antonymy

Reading this article as a straight man is like listening to a rich friend complain about how they have too many rooms to decorate in their mansion whilst I struggle to make rent in a single bedroom apartment. Particularly this bit

>She recommends that app users stop scrolling and talking to other matches once they have found nine people they feel some level of connection with, and dedicate their time to really trying to get to know those people first.

Oh, stop at nine? Well I'll let you know when I eventually hit nine concurrent matches. Hasn't happened yet, eight years and counting. I'm sure I'll be able to stop scrolling any year now. It's like reading about a different planet.

The two movies the author had never seen were two of my favorite films by Miyazaki that I watched in my formative years. Of course the acclaim always went to Nauiscaa, Spirited Away, and Princess Mononoke, but I've always adored Porco Rosso. The atmosphere of those tiny Adriatic islands and interwar Italian cities makes me nostalgic for a place I've never visited.

All they did was automate a process living, breathing human redditors have followed for over a decade: farming karma with reposts. The fact nobody noticed the switch over from human repost spam to bot repost spam is pretty indicative about the overall quality of the site's community, I think.

I've read so many articles like this that point to similar things, the zoning issues, the over-regulation, the fact we need to build more housing as the fundamental fix. Yet all I continue to see from government is the same old heel-dragging intransigence.

So what I'm left wondering isn't how to fix this, or what the government's response will be, but rather what is going to happen to finally force a change in direction? Mass homelessness? Depopulation of major cities? I don't think major economic downturns have the potential to do it. They'll slap a bunch of quick fix band-aids over those issues and declare the problem solved. There has to be something that is too big to declare fixed by printing more money or bailing out a few companies.

A surprising and welcome move by the FTC. Wish they'd hold something like this for how telecoms are regulated.

DRM only punishes paying customers.

Have enjoyed this series a lot. His whole blog is great and you can easily spend hours reading through his lengthy, well-researched posts if you have an interest in premodern military history or topics that brush up against it (i.e. strategy video games, fantasy literature, etc).

Completely forgot about Google Fiber, just assumed they'd abandoned it like so many other Google projects. I was so excited for it back when it was announced. Anything to disrupt the corrupt local monopoly I have to deal with here. Then they scrapped any plans to come to my city and I lost interest.

Weird how Zuckerberg's red flag for low productivity was employees avoiding meetings to work on personal projects. In the first place, I was under the impression FAANG companies encouraged employees to pursue personal projects for the benefit of the company.

>In fact, standardized tests items must be well-defined problems, because they require indisputable answers. Matching a word to its synonym, finding the area of a trapezoid, putting pictures in the correct order—all common tasks on IQ tests—are well-defined problems.

>Spearman was right that people differ in their ability to solve well-defined problems. But he was wrong that well-defined problems are the only kind of problems. “Why can’t I find someone to spend my life with?” “Should I be a dentist or a dancer?” and “How do I get my child to stop crying?” are all important but poorly defined problems.

I wish the article went a bit deeper into analyzing the structural flaws of intelligence tests, because I think this is also an answer to why some people do poorly in school, yet seem to do very well in life overall (materially and emotionally speaking). The ability to find happiness is something worth teaching to people, if it can be taught. I honestly don't know if it can be. Certainly the ancients believed a good, moral life could be achieved through instruction, as the sheer number of writings on that topic they left behind clearly indicate, but then they also had a lot of curious ideas about the nature of reality as we know it. I think it's definitely worth considering reordering the priority of our education toward "poorly defined" questions, at least in part. The real difficulty will be finding people "qualified" to teach these "lessons".

Only if they're extremely naïve. A common theme I see in pro-censorship people is they assume the ability to censor will never fall into the hands of horrible people, that somehow the government will always remain in the hands of people they find reasonable and agreeable. Ultimately, the government is an apparatus of power with a tendency toward tyranny. It is neither inherently good nor bad. In democracies we try to limit this tendency toward tyranny through checks and balances within the governments' various branches and departments, as well as making politicians answerable to the people through election and referenda, and holding everyone equally accountable before the law (in theory). In this context, the freedom of expression is important for keeping the government answerable to the people. If publicly available information is restricted to only what the government allows to be published then the people are incapable of making informed political decisions, and democratic process ceases to provide any meaningful franchise to the people, completely undermining the entire point of a democracy.

Amen.

Still over $4.70/G here. I dread going to the pump.

What's the scoop on the US Forest Service? Obstruction, grift, or waste?

I've never tried to give advice to people in my life since my career is mostly founded on a series of coincidences and lucky breaks. I know that luck factors into a lot of people's experiences, but in my case luck is the foundation of everything I have accomplished outside of school. I've built on top of this foundation, to be sure, but it's like saying fishing is all about waiting for the fish to jump in your boat.

