overthemoon

The bit of advice I got from another parent before I had kids was golden: parents need time off the clock. Sometimes you need to hear your kid screeching about something and know it's someone else's problem. We don't have family around, so we give each other breaks on the weekend, usually one day where my spouse and I give each other half-day breaks. Idk what it's going to be like when he's older, but for now it works.

I've only been at it for 5 years, current gig for about 1.5, so it's too early to tell. But in the right context I'd love to be a lifer. I want to have a deep knowledge of the business that only time can provide, deeper relationships with colleagues, a sense of a legacy. I could see that happening where I'm at, depending on what the work looks like going forward. I'd really like to focus on just a few things, to actually become an expert on something. I'd also really, really like to build something from scratch. I want to be the engineer whose name is cursed by a junior 10 years hence for my incomprehensible decisions.

I keep finding top 5 results that are literal reproductions of SO questions and answers. It's genuinely useless to find rundowns of products--I either go to a few trusted sites or search with "site:www.reddit.com". God help you if you're doing any Windows troubleshooting.

This is the absolute root of what's going on, right here. Twitter is only nominally a tech company; it's a media company. It may be that he had to cut the fat over there, I don't take issue with that necessarily (though I certainly do take issue with the disrespectful way he went about it), but image is incredibly important at a media company and he's notoriously bad at comms except with a small subset of people. Twitter needs sensible policy and thoughtful communication, and he wants to ram his ideology through it like he would shake up any technical process.

This is a phenomenon I only learned about recently. A few indie games I've played recently have CRT options, like Loop Hero. I don't know how close it gets to the IRL effect but it's really cool.

Then why talk about it at all? I disagree with this argument. It has observable qualities, and those qualities can be discussed. Preference is one thing, but there's more to discussions about art than what one prefers.

I can't speak for anyone else, but the sheer span of sounds he wrung out of his gear is impressive, and to make them hang together in interesting ways is why I like it so much. It has real movement and dynamics, he's a songwriting wizard. One of my favorite tracks, "Vordhosbn" gets me so fucking amped, the beat is so bizarre and nervous and energetic. It's textured in a way some other electronic music isn't, it has character. Like "Yellow Calx" off Richard D. James Album, it has this percussive sound like a ball bearing ricocheting off the side of a warehouse near the beginning (which is a sound he uses in other songs I think) that I can't explain, but I love that sound so much. It doesn't happen again in the rest of the track, it's this singular spike of sound in an otherwise mellow and contemplative song, and it's really effective imo.

Sorry if this is annoying, I just really like Aphex Twin.

Daft Punk is doing something very different. It would be weird to drop "Bucephalus Bouncing Ball" at a wedding. This is not a knock on Daft Punk--I think they're great. But occupy a different space altogether and happen to also make electronic music.

I just lost 30 minutes down this rabbit hole. I am so excited to get into this.

Cool projects. I've always wanted to run something like that. What made moderation stressful?

I don't think the author gets it, either. I think that's the point. A small miracle happened.

This is true until it isn't. I expect that if Twitter dies, it won't be a mass exodus, but a thousand cuts. It's not dying tomorrow, but in my opinion its days are numbered.

And I don't mean just because Musk took over, although he's made some decisions already that make no sense to me. It's got issues. People WANT an alternative.

I agree with the assessment of eg Fortnite models that are all colorful and beautiful. Gets tiresome. I see the appeal, it wouldn't stop me from playing a game, but especially as games with heroes or champions or whatever proliferate, as in-game fashion and cosmetic customization in multiplayer only becomes more popular, it becomes a wash of boring indistinguishable colors and hot people. They're unique in that they're distinct from one another but boring because those differences don't mean anything. Kudos to them for doing something a little different.

Just talking about the US here, but what about our current identification systems are so deficient that we need this?

