dizzystar

I worked at Cycorp as a contractor for a few months. Lenat was, without a doubt, the smartest person I ever met in my life. There are levels of scary smart... his intelligence was downright frightening.

I'm sad to see so many call his work a failure. His work was anything but a failure. I think this perception comes down to the fact that the company worked on many things that aren't public, and he do much publicity and self-promotion.

The city has to then add trucks to cover this downtime. It's not only the 3 hours of charging every day, it's the time the truck takes to drive to a station, so maybe 4 hours a day.

NYC has 2800 snow plows. They would have to increase their fleet another 33% or so. That's 900 to 1000 trucks for a tax-funded service. This extra cost excludes the change in logistics, etc.

I'm working on getting back into programming. I took a break after burning out.

My main love of software has always been writing programs that deal with music and audio. I'm going to spend more time writing plugins and building out more of my ontological approach to music theory, and eventually work on more evaluation models.

There is a sinister underpinning to the pay-for-stream stuff. The "influencer / musician" gets penalized hard for boosting Spotify streams (*), then they go on social media and complain that they only make $10 for 1M streams, and attempt to promote other "more ethical" platforms.

In my own accounts, my Spotify streams pay just as much as any other platform. The tricks used for standard influencer accounts don't work for musicians, probably because you can't trick people into believing you make good music when it is clearly garbage.

(*) I should be more clear on what I mean. A stream in the US would pay about 1/2c for each stream, while a stream from Eastern Europe would pay far less. Of course, these streaming farms are located in these areas.

I'm curious how you can to this conclusion. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter were always vehicles for advertisers. I suppose it was more acceptable because it was from "influencer marketing," which was taken so far that the FTC had to step in and start fining influencers for dishonest marketing.

I guess it is different than "we are interrupting your current show for this important topic," but to be honest, I think the new style of marketing is more sinister. We can expect a TV or radio station to show ads and understand it doesn't exactly reflect the thoughts of the stations. In "influencer marketing," we are led to believe that some 16 year old really knows more about the stock market and crypto than those Wall Street guys.

I was in construction in my 20s. I earned $X when I was learning. A few years later, I was working independent and earning $Y. It ended up that $Y was lower than $X. This is akin to earning less as a senior dev than you did as a junior dev, except you'd also have to buy your own chair, desk, computer, and software license to work as a sr dev.

The problem was multifold, and I think the crux of the situation. The people who entered the field didn't respect the field, and only aimed to undercut the next guy, causing wages to plummet in the span of 5 years.

Software doesn't need that much protection yet, but that slide happens way faster than you think it will. It's not about keeping people out; it's about educating those who come in to respect the industry they are entering. Many people are actively preventing people from learning about the proper value of their work.

I find Facebook fascinating. I started using it later than most, maybe 2 years ago. What stopped me from using it was, everyone I knew that was on it never said anything positive about it. They got upset over deleting "their friends" who they never met. They talked about how annoying the cat videos were. In sum, I sensed they received nothing positive from it. I could never understand how people could get so attached to something they downright hate.

Instagram became a uh... a bunch of advertisers advertising to each other. I think 9 out of 10 photos are promotional material. Nothing personal, nothing funny, nothing enlightening. Most all of my friends stopped using it about 1 year ago. I won't get into reasons why, but I think you can add 2 and 2 together.

TikTok just feels more genuine. If someone is dancing, what are they trying to sell? Nothing at all. It's amazing how much talent is on that app. It's only a matter of time before the marketers figure it out and destroy that app too.