dbspin

The Aztecs lacked horses and attack dogs. The Spanish by contrast had perfected combat with both. Both proved decisive over and over again. You're correct in asserting that guns weren't decisive - although initially he noise and visual display of firearms were a significant factor in confusing and frightening the Aztecs (especially the common people and subjugated indigenous groups).

There's no mystery here. The Aztecs ruled brutally over dozens of other indigenous groups, they practised slavery and human sacrifice. When the Spanish showed impressive military equipment and the implication (when reinforcements arrived, albeit in small numbers) that they represented a powerful external military force, ancestral opponents who'd been subjugated by the Aztec empire were quick to throw in their lot.

> an industry body that exists to protect the IP of artists for the mutual benefit of artists and publishers.

This is the most unintentionally hilarious misunderstanding of what the RIAA does, and the power relationship between artists and publishers I've read in years. In practice the RIAA exists to maintain the copyright monopoly of a few major labels. Rent seeking from the non-artist owned catalogues of the enormous majority of musicians who never 'recoup' their initial record deal.

> While it's seductive to carve the world up into goodies and baddies, it doesn't make it true.

It's far more seductive (since it's the default) to assume class relations don't exist, and wealth distribution is meritocratic. There may not be 'goodies and baddies', but there absolutely are rentiers and workers, billionaires and plebs.

All the major labels are public companies. Which means it's the very same people - the investment class, who claim ownership and extract wealth from say Warner and Open AI (should it make any money - obviously the whole house of cards could come down first).

Does ones world view get upgraded to oil paint if one acknowledges that it's the same class of people - and in many cases literally the same people, PE firms and family offices - profiting from 2000s era record industry profits and on the hook for / in line to profit from Open AI, Anthropic and the rest if they IPO?

The practical isn't being given due consideration here. We spend the enormous majority of our time in the built environment. Every single aspect of our homes and cities (from the size of doorways to the level of countertops) are designed around median human size and form. It's ludicrous to suggest these will change to accommodate the need of personal service robots - which already face a host of barriers to adoption, from privacy to cost to reliability etc. If there ever are to be general purpose domestic robots, they will absolutely be 'humaniform' to use Azimov's terminology. Sure a large hotel or hospital or facility can adapt itself to the shape and needs of more specialised machines, but we're not doing that in our homes. Nor are we likely to return to a jetson's vision of dozens of separate functionally distinct machines in the home. We've been doing precisely the opposite for decades - moving more distinct functions to combined devices as housing gets smaller and more expensive.

Death Stranding 1 at least was a fairly large commercial success. 5 million copies sold, critical darling, and a hugely original put at doing something new.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Stranding#Reception

This may be the case - although none of us have access to the real figures.

It's also impossible to judge success relative to marketing budget, how well the game was pushed by Sony etc.

Clearly a critical success and an objectively good game however.

Having lived in Berlin, FLINTA only apartments are a significant minority (up to half) of spaces seeking housemates through publicaly available groups on platforms like Facebook (as opposed to websites like WG-Gesucht). So there's quite a significant material impact. Living in Ireland currently, more and more arts workshops, funding opportunities, arts mixers and the like are FLINTA only or FLINTA preferred (terminology can differ). Ditto club nights, but that's whatever. This is a real and growing issue if you're not a member of the approved groups, but have to function in those environments.

The fact that you can't perceive the equivalence is instructive. Group A generalises individual issues with members of Group B and forms an ideology of blame and exclusion. But Group B was evil all along, cry Group A. Group B have become deranged cry Group A. And so it goes.

I should have also mentioned DaVinci also heavily uses CUDA on Windows, and metal on Mac. I'm assuming the functions implemented in these frameworks do have fallbacks on Vulkan or similar, but I doubt they're as optimised. I know there are some issues with Resolve on Linux for example. Any halfway decent Nvidia card with enough VRAM should work fine - i.e.: a 30 series card is grand. But I'd be skeptical integrated graphics would have the horsepower for denoising or a host of other build in effects. Rendering would likely be slow also. Although this is the least important element of the process on modern hardware.

