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Cake day: September 24th, 2024

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  • Even though there is some network effect just in terms of there being much less content on the threadiverse than Reddit, I do feel like this is something we’re somewhat shielded from. For the most part, we’re not here to follow specific people: my friends aren’t on Lemmy/Mbin, or maybe they are, I don’t actually know or care. I have a Mastodon, but a lot of the people I’d theoretically be interested to follow are still on Twitter, or BlueSky, or Threads or something. It’s not enough of a pull factor to make me join any of those, but it’s probably why I barely use Mastodon.


  • Rotschy, which routinely hired teenage workers amid recent labor shortages, violated the law when supervisors assigned tasks known to be dangerous and prohibited for minors to perform.

    L&I later issued significant fines against Rotschy for the incident, but has for years approved special “variances” for the company to hire minors despite its history of serious safety violations.

    For their part, Derrik and his parents say they do not hold Rotschy responsible. It was a fluke, an unlucky break — not the company being neglectful, they said.

    “I don’t think Rotschy failed my son in any way,” Derrik’s dad said. “All these events culminated into this accident.”

    I hope they were paid very, very handsomely to say that.


  • This is a bit of an oversimplification. Generally, they would use the laughter from the actual audience in attendance. The stands were mic’d but the nature of filming anything is that it will often take multiple takes. Ideally, you get a perfect performance and response on the first take, but that’s not reality. Maybe you got a great laugh, but Jerry clinked a glass loudly over Jason’s line. So they cut and reset, Jerry does the joke again and there’s no mistakes, but the audience response is more muted because they just heard that joke.

    The solution here is pretty obvious: grab the laugh from the first take and dub that over the performance from the second take. Technically, you’re misleading the audience at home because that laughter came from a different take, but it would also be misleading to show the home audience the tenth take and you hear the audience murmur awkwardly as if they hated it, when that’s just the response you’ll get from an audience ten takes deep into hearing the same joke.

    There’s even the reverse case, where maybe some audience audio just isn’t usable. Nobody notices it on the day, but there was one take you got perfectly the first time, but in editing you hear some guy sneezing loudly while the rest of the crowd is giggling. You could just lose that scene or mute the audience for it, or crossfade into some similar audio you got from the previous scene, or whatever. Other times, your actors might continue a scene but the audience laughs over the next couple of lines, so you fade the crowd. In this way, the audience response is only as fake as the show itself is. Maybe Julia gave a funnier line read in take 3 but Jason hit a run on take 5, so you edit those together, making the best of the stuff you got on the day. Sometimes it was necessary to do the same for the laughs.

    It was always preferable to get the real audience response to the actual current take, because if Michael does some physical bit to play off the crowd, you should hear them respond at the appropriate time, even in the middle of a longer laugh. But sometimes the pure documentary fact of what happened in the take that made it to air just isn’t the best version of the show. Ultimately, it’s not a scheme to trick people into thinking the audience responded differently. If anything, a joke that the audience didn’t respond to would get changed on-set rather than fixed in editing. You’d huddle with the writers and go “They don’t like this, what else have you got?” Then you’d feed your actors the new lines and see if they got a better reaction.

    tl;dr: Crowd sound in any sitcom that is filmed before a live studio audience is mostly genuine.

    For a post-script, even pre-taped outdoor scenes and stuff would be shown to the audience on large monitors so that a) they could follow the story and b) so their reactions could be recorded in the same session, with the same crowd, including the same guy with the staccato laugh so everything sounds consistent across the entire episode.

    Sorry this is so long.


  • I do wonder whether the algorithm understands sarcasm. A while back, I watched a video about some movie bombing, something objectively bad like Morbius, and they joked that the movie wasn’t actually failing for all of the obvious reasons, but because it was “too woke”. They didn’t really believe that, they were just making fun of people who say that about movies. Still, for the next couple of weeks I had to keep marking channels as “Don’t recommend” because they were all unironic right-wing rage-bait about the woke agenda. I don’t know for certain that that’s why I suddenly got all those recommendations, but that was my best guess.



  • This makes me wonder if there are any exceptions, things that brains didn’t name. Onomatopoeia seem like a good starting place (and maybe ending place). Did we name cats’ meows meows or just hear them and go “OK, that’s what that is then”? Cat brains didn’t name them that either, they weren’t thinking what they should call the sound they make, they just made it.

    As far as things which name themselves, I can’t think of anything else but sounds.



  • Look, I absolutely hate to do the reading comprehension thing but you’ve misread both the article and my comment on it. The reporter who performed the rescue was Fox’s Bob Van Dillen. The person quoted, however, is Subramaniam Vincent, director of journalism and media ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. The writer of this AP article quoted Vincent who recounted the situation. The writer also added some additional context to Vincent’s remarks which serve to explain the concept of rescuing a person who is crying out for help.

    So … sorry … no. I’m not asking that.



  • This article is weird. For one thing, the last sentence quoted is just confusing:

    Van Dillen is then seen wading through the water with the woman on her back, carrying her to safety.

    Who’s the “her” in that sentence? Anyway, the really confusing part is that they then consulted with an expert on journalistic ethics:

    It’s clear that while he had a professional obligation to report the news, “there’s also someone whose potential life is at risk,” Vincent said. “So I think the call he made is a human call.”

    Considering the rising waters and the woman’s cries for help, along with not knowing when help would arrive, “it’s a straightforward case of jumping in — a fellow citizen actually helping another,” Vincent said.

    Why is the writer explaining this basic concept like I’m an alien? Sometimes, people stop doing their job for a few moments to save somebody’s life even though that’s not what their job entails. That’s interesting. Are the humans then punished for their dereliction of duty?