Netflix and other streaming platforms have made inroads into anime production committees, but you are correct in that so far very little overall impact is seen in the industry. The Japanese domestic market is still the chief driver of demand for new anime, and success overseas doesn't seem to really inspire a response from most of the anime industry. I wouldn't say they're "isolated", since the market has been penetrated by the west, it's more like they're indifferent to western money.

I think Aniplex is in a position to change this, but the difficulty is going to be luring the studios since money doesn't seem to have as big an impact as one would expect.

I don't personally care one whit about the fortunes of Pornhub but this sets a very bad precedent for the internet. The payment processing duopoly is a huge problem, they are able to dictate way too much of what is allowed to exist on the internet. Today it's illegal pornography that everybody agrees is terrible, but that's how it always starts. The safe targets, the stuff nobody objects to, to establish precedent. Once they have this power to censor it is extremely hard to walk it back.

I did very little guessing on the regular puzzle, which took me a little over 6 minutes, but the master-level one did require some brute force at first and took me much longer to finish. Once I got rolling, though, I was able to solve it intuitively. It's more like a sudoku but instead of mathematic logic you rely on your knowledge of English vocabulary and spelling. It may not have traditional clues but by giving you the pool of letters for all words it gets progressively easier as you fill in the grid and eliminates certain possibilities out of hand.

The only real issue is getting your initial foothold, especially if the grid's pre-filled letters are mostly common and not helpful in placement. Having a pre-filled J is much more useful than, say, a prefilled E.

Ditto. I own a great many movies on physical media, and then have digital pirated copies that I actually watch. These digital copies are much easier to store, can be viewed on pretty much any device with no hassle or setup, and are easy to share with friends and family without depriving myself of my own copy. I already paid for a copy of the films once (sometimes twice!) so I don't feel particularly guilty about downloading copies for more practical use. If they want me to stop doing this they should provide a better service.

I'd like it that if a work has been out of print for more than 10 years then its copyright should expire, regardless of the remaining copyright duration. Let them have their 100+ year copyright, but its forfeit if they don't bother to keep it in print. Let somebody else print it if you can't be bothered.

433.7M dollars is still pretty good. Depending on age, it might also be the smart way to do it. A guy in his 20s winning the lottery and a guy in his mid 60s is two very different use cases for money.

Yup. My exact thought upon seeing the headline. Reading the article didn't really bring me away from this reaction either, still feels like a whole lot of bunk.

Climate science community really needs to rein in its doomsayers. I get that exaggeration and fearmongering is an easy way to get attention for issues but it ultimately hurts the cause. Like James Hansen back in the 1980s predicting New York City would be underwater in 40 years. Even if it's just one guy's prediction it has a serious impact on credibility with the public when an expert is seen as alarmist and inaccurate.

Every time the point is raised that this just opens the door for mass surveillance of all private communications we just get vague assurances of "no it won't" like this from the article:

>whilst the privacy considerations that this type of technology raises must not be disregarded, we have presented arguments that suggest that it should be possible to deploy in configurations that mitigate many of the more serious privacy concerns

Which if you parse the language you realize he's saying no such technology exists, or is proven to work, but it might be possible to only violate most of your privacy as long as the government doesn't deem it to be 'serious'.

The people making the videos are much more aware of who their audience is and how to communicate to them. They make the assumption their audience is intelligent, but unfamiliar with the subject material. So they avoid industry terms and jargon, and instead work on establishing understanding of basic principles in familiar terms then elaborate on them gradually. I've seen similar approaches in teaching people with no technical background how to write code, to great effect.

It's by no means easy to write such curricula though. What you're doing is taking a very complicated topic with expert-level information and translating it to non-expert language and ideas. It requires a sophisticated understanding of the topic, and good communication skills. By "good communication skills" I don't just mean being good at talking or writing, I mean the ability to empathize with and understand your audience's point of view, to anticipate their confusion as well as their understanding, and to handle both gracefully. It is important when writing these kind of explainers to not come off as condescending, and that can be especially hard to do when simplifying a complex topic.

I also love these videos, because they're a master class in how to communicate effectively.

If they ended the legacy system they could kiss all donations from millionaire and billionaire alumni goodbye. In the first place, this whole "racial diversity" thing is a diversion in order to maintain their legacy system. Can't accuse them of being elitist and exclusionary if they regularly admit a quota of non-legacy applicants deliberately selected for racial diversity.

Ivy league schools have finite space for new students, you can't really fix this with more money. In the first place these schools don't need more money, they're some of the richest institutions in the country and only growing richer: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-17/ivy-leagu...

So I think a policy fix is in order.

>Formalize it into combat sports, with rules, referees, and medical personnel on staff.

So, what I'm hearing is, we need to bring back dueling.

Ditto. I have no idea why bookmarks are so hard for some people to use. RAM is far more limited than regular storage, and bookmarks are minuscule in size compared to browser tabs. This "problem" was solved decades ago and yet I still see tab-hoarders everywhere.

A modern-day Akhetaten?