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To prevent deer from being hit by cars Finland has tried using reflective paint. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/avoid-deer-strikes-finland-painting-deer-antlers-reflective-paint-180949792/)
File this under "solutions to modern problems that summon the old gods."
(It seems the image on the right is a rendering to show how this "would" work. Not a real photo. Updating again to correct image description to reflect, heh, this.)
When I searched for "reflective reindeer", I got pictures of reindeer holding their chin in their hoof, looking pensively upwards.
I'm so disgusted with the state of search these days. It's not just the AI it's the AI slop combined with the mushy "let us tell you what you really meant" search results.
Obscure band names, artists, concepts are "corrected" to more popular words. "ant" is swapped for "art" if I'm looking for anything cute or amusing ("cute art stickers" NO I want "cute ANT stickers")
It's like modern search is trying to make everyone hopelessly basic. Only popular things exist.
Am I just getting old? One of the things that made me fall in love with the internet is how if you looked for something, no matter how obscure, no matter how unlikely if someone had gone to the trouble of making it you could find it.
That just isn't true in the same way anymore. It's more likely you will be redirected to a more "normal search query"
It "works better" for many people most of the time. But, that's at the expense of making everything strange hidden.
@futurebird @lnlyisol In the early days, there was a lot to do about "the long tail". How the internet made it worthwhile to cater to niche subjects because you could cast such a wide net.
I felt this died when companies like Netflix became big. They started focusing on things with mass appeal. They could have broadened their catalog with lots of cheap, niche movies that a few people would like but they never bothered.
I think it would still make them money. It just doesn't generate prestige.
@futurebird @lnlyisol The big problem is that indie creators get started in the long tail. You can be a webcomic artists or a writer or a musician and so long as you put the work in, you can build up a small audience for your weird ideas.
But centralized social media and streaming giants have brought back the old way of doing things: you're either massively famous or you're nobody, with no options in between. And they're they gatekeepers. They set the taste.
@pbloem @futurebird @lnlyisol I dunno, for a good 10 years Netflix was a goldmine for new niche content. They’ve contracted a lot but they made shows like Nimona and I Am Not Okay With This and many others that were way weirder and more niche than anything I’d ever seen on television before.
@pbloem @futurebird @lnlyisol They’ve scaled way back on those shows but there was a kind of golden era of originals for a bit there.
@MichaelTBacon @pbloem @futurebird @lnlyisol there was definitely a moment when they would green light basically any project. They had to guarantee content for the channel. So easily was trash, and some was absolute gold
@MichaelTBacon @futurebird @lnlyisol That's fair (and probably other streamers are much worse at this).
But that mostly refers to their exclusive and new stuff. If you wanted to watch some niche old movie, like the original King-Kong, or some French New Wave classic, there's almost no streamer or rental service that can do that.
Some cater to something specific things (like art house), but nobody seems to be interested in building up a very broad catalogue across genres.
@pbloem @MichaelTBacon @futurebird @lnlyisol
And you can't find that sort of thing on Pirate Bay either, because they're not popular enough to have a significant number of people seeding them. (I haven't tried those examples, but I've seen this with other ones.)
@TobyBartels @MichaelTBacon @futurebird @lnlyisol
Torrents are a lot better, though. I usually get one or two people seeding at least, so I just have to wait a bit.
If you want really obscure, if you're lucky, there are still DVDs floating around that you can pick up second hand somewhere.
It's a shame, because the tech is right there to have an exhaustive database of all human culture. We just can't seem to arrange our society to allow it to happen.
@TobyBartels @MichaelTBacon @futurebird @lnlyisol
Maybe if storage gets a bit cheaper still, we'll get a bunch of cultural anarchists creating a libgen of movies, so that things will at least be preserved somewhere.
@pbloem @MichaelTBacon @futurebird @lnlyisol
The Internet Archive is keeping some of the stuff, even if they don't make it available. They've been putting up Disney shorts as soon as they come into the public domain, for example; of course, those were never going to be lost, and I don't know how thorough they are with less popular stuff.
@TobyBartels @pbloem @MichaelTBacon @futurebird @lnlyisol Yes, and they just lost a big chunk of its funding. 
@pbloem @futurebird @lnlyisol A while ago I read an article that argued the opposite: that The Problem with Netflix is that they don't need mass appeal or prestige the way movies used to in the box office and so they do pad out their catalog with cheap, niche movies that are meant to make the catalog look broader but aren't meant to be watched: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/essays/casual-viewing/
This still contributes to the death of good niche content online, just in a different way.