_petronius

Or CK Williams, about the "United States" itself:

  The rusting, decomposing hulk of the United States
  
  is moored across Columbus Boulevard from Ikea,

  rearing weirdly over the old municipal pier
  
  on the mostly derelict docks in Philadelphia.
  
  
  
  I’d forgotten how immense it is: I can’t imagine
  
  which of the hundreds of portholes looked in
  
  on the four-man cabin five flights down
  
  I shared that first time I ran away to France.
  
  
  
  We were told we were the fastest thing afloat,
  
  and we surely were; even from the tiny deck
  
  where passengers from tourist were allowed
  
  our wake boiled ever vaster out behind.
  
  
  
  That such a monster could be lifted by mere waves
  
  and in the storm that hit us halfway across
  
  tossed left and right until we vomited
  
  seemed a violation of some natural law.
  
  
  
  At Le Havre we were out of scale with everything;
  
  when a swarm of tiny tugs nudged like piglets
  
  at the teat the towering mass of us in place,

  all the continent of Europe looked small.
  
  
  
  Now, behind its ravelling chain-link fence,
  
  the ship's somnolent carcass, cables lashed
  
  like liliputian leashes to its prow, its pocking,
  
  once pure paint discoloring to blood.
  
  
  
  Upstream, the shells of long-abandoned factories
  
  crouch for miles beneath the interstate;
  
  the other way the bridge named after Whitman
  
  hums with traffic towards the suburbs past his grave;
  
  
  
  and "America's mighty flagship" waits here,
  
  to be auctioned, I suppose, stripped of anything
  
  it might still have of worth, and towed away
  
  and torched into pieces on a beach in Bangladesh.

> "bias against AI"

I know the AI ultras get mad when you point out that AI slop is bad quality, looks bad, and results in a worse aesthetic experience, but it's reasonable to have taste and to rebel against all design and illustration being brought down to the level of obvious low-effort content. Just because you have no taste, does not mean that other people must have no taste, or that having taste is somehow elitist.

The tradeoff you gotta contend with is that by making AI-style art effectively zero-cost and everywhere, not only does it immediately signal zero effort/taste on the part of the people using it, it also makes everything look the same. Composition, color choices, and style of AI-generated art is so samey, and people respond to that sameness negatively, for good reason.

As an art teacher of mine often quipped, it does not matter if it took you five minutes to make it, it just can't look like it took you five minutes to make it. Art tickles the brain when the viewer perceives aesthetic choices being made -- interesting, sometimes surprising, or skillful ones -- and the choice of AI-generated art signals to the viewer that no such choices were made.

(If AI is used is actually ultimately irrelevant, it's whether something is crap and lazy people can tell it's crap and lazy.)

Downvote me all you want, naysayers. If politics didn't work, then the people you don't like wouldn't be in power.

There are more types of politics that national and international. Local, state/provincal, city, etc. The close it is to home the more you'll see the effects, and the more power you'll have. And the more directly the electorate can keep people accountable. But I think it's really throwing the baby out with the bathwater to declare that accountability is impossible, therefore there is no point in enagaging.

Political participation -- voting, organising for the groups you support, actively engaging in meetings and public forums, building social groups of like-minded individuals. It is hugely effective. The worst doomerism is the idea that politics is ineffective. It is incredibly effective, and only the people that participate in it have any effect on it.

There are more types of politics that national and international. Local, state/provincal, city, etc. The close it is to home the more you'll see the effects, and the more power you'll have. But accepting the supine position of "well I can't do anything" only guarantees your powerlessness. Fight for the future you want! Convince 5 people that something is important, and you're already 500% up. It scales like crazy.

More like no one is willing to stick their neck out politically to argue for the positive public policy changes, or challenge regulatory interpretation needed to make real change. Plenty of people see the problems, and even want to fix them, and get stymied by political processes that abhor actually having to argue for change to electorate.

