system advertising identifier (IDFA), which is often used to track. The app is also not permitted to track your activity using other information that identifies you or your device, like your email address.
No one is teaching kids how to handle ads. There's no class at every level of schooling devoted to how advertisers are manipulating you. The schools themselves are often directly responsible for shoving ads at children far too young to have any defenses against it. Meanwhile ad companies pay for experiments on children to learn how to most effectively influence them. Fun fact, children as young as three can recognize brands https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/even-3-year-old-k...
Reality: ads are a fundamental of US commerce that kids will see.
(Assuming >= 8 yo or so) With this reality, I think reducing ads, but also getting them to understand ads, is a better approach than a silly dream of never letting them see an ad.
It's pretty easy to approach this positively, to help them learn. You make a game of pointing out the manipulation, have them identify it, and they learn to see them for what they are. You can do the same for news, where they (very) quickly learn to identify half truths, lying by omission, etc. Kids are pretty great at this sort of thing.
I personally think kids should know that people are often trying to trick them. But, that's something they'll eventually figure out it, with your help or not.
Right, it should have been "teaching everyone how to handle ads" would be more appropriate. Adults including those on this site get taken by ads more than they would probably like to admit (if they are even aware there's something to admit).
This is just another step of "think of the children"
honestly, as a parent, you should be having these conversations with your kids. it is a very sad reality that your kids have a greater than zero chance of being involved in a school shooting.
seriously, this place sometimes thinking everything in the world is the happy path. you have to be prepared for and have an ability to handle exceptions. we can't catch/throw our way through life. teaching kids to learn when someone is trying to manipulate them is not a bad thing. this place seems to think things are someone else's problems, but at some point, you have to realize there is no EU style legislation that will protect you from everything.
How about we have a Purge Day against marketers, advertisers, sales teams, greedy shareholders, and anyone who actively enshittifies every single aspect of life? How about we normalize that instead? Because as brutal as it is, maybe sociopaths wouldn't sociopath if there were real risks to their life and limb incited by their being pieces of shit. :)
