Just because mixedCase does not find captcha pictures to be depressing does not necessarily mean that mixedCase has problems with emotional intelligence. I have no major issues with emotional intelligence as far as I can tell and I also do not find captcha pictures to be depressing. Maybe I would if I looked at them for hours for some reason, but I do not, and certainly the idea of them being "unbearably" depressing strikes me as quite extreme. I understand the author's points about the lack of people, the strange angles and so on and I am sure that if for some reason I had to live in a strangely-angled reality full of roads and gray buildings and devoid of people, that I would find it unpleasant. But I do not have to live in such a reality - I barely even glance at any given captcha, then I click some parts of it and move on.
The way that the author describes the captcha images reminds me of the idea of "liminal space" - a concept that relates to a certain kind of eerie sensation but is perhaps most familiar to people in the form of art that seeks to evoke this sensation and makes normally familiar things like shopping malls and schools instead look eerie. Often simply photographing such places without any people in the pictures does the trick. I do see the eerieness in the captcha pictures but again, for it to really affect me I would have to focus on them for much longer than I actually do. The author, for whatever reason, has become particularly interested in captcha images, but until I read this article at least, I was not.
It seems to me that Indians on average cared a lot more about independence than Americans on average care about freedom from the government spying on them, so I am not sure that Snowden coming back to America would really change much. I think that Snowden has already done more for Americans' freedom than almost anyone else in the world has done and I think that it is understandable if he would rather continue to live outside America rather than risk himself for the hope of changing things further. His initial revelations faded from the media spotlight within months. Even the potentially explosive Epstein case and Epstein's death faded from the media spotlight within months. It is hard for me to imagine that Snowden coming back to America would be likely to accomplish much more than what his initial revelations accomplished. Plus, it is possible that his continued freedom will actually inspire more future activists than him losing it would.
Low-censorship forums tend to be 90% idiocy, 10% really interesting and accurate takes on reality that are suppressed elsewhere. Often they also have a lot of brilliant humor. So I would not say that they are purely idiotic, just largely idiotic. To me it is often worth it to dig through the idiocy in search of the awesome content.
I agree that supermarket fruits and vegetables often seem to lack in flavor but to my taste, Red Delicious is not worse than any other supermarket apple. All supermarket apples, even the sour ones, pretty much just taste like slightly different variants of sugar water to me - the sourness of the sour apples just rides on top of the sugar water taste without really displacing it. I do not know why Red Delicious specifically has been singled out as the target of multiple critical articles given that one could just as accurately write such articles about all sorts of produce. Do most people really think that other supermarket apples taste any better than Red Delicious?
I feel like I should chime in here. I love going out and partying. I love meeting new people face-to-face. Yet I strongly, strongly prefer working remote as opposed to going to an office. I do not need an office to supply me with human contact - I can go find human contact on my own. Indeed, I much prefer finding human contact on my own rather than at the office because at the office, I have to be careful and somewhat repressed if I do not want to endanger my job, whereas in many other social contexts I can be much freer and truer to myself.
Would they still need to publish legalese if they made it so that updates and sending of error reports required the user to click a button every time, and under the button there was some text explaining exactly what data was going to be sent?
Maybe I am being uncharitable, but my initial reaction is: What is all this verbiage? Just make software that does not phone home. Audacity does not need to phone home to implement any of the features that people actually use it for, so make it not phone home. There is no need for legalese or complex explanations. Whatever you think you are going to get out of getting more user data, just drop it. You do not need it. Just make the software not phone home, end of story.
Like I said, though, maybe I am being uncharitable. Am I missing something?
The Economist really misrepresents Turchin's theory by framing it as an issue of there being too many "brainy" people. Turchin's theory has more to do with overproduction of university degree holders, not with overproduction of smart people. Those are two different things. As far as I know, Turchin is not advocating for maintaining some sort of exploited underclass. More than 30% of U.S. adults have at least a bachelor's degree - about double the fraction that had one 40 years ago - which means that a bachelor's degree has limited value as a badge for gaining entrance to the higher strata of society. Note that this is independent of the question of whether it is good or bad for university degrees to be badges for entrance to the higher strata of society. In any case, the relative social value of a university education has massively dropped over the years.
