@Mediagazer@mstdn.social2025-12-19 07:06:00
YouTube's head of products for podcasts Steve McLendon says viewers streamed 700M hours of podcasts on TV in October, up from 400M hours in October 2024 (Ashley Carman/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20
@rperezrosario@mastodon.social2025-11-19 03:15:56
Senior Microsoft Product Manager Wendy Breiding discusses in this recent post how you can now customize your IDE to include agentic AI to your project that is focused on tasks related to a specific language or UI stack, in this case: C# and WinForms. The results have been positive when comparing these agents to previous more general approaches.
"Introducing Custom Agents for .NET Developers: C# Expert & WinForms Expert"
@YaleDivinitySchool@mstdn.social2025-12-18 20:37:28
“A lot of times when we hear information about U.S. religious life, so much of it is based on polls, which do a particular kind of work,” YDS professor and ethnographer Todne Thomas says, noting that polls lack nuance and often focus on political dimensions of faith. “Religious life is important, whether we’re in an election year or not.”
Hear more from Prof. Thomas in the new episode of the YDS podcast series, which you can listen to here:
@cheryanne@aus.social2025-12-18 02:42:10
Vital Arts Podcast
Vital Arts can be embedded in your existing practice to formally recognise these skills while young people produce a show or stage a concert, giving participants real, portable evidence of their achievements...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/vital-<…
@Mediagazer@mstdn.social2025-11-19 02:35:53
Roblox plans to require all users to undergo an age estimation process to access chat features, starting January 2026, in an effort to enhance child safety (Jay Peters/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/822718/roblox-age-estimation-verification-chat…
@crell@phpc.social2025-11-11 03:52:05
"Do your own research" is counter productive when you don't know how to research...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/scientists-explain-why-doing-your-own-research-leads-to-buying-conspiracies/
@cdarwin@c.im2025-12-11 15:08:05
Australians are abandoning travel to the US,
and boycotting World Cup matches there next year,
as the Trump administration flags new rules
that will soon require visitors to ❌hand over their social media history
when applying to enter the country.
In a notice published on Tuesday,
the US Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP)
said tourists to the US
from 42 countries including Australia would have to
🔥reveal all of their social media …
@castarco@hachyderm.io2025-11-16 12:05:17
I have the distinct impression that we could use most American "sci-fi" TV series (which seem to have a kink for post-apocalyptical scenographies) as a diagnostic tool for the autism spectrum.
For a moment, let's leave aside the tons of right-wing propaganda "hidden" in plain sight, and their excessive reliance on boring & worn out tropes (religious & cultish bullshit, irrational lack of communication & excess of anti-social behaviour, all vs all, ultra-low-iq characters*, psychotic & irrationally treacherous characters*, ultra-inconsistent character development used to justify "unexpected" plot twists, rampant anti-intellectualism...).
What could be used as a diagnosis tool is the incredible amount of strong inconsistencies that we can find in them**. It throws me out of the story every single time; and I suspect that it takes a certain kind of "uncommon personality" to feel that way about it, because otherwise these series wouldn't be so popular without real widespread criticism beyond cliches like "too slow", "it loses steam towards the end of the season", etc.
Many of those plots start in a gold mine of potentially powerful ideas... yet they consistently provide us with dirt & clay instead, while side-lining the "good stuff" as if it was too complicated for the populace.
Do you feel strongly about it? Do you feel like you can't verbalize it without being criticised as "too negative", or "too picky", or an "unbearable snob"? Do you wonder why it seems like nobody around shares your discomfort with these stories?
* : I feel this is a bit like the chicken & egg problem. Has the media conditioned part of American society to behave like dumb psychopaths as if it was something "natural", or is the media reflecting what was already there? Also, could we use other societies as models for these stories... just for a change? Please?
** : Just a tiny example: a "brilliant" engineer who builds a bridge out of fence parts and who doesn't bother to perform the most basic tests before trying it in a real setting and suffer the consequences: the bridge failing and her falling into the void. Bonus points for anyone who knows what I'm talking about.
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-12-12 13:41:30
Been starting a habit of writing down story/game ideas as I have them even though most of them will never seriously get started, let alone finished. It's been fun since writing things down gives me a chance to think them through a bit more than just pondering them in my head. Anyways, here's a #GameDesign idea:
"Grand" - is a "reverse metroidvania" in which as a grandparent, you slowly lose movement options as the story progresses, requiring more and more convoluted routes through the map to reach the same areas. You do still explore "new" areas in memory mode (and unlock movement options like a bike in your memories) before traversing the areas again in the diegetic present. The story follows your quest to protect a grandchild from the machinations of a Kafkaesque state, first trying to track them down within the system and then trying to get them released. Each "boss" is "fought" through an abstracted conversation system where memories, keepsakes, and various kinds of emotional/logical appeals wear down your opponent's nihilism and/or fear until they're willing to help you. Normal "enemies" are just people on the street who might bump into you and drain some of your stamina as you pass by if you don't issue a properly-timed "excuse me" or the like.
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-10-09 08:53:20
A look at China's AI toy boom, which builds on decades of consumer electronics designed for children, as AI toy companies expand into the US and other markets (Caiwei Chen/MIT Technology Review)
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/07/1125191/ai-toys-in-china/…
