forgotoldacc

Depends on the industry. Within game development, I don't know a single person not using Blender. People who were big into Maya and 3DS a few years ago have pretty much all moved on.

Saying Evangelion isn't big is like saying Minions are some irrelevant little flick. Evangelion is quite possibly the biggest series in Japan for 3 decades running. You won't find a person who has not seen it to some extent. Evangelion goods are sold everywhere at all times. You really cannot escape it. For the biggest series in Japan to use Blender is a huge sign to the rest of the industry in one of the most risk-averse countries that yes, it's good enough.

Cloudflare has always weirded me out. Back before everyone was using it, a lot of sites would be running just fine for years, then they'd suddenly be shut down for a few days due to DDoS attacks. Then they'd proudly announce they were on cloudflare when they came back. Funny thing was I noticed sites having more frequent downtime after using moving to cloudflare.

I don't see those cloudflare pages much these days, but something about it in those early days always gave me protection money vibes. Cloudflare seemed to come out of nowhere during a wave of DDoS attacks across the internet in the late 2000s and found their way into every site. They had some incredible timing.

Every country that has slid into North Korea style total control begins with a "it won't happen here. And it'd stop before it gets that bad."

Ideally it should taste good. But elementary school lunch isn't exactly fine dining. Some shortcuts are taken and kids are often picky eaters. Salted vegetables are a step up from dinosaur shaped nuggets and pizza, so it's a better middle ground than unsalted food that goes straight to the trash.

There are countries where you can have none of those, but still visit a doctor and not worry about violent crime. The dynamics vary.

I imagine there's also some challenging work that would be fun to dig into. Being the person who can clean up Intel's problems would be quite a reputation to have.

That generation of Apple laptops was my tech awakening. I always thought of computers as tools just for office work and nothing I'd ever want to use. But one day I sat down in front of a G4 iBook and was like, man, this thing is beautiful. And it's pretty fun to use. I got an iMac a couple weeks after that and it set me on my programming career.

And just looking at that picture in the article, that keyboard is beautiful. Apple truly had some incredible design sense. It's very unfortunate how rough their design decisions have been the past few years.

A lot of cities are in the process of replacing lead pipes with plastic. Replacing them again is going to be a huge burden, especially with an increasingly aging population and fewer people to do manual labor unless we have some sort of good automation for manual labor.

With the GBA, the original GBA screen and the first gen GBA SP had very washed out colors and not saturated at all. The Mario ports to the GBA looked doubly since they desaturated their colors and were shown on a desaturated screen. I've heard that the real reason the colors were desaturated was because the first GBA model didn't have a backlight so the colors were lightened to be more visible, but I'm not quite sure that's the case. Lots of other games didn't do that.

And with the second version of the GBA SP and the GB Micro, colors were very saturated. Particularly on the SP. If anything, cranking up the saturation on an emulator would get you closer to how things looked on those models, while heavily desaturating would get you closer to the look on earlier models.

> but I think overall society grew less substantially less gullible over time.

Absolutely not. All that happened is most people became aware that "Nigerians offering you money are scammers." But they still fall for other get rich quick schemes so long as it diverges a little bit from that known pattern, and they'll confidently walk into the scam despite being warned and saying, "It's not a scam, dumbass. It's not like that Nigerian price stuff." If anything, people seem to be becoming more confident that they're in on some secret knowledge and everyone else is being scammed.

Not really. The difference is police in poorer countries can be bribed with the amount of cash you can keep in a wallet. In the US, it requires a large public donation to a political campaign or "charity". Bribes very much exist, and if you think you can't do it, that just means you're not rich enough. In poor countries too, the ones getting arrested are the ones who can't afford the bribes.

People who support the guy aren't rational. He could personally take their every cent, say they're lucky that's all he did, and he wouldn't lose a single supporter. If the military went unpaid for half a year, all his supporters in the military would shift the blame to someone else.

There are countless carbon sinks within the ocean. It finds its way into the shells of creatures (calcium carbonate) and hangs around for a very long time in solid form. And lots of creatures die/defecate, that sinks to the bottom of the sea, and much of the carbon there doesn't rise back up since not all of it is consumed.

And when you're spreading seaweed over a fish farm, a good chunk of that is flowing back out into the ocean and contributing to the cycle of carbon deposits.

https://animatingcarbon.earth/fish-the-excretion-effect-boos...