I'm pretty sympathetic to your view. I have friends I still keep up with from old jobs. I've worked at places where I pretty much hated everyone, but overall I've always managed to connect to someone there, and that was nice. Now it's stilted zoom meetings, Slack gifs, not much else. That's a bummer. I just came back from a 3 day work summit and it was actually great to see people I work with, to get to know them, to read their little mannerisms and find out their quirks. I'm a pretty shy person, and I surprised myself with how much I enjoyed it.

But work is a site of control. I think this is the source of controversy you've discovered. Even if you enjoy your work and the people you work with, it's still an obligation. It took 18+ years of conditioning to get you used to this life. Finally, workers (granted, members of the laptop class like us, already a pretty well-off group) get a bit of a say, a tad bit more control over their lives. You don't have to sit in traffic, or on a train, while your brain rots with stress. You don't have some petty asshole looking over your shoulder. You can see your family more. You can sleep more. It's quite liberating to have that choice.

From where I'm sitting, I see a big push to return to the office in the media. I get the feeling, totally unsubstantiated by evidence, that this is coming from the top. Insecure leaders who need to see their underlings typing. People who genuinely hate that they've lost some control, demanding that the serfs come in under their eye. This is neither nuanced nor totally fair, but I'm trying to evoke some feelings here, to maybe get at why this is controversial.

For me personally, if I could wave a wand, I'd choose a very short commute and 2-3 days in the office. But I also bristle at the back to the office push.

Is anyone planning on watching the World Cup this year? Do you think this is worse than normal, in terms of the host country's track record?

I always try to catch as much as I can, I really enjoy it, but this year in particular it seems nauseating.

Maybe I'm naive but I've never thought about it this way.

I too am disappointed in the defensiveness. It's a completely valid point, and using Japan as a precursor in this narrative was really enlightening, I think.

There are a million causes and effects one could talk about here, supporting all manner of ideologies, and of course I've got my own. But that people are increasingly preoccupied with meaningless, child-like consumption, of fun over joy, is actually a problem.

I say this as a big nerd who likes games and comics and so forth, which I think is where some of the defensiveness comes in. I don't think the problem is located in liking comics. It's in making comics your identity. It's adopting the identity of a fan, a consumer, of making that your outward image, that makes people more childish and less trustworthy, less serious, and easier to control.

I feel like that was implied by my comment, but yes, believe it or not, I do find that also alarming.

That the two splashy examples are hot people in their underwear is pretty telling for what one major use of this will be. Makes me feel weird. I find takes on deepfakes fraying shared epistemology alarmist, people will continue to believe whatever they want to believe and falsifying evidence is still a crime, but the ability to conjure moving images of whatever human body you want without that person's permission feels bad. DALL-E adding protections against sexual or violent imagery is a short term solution, at best, IMO. Maybe I'm being alarmist, too. Perhaps it won't be as easy as toggling a switch next to your friend's photo to take their clothes off.

It's hard to explain why I love it so much. I enjoyed that it wasn't so interested in plot machinery, it was more like the story of her summer. No one's season follows a strict rising action to a climax in the third act/month, but taken as a sum, you get a story about Chihiro learning about friendship, courage, love, and forgiveness. It's kind and gentle in a way that's never cloying or saccharine. I'm thinking specifically of the scene where she gets some rice from Haku and bursts into tears. It's a simple and moving depiction of sadness, homesickness, and fear being chipped away by a small gesture of kindness. But I don't think it's bad at all to have not enjoyed it.

I can't imagine it'll move the timetable up faster than it was already moving. I couldn't speak to the options workers will have. Historically, the answer is "not many", right?

Nothing makes me more fucking annoyed than the singular "hey". I will always, always ignore it. If it's important, fill in more detail, we're not on a phone call.

Why does tissue damage increase the risk of cancer? My guess is that more damage -> more cells created to replace damaged ones -> more opportunities for mutation. Is that right? If you bite the inside of your lip a lot, is that bad? Uh, asking for a friend.