Which of his ideas didn't stick? Pretty sure the guy hasn't had a failure in recent memory.

https://www.imdb.com/list/ls596355504/

It's almost as if people can have a variety of opinions, and support institutions and states they don't agree with in every dimension. 'The left' is a wildly broad church, comparing 'the new yorker' with say 'the socialist workers party' adds more heat than light. Similarly 'Europe' is a very big and populous place, as is the subset of it that's in the EU. Most EU citizens very much oppose attacks on encryption, the digital millennium copyright act etc. Those are pieces of legislation pushed by the European Commission - a body that is not democratically elected.

Your line about capitalised 'Antifa' suggest an unserious lack of familiarity with left-wing groups and causes.

Resolve is extremely RAM hungry. For 4K video I wouldn't want to be editing with less than 12GB of VRAM. I'm guessing that excludes most integrated graphics.

Source - I work as a professional editor (amongst other things). Please commenters, do not come at me with your five minute low bit rate projects that required only a LUT and some contrast and 'worked fine' in DaVinci on a potato.

The irony being that a lot of older practical VFX artists aren't able to tell when CGI is terrible. They're often so enamored with what the tech enables, that they're the last to see how quickly it becomes shoddy. Not sure what the equivalent of the hedonic treadmill is for CG, but it ages very rapidly, versus the best practical effects which maintain a charming physicality - even when they're no longer convincing.

They're enormously risk averse, and realised the infrastructure (and perhaps more important external dependency cost of building out their own training data centres). Now that the utility of the technology is clearer, and OpenAI amongst others have proven it's not only Nvidia and Google that can build a stack capable of training frontier models - I think we may find that the beast waketh from slumber.

The thing that doesn't get written about is that precisely the same situation occurs for women. Decentering men is equivalent to MGTOW. The torrent of misandrist content on social media utterly dwarfs the amount of 'red pill' / manosphere or similar content. It's mainstream in a way outright misogynistic content hasn't been for decades. Worse still, it's almost impossible to have this discussion without the immediate repost of 'but actually men are terrible', or some other such nonsense.

There's a very old fashioned 'battle of the sexes' being pushed by algorithmic content, and it's having visible toxic effects on the capacity of people to socialise, form relationships, engage in social reproduction and function normally in society. There's a vast torrent of such poison aimed at both men and women. Pretending it's only occurring to men, or that only men are being radicalised, is refusing to engage with the problem.

The comments section of literally every mainstream video on instagram reels, tiktok and the like that in any way touches on gender, masculinity, femininity etc - isn't dominated by misogynistic comments and hasn't been for years. But rather thousands of 'not all men, but always a man', 'yaas goddess', 'men aren't lonely enough', and countless other shibboleths.

The normalisation of FLINTA only spaces (and accommodation) and the like offline has brought these dynamics into the real world in ways that further isolate and dehumanise.

This was true right when Weimar Germany fell to the Nazis also. There's a degree of inertia to politics. We're also talking about a region of Germany that has been economically depressed for decades, with an unemployment rate twice the national average.

Sadly we're all internet people, and have been for about 15 years. If you mean people on Hacker News... Then yes, obviously they're by and large better informed about the reality of surveillance, government and corporate, than most. Nothing theoretical about any of it. Unless we fail to remember the content of Snowdon's leaks.

I find your comment bewildering. It seems so focused on the perceived effect of an issue that it leaves no room for the actual material effect of the issue.

Frankly I couldn't give two hoots about the impact on sales of future robotic devices of the 'PR problem' of their perceived privacy intrusions. By contrast the actual danger of their real material privacy intrusions is deeply concerning. Similar to Ring - or more pertinently Flock cameras.

The media discourse is interesting, but only sociologically. The fact that these devices are actually spying is significantly more pertinent.

> PR is the problem you have to overcome for people to let smart devices into their homes too.

