superultra

I oversee pressing for over 150k+ records a year. We eliminated download cards a while ago because the redemption rate was so low. I wouldn’t doubt if the number of buyers who don’t own a record player is even higher tha 50%, and that the percentage of people who actually play the records is actually 10-20%. I don’t have data on that, it’s just a hunch.

Many of us in the indie music industry (hip hop sustained record plants for many years, arguably until independent music started pressing in the 2000s) have mixed feelings about records. It’s a lot of plastic. A lot of waste. And they’re cubersome to bring on tour.

But there isn’t another physical medium that sells at all as well as vinyl. Soft apparel always does well. But people want vinyl.

I don’t love the Gen Z framing of this though. Vinyl purchasing at this point is multi generational.

I don’t think it’s some mysterious Gen Z love of physical. I think we all know that Spotify doesn’t pay artists appropriately and we want to help sustain the music we love. Buying digitally is just isn’t the same for a lot of people (even though it arguably is the best and easiest income generator for artists).

I live in an Atlanta neighborhood where one of the founders lived. A prototype for Flock Camera was designed by three Georgia Tech grads because someone kept breaking into their car (not uncommon in our neighborhood tbh).

The trick is that the camera was pointed towards a middle school. Which means they were constantly recording kids without adult consent.

Now, years later, Atlanta is the most surveilled city in North America and one of the most in the world. Flock cameras are everywhere. There are 124 cameras for every 1,000 people. Just last week, a ex-urb police chef was arrested for using the Flock network to stalk and harass citizens.

I know a lot of people who work at Flock. I’m shocked that they do though.

I don’t know when it stops.

I don’t need everyone seeing the dirty laundry of my first draft and edits. I too work in a working doc and then when completed I drop it at once into the final google doc.

But can it really clean clothes if it doesn’t have 802.11ac with AI spot cleaning and a 750mv iOS app??? /s

I’d say that an increasingly more common strand is that the way LLMs work is so wildly different than how we humans operate that it is effectively an alien intelligence pretending to be human. We have never and still don’t fully understand why LLMs work the way they do.

I’m of the opinion that AGI is an anthropomorphizing of digital intelligence.

The irony is that as LLMs improve, they will both become better at “pretending” to be human, and even more alien in the way they work. This will become even more true once we allow LLMs to train themselves.

If that’s the case than I don’t think that human criteria is really applicable here except in an evaluation of how it relates to us. Perhaps your list is applicable in LLM’s relativity to humans but many think we need some new metrics for intelligence.

Thanks for deep diving on doubling down lol

The day I trashed my huge collection of WIRED print mags, including that one Y2K dark glossy cover, was a sad day

More and more these are feeling like they’re written for investors not users:

> Adobe is doubling down on its strategy of using AI to bring more users into its product ecosystem.

> Adobe has shipped many AI-powered features and products this year.

I’m not a professional designer but I use the creative suite enough in my contracting work to pay for it. The AI integrations thus far are laughable, more for a good laugh than practical use. I don’t have a lot of hope for this either.

If all this is a bubble I’m hopeful that it bursts soon. AI is powerful and useful but we’re so far into cramming AI features into products to satiate investment that it’s time to return to user based work.

(Also is “doubling down” the new “deep dive”?)

To each their own. What you call old I call classic. I have bought a few of these pieces and they look great.

You’re wrong on several things. There’s a big difference in the kind of domestication of dogs - which we generally think of when we think of domestication - and animals who serve extracurricular domestication, ie ferrets.

I also have 2 cats, having had 2 prior. They’re great. But it’s just science that they are not fully domesticated.

I also lived on a farm as a kid.

So let’s not make assumptions to prove an incorrect point.

> It's been done in churches for centuries

I mean, how is "healthcare" from 500 years ago the bar here?

And isn't single-payer state-funded healthcare the scaled version of a small town passing the plate around anyway?

As I think about it, gofundme is even more kafkaesque in that it gatekeeps fundraising to those who have online social networks strong enough to fundraise. We don't hear about those who aren't able to because in the Jia Tolentino definition of "silence," they are not able to express that need online.

> Maybe she was really bad with money

I guess I fundamentally disagree that a kind of Dave Ramsey level of financial saving is a prequisite for healthcare. Indeed, I'd argue that casinos are a symptom, not a problem, of a system in which the only "viable" way out is gambling - again another tentpole in a complicated kafkaesque system.

I’ve lived in both Canada and the US. My grandma in Canada had to wait 9 months for a hip replacement. Even though the government provided help with paid aids, it was not a great situation.

My mom here in the states needs a hip replacement and she can’t afford it because she’s maxed Medicare.