> Veramaris, a joint venture in the Netherlands and the United States, cultivated algae that produced the same omega-3 fatty acids found in fish oil, and in quantities sufficient to replace billions of forage fish.

If something like this works, it has the double benefit of pulling carbon from the air/water and turning all of the matter into food. With typical plants we grow on land, (generally) most of the plant isn't consumed so whatever carbon it stored is a waste product. In some countries, that waste is just burned and sent back into the atmosphere. But basically 100% of algae's mass is consumable.

If that doesn't seem crazy, then that shows just how insanely expensive college has become on average these days.

Seems like the problem was the US medical industry getting everyone hooked on opiates. The US even prescribes fentanyl for injuries, a temporary problem, and gets people addicted to the strongest stuff in the world for life.

But maybe the hospitals and American drug corps are all covert Venezuelan operations. Probably not, though. This makes as much sense as invading Iraq for a terrorist attack carried out by a rich Saudi Arabian family.

You thinking killing some random people thousands of miles away is some sort of step in the right direction is honestly just sad. Imagine Botswana having a problem with lion attacks and their president kills your family on the other side of the earth because the people of Botswana want the president to do something, and killing someone, doesn't matter where, is progress towards a solution. I'm an American, but it's stuff like this that makes me realize that hundreds of years from now, people will hold the US's government and its people in the same regard as King Leopold and colonial Belgians.

20 years ago, kids were using proxies and VPNs to get around forum bans. Kids today are most certainly still using VPNs.

The US seems to be at risk of becoming a Japanese style economy in the coming years. As in they focus on tech that sells well locally, but is of no interest outside the country. And that can work for their economy and is a nice way to package protectionism. But eventually, people years down the road see how much better tech is in the outside world and jump to it and never look back. Then your own industry starts to drown and is only held up by a class of elderly people afraid of change.

Examples are the strange Japanese flip phones and the computers with CF card and floppy drives with a 1.5 ghz single core CPU selling for twice the price of a MacBook Pro.

With BYD selling globally now, and Boeing losing its reputation, American vehicles of all sorts are at risk.

Yep. Your art is now their training data. Their AI subscription today comes at the cost of your job tomorrow.

You can go to China and see it for yourself. The USSR made itself inaccessible to foreigners for the most part, but you can hop on a train and visit nearly any place in China freely. It's pretty easy with their extensive train system.

I see a lot of cope with "c-China is lying! It's not really that good!" But lots of tourists such as myself have been all over the country, and tbh, I think the "propaganda" undersells it a bit. I thought there was no way it could be as nice as the travel videos I saw, but it was even better.

They're about as smart as a person who's kind of decent at every field. If you're a pro, it's pretty clear when it's BSing. But if you're not, the answers are often close enough.

And just like humans, they can be very confidently wrong. When any person tells us something, we assume there's some degree of imperfection in their statements. If a nurse at a hospital tells you the doctor's office is 3 doors down on the right, most people will still look at the first and second doors to make sure those are wrong, then look at the nameplate on the third door to verify that it's right. If the doctor's name is Smith but the door says Stein, most people will pause and consider that maybe the nurse made a mistake. We might also consider that she's right, but the nameplate is wrong for whatever reason. So we verify that info by asking someone else, or going in and asking the doctor themselves.

As a programmer, I'll ask other devs for some guidance on topics. Some people can be absolute geniuses but still dispense completely wrong advice from time to time. But oftentimes they'll lead me generally in the right way, but I still need to use my own head to analyze whether it's correct and implement the final solution myself.

The way AI dispenses its advice is quite human. The big problem is it's harder to validate much of its info, and that's because we're using it alone in a room and not comparing it against anyone else's info.

In my experience, there are two types of customer service.

One is the type where people are working to actually help the customer and the rep is authorized to take whatever action necessary to accomplish that goal.

The other is the type where the rep has no authority to do anything. They'll endlessly transfer the caller to another rep, make them wait, transfer again, make up excuses for why nothing can be done, and just do what they can to goad the caller into consenting to giving up, absolving the company of having to pay anything or provide any sort of service.

I don't think number one will be replaced by AI. I think number two will be replaced by AI.

My point was pretty clear.