Why on earth should real material concerns be 'overcome'? These concerns focus on real and deeply serious issues. They concern child safety, marital privacy and a host of other real issues.

> PR is the reason they even had anything to listen to.

This is factually incorrect. You're confusing the shadows in the cave for reality.

> I think you’re going to have to PR challenges getting people to welcome robots into their homes.

I think it's important that someone point out this isn't a 'PR problem'. It's a practical resistance to commodified surveillance. All these domestic robotics companies train on video of users homes, many sell such data, each and every one are a vector for state domestic state surveillance. Not to mention criminal hackers, stalkers and others with an interest in who is at home when and what precisely they are doing. Short of having non-internet connected, locally processing domestic robots - something unlikely to exist in the foreseeable future - they are a privacy nightmare. Bad as google home, alexa and such devices are for privacy - a walking, controllable, camera and set of mechanical arms running loose in a home is infinitely worse.

> Prediction markets -- or really any price system -- aggregate the best available information about the future.

The best information available to those participating in the market (in good faith).

> Now, say that you somehow knew that this coin wasn't a fair coin

So insider trading?

I appreciate the verbose response, but the original comment implied that prediction markets literally predict the future... Which as you've stated they do not.

I'd contest the idea that they aggregate the best information too. Since they seem highly amenable to manipulation, the metagame of convincing the market that a given future is more or less likely seems more profitable.

Confidently stating a given markets prediction is wrong would involve accurately predicting the future... If one could do that consistently, a prediction market would be unnecessary to accruing wealth and power.

That's an idiotic premise. There's no circumstance in which it wouldn't be better to load in the missing data computationally.

> the claim that prediction markets do not accurately predict the future. It's trivial to prove that this claim is false, because if it were true, it would be very easy for anyone to make a huge amount of money on prediction markets

I'm not intimately familiar with prediction markets (I avoid gambling), but can you explain how this is the case? If the market unpredictably incorrect, then shouldn't it be difficult / impossible to predict precisely which bets will be wrong in a way that would allow you to profit from them?

Ultimately isn't it the case that all they're doing (at least from a prediction point of view) is aggregating (better or worse informed) guesses? Excepting outright corruption / insider trading of course. This might tell you a great deal about what the set of users of a given prediction market expect as an outcome for a given prediction, but it doesn't tell you anything about the future itself. Any more than the stock market (fails to) tell us to pull out money out the day before a crash.

Expert as a stochastic parrot may be in impersonating expertise, grammatical or otherwise, I don't see how citing it is relevant.

Always, but perhaps not in this case. I wasn't correcting spelling, but coherence. The comment I replied to includes a sentence that is both ambiguous and non-nonsensical. It doesn't seem to be an issue of grammar, but rather clarity of thought.

> Then maybe it's time you look up how unemployment statistics are calculated in Switzerland and you will be surprised that you counted into them.

First off the sentence simply doesn't make sense. Specifically 'you will be surprised that you counted into them.' I assume the commenter meant something like 'you will be surprised that you were included in those statistics. But it's highly ambiguous since 'you counted into them' isn't sensical.

Trying to parse it from context, they could be suggesting a reader would be surprised at how the statistics are calculated, at who is included, at who is not included, or at how similarly they are calculated when compared to other countries.

"Then maybe it's time you look up how unemployment statistics are calculated in Switzerland and you will be surprised that you counted into them."

Not to criticise, but just to point out that this sentence doesn't quite make sense in English, and it's not immediately apparent what you mean. The sentence has to precisely opposed interpretations.

Strongly disagree. Most crimes are crimes of opportunity. Most 'pervs' don't start out that way either. Detecting increasingly easy to conceal sousveillance devices is probably essential for any kind of normative public sphere to continue to exist.

Antifa isn't an organisation at all. It's a loosely defined ideology / set of tactics that leftist movements (everything from black block kids to local democratically organised spaces) sometimes use or follow.

Doesn't do bike routes at all in my country (Ireland) for some reason.