Gyokuyoutama

"Zat's German engineering."

Man, looking through that Yahoo! history is sobering. You can clearly see the point where the Web Directory, you know, the main way to search for useful information in a search engine is just pushed to its own little box at the bottom to make way for more advertisements and social media features. That year was 2004. It's completely gone by '09. Then they go completely hog wild and butcher the format for mobile phone users by 2017.
 
I swear, smartphones, social media and the web going mainstream in general were mistakes. I hate the Internet now.

Fuck me, that first gen of mobile design is something I almost completely forgot about. It has a bit of the Vista/7 glass look with slight bezels on stuff like buttons which was all the rage at the time. When I saved up and got the first gen itouch it really blew my mind with all the functionality it had. I remember testing all sorts of different sites to see which ones still worked with its mobile Safari version and I watched a ton of anime on it (very preferable to watching anime on the shared computer out in the living room)
 
This is probably an example of "It was in vogue when I first started getting into computers and phones so I like it the most" but man I still vastly prefer the glass aesthetic over most others. Makes me annoyed that pretty much everyone gave up on that for flat aesthetics which aren't pretty at all in comparison. Luckily I'm not the only one so there are dedicated people out there customizing anything they can to reinstate it. I've been trying to find a nice glassy look and feel for KDE Plasma but maybe I'm bad at searching but a lot of the ones I've seen seem to be "completely copy windows 7" which I feel like is just kind of unnecessarily locking into microsoft design language when it's just the aesthetic I want, but whatever. I might be getting too picky and just need to learn how to tweak stuff on my own

Here's a cool website:
 
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/
 
Track how various sites and programs changed over the years.  Did they get better? Did they get worse? Did they peak in some specific year? You be the judge.

I stumbled across this when I was trying to explain the ways that people interacted with the web over the years, and realized that the front page of Yahoo! would be a good indicator both of web design standards and also what people expected from a "start page."  But the internet archive currently goes back to only 1999 for Yahoo, so I needed to find what it looked like from 1994-1998.  This page does that and more.
 
EDIT: Personally while I have a soft spot for the extreme simplicity of the mid 90's and think that some pages work best in that format, my favorite aesthetics on webpages come from about 1999-2004, and I think you see a clear drop in the usability of web pages after the early 2010's.  But the data is there, so you be the judge.

Here's a cool website:
 
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/
 
Track how various sites and programs changed over the years.  Did they get better? Did they get worse? Did they peak in some specific year? You be the judge.

I stumbled across this when I was trying to explain the ways that people interacted with the web over the years, and realized that the front page of Yahoo! would be a good indicator both of web design standards and also what people expected from a "start page."  But the internet archive currently goes back to only 1999 for Yahoo, so I needed to find what it looked like from 1994-1998.  This page does that and more.
 
EDIT: Personally while I have a soft spot for the extreme simplicity of the mid 90's and think that some pages work best in that format, my favorite aesthetics on webpages come from about 1999-2004, and I think you see a clear drop in the usability of web pages after the early 2010's.  But the data is there, so you be the judge.

I guess I've developed an interest in historical game packs like the SNK collection, since I picked up the Atari 50 collection.  This is an interesting contrast to the SNK collection because to be frank it's something that if you don't have a historical interest in Atari or the early days of video games, it's really not worth it.  Most of the SNK games still hold up so you get a solid collection of games, but many of the games in the Atari set are not things that most people would be interested in playing.  There are a few reasons for this:
 