Sure, but why should someone who goes to university and studies, say, literature for 4 years feel more entitled to owning a house than someone who, say, did not go to university and instead read and studied literature on his own for 4 years?
I think that the Economist headline misrepresents Turchin's theory. The issue is not that there are too many smart people, it is that there are too many university graduates who feel entitled to a limited set of niches in the upper strata of society. Those are two different things.
There is a huge difference there though. Teaching people to read actually does make them enormously more educated. On the other hand, putting people through university does not necessarily make people even slightly more educated. Most people I know who are university graduates are not what I would call educated in any real sense and I doubt that they were significantly more educated when they left university than when they entered it.
BTW, I did not downvote you. I do not know who did, but personally I do not downvote.
I think that the native Americans would have managed to learn how to use European technology just fine, but I think that it would have been hard for them to build the necessary infrastructure to mass-produce it in time. Maybe if they had managed to ally with one group of Europeans long enough to hold the others off and give them the needed time, it would have worked.
True, but from what I understand the Europeans would probably have won anyway. In 1500 AD, indigenous Americans had about the same level of technological development that Europeans had had in 1500 BC, so I suspect that unfortunately even had diseases not played a role, it probably would just have been a matter of time before the Europeans managed to bring over enough people to overrun the Americas. It would have taken longer but I doubt that the indigenous Americans would have been able to adopt European technology fast enough and on a large enough scale to beat the Europeans back.
Now on the other hand, if Europe had suffered something like 50%+ death from American diseases while indigenous Americans suffered much lower death tolls from European disease - in other words, the reverse of what actually happened - then I figure that all bets would have been off. In that timeline maybe the indigenous Americans would have had enough room to maneuver that they would have been able to adopt European technologies in time to defend their lands.
If it is so easy for US companies to hire good remote developers en masse from places where it is cheaper to live than it is in the major US tech hubs, then why did US companies not start doing it years ago? Are the people who run software companies so cautious that it took mass enforced work from home to make them decide that hiring cheap developers remotely could actually work? I have some doubts about this. Maybe hiring good cheap remote developers is not as easy as it seems.
He may have been an office bully, an adulterer, and possibly even someone who had sex with underage girls on Epstein's island. However, as far as I am concerned, opposing diversity efforts is a good thing and should not be mixed up with those other things as if it were a negative. If America wants to make up for its legacy of slavery and racism, it should do so by directly and forthrightly aiding descendants of slaves through well-defined government programs, not by fostering a thought-policing culture that forces companies to indefinitely hire people based on qualifications other than merit.
I started using Notes a lot at some point because it is just right there in the Dock, it has an attractive design, and unlike with text files, it is easy to just drop images into it. Problem is, now I have probably thousands of notes in Notes but as far as I can tell there is no easy way to export them to text format or HTML or any other simple format. I recently tried a third-party app that is supposedly able to do export from Notes to text for you but the exported text files lacked the original note last-modified times and a bunch of the first lines of the original notes were also missing. I wish that Notes itself made it easy to export to text files - I would be ok with not having images exported. It would be really nice to back up all my notes to plain text rather than being locked in to some sort of Apple cloud nonsense. Notes does have a built-in export to PDF feature, but it seems that you can only export one note at a time that way and also, the note last-modified times get dropped on export.
So a word of caution for other Notes users - Notes has its advantages, but if you ever end up with a large number of notes and you want to copy them outside of the Apple ecosystem, it will probably not be straightforward.
