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Boston really is a city of riches in terms of college radio, and each one has its own appeal.

WERS has professional-level radio production, solid music that has broad appeal without being "mainstream". Emerson is one of the few schools I know of where some people will go to the school specifically for the radio station. It's why they have such a large, consistent listnership.

WMBR's DJs are fantastic. The station itself definitely has a more college feel but it's still very well-produced and the station itself seems to be really good at playing obscure tunes, especially in the psych/garage/punk/shoegaze realm. There's a distinct sort of sound I expect with them that almost reminds me of WFMU where I grew up, which is high praise.

WHRB tends to favor classical and jazz more than the other schools' stations because they dedicate large blocs of time to those genres

And then there's my WRBB. We sometimes had some gaps in production (depending on who was DJing) but it's still a great listen since there tends to be a wider range of tunes that come through the station. It also helped that many of our DJs were stalwarts of the local DIY music scene, so we gave airtime to a lot of small local artists that might not have a ton of promotion otherwise.

Personally, I'll always have a soft spot for WRBB owing to my time there but really you can't go wrong with any of these.

Love this.

Curious how you chose the default 8 stations? This is obviously super nitpicky but WERS deserves the Boston spot over WHRB IMO. Yeah, Emerson isn't exactly a powerhouse school, but their radio station is a legitimate player in a major radio market in a way that most college radio stations (Harvard's included) aren't. Definitely more important in Boston than WHRB is.

That aside, I'll two stations to your list: my former home station, WRBB, in lovely Boston, Massachusetts, and WMBR across the river in Cambridge.

> Why do so many cars look so angry? Big front grilles that look like a growling, howling maw full of teeth, bulging, muscular body shaping

I am convinced that the omnipresence of this style is going to make the rounded and friendly cars of the early 2000s increase in value in the coming years. Heck, they're only a few years from being eligible for historic plates at this point. My flaming hot automotive take is that the much derided "fried-egg" headlights of the late 90s and early 2000s era Porsches are actually great, and offer a nice contrast to the super-angular headlights we see today to create that aggressive look.

Might a large influx of a new type of user potentially change Mastodon's feature set by altering development priorities to accommodate said new users? Definitely something to consider.

While I won't object to the notion that a global recession may be on the way, the UK's particular situation is greatly exacerbated by Brexit and so might not be universal.

You've got the right idea. Large stadium bands are almost always a poor value proposition, and that was the case even before dynamic pricing. Some of these shows are definitely cool, but the price relative to smaller touring acts (who are often just as if not more talented) is so astronomical that it never made sense to me

There's a much easier long-term solution to this problem: electric heating, powered by electricity from Hydro-Québec. Unfortunately, the LNG industry has lobbied hard to block transmission lines, but it would make a huge difference should the lines eventually be built.

I always laugh when I see the huge "USE NEW REDDIT" header when I'm not logged into old reddit. I will stop using reddit if they ever force me onto the new interface.

The negativity runs rampant because the goodwill tech folk gave these companies was crushed when they demonstrated that they didn't actually have good intentions. After so many transgressions why should anyone trust Meta with anything? Even if this was the solution to all my problems, should I just let them off the hook and forget about the past? Maybe I would be more optimistic if this was coming from a company without a history of disrespecting its users.

I don't know if VR is the path to bridging the fidelity gap you mentioned, but even if it was Meta's "round out any potential rough edge" approach represents a step backward from what we already have. Why use their game, which infantilizes its users to avoid alienating potential advertisers, as opposed to VRChat or something else where you might actually have a meaningful interaction?

Our school's IT department used to go around with wireless scanners to make sure nobody was running networks without the school's permission. I knew people who got busted for stuff like that, but my roommates and I eventually hacked a way around this by naming our network "Dave's iPhone Hotspot" and never had any issues. At that point, the webserver moved from my boyfriend's place back to my own until we moved off campus the following year.

Similar story: In college much more recently (2019), I had a linux server running at my boyfriend's apartment since he was off campus and we were blocked from doing anything like that on the school's network. Sometimes, I would say hi to him or wish him goodnight by playing a little tune on the PC speaker hooked up to that computer. He'd always text me back with a smiley face or something like that. Feels like that kind of interaction is really rare on the web these days, but we had fun with it for a little while.

Absolutely agree with your point, and I'll add onto it from experience.

> The ones setting themselves apart with track are participating in Varsity at least a few years, doing well at State, and a likely courting at least D2 athletic scholarships

Sports (especially track and field) don't set you apart at all as an applicant for unless you're good enough to make the college's varsity team. That's the sole metric highly selective schools are using to assess athletic ability unless you have some extenuating circumstance that makes your participation in the sport especially meaningful.

A lot of people forget about this point. Arbitrary municipal boundaries are set up all across the US to create pseudo-private schools that, while public, are really only accessible to people who can afford to live in the very pricy areas that make up those school district. I grew up in an affluent area and went to a private catholic high school. The public school I would have gone to had better average test scores and way more funding/resources than my school, and indeed the majority of the private schools in the area.

Markets are forward looking. FB's growth numbers don't look great, and if you don't buy into their bet on the Metaverse you might be less inclined to see a bright future for that company.

As far as I know, you can satisfy your fiduciary requirements by treating employees well simply by claiming that it attracts better employees and avoids costs associated with searching for new ones.

I first learned about Mr. Subotnick in a class about the development of electronic music, among other titans of the 20th century avant-garde music. Many of these composers will never earn the widespread appreciation they are due for their accomplishments, but they left an indelible mark on music production, and serve as inspiration for a surprisingly wide breadth of artists.