Since we are literally at the dawn of video games (reports at the time called them part of the "pinball industry") some of the games are extremely primitive.  For example, "Touch Me" is basically just Simon (i.e. push a series of buttons in response to what blinked.)  Games like Breakout are certainly playable, but since they invented a genre later games innovated so much on the basic formula that going back to the original will feel lacking if you've seen anything from later on. Many of the games are two player only, like Pong, Combat and Air Sea Battle are meant to be played 2 player.  There is no AI at all, so no real game unless you have someone else playing.  These games actually do hold up if you are willing to look past their age... but since we are talking about local multiplayer with two controllers only, you will need to find someone to agree to play a mega-old game when you could easily be doing something else.  Not an easy sell. Many of the games are arcade games.  In a way this is nice, since they punched higher than the console games of the time.  But the downside is that sometimes they used special peripherals that you won't have on PC or modern consoles.  In particular, Missile Command, Centipede and Crystal Castles all used a trackball.  I guess there are trackballs you can use with PC, but who has one?  Missile Command and Centipede work pretty well with a mouse and Crystal Castles is at least playable with a joystick, but you are missing a key part of the experience.  Similarly there are some arcade racing games that are meant to be played with a steering wheel, some games meant to be played with a paddle (i.e. a rotational dial like what you use in Pong), etc. Some of the games are just not good.  Sometimes this is due to technical limitations, like what you have on Atari 2600.  Sometimes it's just because the library sucks, like what happened with the Jaguar (but at least you get a historical perspective of why the Jaguar failed.) Some of the actually fun and innovative games are so far back that you really have to stretch your modern imagination to get into them.  Adventure is an example of this; it's a pretty neat little top down action adventure game, but it's also a game where you are a dot carrying an arrow to fight ducks. The collection also suffers from the fact that this is Atari only.  In particular no Activision (made by disgruntled Atari ace employees) so no Pitfall, River Raid, Kaboom!, Keystone Kapers, etc. This is a shame, since those are some of the best games for the 2600.  No tie ins with other companies like Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong, Pole Position.  This in particular hurts the Jaguar, since you won't be getting games like Cannon Fodder, Aliens vs. Predator, Theme Park or Rayman, leaving Tempest 2000 as the only great game on the system.
 
With all that being said, there are many games you can have fun with here.  I think that Asteroids, Centipede, Tempest and Missile Command all hold up and help to see how people got obsessed with the arcades in the early 80's.  Cloak and Dagger, Warlords and especially Food Fight are some great arcade games from later.  (Crystal Castles would be perfect if I had a trackball.)  The consoles include a mix of mediocre (but high selling) stuff, experimental games like Club Drive, Ninja Golf, Basketbrawl, Haunted House and Solaris, and even some home brews and unreleased games.  I imagine that you will find at least a few games that you will legitimately enjoy (I recommend starting with Food Fight and Tempest 2000 since those are both pretty straightforward to understand and well done.)
 
There are a lot of repetitions through ports and the like.  For example, with Asteroids you have the original arcade game, the sequel Asteroids deluxe (really more of a remix of the game), ports for the 2600 and 7800 systems and a combined port of Asteroids and Missile Command for Lynx.  Similarly, there are 5 version of Missile Command.  Normally I would say that this is just padding, but there are 109 games in total if you include ports, and if you only include "original" games you still have 77 games.  But what makes this interesting is the historical perspective.  You can see what Asteroids was like in the arcades, then play the 2600 port to see what was available at home.  In some ways the games are very similar, but in other ways the home experience was obviously inferior.  Very unlike today when you can get everything you want on a PC or modern console.
 
In terms of emulation, it has what you would want.  You can mess with filter and border options depending on whether you want a clear view or a simulation of what it would like at the arcade.  Arcade games have DIP switch options to let you change starting lives, freeplay options, etc.  The games for the Atari 2600, 5200, 7800 systems let you control the difficulty switches on the console for similar results and you can mess with the controls.  My only real complaint there is that you can't remap controls for multiple players to a single keyboard; you need a controller for everyone which can get annoying on the 4 player games since I generally don't have 4 controllers connected.  Having two people on controller and two people on opposite sides of the keyboard would work fine.  But let's be honest, I'm never going to get 4 people to agree to play these games so this is a rather minor complaint.