"...when all experience can be deconstructed and reconfigured, there become simply too many choices. And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as "liberating" as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of an assembly's quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience."[0]

The quote about the purpose of terms like "content" and "content creator" is spot on. It's the shipping container of the internet, a way to standardize units of things to sell and consume. Call it a necessity of the market, a knock-on effect of Amazon omni-retailers, but it's dehumanizing to reduce all creative effort to indistinguishable units, and strange that so many people take on the mantle willingly.

It's also expedient. Take a subset of YouTubers, they're likely doing different things across multiple disciplines. Video editing, music, education, performance, it's hard to name all those things. Easier to say "artist". Or "content creator". So I don't think it's all due to the machine.

[0] https://www.thefreelibrary.com/E+unibus+pluram%3A+television...

This is wild. Interesting that her family denied the claim she was self-administering DMSO.

Magic: The Gathering is an interesting case. On the one hand, there's a crazy amount of data in terms of win rates on Arena and MTGO, as well as popular cards in a given format (especially EDH with EDHREC). What a computer cannot do is win games, or analyze a deck based on its oracle text and tell you what can win. One of the more interesting facets of this (to me) is watching the prices change from spoiler season to a few weeks/months after release. Fable of the Mirror-Breaker was less than a dollar when Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty came out, and it's over $20 now. Tiamat, from Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, was over $25 after the set was released, now you can get it for around $10-$15. (Price has a lot more information in it than just game utility, but its desirability for gameplay is still pretty high in the list.)

For as uniform as, say, the standard meta is, it's still based on player consensus and behavior, not computer analysis of game mechanics or simulations of games. Turns out player consensus is still pretty good. I don't know if you could moneyball Magic.

I agree in regards to Magic. Arena especially is hyper optimized. I decided to just netdeck a mono red aggro that did well in ranked, and have been racking up Ws. Sooner or later that strategy will fall apart and I'll probably just give up on Arena, I don't personally enjoy the idea of the MTG hivemind making a deck for me if I want to win.

That said, I have a weekly group that plays pretty low level paper commander, and it's a blast. We live in different states now but play on Spelltable and get together every few months to do a draft. It's the only way to play, IMO. Plenty of room for creativity within the confines of our personal meta.

You can't say it's definitely not ego. You can say there are regulatory issues that incentivize larger trucks, but if people didn't want them, they wouldn't buy them. Their mere availability doesn't explain it. It's a statement vehicle, that's how it's marketed. It's masculine, it's imposing, and it has the excuse of utility to assuage fears of appearing vain (a stereotypically feminine trait).

It can be other things, too: it can be useful to move shit around, it can be safe relative to the car you pancaked, it can lug your family around, it's the result of poorly thought out regulations. But it is also a vanity purchase. It's not bad as the justifications people would make when they bought Hummers back in the 2000s, but it's closer to that than a sheer calculation of utility and efficiency, which should be obvious because they don't have to be that goddamn big to move things around.

Disclaimer: I drive a Honda Fit. These trucks could turn me into paste. I'm irritated that I have to consider upsizing just to ensure my infant son survives a collision with a vehicle whose driver can't see in front of them. But I confess my car is a vanity statement, too. I bought it because I won't have to go to the shop as often (fingers crossed) and I won't have to buy another car for good long while. But it also has the vibe of being smart and urbane. Americans very much buy their cars based on image.

"Polarization" is not, in fact, the "the single greatest weakness of the United States as a country today." I am so sick to death of this sentiment. Fukuyama and guys like him love systems, they love tinkering, they love efficiency, they love "getting stuff done". Never mind the unspoken ideology of the middle, never mind what we're actually trying to achieve has a distinct ideological identity, we're political engineers, here! We're just trying to fix the system! It's almost like they're optimizing for bill passage rate.

I reject the idea that technical moderates are the default, that they're non-ideological, and that a watery combination of left and right ideas is best because it appeals to the most people, if only because we've been doing exactly that since the 80s and it's gotten us here.

We've put off buying our first home for a long time. Maybe things will look a little brighter in the spring.