> “What makes capitalism so successful is that there’s motivation to succeed,” said Ted Clark, executive director of the Northeastern University Center for Family Business. “If you take all the financial incentives away, the family will have essentially no more interest in it except a longing for the good old days.”

Pretty telling that a business school administrator has no concept of being motivated by anything other than pure profit. Always a depressing wake up call to remember that these kinds of people exist and that people actually take anything they have to say seriously.

Agreed. I'm a competitive runner and nobody in that community is showing up to interval workouts with an Apple watch. I don't see this watch changing that, especially when better battery life and tracking (which is all the road/track running segment really cares about) can be had at a fraction of the cost with Garmin or Coros. The ultra/hiking community will run into problems with the 36 hour battery life, especially if they're using the map features.

I really have a hard time seeing who this watch is for.

Plant-based meat substitutes are getting pretty good days, but it will be interesting to see how soon we can sustainably produce lab-grown meat at scale. I've been a vegetarian for about two years now for both environmental and ethical reasons, but I would be perfectly alright with eating meat again if that tech matures enough to enter the market at a reasonable price.

It seems like AI image generation is close, but still slightly "off" as you say. To me it remains to be seen whether that's actually a huge achievement, or whether there's more work to be done to achieve that last 10% than has been done so far. The poster you're replying to used gaming as an example, and you only have to look there to see how graphical improvements in the last 10 years have diminishing returns versus earlier improvements.

I could be wrong but this seems like an area where our progress will look like an S-curve. Getting that last 10% could be the real achievement.

Fashion trends are currently rebelling against the understated 2010s by bringing the late 90s/early 2000s aesthetic back in the form of wider fits and louder colors. Makes me wonder if/when we might see a similar change in web design, or even furniture. I might be biased as a younger person without many memories from that era, but I'm all for some change (barring impacts to accessibility) if it breaks up the monotony of the corporate-lite graphic design trends of the mid 2010s.

A 4-minute mile represents the same milestone regardless of the other competitors in the race, not relative to their performance. You can win said mile by a minute, or come last; if your time is 3:xx.xx, then you've broken that milestone.

The decathlon works the same way- the points scoring there isn't relative like Elo is, it's done by performance in an individual event. You don't get any extra points for winning a given decathlon event, there's a scoring scale for your marks regardless of position.

The exact same performance will differ in how it affects two players' Elo depending on both players ratings. If all players' ratings were to be 100 points higher with all else equal, the top players ratings would rise as well. If everyone in my Mile runs 10 seconds faster, my time doesn't also get 10 seconds faster.

Basically, one record is an individual performance mark. The other is a ranking, which is a different kind of metric entirely.

With all that in mind, chasing a world record Elo is still a worthy goal IMO. The competitive chess scene is old and robust enough that it remains a meaningful benchmark, even if it is a relative measure.

> insisting that surely your jobs are too special and complex for this to ever happen to you

This insistence bugs the crap out of me, and shows just how arrogant tech-types (and even more so, business-types) can be. The late David Graeber noted this attitude, and while he's talking about investors/entrepreneurs/financiers, it could equally apply to the cocky software engineers I've met over the years:

"It's possible for futurologists to imagine robots relpacing sports editors, sociologists, or real estate agents, for example, yet I have yet to see one suggest that the basic functions that capitalists are supposed to perform, which mainly consist of figuring out the optimal way to invest resources in order to answer current or potential consumer demand, could possibly be performed by a machine. Why not?"

I optimistically believe that art will never be automated away like software engineering has the potential to be. The human creative element is so core to what art is that replacing it with a machine misses the point entirely, even if a machine could fully replicate an aesthetic.

You'd be venturing into the realm of psychology for that, but I would argue that short-term engagement != long-term desire. Think of gambling or gaming addictions- nobody's "forcing" those people to engage in behavior against their best interest, but many would argue that they're not freely choosing to succumb to addiction either.

The answer to that question has nothing to do with my objection. I was simply pointing out the irrelevance of the "original intent" of these algorithms, given that we now know, and have known what they do. Focusing on that downplays their effects, which can indeed be considered their intent nowadays since we have known the effects for a while.

Say you hit a button, and each time you hit it you gain a million dollars. After you hit that button once or twice, you discover that it also causes great harm to other people. If you continue to hit the button, your original intent (when you didn't know it's effects) is no longer relevant to whether or not it you should continue hitting the button, since you would now knowingly be harming people for your own profit. The side-effect is no longer a side-effect. It's just an effect.

To answer your question anyway, perhaps we should consider the well-being of a user and bake that into our algorithms. It might not be as profitable, but there's a reason we regulate companies- having some restrictions on profitability can often be a net benefit to society.

This distinction is needlessly pedantic. While social media companies might not have initially sought to promote toxic content, they have long since known they are effectively doing so and have done very little to stop it. In practice, "content that increases the engagement rate" so frequently means toxic content that it's not a useful distinction.

Cigarettes still have their place in art, and not just film. Smoking and cigarettes are a huge theme in Car Seat Headrest's Twin Fantasy, which was releaased in 2011. Even if you restrict your view to film alone, there's plenty of smoking in movies. You only have to go as far as Wes Anderson, or Marriage Story, or every other A24 film.

I love Paradox games, but I can't play them because as soon as I start up a campaign I know it will become a huge time sink for a few days. I think their games definitely require/develop problem solving skills, especially in areas where you need to make changes to create indirect effects. With that said, they may not be the best way of going about it.

I don't have a lot of faith in this data set. The Books Around America site lists the Blue Ridge Mountains as being in Arizona, which is 1500 miles away from their actual location in NC/VA.

Just a case of different priorities for different people. Some people are just in it for the cash and in that case applying to the top-paying companies would be optimal.