"rules-based order" is one of those phrases like "rogue state" and "international community" that is usually though not always used by mouthpieces and fellow travelers of the American hegemony for propaganda purposes. There is a certain social group of bureaucrats, journalists, think-tankers, and various other sorts of nomenklatura who swirl around Washington D.C. and seem to suck these loaded terms into themselves along with their mothers' milk. They do not necessarily intend to use these phrases as propaganda - often they use these terms because they genuinely buy into the ideology behind them - but the ideology itself makes those terms propaganda nonetheless.
I think that statements like this are usually written more for political than for scientific reasons. Yes, "races do not exist" is true in the sense that 19th century classifications made by racist Europeans do not do a good job of mapping the reality of human genetic diversity. However, race does exist in the sense that, for example, two randomly selected people from China are likely to be closer to each other genetically than either is to a randomly selected person from England - and not only that, but it is also likely that the average person or, for that matter, computer algorithm will do a fairly good job of guessing people's genetic distance based on their visual appearance, at least for relatively large genetic distances.
I feel that too often, politically motivated people pick up on such academic statements and use them to justify implying that the very concept of racial difference is inherently empty or wrong and perhaps should even be tabooed. It is a bit of a motte and bailey technique: you first say, "Look at these statements - see, science rejects the very concept of race - any discussion of racial difference is thus unscientific and in any case what are you, some sort of bigot?" And if anyone pushes you more closely on the matter you can just retreat to the actually justifiable position, "Oh well of course I did not mean that there are no identifiable patterns in human genetic diversity, that would be absurd, I just meant that old European racial classifications are inaccurate."
Interesting. I do not have aphantasia. Actually it is easy for me to visually imagine. However, trying out this Ganzfield flicker for more than 5 minutes did nothing for me. Maybe I will try again later in a darker room and for a longer duration.
I am surprised that there is even as much coverage as there is. We are still getting basically the same footage of big deserts full of broken rock from Mars that we were in the 1970s, it is just in higher resolution now. There is not much reason for a person to get particularly excited about yet another Mars rover unless that person is interested in some pretty technical stuff. And with a Chinese rover, US audiences do not even get a nationalist thrill from news about it. Basically, unless you are into science, the reality of Mars is kind of boring. It is like Antarctica - there can be a lot of drama in getting there and surviving there and traveling around its rough conditions, but actual footage from there is almost entirely just very similar-looking vast white plains.
Well yes, that assumption is incorrect, but I am not making that assumption. When I said skimpy outfits I had in mind skimpy outfits worn in the context of the wearer wanting to attract attention. Maybe I should have been more precise, but I assumed that my audience would understand what I meant without me having to spell it out. Also, when I wrote my original post I had two different things in mind - intentional grabbing of attention, which is what the person I was replying to had in mind, but that post also made me think of unintentional grabbing of attention: for example, would that person be annoyed by just some random airplane passing by the beach even if it does not carry an ad? How much does intention matter? Etc.
I am not limiting it to attractive women, that is just the example I used. I think that extrapolating the idea to attractive men, to unattractive people in skimpy outfits, and so on makes sense.
By that logic, attractive women who go out in public wearing skimpy outfits are committing theft - but I would not want to make dressing sexily and then going out in public illegal. I think there is something about the airplane banner at the beach and the slick hyper-calculated megacorp advertisement that pops up on the website you visit that is annoying for reasons other than theft - it is not so much the grabbing of one's attention that is annoying, but rather what grabs it and what the intentions behind it are and what context it happens in. Part of what makes many ads suck, I imagine, is that people deliberately design them to be unpleasant - which is why so many of them are garish. They stand out in part because they actually are meant to be annoying. In which case it is not so much the grabbing of attention that is the problem as what grabs it and what the intention is - in the case of the deliberately garish ad, your attention is grabbed in a deliberately unpleasant manner by a team of total strangers who work for YetAnotherSlickModernCorporation, want only profit, and are probably not offering you anything that you want.
The Presidential election popular vote margin has not gone over 10 million votes in over three decades now, in a country that has averaged about 300 million residents over that time span. These are not margins that support the idea that the population as a whole skews left as much as mainstream media skews left.