astro-

I love that DRM content was where they drew the line. Customer privacy? Eh, whatever. But movies? Let's not poke the bear...

Desktop copilots/assistants have huge potential, but this type of data collection can't possibly end well.

Very cool! But imagine having a rough day and accidentally running one of the heavy machines into the supporting pillar. It looks pretty tight under there.

And it’s cheaper as well!

In healthcare, the workers are in high-stakes situations with personal liability for the care they provide. When you make a mistake, your license can be taken away. Licensing is important to prevent malpractice, but it does enable a form of worker exploitation.

When you’re on a severely understaffed ward, you have to get the work done whatever it takes. If the next shift fails to turn up, you can’t just go home. People’s lives are at risk. You’re responsible until you can hand the care over to someone else.

Like this, things can be stretched to unhealthy or even dangerous levels for a long time before there’s any accountability for the management. The front line staff have to get the work done, often at great personal expense.

Honestly, I don’t know how people do it.

One thing that is unlikely to change, regardless of what happens: people will keep writing these speculative doomsday pieces (perhaps with the help of some generative AI).

“What if all the roombas decide to band together and unionise? That would be a disaster!”

When humanity gets wiped eventually, maybe the robots will keep the tradition going?

“Traces of human DNA discovered in Alaska! Any chance they could come back?”

> girls who spend five hours or more on social media per day are three times as likely to be depressed as girls who use social media only a little or not at all

I mean, I can't possibly imagine the state I would be in if I spent 5 hours on Instagram every day for extended periods. But the same applies to watching reality TV or reading tabloid newspapers.

Social media clearly affects young people — some of them negatively. That said, it's not 100% negative all the time. Maybe it's just changing the structure of society. In the same way that computers gave nerds the option to be the cool hacker kids and highly-paid FAANG engineers later, some skills/traits/behaviours are becoming more valuable while others are losing their usefulness.

Things won't be the same, just like things aren't the same as they were 200 years ago. People will adapt and learn to deal with the new challenges.

I’m wondering whether another motivation for this could be trying to keep the data set as clean as possible for future model training.

Creating videos takes quite a bit of time. If AI video generation becomes widely available, pretty soon, there could be more AI content being uploaded to YouTube than human-made stuff.

Presumably, training on AI generated stuff magnifies any artefacts/hallucinations present in the training set, reducing the quality of the model.

Universal must be in a pretty difficult negotiating position here. The artists they represent want their music to be distributed on TikTok. The royalties are nice, but the primary value is likely the popularity boost of having your music featured in insanely viral videos and trends with billions of views. Universal doesn't get a cut of that though (aside from increased streaming revenue elsewhere).

Not the most credible theory, but it reminds me of the "Hedgehog in the cage" mechanical puzzle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgehog_in_the_Cage

So maybe there's a wooden/metal piece that goes inside, and the challenge is to get it out?

I'd say that open-source works best for companies when they don't open the main thing. Meta building React in the open is a good example. The community gets a well-maintained library. Meta gets free testing, code contributions and potential hiring pipeline. When trying to compete with Meta, React gives you virtually no advantage. There's no incentive to leave important features out of the public codebase. Both Meta and the community benefit.

Would it make sense for Meta to open the codebase for facebook.com? Aside from studying/scrutinising the code, the only other thing you'd be able to do with it is to change the logo and try to compete with Facebook.

In this example, it's still probably not enough to disrupt them thanks to the social graph and infrastructure complexity. But you could imagine moments where even Meta gets nervous when anyone can start competing with feature parity from day one.

Over the long-term, it's more likely that Meta would want to keep some features private. It's also less likely that they would get lots of quality contributions back. If you're running a fb.com clone in production, you're likely trying to compete with them on some level. This leads to a weird relationship with the community and limited value for both sides.

Create what is essentially a public API to your browsing history and sell it as a privacy feature. Bold move.

I would find it acceptable if you would set those topics yourself. Hopefully, they can at least be randomised via an extension.

Trees on private property are also missing — in front of people's houses/communal areas in front of blocks of flats. There's quite a few of those around me that I would consider to be "street trees".

Pretty cool site, though!

perilunar: Thank you!

Hugely inspiring! Thanks for sharing your story, Noah.

Whoops. Thanks for pointing it out! I fixed it right away, sorry about that.

Thanks! No, it was the one that came up first on Google I guess. Since all that I'm using is change_geometry and resize! I might switch it over to something more lightweight.

Made a note here: https://github.com/pazdera/catpix/issues/1

Thanks for the suggestion, Matt!

You're absolutely right.

I was trying to showcase what can be easily done with things that are there. And in particular the possibility to use RGB directly in the terminal.

Really like your ASCII art generator, by the way!