In Tokyo when I search for convenience stores, a lot of the time Google Maps will also show ATMs, assuming that's the reason I want to go to a convenience store. Inversely, if I search for a bank branch, it'll show convenience stores. The fuzzy search results can be very frustrating sometimes.
I have been creating animations using a similar process but with a regular camera and manually splicing the frames together. [1,2,3] The effect is quite interesting in how it forces focus on the subject reducing the background into an abstract pattern. Each 'line' is around 15px wide.
I also shot a timelapse of the Tokyo skyline at sunset and applied a similar process [4], then motion tracked it so that time is traveling across the frame from left to right[5]. Each line here is 4 pixels wide and the original animation is in 8k.
> Daily puzzles are engaging, efficient, scalable, and well-aligned with key product and business goals.
bring it back within the realm of human-generated PR text? Or it's too perfect? I find the perfect number of syllables to be off putting sometimes, it can feel like the uncanny valley of text.
Not only does the sun not rotate around us, the rest of the galaxy doesn't even care to think that we exist. An interesting evolution in thought nonetheless.
I wouldn't say it's hatred, they're just extremely risk adverse - every situation needs to be entered with caution. It seems to be common across a wide range of Japanese companies.
Recently, there is a certain amount of Disneyesque revenue maximization that seems to be going on though, and keeping control of legacy titles is a part of that for sure.
Yes, they're risk adverse but in the last couple of years, Nintendo has also become much more legally expansive than they were. Of course, Nintendo has long been legally aggressive, especially in protecting their trademarks ("Super Mario" et al) but the expansiveness is both new and deeply problematic. It was fine when Nintendo was legally aggressive suing unlicensed Super Mario T-shirt makers but in the past couple of years they're going just as aggressively after retro fan and preservation communities and other non-profit, minor players who they previously mostly ignored.
This change was a conscious decision and makes little sense because these new targets have always tangentially infringed some IP rights but never in ways that had measurable financial impact on Nintendo's current core products. And, arguably, retro preservation and fan communities are net positive for Nintendo's brand. Even notoriously litigious companies like Disney choose to selectively turn a blind eye to cosplayers in Marvel super hero capes. Threatening or suing your hardest core, most loyal brand fans for doing things that didn't make them money or cost you money (at least rounded to the nearest $100) is not only a waste of resources, it's actively bad for your brand.
This has turned me from generally positive toward Nintendo to literally hating the brand. Sure, doing this is technically within their rights but it's just being shitty and there's no compelling reason they had to change from being selectively reasonable to "full-on asshole" toward their fans.
Nintendo isn't changing, the world around it is.
15 years ago there were no youtubers who built a business around pasting a talking head over a video game stream. It seems nobody even asks Nintendo if they are ok with that and now people are angry because the answer turned out to be 'no'. That's not how copyright works.
The emulator authors who made millions by accepting donations with the explicit promise of facilitating piracy of the latest Nintendo games still for sale also should have known better.
There's a lot of hate for Nintendo right now, but imo it's all on entitled gamers who want stuff that Nintendo created for free. There's no company that can safisfy those demands and stay in business.
It feels to me like it's getting democratized in the same sense as to what happened to professional photography in the early 2000s with the introduction of digital cameras and high quality color inkjet printers. The barrier to entry becomes so much lower.
Instead of dealing with the costs associated with using, developing and printing from film, as well as the skills associated with knowing what a photo would look like before it was developed, digital cameras allowed new photographers to enter the industry relatively cheaply and shoot off a few thousand photos at a wedding at a relatively negligible cost. Those photographers rapidly developed their skills, and left studios with massive million dollar Kodak digital chemical printers in the dust. I know because I was working at one.
If you remember, this was in the time where the studio owned your negatives ostensibly forever, and you had to pay for reprints or enlargements. What were amateur photographers could enter this high-margin market, produce images of an acceptable quality, charge far less and provide far more.
I'm not able to say whether this will happen to software development, but the democratization of professional photography absolutely shook the somewhat complacent industry to its core.
In that case it had nothing to do with contempt for creative people, it was the opposite, anyone who wanted to be creative now could be.
Digital cameras didn't change the need to go out and actually shoot the photos, however. They didn't change the fundamentals of lighting and color and what a good photo looks like. It was a more convenient and cheaper process compared to film, so more people could participate in photography, but it maintained a lot of the creative process.
