jwie

A lot of words spent on the ocean. None on wine and the practicalities of epic verse.

The thing to understand here is that the ancient people who would have heard these words from a poet did not drink wine as we understand it.

Wine was a concentrated product added to water for consumption. This did a few things, but the important ones are condense calories, make the water safe to drink, and the concentrated wine product was easier to store and ship. Wine dark means this stuff.

We think of epic poetry as some kind of high literature. They were more like Marvel movies of the day. Wine dark is not a fanciful metaphor, but rather something the audience understood and fit into the meter.

Homeric verse had to fit into dactylic hexameter. Easy phrases are sprinkled throughout Epic poetry that make the scantion work out. Wine-dark sea is one of them. Swift-footed Achilles and Rosy-fingered dawn are some other notable examples.

These phrases are used when it makes no sense. The Iliad talks about Swift footed Achilles sitting down, so arguments that meter isn’t determining turns of phrase is simply wrong. It’s just an epithet that fit into the scantion.

These are really long poems that were recited, from memory to audiences. Memory was their primary storage. So there are a lot of “go-to” easy phrases that are really just vamping, but since it’s thousands of years old we want it to mean more.

There was an opportunity here to explain why this isn't a big deal.

This entire article is devoid of any synthesis or value added information. If I saw this on DNYUZ I wouldn't give it a second look, but CNN has lesser aspirations .

The pandemic hiring blitz was more like seasonal hiring in a sector that doesn’t normally do that, and nobody had the vocabulary to describe the phenomenon.

Combined with talent hoarding the whole thing became a luxury companies can’t afford without free money from either investors or the fed.

Even with all this cutting, headcount is still growing. But it’s harder than ever for the entry level guys. Painting a rosy picture here is wrong.

Being in the middle Mux wouldn’t be able to offer more substantive changes to the service problem. A neat operational fix to a tough event driven problem.

The root cause here is “sports streaming services are garbage.” Mux can’t do anything about that, and likely their “partners” don’t want to hear it anyway.

Part of me would have preferred to technically sweep this under the rug so nobody who cared would notice or be able to complain about it.

Turning your life into a checklist is missing the point.

There’s an easy way to do this. Buy out the contract.

Companies offer foolish lifetime packages all the time. I think it was American Airlines offered lifetime unlimited first class flights. They can’t claw this product away from the few remaining die hard users, and they only sold a few dozen of the things.

I expect the reason for wanting out of the deal is the same.

Airline seats and supercharging time share a scheduling problem. Having even a few customers with unlimited rights to a limited resource creates intractable scheduling conflicts.

The engineers learned from Scotty. There was a great scene in TNG where Scotty reveals to Geordi the estimates were rigged all along.

But then again, it’s a TV show designed to produce tension. Star Trek: Drydock wouldn’t be as exciting. But anyone who’s ever worked with ship’s equipment knows, it’s a lot of fun to test missile launches. Cleaning those tubes, however, not so much.

A few shows have spoken to the likely realities of maintenance. The Expanse and Battlestar Galactica didn’t hand wave the logistics and maintenance such vessels would certainly require.

Don’t need a philosophy. Need a destination.

The whimper of the end.

If you can convince everyone else at your shop that nobody perceives pizza parties as valuable they’ll stop offering them.

Until then, these sorts of low cost rewards deliver value. Only you can fix this. Only you can ruin pizza parties for everyone.

The reality is that they’d offer nothing given the choice between something real and something like a pizza party.

No number of pizza parties equals an annual bonus that matters. So enjoy the small things. It’s what's available. The rest is between you and whomever authorizes your promotion/bonus budget.

They have no other abilities in the first place. The adjectives are just as meaningless.

"Ask" it about academic articles and their authors for {topic} and to summarize a body of research. The names might even be real people, but they won't have written the article, which probably doesn't exist. What it will do is sound like an article title, and to anyone unfamiliar with that body of work, will sound plausible.

If your area of inquiry doesn't require valuable or reliable information as an output, sure I guess they have value. But for anything that's hard and matters, it's a parlor trick unfit for use.

Small objective differences create vast differences in outcomes. Those things where that isn't true have already been automated away or commodified so there's very little margin left anyway.

