Personal tastes and preferences and opinions aside, clothing is a pretty important aspect of communicating. Easy reference point is Mean Girls: On Wednesdays, we wear pink. In that scenario its simply a means of communicating conformity and support for the group. Seasonal tastes change because tastemakers set them, and people who want to be in the zeitgeist follow suit.
And even in sub-cultures where one is just trying to communicate their distaste in fashion, there are usually unofficial dress codes. At nerdier conventions I typically see screen t-shirts riddled with pop culture references, or standard issue polos + khakis that communicate a sort of "I'm professional and I don't want to overthink my wardrobe". They're also the only place I see utility kilts, which definitely communicates something.
Einstein famously had several copies of the same outfit, because he didn't want to think about dressing, but he found one that worked for him. And I've seen several engineers copy this approach - communicating efficiency and I'd argue at least some desire to emulate an Einstein.
I'll pile onto that. I love improv. It gave me a new set of mental skills that are difficult to train for elsewhere. It teaches you how to walk in a room and make the best of any situation and overcome that feeling of meeting strangers. I find any difficult work situation I can now approach from a "what can we do with this?" mentality, where I used to always dread rolling up my sleeves to do more work. Highly recommended to anyone, but especially anyone in a leadership role.
Tearing into a popular piece of media is just really, really cathartic, and much more so if a group of people agrees with you. And if we're gonna be honest its punching up most of the time, so it seems fairly harmless. Someone brought up Nickelback, its not like they've been shoved aside from relevancy, they were super popular the entire time people tore up their music critically. If someone puts them on at karaoke (or if someone puts on Starship for that matter) I'm sure most of the place is going to sing along.
One of my coworkers stated this a few years ago: "i'm on an interesting musical journey right now: trying to identify musicians/groups/bands/artists, etc. that i've over looked because they were "mainstream" popular"
And I always thought that was kind of a hilarious thing to go through. Most people I know who are music snobs are generally anti-pop music and it seems like they miss out on the fun stuff that everyone gets into.
I couldn't get into Nickelback personally because they came in on a wave of similar music that I was generally over by the time they got big.
Its been awhile since I've seen it but Spinal Tap was making fun of a lot of bands like that, its part of their fictional band's backstory. They start out much like the Stones with some simple catchy early 60's tunes, turn into a hippie band, then quickly transform into metal in order to follow the money.
Most of the comments here are going to predictably call out that "We Built This City" is not the worst song of all time and offer up an example that's ostensibly worse.
But I think a very important caveat missing from the article and all of the comments here is that Blender/VH1 never said it was the worse song of all time. They said it was the most "awesomely bad" song of all time. To which I 100% agree with. Its not worst songs, its good catchy songs that are also objectively bad. And I think "awesomely bad" is just a great way to title it. We can all agree "We Built This City" is a catchy ear worm you can rock out to in the car, it lifts my spirits whenever it gets played. It stands on the pantheon of terrible but awesome hits like "Ice Ice Baby", "She Bangs", and the Ghostbusters theme song.
Nobody is saying you shouldn't listen to "We Built This City". Its a guilty pleasure. Crank that mother up on your car ride home alone and rock the fuck out.
Big Excalidraw fan and I had no idea you could do that...this might be the version controllable solution I've been looking for. Also have given up trying to get mermaid and other solutions to work well.
Never seen anyone get so worked up about the idea of growth mindset. This seems like some wildly misplaced animosity toward the concept. Especially in regard to trying to shift away from calling kids "intelligent". Author here neglected the whole point of that, which is that we typically used to say "you're so gifted, you're so intelligent". The theory is that many kids would take failures poorly after hearing that a lot and decide "I wasn't gifted enough to solve this problem" and would give up. I'm not here to say whether that's panned out or not, it seems very new in the child psychology space, but I think the idea makes sense. Give kids the encouragement to keep striving instead of believing they were just built a certain way.
Sure there are, plenty of low income countries with fledging industries, but the governments get more and more risky to deal with the further down in income you go.
Well it’s not aimed at IT people and programmers (though the policies still apply to them), it’s aimed at everyone else who doesn’t understand what a phishing email looks like.
Good read and really just highlights the complexity and tension involved with huge corporate organizations. I would not have ever guessed that Alexa alone would have so many teams and engineers involved, because from the outside it seems like the only iterations were on the physical models. The voice assistant didn't seem to change in any meaningful way for a very long time. It even seems like Amazon employs some form of internal start-up model, but that still struggles because of the internal politics. Maybe when it comes to individual products, its best to keep the teams small and nimble.
