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I think it largely comes from a lack of empathy that has been cultivated for a while now through the loss of social cohesion. It seems like across the board (families, friends, local communities, spouses etc), people are suffering socially and turn to insular groups on social media to cope.

Aren't they basically being kept alive by Google at this point? Almost 90% of their revenue is from that one deal at it has felt like they have been more concerned with other initiatives for a while now.

I have noticed that there has been a kind of resurgence in older digital cameras that used ccd sensors and different sensor filters compared to contemporary models. A lot of people feel like new cameras now are almost clinical in how they take pictures and because of that they lack personality that older, quirkier cameras had, a similar argument to why some vintage glass is desirable despite being technically inferior to what you can get now.

IIRC New York is also going in that direction as their DA recently announced similar policies.

Clearly I do not have the level of understanding to have any idea what is going on, but the fact that this is happening is so many major metro areas in the United States seems completely absurd to me. Is it just a case of the criminal justice system completely buckling under strain?

A similar thread could be the proliferation of literature meant to help identify and condemn witches with the invention of the printing press, which greatly influenced the witch hunt moral panic that followed.

In contrast, telephones don't amplify messages in the same way, and radio had the drawback of being temporary since broadcasts couldn't easily be recorded and distributed like pamphlets and books.

"Trust the science" hasn't made people more rational, it has made "science" more dogmatic. I wonder what governments and the media will latch onto once they have eroded the trust in science, because there aren't many other trustworthy institutions left.

I think there is a misunderstanding here, I'm not involved in any web3 stuff I am just discussing it. I think whether or not you or I think it is a good idea or not is irrelevant because the reality is that there are people that are working on things because they think they are good ideas, and there are people investing in those things similarly, even things you would consider ethically questionable. It happens and will continue to happen.

Facebook doesn't need to build it all themselves, they just have to make the platform that everyone else will want to build on, just like what all of the current tech giants have done for the past 20 years. The idea isn't about chasing trends (or even something specific like a "metaverse"), it is seeing where innovation in happening and hopefully avoiding further concentration of power in the future of the internet.

Also turning down money for yourself is one thing, but turning it down for your employees and everyone else involved is different.

The big company isn't taking over, the big company is making the thing so they own it. The point was that having a similar distributed solution takes power away from the big company because it provides an option for users to choose if the big companies implementation becomes too onerous.

No that isn't what I am saying, I am simply saying that there appears to be trends in the way technology is going to be developed and used. Facebook wasn't the first to think of a metaverse, but they are a big player in how it will develop based entirely on how big they are. Money has already increasingly become digitized and will continue to trend that way long before any central bank digital currency gets developed.

The point is that nobody knows what the future tools of the internet will be, they can only see trends and act on those. Most are probably stupid and most will probably be useless, but innovation will inevitably happen. Its fine if you think places like facebook can have the metaverse to themselves, just like it is fine for people to think they shouldn't.

I think the idea is that there are entities like facebook/ meta who believe that the metaverse is going to be a big thing, so if a "metaverse" is going to exist and see adoption, most people would much rather have it not be under the sole control of a corporation like facebook like most of the services on the web right now. Similarly, digital currencies are going to eventually become mainstream, and there are similar concerns about how central banks will implement them. In cases like these, having an second option that isn't controlled by some powerful institution could help democratize how they get implemented and used. If you dismiss it, then you are just leaving it to these large institutions to make the rules like they previously have, they have the power and resources to out compete, buy or snuff out any traditional competition.

In what way is crypto not anathema already? HN has basically been dumpstering it for over a decade now at every opportunity, the general public considers it some imaginary money ponzi scheme scam, over the last year people are laughing at the stupidity of things like NFTs and meme altcoins. It was only very recently that anyone in finance has even begun to consider it anything but a complete joke. Of the people that don't consider it an outright scam, probably 90% of those people are insufferable cryptobros or scammers who latch onto the buzzword, who make hating cryptocurrencies very easy.

I wouldn't be surprised if all of the media attention it gets is mostly because of how much most everyone hates it. It is the thing that tech inclined people love to hate watch.

I think most of the ire towards NFTs and the greater cryptocurrency space in general is misattributed to the technology instead of the human behavior (specifically the audacious and immoral) that influences some of how it has been used. When people think about the cryptocurrency space, nobody actually cares about developers, they care about the scams and the insufferable cryptobros and their memes which dominate every headline and every large social space related cryptocurrencies.

The real headline most of these criticisms related to is probably closer to how deplorable people will act when they are capable of separating themselves from the costs and responsibilities of their actions.

Yeah that was what I thought too, but I don't have a full enough understanding to definitively say if IBM had any culpability or not.