Where the collection shines is in the historical aspect.  You get a good feel for that from the games themselves, but the collection has a timeline mode that is loaded with features.  Digital Eclipse did something similar for the SNK collection, but there it was really just a brief description of various games with some idea of the context, some screen shots, and maybe some promotional art or manual pages.  The Atari collection has that too, but also includes a wealth of video footage including historical interviews, retrospective interviews done for the collection, historical news footage, etc.  They go into a lot more detail on important games that were not included in the collection to give a real feel for how Atari was doing on a year by year basis.  This is particularly the case with Atari's ill-fated Pinball games (the only pinball game in the collection is a virtual table for the Jaguar.)  I like that they aren't shy of saying where there were flops and where there were successes.
 
Like I said with the SNK collection, you can emulate this stuff rather easily, but the historical presentation of the collection really adds to the experience.  Digital Eclipse has found a niche and is doing their best, when they could have easily just slapped a bunch of roms together in a cash grab.  I'll probably pick up their Jeff Minter game collection if it goes on a good sale.  They also have a "Making of Kareteka" collection, but that might be too niche for even me since it focuses entirely on one game (and its many, many, ports.)

I guess I've developed an interest in historical game packs like the SNK collection, since I picked up the Atari 50 collection.  This is an interesting contrast to the SNK collection because to be frank it's something that if you don't have a historical interest in Atari or the early days of video games, it's really not worth it.  Most of the SNK games still hold up so you get a solid collection of games, but many of the games in the Atari set are not things that most people would be interested in playing.  There are a few reasons for this:
 
Since we are literally at the dawn of video games (reports at the time called them part of the "pinball industry") some of the games are extremely primitive.  For example, "Touch Me" is basically just Simon (i.e. push a series of buttons in response to what blinked.)  Games like Breakout are certainly playable, but since they invented a genre later games innovated so much on the basic formula that going back to the original will feel lacking if you've seen anything from later on. Many of the games are two player only, like Pong, Combat and Air Sea Battle are meant to be played 2 player.  There is no AI at all, so no real game unless you have someone else playing.  These games actually do hold up if you are willing to look past their age... but since we are talking about local multiplayer with two controllers only, you will need to find someone to agree to play a mega-old game when you could easily be doing something else.  Not an easy sell. Many of the games are arcade games.  In a way this is nice, since they punched higher than the console games of the time.  But the downside is that sometimes they used special peripherals that you won't have on PC or modern consoles.  In particular, Missile Command, Centipede and Crystal Castles all used a trackball.  I guess there are trackballs you can use with PC, but who has one?  Missile Command and Centipede work pretty well with a mouse and Crystal Castles is at least playable with a joystick, but you are missing a key part of the experience.  Similarly there are some arcade racing games that are meant to be played with a steering wheel, some games meant to be played with a paddle (i.e. a rotational dial like what you use in Pong), etc. Some of the games are just not good.  Sometimes this is due to technical limitations, like what you have on Atari 2600.  Sometimes it's just because the library sucks, like what happened with the Jaguar (but at least you get a historical perspective of why the Jaguar failed.) Some of the actually fun and innovative games are so far back that you really have to stretch your modern imagination to get into them.  Adventure is an example of this; it's a pretty neat little top down action adventure game, but it's also a game where you are a dot carrying an arrow to fight ducks. The collection also suffers from the fact that this is Atari only.  In particular no Activision (made by disgruntled Atari ace employees) so no Pitfall, River Raid, Kaboom!, Keystone Kapers, etc. This is a shame, since those are some of the best games for the 2600.  No tie ins with other companies like Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong, Pole Position.  This in particular hurts the Jaguar, since you won't be getting games like Cannon Fodder, Aliens vs. Predator, Theme Park or Rayman, leaving Tempest 2000 as the only great game on the system.
 
