6,822 karma · joined March 31, 2009
Now, there are certainly other axis along which you can judge a war.
All I know is that they worked hard on this game and found plenty of people who enjoy playing it a lot and that’s that. Doesn’t mean they are wrong, doesn’t mean I’m wrong in bouncing off. I do think it is interesting to explore why I bounced off and others might not – I can identify with many of the negative comments here, especially the 10,000 bowls of oatmeal one regarding the procedural generation which probably was the one thing I was most fascinated by when I decided to install the game – but there are so many other systems and elements in this game that if you more into those I can easily see why the game works much better for you.
Also, that essay is a real banger.
I think we should talk about the Bauhaus and where they were coming from. Industrial mass production allowed for cheaply mass produced ornaments during Historicism. To me it is easily understandable why the Bauhaus wanted to find a different approach to how to deal with industrialization and how to incorporate it into architecture, going away from mere imitation and copying. I think it’s extremely fascinating that those ideas took root in the Soviet Union (creating utilitarian living spaces on a mass scale) and the USA (office buildings).
Many contemporary artists, however, have very little or nothing to do with Bauhaus and its ideas at all. There is just no link connecting them … and while the Soviet Union did employ industrialized mass production to build living spaces without ornaments its art was more often than not Socialist Realism, which is a different beast altogether.
But I do recommend you read Asylum for the Homeless by Adorno because I think you might like it: “Actually one can no longer dwell any longer. The traditional dwellings, in which we grew up, have taken on the aspect of something unbearable: every mark of comfort therein is paid for with the betrayal of cognition; every trace of security, with the stuffy community of interest of the family. The newly functionalized ones, constructed as a tabula rasa, are cases made by technical experts for philistines, or factory sites which have strayed into the sphere of consumption, without any relation to the dweller: they slap the longing for an independent existence, which anyway no longer exists, in the face.”
You cannot and will never be able to hide millions of drones in your backyard. That’s the relevant difference here. And that is not a mere quantitative difference, that is a qualitative difference that fundamentally changes the situation.
Which is to say: there are significant downsides to such an approach to the extent that this is fit for a spooky story or an abysmal horror flick but not compatible with actual reality.
Cheap drones do change a lot about how wars are fought, sure. They are in that sense extremely relevant. But that does not mean that your scenario or similar scenarios like it are remotely realistic.
Put another way: Cheap drones are not nuclear weapons (which actually did lead to a earth shattering change in global power dynamics, though I would argue even their transformative hasn’t been absolute).
Cheap drones are more like machine guns, tanks or airplanes. “Mere” new technology. Obviously hugely important and impactful, not earth shattering.
(As for whether AI might be earth shattering, I do not know nor do I even want to get into that question here.)
There is no reason why there has to be a negative effect of text watermarking.
My view on exercise is that it should give me something in the moment. That also helps keep me motivated.
So arduous hikes and bike tours aren’t something I do for the exercise, that’s just a nice side benefit. I do those because I want to get to exciting places or explore the world at a pace that makes sense.
I ride my exercise bike to keep in form and be able to do those hikes and bikes tours, even to go further and enable me to reach new places and do new things. Same with swimming, though that also helps me to clear my head and think about stuff. Both of those can potentially be boring, but at least I always feel amazing and energized afterwards.
Strength training is admittedly something I do almost exclusively for its long-term health benefits (and struggle the most with), though I also like feeling stronger and seeing my body change at least a tiny bit. Oh, and it’s an activity (as well as some Yoga and flexibility exercises) I do together with my partner, so it always has that social component.
Bouldering and badminton (both of which I absolutely suck at) also have that social component: it’s something I do with other people.
Oh, and then I don’t own a car, so my bike is my only means of getting from a to b and transporting things. So I automatically get moving that way and it never feels like wasted time or even exercise to me.
That’s much more than five hours per week spent exercising and very little of it is boring or feels like empty time that is merely an investment into my future. I do think that’s the trick to being and staying active. At least for me.
