Accurate except for the “instead” part. Road maintenance comes from local taxes, whereas military aid comes from federal taxes.

They've built a library of small building blocks for character movements. These blocks can be combined in various ways to create a wide range of animations. … Instead of designing separate animations for each of these situations, they use these building blocks to put together the character's movements naturally.

This sounds like shape keys, which is a technique already widely used in games and animation today. When you get shot in Battlefield, your character model plays a “getting shot” animation. When your character runs, it plays a “running” animation. When your character gets shot while running, these two animations are combined - it’s not a separate “shot while running” animation.

Would love to know if there’s actually some novel aspect to this “invention” but it seems more likely that this is yet another bullshit patent approved by a clueless clerk who did zero searches for prior art.

Edit: Read the patent. Not only does it describe nothing novel, it doesn’t even document what they did. All it says is basically “we created animation blocks and combine them”. The details are just a bunch of bullshit jargon spew:

attributes can include conditions, properties, events, flags, graphs, values, references, and variants

I have 7 trees on my property. If you pay me $700 I’ll promise not to cut them down for five years, and you can subtract 35 tons of CO2 from your environmental balance sheet.

That’s how carbon offsets work. They’re bullshit.

As someone who has designed and used telemetry systems, I’ll never quite understand the strong aversion some people have to them. Telemetry is what lets me tell my boss “yes people really do use our software this way and we can’t break it” or “90% of crashes happen right after the player uses a grenade”. And despite what some conspiracy theorists would have you believe, telemetry data for software from reputable companies does not get sold or used for marketing purposes. Our lawyers make sure of it, and also make us go through privacy reviews to make sure that data isn’t leaking PII.

union leaders and truck drivers said would save hundreds of thousands of jobs

There might be good reasons to have human drivers in autonomous trucks, at least for a while. But “saving jobs” is not one of them.

Nuclear Gandhi has entered the chat…

a game I made in 1995

a game someone else made in 1995 which was later hostilely acquired by EA only to see it immediately fire all staff and shutter the studio

FTFY

”Without these people, it would be painfully obvious how unfunny I really am.” - John Oliver, probably

Veritasium has really gone down hill. I honestly think it started when he did the video on “clickbait” and actually realized how much more lucrative it was to make shittier clickbaity content than make straightforward science content.

It went from “here’s why magnetism is just electric field + relativity” to “I buried myself in cement - you won’t believe what happens!”

He’s technically correct - if you bleed fast enough for long enough, you won’t get infected by anything that needs a live host to grow.

This is the third post I’ve seen on Lemmy recently where people seem to overwhelmingly think the word “scam” just means “something I don’t like”. To be a scam, something needs to be dishonest in its representation, usually either by falsifying the true cost to the buyer, or lying about what is being provided in return.

I’m really glad I didn’t purchase that stupid screwdriver now.