With all that being said, there are many games you can have fun with here.  I think that Asteroids, Centipede, Tempest and Missile Command all hold up and help to see how people got obsessed with the arcades in the early 80's.  Cloak and Dagger, Warlords and especially Food Fight are some great arcade games from later.  (Crystal Castles would be perfect if I had a trackball.)  The consoles include a mix of mediocre (but high selling) stuff, experimental games like Club Drive, Ninja Golf, Basketbrawl, Haunted House and Solaris, and even some home brews and unreleased games.  I imagine that you will find at least a few games that you will legitimately enjoy (I recommend starting with Food Fight and Tempest 2000 since those are both pretty straightforward to understand and well done.)
 
There are a lot of repetitions through ports and the like.  For example, with Asteroids you have the original arcade game, the sequel Asteroids deluxe (really more of a remix of the game), ports for the 2600 and 7800 systems and a combined port of Asteroids and Missile Command for Lynx.  Similarly, there are 5 version of Missile Command.  Normally I would say that this is just padding, but there are 109 games in total if you include ports, and if you only include "original" games you still have 77 games.  But what makes this interesting is the historical perspective.  You can see what Asteroids was like in the arcades, then play the 2600 port to see what was available at home.  In some ways the games are very similar, but in other ways the home experience was obviously inferior.  Very unlike today when you can get everything you want on a PC or modern console.
 
In terms of emulation, it has what you would want.  You can mess with filter and border options depending on whether you want a clear view or a simulation of what it would like at the arcade.  Arcade games have DIP switch options to let you change starting lives, freeplay options, etc.  The games for the Atari 2600, 5200, 7800 systems let you control the difficulty switches on the console for similar results and you can mess with the controls.  My only real complaint there is that you can't remap controls for multiple players to a single keyboard; you need a controller for everyone which can get annoying on the 4 player games since I generally don't have 4 controllers connected.  Having two people on controller and two people on opposite sides of the keyboard would work fine.  But let's be honest, I'm never going to get 4 people to agree to play these games so this is a rather minor complaint.

Where the collection shines is in the historical aspect.  You get a good feel for that from the games themselves, but the collection has a timeline mode that is loaded with features.  Digital Eclipse did something similar for the SNK collection, but there it was really just a brief description of various games with some idea of the context, some screen shots, and maybe some promotional art or manual pages.  The Atari collection has that too, but also includes a wealth of video footage including historical interviews, retrospective interviews done for the collection, historical news footage, etc.  They go into a lot more detail on important games that were not included in the collection to give a real feel for how Atari was doing on a year by year basis.  This is particularly the case with Atari's ill-fated Pinball games (the only pinball game in the collection is a virtual table for the Jaguar.)  I like that they aren't shy of saying where there were flops and where there were successes.
 
Like I said with the SNK collection, you can emulate this stuff rather easily, but the historical presentation of the collection really adds to the experience.  Digital Eclipse has found a niche and is doing their best, when they could have easily just slapped a bunch of roms together in a cash grab.  I'll probably pick up their Jeff Minter game collection if it goes on a good sale.  They also have a "Making of Kareteka" collection, but that might be too niche for even me since it focuses entirely on one game (and its many, many, ports.)

I guess I've developed an interest in historical game packs like the SNK collection, since I picked up the Atari 50 collection.  This is an interesting contrast to the SNK collection because to be frank it's something that if you don't have a historical interest in Atari or the early days of video games, it's really not worth it.  Most of the SNK games still hold up so you get a solid collection of games, but many of the games in the Atari set are not things that most people would be interested in playing.  There are a few reasons for this:
 