This is true of all contract notarization in Germany (even when buying a house, jesus that is a slog), and although it is a bendy-banana level silly thing that people focus on, isn't actually the biggest problem in company founding here. MUCH more problematic is unfavorable tax rules making equity compensation difficult, capital requirements, legal/notary fees, and an investor class that is notoriously skittish.

If you could solve all those problems and still had to go listen to the Notar recite the contract in a monotone, it would be a worth trade.

Per the Wikipedia article, an SE cannot be incorporated directly. It must be created out of one or more national, public (!) companies already formed under the law of a member state.

Not so much controversial, as evidence that you completely lack capacity for empathy and you should do some serious self-reflection. This is just a really vile and amoral view to hold.

People are being hurt by this, because "just pixels on a screen and bytes on a disk" can constitute harm due to the social function that information serves.

It's like calling hurling insults at someone as "just words" because no physical violence has occurred yet. The words themselves absolutely can be harm because of the effect they have, and also create an environment that leads to further, physical violence. Anyone who has experienced even mild bullying can attest to that.

Furthermore women and girls are often subject to online harassment and humiliation. This is of course part of that -- we aren't talking about fictional images here, we are talking about photos of real people, many who are children, being manipulated to shame, humiliate, and harass them sexually, targetted at women and girls overwhelmingly.

Advocating for the freedom to commit that kind of harm against other people is gross, and you should reconsider your views and how much care you have for other people.

Equating speed of travel with innovation is lame: a lot of work has been done in recent decades on making airplane engines more efficient, which makes air travel more economical both in terms of cost as well as C02e emissions per passenger (the Jevons paradox implications of that can be taken as read).

The whole post comes off a bit as someone who doesn't really understand the passenger air travel industry very well, and isn't particularly interested in changing that.

I mean, if you read about how current industry-standard recommendation systems work, this is pretty bang on, I think? (I am not a data scientist/ML person, as a disclaimer.)

If e.g. retention correlates to watch time (or some other metric like "diversity of content enageged with"), then you will optimize for the short list of metrics that show high correlation. The incentive to have a top-tier experience that gets the customer what they want and then back off the platform is not aligned with the goal of maintaining subscription revenue.

You want them to watch the next thing, not the best thing.

Your sci-fi distopia flash fiction is compelling, but not actually on topic in this discussion.

"Think of the children" is weaponized for censorious purposes, but also the harms of social media are well documented (unlike many of the other moral panics fuelled by this phrase). Communication channels are becoming managed spaces, but by private companies not accountable to the electorate, not by the state.

I'm not sure a blanket under-16s ban on all social media is the right answer, but there are really good reasons why people support this that you need to engage with to have a useful discussion here.

If a thought like this has occurred to you, a dilettante, after reading a headline and/or cursorily glancing over the article, then you should assume that a study conducted by people with substantial academic training and deep expertise in the field have also had this thought and incorporated it into how they perform their analysis.

Drive-by anti-intellectualism like this is the death of interesting conversation, truly.

On my iPhone 16 Pro + Airpods Pro, when I start the game (tapping on the screen when it says "Tap to start") I get a message saying "Airpods Disconnected", even though the Control Center on the phone reports them as connected).

Tried restarting the app, and disconnecting and reconnecting the Airpods with no luck.

Love the concept, though!

I would add to this that in my experience, many teams actually perform better when co-locating, even if individual people on that team would prefer (or feel they individually perform better) remote.

Covid normalized remote working, but also didn't necessarily make companies and teams _good_ at it; I suspect RTO is easier than fixing the fact that your org sucks at remote work. It is hard to do well! it requires different strategies than just picking some software.

Partial/voluntary RTO also is the worst of both worlds: people coming in the office to sit on Zoom with colleagues who never do. Ultimately, I think RTO is a valid choice as a company, and a lot of orgs are coming to regret not messaging from the beginning that remote would be a temporary arrangement during the pandemic.