What are you talking about when you speak of good/best outcomes? I think especially when it comes to talking about fitness it is important to be explicit about outcomes because only with outcomes in mind can you talk about what “good” actually means.
In that context I’m a bit confused by your focus on (endurance) athletes. Their overriding goal is obviously increasing their athletic performance in a way that keeps them injury free. Their main focus aren’t health outcomes. That’s not the same. So if you focus on them you are in danger of talking past each other.
To that point: sure, those studies often have unrealistic protocols but the way (performance) athletes train is also unrealistic for most people!
If those studies are about population health they should have realistic protocols (in terms of: realistically achievable and adhered to by non-athletes, in the best case also empirically grounded in the sense of: this is a realistic range of activities non-athletes might actually engage in on a regular basis) for non-athletes.
Whether that’s a viable product I don’t know.
It’s just a sliding death scale, not a binary one. Sure, there might be steps, it might not all be linear, but still: doesn’t mean at some point doing something is pointless.
The interaction between individual behavior changes and political changes is interesting and to my mind where lots of interesting stuff happens. I’m not 100% convinced that politics is always downstream from culture and culture is downstream from individual behavior changes but I do agree that there is an interesting interaction happening that’s worth looking at and addressing.
The abolitionist in isolation certainly will not be able to abolish slavery, however their individual behavior might contribute to an atmosphere where slavery is ostracized and seen as more obviously evil by more people, thus making it easier for politicians to make political decisions that ultimately lead to the abolition of slavery.
I think that is why it is always so important for me to point out that it is certainly never wrong to individually behave in a way the limits your own individual contribution to climate change. I mostly have a problem when that‘s the end or even the main focus of it. Climate protection to my mind is most effective when it is tightly coupled to clear political demands. Too often individual behavior changes are used as action terminators. My impression is that individual action is often presented (as here) as a complete solution to climate change when it is anything but.
Political change is needed to achieve any of this. Changing your individual behavior or even the individual behavior of everyone you know – while certainly not wrong! – won’t solve this.
This is like trying to abolish slavery in 19th century US by not owning slaves and trying your very best to not buy anything that involves slave labor … laudable, but not a way to abolish slavery.
In that sense it is never to late. We can always do something to limit the damage. It’s just that it gets harder and harder and some damage becomes irreversible at a certain point.
Had we done more 25 years ago it would all have been cheaper, easier and led to less damage overall. That doesn’t mean doing something now is suddenly not worth it.
That said, renewable sources are so cheap and consequently economically appealing that not even the incredibly dumb Trump admin can stop them.
The US has been consistently tactically excellent. Strategically this is a blundering loss.
If you strategically aim your awesome unmatched powers the wrong way you can still lose.
Empirical evidence through observation or self-reporting, sampling in some meaningful way, would obviously be preferable but is also often just not practical.
Guessing at numbers to check whether your thesis even works with some plausible assumptions is a meaningful first step and to my mind a good way to reason through something like this and make it discussable.
A possible outcome of such an exercise is also that for your thesis to work out you need to make wildly implausible assumptions, so that helps you to discard that thesis.
From my perspective this is a very useful way to approach a hypothesis where empirical evidence is scarce or at least hard to get. No reason to dismiss it immediately – especially since the fact that those are guesses was never hidden.
This is actually mostly down to constraints: even if you suck you will suck in some coherent consistent way that will give your music videos more structure than this mess.
Those videos are just nihilistic despair.
Maybe there are some nooks and crannies where this tech can be employed and actually save time/budget. Maybe. But what does not work is to just take the output and use it. There is nowhere near enough precision there.
Smartphones can read that chip and the state as well as private businesses could in principle use this to do age verification – even the super minimal version of age verification that just asks for a certain age threshold and gets a binary response whether that threshold is met. (Which to me if we can achieve it is the perfect solution.)
