philodelta

Musk very clearly actively sticks his fingers in the pie to steer narratives. Easy example, one of his children came out as trans (to Elon's apparent dismay), and now "cisgender" is flagged as a slur/hate-speech. There is other, anecdotal evidence that certain posters (ridiculously, Musk included) have their posts elevated above baseline visibility, but I don't have any statistics to back that up. Other flavorful unsolicited changes to the platform, such as changing blocking to allow blocked people to still see your posts, seem again like self-serving dictates from the top. Perhaps generally not censorship, but heavily biased moderation very clearly steered by the agenda of a single man.

I think a democrat who could actually distance themselves from Biden, someone who had more leeway to criticize his policies without the obvious "if current policy is wrong, what's stopping you from changing it" question, would have faired better. Maybe not won, but done better. Certainly there was no way Biden would have won re-election and switching was a good choice, but too little too late.

I make bread by hand and "gross cooking hands" includes hands covered in shaggy dough.

don't get me wrong, it is silly, but also being able to set a timer without touching anything with your gross cooking hands is unironically a wonderful feature.

I can only speak to my own interpretations of the text, but this is a setting where magic well and truly exists, if typically in forms that were seldom seen directly. I don't think it's explicitly said, but again, Bilbo the burglar and Frodo somehow sneaking into Mordor, there is a broader underlying implication that hobbits are intrinsically easy to ignore and discount. I was always given the impression this was largely what kept them safe, not any realistic defense mechanism, but a borderline mystical unimportance.

I think I may be old-man-yells-at-cloud-ing here, but maybe making products to solve all these use cases for a beginning user is just what an educational tool like raspberry pi shouldn't be doing. Inconveniences like this are what really spurred on my own education in operating systems and networking, making me ask "ok, well, how can I do this myself?"

Yeah, I understand where this author comes from but at the same time the whole premise sort of garners a head-tilt, half-squint, visible confusion. Companies only really self-regulate by way of failure. If they die they prove the negative hypothesis, but the positive hypothesis was just "this product will make net profit" not "This product will not materially harm society".

this is mentioned and addressed in the article.

This reminds me a bit of the some of the problem solving experiments done comparing pet dogs to undomesticated wolves. The experiment wasn't overly complicated, a piece of meat was placed in a locked cage and the animals were given free reign to try their paws at getting to the food. The wolves were persistent, some employed tools like sticks to push the food out, some managed to navigate the clasping mechanism on the cage. The domesticated dogs more often than not quickly gave up and looked to the human present for help.

This has already become self-evident when trying to find images on google. I have seen whole pages of results which were AI-generated. At every level it becomes so hard to understand the motivations of my fellow man in regards to these problems, it quickly invites almost conspiratorial thinking. How could anyone be so stupid, how is anyone benefitting, from the obvious and apocalyptic poisoning of the well. Especially when in the case of AI-imagery, if I really wanted the amalgamized paste of generative output I could just make it myself. Some part of me actually finds it offensive, that someone would have the gall to waste storage on this easily replicable digital refuse.

Flipper is fun, and cool in a very cyberpunk way (even the name makes me think of the dolphin in johnny mnemonic), but what kept me from buying one, is, while cool, it's aesthetic was really the most unique thing about it. My use cases for it were covered by things I already own, and it is somewhat expensive given all that.

I know people got hurt (and fish died) but all I can think is, this is a hotel lobby, there most certainly IS security camera footage of the failure and subsequent deluge and man do I want to know what that looked like.

I mean, at least with real life sports there are no hacky obtuse contrivances because, it's real life, not a videogame with a meta that includes knowledge of engine exploits or intimate knowledge of map geometry. Someone pixel-aligning themselves to throw a blind smoke that bounces off of invisible above-the-map geometry to eliminate a sightline or someone blind firing though a wall-bang because they've counted the seconds since round start and judge someone might be there is obtuse to anyone onlooking via a stream. In football, or golf, or soccer, all the elements of play can be observed all at once without multiple angles needed to explain what's happening.

Though there is the threat of rules being made to govern "unsportsman-like" behavior that dissuades this kind of thing. If the powers that govern the sport determine they don't want this to be a mainstay, they can rule it out. The videogame exists in a realm of concrete and unchanging rules, theres no threat of making anyone mad, besides the person at the other end of the couch of course.