Since we are literally at the dawn of video games (reports at the time called them part of the "pinball industry") some of the games are extremely primitive.  For example, "Touch Me" is basically just Simon (i.e. push a series of buttons in response to what blinked.)  Games like Breakout are certainly playable, but since they invented a genre later games innovated so much on the basic formula that going back to the original will feel lacking if you've seen anything from later on. Many of the games are two player only, like Pong, Combat and Air Sea Battle are meant to be played 2 player.  There is no AI at all, so no real game unless you have someone else playing.  These games actually do hold up if you are willing to look past their age... but since we are talking about local multiplayer with two controllers only, you will need to find someone to agree to play a mega-old game when you could easily be doing something else.  Not an easy sell. Many of the games are arcade games.  In a way this is nice, since they punched higher than the console games of the time.  But the downside is that sometimes they used special peripherals that you won't have on PC or modern consoles.  In particular, Missile Command, Centipede and Crystal Castles all used a trackball.  I guess there are trackballs you can use with PC, but who has one?  Missile Command and Centipede work pretty well with a mouse and Crystal Castles is at least playable with a joystick, but you are missing a key part of the experience.  Similarly there are some arcade racing games that are meant to be played with a steering wheel, some games meant to be played with a paddle (i.e. a rotational dial like what you use in Pong), etc. Some of the games are just not good.  Sometimes this is due to technical limitations, like what you have on Atari 2600.  Sometimes it's just because the library sucks, like what happened with the Jaguar (but at least you get a historical perspective of why the Jaguar failed.) Some of the actually fun and innovative games are so far back that you really have to stretch your modern imagination to get into them.  Adventure is an example of this; it's a pretty neat little top down action adventure game, but it's also a game where you are a dot carrying an arrow to fight ducks. The collection also suffers from the fact that this is Atari only.  In particular no Activision (made by disgruntled Atari ace employees) so no Pitfall, River Raid, Kaboom!, Keystone Kapers, etc. This is a shame, since those are some of the best games for the 2600.  No tie ins with other companies like Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong, Pole Position.  This in particular hurts the Jaguar, since you won't be getting games like Cannon Fodder, Aliens vs. Predator, Theme Park or Rayman, leaving Tempest 2000 as the only great game on the system.
 
With all that being said, there are many games you can have fun with here.  I think that Asteroids, Centipede, Tempest and Missile Command all hold up and help to see how people got obsessed with the arcades in the early 80's.  Cloak and Dagger, Warlords and especially Food Fight are some great arcade games from later.  (Crystal Castles would be perfect if I had a trackball.)  The consoles include a mix of mediocre (but high selling) stuff, experimental games like Club Drive, Ninja Golf, Basketbrawl, Haunted House and Solaris, and even some home brews and unreleased games.  I imagine that you will find at least a few games that you will legitimately enjoy (I recommend starting with Food Fight and Tempest 2000 since those are both pretty straightforward to understand and well done.)
 
There are a lot of repetitions through ports and the like.  For example, with Asteroids you have the original arcade game, the sequel Asteroids deluxe (really more of a remix of the game), ports for the 2600 and 7800 systems and a combined port of Asteroids and Missile Command for Lynx.  Similarly, there are 5 version of Missile Command.  Normally I would say that this is just padding, but there are 109 games in total if you include ports, and if you only include "original" games you still have 77 games.  But what makes this interesting is the historical perspective.  You can see what Asteroids was like in the arcades, then play the 2600 port to see what was available at home.  In some ways the games are very similar, but in other ways the home experience was obviously inferior.  Very unlike today when you can get everything you want on a PC or modern console.
 
In terms of emulation, it has what you would want.  You can mess with filter and border options depending on whether you want a clear view or a simulation of what it would like at the arcade.  Arcade games have DIP switch options to let you change starting lives, freeplay options, etc.  The games for the Atari 2600, 5200, 7800 systems let you control the difficulty switches on the console for similar results and you can mess with the controls.  My only real complaint there is that you can't remap controls for multiple players to a single keyboard; you need a controller for everyone which can get annoying on the 4 player games since I generally don't have 4 controllers connected.  Having two people on controller and two people on opposite sides of the keyboard would work fine.  But let's be honest, I'm never going to get 4 people to agree to play these games so this is a rather minor complaint.