It wasn't necessarily just IBM's fault either, it was complete incompetence by the government who continuously pushed the change through in the face of ample evidence (and IBM's own suggestion) that it should have been delayed.

Not only did they push it through despite issues even after initial limited rollout, they made a ton of terrible decisions like to do training in house instead of from IBM as cost savings, made the new Public Service Pay Centre elsewhere for political reasons with new staff and they laid off most of the people that worked on the old system and decommissioned it so there was no going back.

It is almost the natural progression I would say. Steve Jobs talked about it with regards to Xerox in a famous interview where technology gets you to a dominant position, but marketing monetizes that position so there will be a natural progression in leadership favoring marketers who become responsible for much of the growth after a certain point over developers.

Just looking at video games, the most profitable games now aren't AAA games with super immersive graphics, worlds, stories and so on, it is the mobile gacha games with simple graphics and simple mechanics that are basically predatory in how they are able to ingrain and establish themselves into a routine while they siphon money away from a certain demographic of their user base. These days AAA games are mostly AAA in their cost to produce, few are innovative, or produce better gameplay or tell better stories than what is being made by smaller indie studios. Most are just pretty to look at if you have a beefy video card that can crank the settings up.

I assume they found much more insular communities either in the form of obscure subreddits or other communities (like here for example). It might not be the case of them actually leaving, it is just that for every user like that, there are 10000 new users who came from some place like facebook.

Reddit to me is the kind of thing where monetization methods feel like they run counter to what I consider the main value of the website is. People visit because of the communities, but advertisements and astroturfing erodes that by making the communities more and more inauthentic. The problem is that advertising is where the money is, they aren't going to survive on reddit golds. So it seems like the path they have been on for the past decade has been to both grow enough and change their demographics such that the majority of their demographic is less discerning to advertisements and astroturfing, and to generate engagement through communities that enable that sort of advertisement.

Now I suspect they are trying to transition towards somehow deriving value as a hub for what are now cult like communities that stan and provide PR for powerful groups like various corporations, media conglomerates, sporting leagues and franchises, political ideologies and so on. Those are the communities that feed off drama and hype that social media has learned will drive the most engagement. They sprinkle it in with other innocuous things like cute pets or viral tik tok reposts (and the other subreddits that are actually very good) to make it not seem as egregious as it really is and hope that most people continue to believe that it is the same organic "front page of the internet" that it had become ever since Digg decided to kill itself many years ago.

Much like almost everything else from that time, they simply just outgrew and replaced their core demographic with a group that are much easier to exploit.

Depression is like a catchall term to represent symptoms that could have any number of causes, which is why treatment is very difficult and inconsistent from person to person.

A lot of the time the change in behavior is a coping mechanism rather than a cause for the depressive symptoms. They don't work out because they are so physically drained they can barely even muster up the energy to fulfill their responsibilities, or they become recluses because they believe their social connections aren't capable of supporting that level of vulnerability.

I suspect that it is more like the other way around, in that lifestyles incentivized in the developed world are rather poor at mitigating causes of depression, and by that I mean on a more fundamental, macro level instead of individual, which is why it has become so pervasive. For example, we have a fairly individualistic society, where many people have very shallow roots in their communities because of various causes of upheaval like immigration, education, employment. This makes it very difficult to get compassionate community support, which leaves mental healthcare workers to fulfill that position in a clinical manner.

As cheesy as it sounds, afterwards I sort of felt like the bad cg (and copy pasting assets) was intentional. Maybe it was meant to contrast the eva specific parts with the rest of the regularly animated sequences with human characters. The scene that made me think this way was near the end the giant Rei head exploded into a bunch of 3d eva models (about 2:20), where afterwards they decided to animate the contrasting scene with humans without 3d, which was probably so much more work that I felt it must have been intentional for some reason.

I agree too, for me it sort of boils down to don't hate the player, hate the game, and congress are the ones that make the game's rules. The game right now rewards unscrupulous behavior, so it makes sense that successful companies "get away" with doing it. As demonstrated, simply player hating doesn't do much.

Yeah you are right, it was more like getting into the black.

Sorry, I didn't mean that what I said was the origin, only that was what it was marketed as around that period, and I should clarify my context that I was talking about what it was like in Canada, where it has only relatively recently become a thing. I guess what I meant to refer to was its etymological shift from the "selling excess stock" narrative in America (which itself was just a rebranding of the previous meaning) towards becoming a global event of consumption for consumption's sake in itself.

Maybe I am wrong, but I feel like it has only been within the past couple decades that we have seen things marketed as black Friday outside of America, or sales co-opting the name for things like pre-black Friday sales, extended black friday sales and things like black Friday in summer.