You mentioned ambulance. My wife called an ambulance for our kid who tripped on something at a park and a rather hysterical person told her she needed to call an ambulance right away. Pressured, she did so; our kid was fine. But we then owed $3,500 for the ambulance. Though we were paying on a payment plan and never missed a payment, the bill got turned over to collections for some unknown reason. We got it sorted it out but it took about 15 hours of work to resolve and fix our credit.

I’ve found that my Canadian relatives complain often about the system but very few seem to truly understand what is good about that system.

Pick your poison. Like many things here in the US, healthcare in the US is great if you have money, bad if you don’t.

Can confirm, I live in Georgia.

The real stickler is that just from pure lucky timing, data centers will likely be the direct beneficiaries of the third reactor coming online at the Vogle plant here in Georgia. So taxpayers foot and will foot the bill, and meanwhile our governor and mayor are tripping over themselves giving tax breaks to data centers.

I think you’re mistaking slight natural adaption for domestication, and taking domestication for granted. Go into nature and try and train a wild wolf. Good luck! You can’t.

Domestication, in the way that we see having happened with dogs (and cattle, and chickens) takes a really long time.

We consider cats “domesticated” and yet demonstrably they are not. If they were much bigger, they’d eat us, and if set into wild, nearly all household cats immediately revert to feral.

I owned five ferrets once. Loved them so much, but came to the realization that there are animals that should be pets and animals that maybe shouldn’t (yet). I think we have many, many more generations before raccoons are at the same level as dogs.

The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet according to Forbes, richer than the subsequent three nations combined.

It’s a tragedy that our own citizens are not the direct be beneficiaries of that wealth.

I think a lot about the scene in Star Trek IV when McCoy is in a hospital and says “what is this the dark ages?”

Gofundme is like a kafkaesque tragic absurdity that - hopefully - will be looked at as an indictment of the inequitable K shaped economy we’ve built, and hopefully fixed in the future.

Man, seeing the visualizations here reminded me of how great it was to load up some music in Winamp (downloaded via soulseek), turn on the geiss visualizer, and get stoned.

This feels like someone in a marathon deciding to quit because they just ran really well for the last 10 minutes, with the assumption that since they were running really fast there’s no reason to think they won’t keep running fast. It’s deeply flawed logic.

The other issue is that while he might be right, the worst and biggest consequences of being wrong will not affect Bill. Or, frankly, anyone reading this comment.

It’s such a complicated problem for us humans because we often struggle to conceptualize beyond our own tribes, let alone humans who won’t exist for decades.

But the problem is that IF climate scientists are right - and other than a few cheery cherry picked stats, Bill has no evidence saying otherwise - then the longer we do nothing the bigger the impact.

Will humanity die? Probably not. But will it drastically affect QoL for nearly all humans on the planet save the 1%? Probably.

Thank you. Had to turn off my blocker for that site, I was drowning in pop-ups

> Gamification is great.

Is it?

I think the gamification is at the core of why Duolingo has persisted even though it doesn’t work.

At any point in real learning, or in acquiring any kind of skill in anything, one hits a plateau and the thing becomes boring or dull or hard. Internal drive to learn the thing must overcome the drudgery of repetition until you exceed that plateau. And then eventually there’s another one down the road.

What’s more is that the more we learn the more we get rewarded for confronting and pushing through the boring or hard. It’s a real reward that dopamine is evolutionarily designed to encourage. In a way, learning is already as “gamified” as it needs to be.

Gamification on the other hand convinces us that we’re making progress but it’s completely artificial. It manipulates dopamine in ways that don’t encourage actual and more learning. Instead gamification rewards gamification.

We need less gamification in our world and more internalification.

I think the problem no one on either side wants to admit is that these shooters rarely fall into either side. They’re mentally unstable people who are attracted to fringe crazy ideas, regardless of the political stripes.

Their behavior indicts all of us Americans.

But of course admitting that and doing something about it means working together, which is a much harder solution than pointing fingers at the other side and doing little else.

The current president and vice president of the United States said on multiple media channels that an entire racial demographic of people in a city were eating cats and dogs, and those same people are concerned about the minutia of a late night comedian’s informational and semantic accuracy (who they also claim no one watches, which is probably itself mostly true).

That’s a lot of pearl clutching don’t you think

He did not say that the kid was MAGA, or at least not exactly. Here’s all he said about it:

> We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.

> In between the finger pointing there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level you can see how hard the President is taking this.

He then played a clip where a reporter asked Trump how he was doing. Trump said good and immediately started talking about his new ballroom.

What about any of that is misinformation? Given how they were certain the shooter was trans because he used arrows on the bullet - which were helldiver 2 codes - it did seem like people were trying to make it seem like the kid wasn’t MAGA.