Where the collection shines is in the historical aspect.  You get a good feel for that from the games themselves, but the collection has a timeline mode that is loaded with features.  Digital Eclipse did something similar for the SNK collection, but there it was really just a brief description of various games with some idea of the context, some screen shots, and maybe some promotional art or manual pages.  The Atari collection has that too, but also includes a wealth of video footage including historical interviews, retrospective interviews done for the collection, historical news footage, etc.  They go into a lot more detail on important games that were not included in the collection to give a real feel for how Atari was doing on a year by year basis.  This is particularly the case with Atari's ill-fated Pinball games (the only pinball game in the collection is a virtual table for the Jaguar.)  I like that they aren't shy of saying where there were flops and where there were successes.
 
Like I said with the SNK collection, you can emulate this stuff rather easily, but the historical presentation of the collection really adds to the experience.  Digital Eclipse has found a niche and is doing their best, when they could have easily just slapped a bunch of roms together in a cash grab.  I'll probably pick up their Jeff Minter game collection if it goes on a good sale.  They also have a "Making of Kareteka" collection, but that might be too niche for even me since it focuses entirely on one game (and its many, many, ports.)

I spent 3-4 months working on a feature that would only be "useful" for a total of 2 months maximum of the app's entire lifetime instead of some more crucial features that needed to be fixed or added because someone somewhere higher in the chain is significantly more concerned about the initial "optics" of their apps rather than the core features because those can be updated in the future.
 
Yes,  they can make some questionable decisions sometimes.

This made me go back to those "Senko's Lab" .webms that got shared a lot years ago. The youtube upload for them has the default community closed captions as russian. Funny
 
 

Things have gotten worse.  Outlook now does markdown formatting.  If you don't know what I mean, it's that thing that's becoming more and more common where you can do stuff like **text** for bold, ~~text~~ for a strike through, etc. The problem is that _text_ is one shortcut for italics.  This is a problem because I often have to send e-mails with subscripts and superscripts on variables.  For subscripts I use _, like a_1, a_2, etc. This works well because it's intuitive and everyone is used to writing things that way in LaTeX anyway.  But now if I say "consider the variables a_1, a_2" outlook will change it to "consider the variables a1, a2."  As with all autocorrects, there doesn't seem to be any way to disable this in the current version.
 
Another annoyance is that it always capitalizes after a period.  So if you use phrases like "i.e.", "et al.", "etc.", "ex." it's going to mess up the formatting on the next letter.  This is annoying enough for normal sentences, but can also cause the types of issues with variable names that I discussed in the last post.
 
It's to the point that when I need to write an e-mail on my work computer I just write it in notepad and then copy paste it.

Things have gotten worse.  Outlook now does markdown formatting.  If you don't know what I mean, it's that thing that's becoming more and more common where you can do stuff like **text** for bold, ~~text~~ for a strike through, etc. The problem is that _text_ is one shortcut for italics.  This is a problem because I often have to send e-mails with subscripts and superscripts on variables.  For subscripts I use _, like a_1, a_2, etc. This works well because it's intuitive and everyone is used to writing things that way in LaTeX anyway.  But now if I say "consider the variables a_1, a_2" outlook will change it to "consider the variables a1, a2."  As with all autocorrects, there doesn't seem to be any way to disable this in the current version.
 
Another annoyance is that it always capitalizes after a period.  So if you use phrases like "i.e.", "et al.", "etc.", "ex." it's going to mess up the formatting on the next letter.  This is annoying enough for normal sentences, but can also cause the types of issues with variable names that I discussed in the last post.
 
It's to the point that when I need to write an e-mail on my work computer I just write it in notepad and then copy paste it.

I've been experimenting with having copilot translate images with Japanese text.  In some ways it's impressive in that it can recognize features in images and talk about them and sometimes pick up specific bits of text.  For example, sometimes it picks up no character names which it couldn't have gotten from elsewhere.
 