It has been interesting watching the concept of Black Friday (and cyber monday) evolve over the past 20 or so years from being mostly an "American big box retailer dumping excess stock" thing to "oh boy its black Friday, time to go buy stuff!" thing. The entire event has basically been undeservingly co-opted by everyone looking to cash in on hype over an event that basically doesn't even resemble what made it a thing in the first place.

Just like how for singles day in Asia, retailers shamelessly just jack prices up beforehand to make their sale prices look like discounts. These events seem more about whipping the naive mainstream consumer into a consumption frenzy than having real deals to be excited about. While those deals still exist, they are like nuggets of gold that you have to sift through the noise to find.

iirc it is because it heavily implicates both Peter Daszak, who was the head of the UN investigation of the Lab Leak theory, who orchestrated the Lancet letter denouncing the Lab Leak theory, who has now been shown to have conducted gain of function research on bat coronaviruses at the WIV, and Fauci who provided funding for this through Daszak's EcoHeath Alliance and NHAID after there was some sort of restriction on that kind of research stateside. On top of that China is completely uncooperative with the effort and wouldn't provide any evidence to implicate themselves.

Blizzard has been the walking dead for a very long time now. They could very well be the Xerox of the video game industry. At that point of merger, they were big dogs in esports, and had the best rts, arpg, and mmo games out but they haven't done anything up to that level since then and have been completely incapable of capitalizing on their position, letting all of their advantages slip away.

They failed to capitalize on custom wc3 maps, so dota allstars spawns the moba genre with LoL, Dota2, smite, and countless others, tower defense games and other maps all spin off to make their own games. They make SC2's custom map functionality worse which cripples any chance for capturing further innovation.

They completely torpedo e sports with the release of SC2 which many consider just inferior to SC:BW, completely ignore WoW arena, or any kind of innovation at all with WoW, only releasing uninspired expansions to further milk addicts. Now players have gotten bored enough to jump ship to FFxiv and they are losing their cash cow. Lets not forget the entirely forgettable Warcraft movie too.

Even Overwatch was supposed to kill cs:go but it is basically treading water now, especially since the sequel was delayed and Jeff Kaplan has left. The pro league is a joke compared to the big names. HOTS was abruptly abandoned. Hearthstone was basically their only great success (but I assume is stagnating like everything else now), without it they basically have nothing which is why they have turned to remakes recently (and have failed spectacularly with wc3r and had to outsource d2r in response). They basically have nothing substantial until d4 or Overwatch 2, both of which were delayed until 2023 at the earliest. Now with all the workplace culture scandals they are hemorrhaging talent on top of everything and have effectively lost their position as one of the most desirable studios to work for in the industry.

I don't think Blizzard knows how to make good games anymore, that part died long ago.

I am not familiar with the specifics, but when I lived there last year the cheapest nvmo plans would offer 20gb data for ~2-3k yen/mo, while main infrastructure carriers would be 2-3x that, but recently Rakuten has become rich enough to just build out their own network, and I assume combined with government pressure, within the last year they have all rolled out value plans that are around 20gb for ~3k yen.

It's free advertising at this point, people are memeing them into relevance.

I think the best part is the dance you do when looking for a therapist where you try to say you really need help, but you have to temper that severity by saying that you aren't in such bad shape that you are suicidal for fear that they commit you to protocol or something.

In reality mental healthcare feels like only a slight step up from antiquated methods from days long gone. Trying the medication roulette is like spending months at a time throwing darts blindfolded to see if anything helps, hurts or does nothing at all. Waiting months to see professionals who are burned out or just trying their best to not be completely overwhelmed by the demand but are unable to give meaningful care because of how overwhelmed they are. Or not even being able to see a therapist at all because it is cost prohibitive. And then consider basically having to do that on the side while you have your other obligations that you have to tend to. I wouldn't be surprised if only a fraction of people who need help get it, and of that fraction, only a fraction of them see a benefit. It basically boils down to society not caring, or barely caring at most.

In the end I suspect that the efficacy of mental healthcare has its limits, after all it is like trying to fix people after they have been broken, which is way harder than supporting people before they break, but that depends on social structures and support groups that are increasingly weak and strained.

No you are absolutely correct, I was just illustrating the disconnect between what people think they are communicating and what it actually comes across as.

There is a degree of nuance that is definitely lost when people say to trust the science, which is to say that the rigorous process is what is generally trusted, but that isn't how it is communicated which is why "trusting the science" is probably a slogan that does more harm than benefit. For example it is sort of tone deaf to say that now, after how science experts have handled the first part of the pandemic, or how science has been used to justify things like the oversubscribing of opioids, or what they have said regarding nutrition (sugars vs fats), or carbon emissions and even smoking in the past. Politicizing science taints science more than it benefits politicians, but since they don't bear the costs of that erosion of trust, they will continue to politicize it.