The post talked about that too: LLMs could come up with a query for any question. A technical person would know how to spot the problems with that query or even the question, a non-technical person wouldn't know that they just asked for a bunch of hot nonsense.
I can definitely sympathize with alcohol improving me in some situations. When I'm at social gatherings sober I'm in my head a lot, overthinking. A couple of drinks in though and I'm not using my analytical brain, I'm using the part that is good at improv, and I have much better conversations because of it, and usually comes away from those events more positive than sober.
Drinking during celebrations are some of my favorite memories. Its like we're all already happy and high on good news, think weddings or big sales news or getting a big project completed. And then we drink because the worries of the world are behind us, now the happiness is uninhibited and jovial. I like to think those moments add time to your life.
Yea I thought that was the whole reason. But I guess there was a lot of chasing of physical reasons that wine and other alcohol would be beneficial. I usually heard about antioxidants being cited as a positive.
Stress is generally bad for the body (but note: I am not a doctor), and a little alcohol can be a social lubricant and reduce the stress of social situations or just your life problems in general. If the only real benefit of alcohol is from social lubrication, then its probably an almost impossible thing to find causation, just too many factors to deal with.
Bigger tendency of discourse to draw quick association lines instead of looking at the product holistically.
A handful of bad video games released with poor micro-transactions, so micro-transactions leads to bad games. A lot of bad movies released with over-reliance on poor CGI, so CGI leads to bad movies. But in both of those cases I can see where the underlying methods could be a net positive for the product - if implemented well and with good intent.
In the case of Fury Road, tons of great choices that are a net positive on the product. Including practical stunts and CGI and lots of artfully done color saturation. A lesser movie will try to ape everything Fury Road did just to make a quick buck on its success, but not really taking into account how the color saturation or the stunts enhanced parts of the story and theme.
People with an opinion on a piece of work: judge it how it should be judged on the whole! These little shortcuts in discourse are boring and tiresome.
I think the whole point is that in cases of aesthetics, we built a bunch of eyesores for utilities and industries in the past anyway. Also I'm sure the next guy is going to say "does my land-ownership not mean anything? Why could my neighbor build an oil field in the past but I can't put up a big wind farm?"
It's not black and white like that and trade-offs get made all the time.
You know this is a really ironic response to this thread. Many of us wish nuclear power didn't take 10+ years to build, but it does. How long is it going to take to change people's minds about this topic? Maybe the same amount as it might take to change your opinion on alternative energy sources.
At least alternative energy has less NIMBY people and more willing to take a shot at it.
The thing I would be worried about is noise in otherwise serene areas. But I'm yet to see a wind farm in an area and think "bah, what a waste!" I'm usually pretty pleased by the sight of them. And if I'm going to be totally fair, I hate the noise from freeways, but I also don't like living that far away from them.
Every one of these types of threads pulls out the pro-nuclear folks. I get that nuclear is really cool, but I don't get why anyone loves paying billions for projects that take 10+ years to complete. And sometimes they don't even complete! In the meantime you could've setup many different alternative energy solutions, not just wind, could've done it in the fraction of the time and probably under-budget.
What no one wants to revisit Nagano Winter Olympics or Tetrisphere? Its probably closer to 50 if you want to include some of the lesser-known but interesting titles IMO. One of the most interesting games was Body Harvest since its clearly a prototype for a lot of what became GTA3
Pretty fun! I would recommend looking up "juice" in gaming and adding some spicier animations just to make it a little more satisfying to play. The idea is pretty fun though!
If they erected a statue of Steve Jobs across the pathway I bet it would be pretty well travelled again :) I'll have to check this out on my next visit, I don't think I've ever noted it before, central park has a ton of little discoveries to make.
I thought of that movie almost immediately as well. Seems like we're right about there, but obviously a little further away from the deeper conversations. Or maybe you could have those sorts of conversations too.
This is a kind of horrifying/interesting/weird thought though. I work at a place that does a video streaming interface between customers and agents. And we have a lot of...incidents. Customers will flash themselves in front of agents sometimes and it ruins many people's days. I'm sure many are going to show their junk to the AI bots. OpenAI will probably shut down that sort of interaction, but other companies are likely going to cater to it.
Maybe on the plus side we could use this sort of technology to discover rude and illicit behavior before it happens and protect the agent.