The infrastructure is there and since 2017 those RFID chips are even actived by default when new ID cards are issued. (The cards are valid for ten years so nearly all ID cards have those active chips.)
The biggest issue currently is a network effect one: hardly anyone is using the chip so people don’t create their initial PIN, creating a UX hurdle for adoption. (If you want to use your ID card chip you have to find your initial PIN somewhere in your documents – if you didn’t throw it away – and then create your proper PIN, you can’t just start using it.)
I can sense usage increasing but exactly because of the poor initial use UX all sorts of private alternate solutions exist that are plain worse from a privacy preserving point of view. For example ones where you film your ID card from both sides (so the hologram is visible) which just suck. (You just share everything … which is just so unnecessary.)
To change this we would need a policy that requires age verification without sharing the birthdate or any other PII.
Policy changes are needed to address this problem. It’s a political problem that needs a political solution.
At a certain point the information is simply redundant. The meaning of the naked number can and will easily be inferred from context. You don’t even notice it. Both while writing and also while reading. A proper proof reading will catch that (maybe, though I myself am actually hilariously bad at proof reading and miss obvious stuff all the time, so being able to properly proof read and catch things always seemed like a super power to me) but I don’t think this blog author does that (and I don’t really expect it? It’s fine …)
It totally get that there are people who will be endlessly annoyed by that – I’m also annoyed by people using quotation marks the wrong way. But it doesn’t really impact readability of the context is clear enough (as it obviously is in this case).
For example in Germany, splitting the bill is pretty normal, to the point where restaurants are adapted to it. Since this process adds some friction it is, however, also the case that someone will pay for everything and split afterwards (or variations on that theme).
Newer payment systems seem to have made that easier (e.g. mobile devices that allow waiters to initiate the payment for a subset of what a table had and allow for contactless payment). The older variant of that is the waiter going with you to the cash register that basically allows them to do the same bill splitting. The even older variant is the waiter breaking out paper and pencil and doing some addition (though I seem to remember waiters actually being annoyed if they had to do that, not so with the new solutions).
Basically, waiters have a list with all the items in front of them and you tell them what you had and they pick them. They can then just initiate a normal payment process and leave the rest of the table as is.
More time consuming and finicky than just someone paying everything all at once, sure, but a well worn and designed user journey you seemingly don’t have to torture those devices into making possible.
In fact, I will often be extremely apologetic when saying I want to split the bill but have noticed no eye rolls or complaints from waiters. It’s just smooth sailing. I do honestly think that was different when waiters had to do math and cross out things on bills and stuff (which I distinctly remember from my childhood/youth in the 2000s).
The only path for workers to have leverage against capital is if they work together in solidarity. There is no other path. Unions are a path towards achieving that.
Doing a job at a lower wage is giving up leverage and nonsensical on its face. But makes sense that this capital perspective is taken here …
Workers working together in solidarity is the right approach to get more power in the lopsided power dynamic between owners and workers. Owners have too much power, workers too little. Solidarity is a path towards fixing that.
Of course the US are the all-powerful juggernaut with many levers to pull to use their power. Winning battles is easy. Winning the metaphorical war is harder.
In practice this means that police won’t do anything about people wearing headphones. Wearing them is totally fine. However, if you get into an accident you might get a larger part of the blame if it’s determined that you not hearing so well contributed to the accident. (The rules of the road do have a general clause that you need to pay sufficient attention – so anything distracting might get you to shoulder more of a blame in case of an accident, even if it isn’t explicitly banned. Use common sense …)
As I said, cars are inherently quite isolating, so car-centric maniacs better try not to legislate my right to wear headphones while riding the bike aways while they sit in their sound dampened boxes, casually overtaking me with too little distance.
(I strongly suggest to never turn on noise isolation while riding the human powered kind of bike and I also recommend either turning on the pass-through mode or just putting in the earphone on the side away from the road.)