Bad people aren't limited to one race or anything. But far end politicians love propping up a minority on TV because then they can have an excuse whenever they're compared to historically bad political movements.

You're the only one bringing up white Christian males here, which kind of proves my point. You seem to think that for some reason I care if a politician is white or Christian. Extremist Islamic parties love propping up Christian minorities on TV and saying they'll defend them (they won't). Right wing western parties really, really love propping up a Jewish party member because they can say "we're not Nazis!!! All Nazis hated Jews and we love them!!!" Because the average person really thinks nazism was really only about killing Jewish people, when the reality was they only got around to that after several years of other awful stuff.

The LDP is propping up their 100% foreign born, foreign citizenship politician so they can say "see? We can't be anti-foreigner because the lady controlling this is a foreigner." The optics are transparent and it's even what they're astroturfing their message on social media as. Japanese politics are all about image. They don't pick a foreigner who illegally held dual citizenship to head anti-foreigner policies by accident.

She had American citizenship until recently. She's overcompensating by larping as a native when she isn't. She was intentionally picked to be a token foreigner to lead the anti-immigration policy of the new administration, just like the US's regime can say "You can't call us far right! That Stephen Miller guy's Jewish!" They love their token minorities since it's an easy counterpoint that they think proves they're angels with good intentions, and unfortunately, half of any given country will completely believe a government that uses minorities for that purpose.

Yeah, stuff like this is great for people who want to be outside and get some exercise, but aren't doing it for the purpose of competing with anyone.

I personally love hiking. I love going into nature, seeing new places, and being away from people. But there are times where I go for a slightly easier course instead of the one I actually want to do, because that few extra hours would absolutely wreck my body, especially since I'm often hiking in different places for several days. A little boost would be nice.

And with e-bikes, they're great for commuters and people just riding around their neighborhood. Lots of people ride them in my town for doing shopping trips. More affordable than a car, better for the environment, better for your health, and people who otherwise would take a car because they can't deal with pedaling uphill or long distances have a great alternative. I imagine powered shoes will be the same. People who feel like they're too old/out of shape to walk long distances often opt for cars, but if powered shoes give them the confidence to walk, it's far better to take an electronically assisted walk than to sit in a vehicle.

Tech corps and ex-PayPal guys would be putting billions into making a new constitution and it would be far, far worse than what we have now. And while the French love using violence and destruction to defend their countrymen and their rights, Americans would gladly be lemmings off a cliff so long as someone told them it pissed someone else off.

It's interesting to me how common will o the wisp was in the past, but the concept seems completely forgotten. Of my grandmother's generation and in her town (which was nowhere near a swamp), everyone reported seeing weird lights floating around during their youth to early adulthood. They were always very clear that the lights were not fireflies, which were also common at the time but very distinct. I'm lucky I at least got to witness fireflies in my youth.

Anyways, an interesting nugget is buried in that article. It says that a reason will o the wisp may have been common in the past is because lantern flames may have ignited the gas, which seems like a decent explanation. People use electric light everywhere now.

I guess another issue could be that there's so much ambient lighting from street lights and light being reflected off clouds that it's simply too bright for us to see anything. People back in the day probably experienced a lot more completely black nights.

It's completely possible that will o the wisp will be a completely forgotten phenomenon in a couple more decades, since I don't know anyone under 80 who's reported seeing it, and kids probably don't even know of it now. And it makes me wonder if there are other phenomenons that ancient people were very aware of but no living person has ever seen.

For that matter, companies should be banned from referring to selling off your data to random spam companies as "sharing with partners." Partners comes with an implication of being somewhat equal or at least on trusting terms. The companies selling our data don't trust these companies. They probably don't even know their names.

If the data is being sold, it should be legally required to word it in that way. If there's even the slightest possibility of your data being leaked to spammers, it should be worded to reflect that.

"Do you consent to us selling your data to any party that wishes to buy your data? Do you consent to the possibility that your data will be used to spam you or steal your identity in the future? Yes/No"

Seventh biggest economy with the 21st biggest population seems like an economy that punches above its weight. Plus a low GINI coefficient suggests there's less wealth divide than a lot of other places. Seems like they have a mature economy and don't need to grow forever like a tumor. Once you reach a certain point, optimizing for quality of life seems nice, and the French do seem to aim for that.