But of course, this is all buried in the usual strategy of "just make plausible shit up."  For example, I fed it the pick I modified for Wicket's Birthday:
 


 
It made the claim that the Japanese text is ハッピーバースデーお誕生日おめでとうございます!  If you look at the first part you will see that it is wrong.  It's the katakana for "Happy Birthday" phonetically (i.e. happi-ba-sude-) when in reality this is the phonetics for "Wicket."  Now why would the AI have done this?  Probably because it either recognized the cake and/or the English "Happy Birthday" and thus drew from its birthday related JP responses.  Honestly, I'm kind of skeptical about whether it recognized the お誕生日おめでとうございます, as that is a standard Japanese birthday congratulations and so would reasonably appear in a birthday picture with JP text.
 
Now what makes this weird is that if I specifically ask it what text is in the white box it will say "Wicket-san", meaning that it can parse that text, but it lied about it in the initial response anyway.
 
Here's another example.  I gave it this image of Nora Cat in the rain:
 


 
It claims the image has the text 雨だから便利でしょう? With the meaning "it's convenient because it's raining, right?" referring to an umbrella found that Nora apparently plans to use personally.
 
The actual text is 雨が降って来たので、傘を持ってきましたよ which means something like "because it started raining, I came with an umbrella" with the implication that this is being given to the viewer.  So it looks like this time the AI just made up some phrase that a character in the rain with an umbrella might use.  Again, if ask it for what text is specifically in the text balloons it gives me the right characters (though out of order since it's too dumb to read a manga panel right to left) so it has that capability, but it doesn't use it when asked to translate.
 
But then I feed it this complicated image from Doitsuken, which I thought for sure would stump it due to the highly unusual situation and the amount of text which isn't over a flat image:
 


 
And it pumps out this translation:
 
“私は出来る狐” (Watashi wa dekiru kitsune) - which translates to “I am a capable fox.”
“大丈夫ど私は出来る狐” (Daijoubu do watashi wa dekiru kitsune) - which roughly means “It’s okay, I am a capable fox.”
“運転中に人型解かないでね?” (Unten-chuu ni jingata hodokanai de ne?) - which translates to “Don’t transform into a human shape while driving, okay?”
“君·だんだん戦っぽくなってるけど” (Kimi, dandan ikusa-ppoku natteru kedo) - which means “You’re gradually becoming more like a warrior, though.”
 
That nailed it, there's only three mistakes:
 
1.) As before, it reads in left-right order and not right-left so this is all reversed.
2.) It confuses the kanji 獣 (beast) for 戦 (battle/war).  That is, he's saying that she's shifting back into an animal shape during the driving exam.
3.) It interprets 人型解かない as "don't transform into human shape" when it actually means "don't undo your human form", i.e. don't transform into a fox.
 
Let's try one more, using the intro page that I translated way back before I got too lazy to continue:
 


 
It gives this translation:
 


 
The names and races are accurate, at least.  But "Kitsune Musume", while technically something Kotoha is, appears nowhere in the text.  Shihiru is of course not Kotoha's older brother, being both female and unrelated to her, and no such text appears.  The Personality, likes, dislikes are all made up out of whole cloth.  I tried asking it specifically to translate the text under Kotoha's name, since in other cases asking it to translate specific lines would get something accurate even when it had previously lied.  It tells me  "The text under Kotoha’s name reads “性格：さっぱり” (Seikaku: Sappari), which translates to “Personality: Refreshing/Clear-cut"", which you can verify does not appear in the image.  What it did is take the made up translation and translate it back into Japanese. 
 
I asked it to translate a second time and got this:
 


 
Interestingly the character names are now wrong (though Kotoha's name does appear in Shihiro's description.)  Things aren't perfect; in particular it missed the fact that Kotoha specifically can't hide her ears and tail but otherwise can look human, but far better than the first try.  The problem is definitely not that the AI can't be used to trsnalte this sort of thing but that it won't.
 
