afandian

As everyone is sharing their favourite miniature artists I’m going to share Bobby Fingers, who makes the best videos on YouTube IMHO.

The Jeff Bezos boat would probably appeal to this crowd, although it is by not remotely miniature.

The web around the late 90s and early 2000s had some really sketchy stuff. I think the difference is that it used to be the sleazy underbelly. Now it's accepted as mainstream.

My local 'newspaper' website is chock full of scam adverts. The print version is dignified. The website people, somehow, turn a blind eye.

And I got an advert on Youtube this week using sexually explicit language to sell pills.

Feels like standards, and expectations, have really slipped.

I doubt that anyone knows 300 million people let alone that many Americans.

Agreed, I doubt that a mega-behemoth like Google or Microsoft could emerge in Europe. Especially not on a compressed timescale.

But if they really wanted digital verification without the surveillance capitalism built in, I’m sure there are plenty of companies that could do it. Especially if it was around an open source framework.

We need to remember how to operate without the Internet, and de-risk our dependence on it. Whether that's reducing the use of computers in our daily lives, or getting more open-source-software-runs-offline-on-my-machine.

We did it before. We forgot at the time when things were more-or-less free.

(I don't know how we do this. I'm as dependent as ever.)

What are the "AI gods" going to do in this scenario?

AI is about many things, but a big factor is enclosure.

I don't understand where the all the EU anti-trust and anti-corruption regulators are here. _Governments_ enforcing that you have a Google or Apple account to participate in society is transparently absurd.

This isn't only a digital sovereignty issue, it's also an anti-competition issue.

It's been dark since the Grimms, and likely long before!

I just rewatched it (link in sibling link). It's mocking Farquaad, but I think is clearly meant to be taken as slapstick. Implying that torture is no big deal.

I'm referring to this scene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYcm_9YELQE

At the opening of the scene, the gingerbread man is being drowned in milk. You see from the shadow, and the voice, that he's having his head submerged in liquid. then Lord Farquaad says "enough! he's ready to talk". So that's simulated drowning as part of interrogation to get information.

Nit-picking about the exact _orientation_ of the victim, and therefore what type of simulated-drowning torture this constitutes, is somewhat missing the point I was trying to make! i.e. that torture is normalised to the point of being slapstick in a children's film.

I was horrified by the literal waterboarding scene in Shrek. Granted it was a year or two before the USA started trying to normalise that form of torture. I don’t know what was in the popular consciousness in the US at the time. But it’s very spooky.

Children’s fiction has always had a very dark side though.

I imagine their maths is fine. Their objective is to tackle climate change through raising awareness. That happens at the macro scale.

Luddites were campaigning against child labour and dangerous working conditions, amongst other things. Pick which side of history you want to be on!

Yet here we are talking about the environmental impact of Microsoft data centres in NL. We wouldn’t otherwise be.

I'm sure there was some passive agreement involved, and probably some "politician's syllogism" too.

But the null hypothesis is that there is no new legislation to vote on. It must have come from somewhere!

You can survive and be exist in society without both.

I doubt those representatives gathered a sufficient mandate from their public given the huge consequence.

I’m no conspiracy theorist, but it does seem that there’s an international influence outweighing democracy.

Cui bono?

There’s a huge amount of stuff that the EU does that no one consented to, or had a realistic democratic avenue to influence.

I’m in the UK and very anti Brexit. But were we still in, I would have no idea how to influence what happens behind those closed doors at the European Commision.

Granted the current UK Labour/ Conservative pact on these issues show they’re completely out of control. But I still theoretically know how I could influence policy.

The challenge is to retain an ordering over the result set. How would infinite scroll behave any differently in this case? The changing results seems to be an orthogonal concern to pagination/infinite scroll.

Infinite scroll evolved alongside algorithms that incentivise addictive content. So it’s “good” UX in that it’s effective for consuming addictive content…

When I’m trying to do something constructive, like search or browse, infinite scroll is IMHO disastrously bad. You can’t keep your place in the list, or jump ahead/back.

Yes. "I rubbished his proposal", i.e. "I criticised his proposal".

(I can't imagine what an intransitive 'rubbish' would mean!)

"To rubbish" is a very common verb, at least in British English.

I wonder if it’s malicious compliance on the part of the manufacturers.

They can trivially determine if their tech is effective. Making it mandatory, despite the problems they must surely know about, might produce some democratic pressure for more nuanced legislation.

Luckily our investors helped us out with the regulatory capture, so we don’t need to worry about the safety, just the palatability.

Maybe it's the cause of our "bad teeth".

(I heard the rumour too. But no-one I know fails to rinse the "washing up liquid" (as we call it) off their plates)

Wow!

(No, from dry-cleaning)

Too late, already been done!

https://stroodles.co.uk/collections

I bought some edible cups out of curiosity a few years back. Nice for coffee. I did end up eating them all, although some of them were still dry at the time of consumption.

I think edible soap has better behaviour-adjusted shelf-life here.

Thanks, I might try and reset that 'trust'. I don't recall if it popped up or not originally.

It's a quite old, third-hand car. But there are plenty of people reporting the same thing.

But why can't my iPhone let me set permissions for the thing I plug it into? It's unreasonable to prevent me from changing the audio output.

Examples:

- https://www.peugeotforums.com/threads/mp3-ipod-random-play-p...

- https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254051162?sortBy=rank

I don't know the first thing about dishwashers, but it seems obvious to me.

The cycle-to-volume ratio is as bad as it could possibly be. Conventional dishwashers recirculate water as they wash and rinse. I imagine there's an mx + c formula to how much water is needed (c = enough water to prime the pump or whatever). So compared to a normal size load, you'd be wasting that constant amount of water.

The wash is also likely going to follow mx+c (c = time for grease to break down, time to rinse, time to dry etc). You can wait a few hours for a whole set of crockery. Can you wait a few hours for a single plate?

Commercial "passthrough" dishwashers work very differently. Manual mechanical action with a spray, plus a quick wash, sterilise and rinse. At that point why not wash your single plate by hand?

The innovation here is clearly edible soap.

And the 'less water' claim is technically correct, but it doesn't mention the decamethylcyclopentasiloxane. Just because it's complicated to spell, you understand.