It might be true in a misleading sense that the AI {product} is some large fraction of a genuine {product}, but that doesn't mean anything because the value is contained in those differences above the AI produced baseline. The value floor, so to speak, is a lot higher, but the ceiling hasn't risen an inch.

Those that move down in quality to preserve margin will soon discover there's not a there there.

Porn is a hyper reality. It’s obscene, but more it’s really just produced a lot. Normal sex resembles porn about as much as a show about high school resembles high school.

There are some specific harms of pornography, but it shares a lot of dimensions with commercials, marketing, and other media.

The entomology of the word porn even indicates this. It means “to sell off” eventually meaning prostitution, which is a sales activity primarily.

Digital porn scales well, though this isn’t good for most. We’d be in a better world with non-scalable sex work instead. It’s more ordered and aligned with the human experience.

The digital whores are not human, and you can’t have sex with them, which is the whole draw no?

The problem with VR isn’t complicated. People get sick when they use it, and there aren’t any killer apps for it.

These limitations have been known for decades as every VR attempt has run into them. Oculus and The Virtual Boy ran into the exact same problems.

I’m sure someone warned the Meta teams of this and they assumed they’d crack this intractable problem with one weird trick, but they didn’t, and probably nobody will. Certainly not while they’re trying to anyway.

Garbage in. Garbage out. Just like anything else in this computer thing.

The fact that I have to file the return is itself part of the problem. This process should be “irs gives you a refund or tells you what you owe and then you either dispute it or take it”. The audit practice invites mischief into a system where someone makes a judgement about when to audit, and the process is the punishment.

Just tell me what I owe, and if I feel like it I can dispute it. If they can validate a tax return they obviously know what would be correct.

Family is everything, and we should be willing to make sacrifices for our own.

However, for the generation that plundered their children and grandchildren, less than care is merited.

They will receive care in proportion to the care they gave.

I meant more, it’s not like people aren’t using as much as they can. It’s that there’s some tactics used against workers.

This happened to an in-law who works for a soft drink distributor, but this kind of thing happens often in decent wage but lower end jobs, the 20-40/hr range.

At the high end it’s more workaholics or people looking to get promoted. On the lower rungs it’s coercion and games by HR to manage people out and claw back vacation days.

There’s likely some nuance here.

Lets say a worker has nominally 10 days off per year. What the company does practically is if you take more than 6 days off is start writing you up. Theoretically you could take 10 days but any infraction would result in termination. The practice ensures employees are always dismissible for cause unless they don’t use vacation days.

Not all companies use such tactics on their workforce, but enough do to make it a systematic problem.

Mandatory payout at 100% for unused PTO, and a ban on use-or-lose would be a good start.

We can only imagine what the lightbulb world would look like if the Phoebus cartel didn't hamstring R&D.

Some might be tempted to believe that we'd have discovered what technology they suppressed, but they are insufficiently pessimistic. Technology gets worse all the time, and lightbulbs are a great example of that happening on purpose.

It’s gone from a kind of commission on service to a specific person to a voluntary overcharge for anything because why not ask if the customer is willing to pay more.

I’m not tipping in the drive through.

I equally hate the charity “round up” or whatever. I’ll donate myself without paying a commission you get to deduct, thanks.

Ah yes it’s a “labor shortage” not high labor demand and wages of course.

No one is allowed to state the actual reason they oppose high density housing, so any will do.

Or we go back to physical forms for important things and call it good enough.

We could call it revolutionary air-gapped physical security strategy.

Reading aloud in an odd cadence is effective.

The benefit of a system not understanding what it’s saying is that it can’t understand what not to say.

We can only hope this feature is endemic to the technology.

You can’t sell non-action.

It’s a broken window problem. It’s difficult to measure the value of leaving stuff alone. The line on the chart doesn’t go up.

We intervene because it allows us to sell product. There’s no commission on discretion.

There’s a simple reason for them not interviewing. No upside for the pilots, and the information could be used against them.

I find myself agreeing with the union’s reasoning. There’s no justification for recorded audio. Stenographers are fine for all legal applications of authoritative transcripts.

If the air traffic controllers still had a real union they’d be doing the same thing.

All cause mortality is lower among light drinkers than non-drinkers.

Small doses of harms are typically beneficial. Not all harm is bad, and safety is not always desirable.

I hope they do it. It would be fun to trick it into generating highly brand inappropriate product placements.