I also asked it to translate some chickenscratch handwritten images, but it failed hard on all of those, not that I was expecting it to get anywhere.
 
But all in all that's pretty impressive.  Considering I'm using a free tool, it's certainly clear that current AI can be made to have powerful text recognition, image recognition and text translation capabilities.  However, it's also clear that the current methods for doing it are unreliable, because the AI is apt to make up something at random.  If someone were to optimize each part of the problem, such as text recognition, text translation, image recognition, sentence writing, etc., and then create a general framework to feed information from one part of the model to another, then I think we could get some pretty amazing stuff.  This seems to be more or less what Vedal is trying to do with Neuro-sama and the results so far have been pretty good for a one man team (and let's be honest: Vedal isn't a genius coder.)  But the CS academics are all in on the idea that if we stuff in enough training data then we will have competent "general intelligence" appear out of nowhere, even though every single time these models end up spending more time giving plausible sounding answers than doing what you want.

Was bored. Decided to mess around with AI. Asked to create an ASCII art, but it got it wrong every time.
With each attempt, it got more and more disturbing.
 
 
I believe a curse has been placed upon my crops.

Speaking of DS9 (several weeks ago) it always bugged me how
 
 

Thank you for tying this back to gaming because I'm too much of a dumbass to pay attention to which thread I'm in.
 
But that does mystify me everytime I hear that over a mic.  How can you live that way?  I gotta replace a smoke detector tomorrow due to the dreaded "end of life" chirp, and right now it's in "hush" mode which should theoretically last three days.  But I know from the last time I had to replace one that it never lasts as long as the manual claims, so who knows if it's going to decide to start being noisy again after I've been asleep for two hours?  Just that is enough to wear away at my peace of mind.
 
But living with a loud beep every 30-300 seconds (depending on the manufacturer)?  For days on end?  Forget how people have that happen and don't try to fix it, how do you live like that and not go insane?
 
EDIT: I mean, even if you were in full on "fuck it, I don't care if my house burns down" mode, wouldn't you eventually take the detector off the ceiling and throw it out?

Or you have a friend that refuses to acknowledge it yet keeps an open mic, gaslighting you into thinking it's yours until you take off your headsets and check them.
 
Luckily I can bring them up since they don't post here anymore.

Everyone needs an automobile, even those with many tails. This was the largest auto I could afford. Should I therefore be made the target of fun?

decided to replay the episodes on a whim. without a guide for get some grub I just tried to be thorough. I was off by fucking ONE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Girl Yuuki was a webcomic about an otaku guy named Yuuki who bought a magical girls anime which was actually a ploy by the Norse god Hermod to recruit a new valkyrie, thus making Yuuki into a valkyrie themed magical girl.  Things are made more complicated by the fact even when he undoes the magical girl transformation, he remains a girl.

A couple years later there was a tokusatsu show in Japan called Holy Girl Warrior St. Valkyrie ( 聖少女戦士 St.ヴァルキリー) about a guy named Yuuki who inherits a magical item from his mother which turns him into a valkyrie themed magical girl.  Things are made more complicated by the fact even when he undoes the magical girl transformation, he remains a girl.
 
No, the webcomic author wasn't involved in the tokusatsu show.  I wouldn't be surprised if most of the staff of the show wasn't even aware the webcomic existed, and this was all done by one writer who snatched the idea without telling anyone.
 
From what I can tell the tokusatsu show seems to have taken major divergences from the webcomic overall.  For example, I can't see any Norse gods showing up despite Hermod and Thor being mainstays in the webcomic.
 
Both of these things are pretty damned obscure these days, so if anyone plans to make a "top 10 things YOU didn't know about Japanese shows" videos this would be a topic to hit.

Was reading the newspaper (), when my eyes stumbled on this particular picture.
 

 
I never watched the videos, but I gotta say I feel really bad for Gooseworx.

Didn't see Hellsinger in the thread. The soundtrack is really good.