Turns out the kid is neither, or both, and was just terminally online, which none of us want to admit is the real problem because we’re all also terminally online.

To each their own I guess but I think this is a beautiful home. My home was built at the same time (1965) and seems to share a lot of characteristics to David’s home, although my house is much smaller.

You’d be surprised how hard it is find houses like this. Many of them have been gutted and rehabbed into “open” floor plans, with a lot of white paint and white barn doors.

This is unfortunate because house builders back then really knew how to create distinctive spaces.

This home has a lot of beautiful light, feels very airy and open, and yet feels very distinctive and characteristic.

Probably the biggest drawback and challenge will be, as other commenters have pointed out, that Lynch smoked packs a day and getting that out will be tough.

Otherwise there absolutely buyers who would love this home.

You may be right but it’s worth noting that many mid century kitchens - including my own - were less focused on hospitality in the kitchen and more on efficiency. In some cases this was because homes had hired help.

My MCM kitchen is large enough to host but the cooking area is like this galley. I love to cook. Having lived in a home with with a huge open kitchen, I vastly prefer this galley style. It really does save time. When you’re doing a few things at once, a large kitchen with a lot of space between stations is a liability.

I live in the neighborhood where Flock started. The three Georgia Tech grads moved into a house in the West End in Atlanta. It’s a great neighborhood but like any urban neighborhood, you often deal with car break-in’s, so the roommates built a prototype security cam.

All fine so far. Except that the direction it was pointed at was the neighborhood middle school. Which means these three notably white college students started flock by surveilled predominantly black young kids.

The neighborhood was pissed - but what are you going to do?

Eventually Flock took off and they moved out.

My point is that if your product started as surveillance on not just another age demographic but a racial and class demographic, is it any surprise that all of this is fundamentally in the DNA of the company?

Define current. My dad turned the lights off on one factory as recently as 2018, a factory that Trump visited and bragged about saving (it wasn’t saved).

It’s not the same as factories in the 1989s true, but people are still missing fingers or limbs as a result of the work. Not only that but the resentment between workers and management remains extremely antagonistic.

We really need to stop glossing over the dangers of industrial work. It’s not a triangle shirtwaist fire but it’s not some kind of imaginary industrial utopia of pristine machinery.

Industrial work is dangerous menial labor.

I looked up the EPA report for the brownsite. It listed arsenic, barium, multiple chromium compounds, 2,4-dimethylphenol ethylbenzen lead, 4-methyl-2-pentanone, methlyene chloride, naphthalene, toluene, and xylene at hazardous levels. It also mentions steel, zinc, and nickel dust and fumes.

I do know that I drove by the old site a few years ago, and you can see the outlines of not just the buildings but the machinery because the dirt is a different color, and there's either no or very little grass or just stubborn weeds growing in those areas.

Totally agree but is more environmentally friendly and more humane part of the current political rhetoric?

And absolutely outsourcing to somewhere else hurts somewhere else. But let’s be realistic: the kind of drastic change that would require no one getting hurt is not in the American discourse.

You’re not wrong on most of your points - and I’m not denying the value of hard work. And I’m also well aware of the drudgery of office work.

That said, have you worked in the kind of factory that will come back? I did a summer stint at my dad’s steel mill as a 19 year old. I’m proud of that summer but that work took a lot of me. When other friends were out doing things, I was too exhausted to hang out. The money wasn’t great either. And that’s a microcosm of most of those older worker’s lives. Many drank heavily. I’m not bemoaning them at all or their work.

I’m just saying that the early 2000s wasn’t the 1850s either.

I don’t deny there’s a better life than office work but let’s not gloss over the kind of hard - as in, really hard - labor that industrialization requires.

It’s not just too expensive. We need to seriously ask ourselves do we want too, at all, even?

My dad worked in a steel mill all his life so that me and my siblings didn’t have to. We’re he and the other guys at the plant proud of their work? Absolutely. Does nearly everyone wish their kids would do something else? Absolutely.

Industrialism has ipso facto become the soup du jour for thr agrarian myth. The reality is that it’s long, hard, relentless, menial labor. It’s also terrible for just living in general. My dad basically turned the lights off on a steel plant. That was 20 years ago and the land it was on will be unusable for even landfills for another 100 years. It was on a river and the river still smells like chemicals, and fish routinely die when passing through that area due to chemical runoff from the land.

So, I’m sorry, why do we want that here (let alone anywhere)?

I’m not saying that I don’t complain about my work from home job or that there aren’t negative effects but good luck weighing me getting carpal tunnel or taking anxiety meds to the stuff that industrial labor does to your body and our living environments.