> Even in the dot-com era, the early internet was already changing media and commerce in fundamental ways.
I agree that AI is overhyped but so was the early web. It was projected to do a lot of things ”soon”, but was not really doing that much 4 years in. I don’t think the newspapers or commerce were really worried about it. The transformation of the business landscape took hold after the crash.
> This is the one thing that puzzles me most about dating apps: where do all these pictures come from?
People actually curate the profile and copywrite the text. It’s not real authentic life documented by accident. Once you put your profile there for others to judge you soon figure out that it needs to be manufactured. That’s when you start asking for others to snap a photo while your out doing the thing you maybe wouldn’t even do if it was not for the show.
I recommend the book and the new research. It reflects on the rat park study and makes what I think are good arguments that addiction is not a simple thing we can fix only by fixing the enviroment even though it is part of it. OP was asking for evidence so I thought I’d chip in with a modern source. There are no socities that have solved addiction. Obviously it is a gnarly problem.
That’s a good goal and I think we should aim for that regardless if it fixes addiction. I would not call it easy though. And would it be world without addicts? There are plenty of well connected rich social happy folks who can’t handle simple molecules. Environment is part of the usage pattern but it’s not the only thing. That’s the books point I gather.
There is a new book by Owen Flanagan ”What is it like to be an addict”[0] where he goes through the phenomenon of addiction from many different angles and argues that rat park type findings are true but only give partial view to the problem. His view is that it is very multifaceted subject and can’t be understood or tackled with any one easy fix.
> ”Full self driving" is another example; your car won't be doing this, but companies will brag about limited roll-outs of niche cases in dry, flat, places that are easy to navigate.
Not expecting my car to be self-driving anytime soon, but I have understood there is actual working robotaxi service in San Francisco which is not easy or flat? I think we can’t keep saying self driving cars will never happen when this kind of thing already exists.
This unoptimizing has been going on since the start of time. Why are the values in json to start with? At somepoint the bad slow generalized version will overtake the specialized ways of doing things.
I am surprised one bag crowd seem to pack so many computing devices with them. Some have phone, laptop, ipad and kindle and pride themselves on being minimalists.
People use these for sure but the biggest problem with these I feel is that they produce ”finished shots” with 8 bit colors and heavy grading. It’s hard to mix it with the other material which actually looks quite bland while it is being worked on. Would be great if somebody would train a model on raw footage.
True but it is also like saying that some office building came out better than other because the workers put more effort into it. There is skill to to the craft but also it’s a game of constraints and how the project is planned and budgeted is large part of how it will look in the end. I believe what has changed is that producers know that cg looking cg is just a stylistic choice among many others and doesn’t hurt the box office in some genres almost at all.
Video signal without the noise or grain is annoying to watch as it makes everything in the ”out of focus” zone look smooth blurry. Your eyes want to focus yet it is an illusion of depth without an actual depth. Noise texture emphasizes that this is just a 2D plane after all so your eyes can rest and the viewer doesn’t feel like they need glasses. This is just my theory of it based on observation. No research behind it.
I think he argues more that if 24-bit audio would have been brought to the market like HDR it would have been advertised as being able to be louder. The new stereos would lack the volume control as 24-bit audio would encode absolute volume levels and older formats would play quietly from the new amazing hardware. Songs would be mastered to have more dynamic range changes so that the sound would pop over to loud volumes every now and then. This would be attributed to the higher bit depth of the signal format even though it would be just a different style of producing music. In order to play old songs loud in the new amazing stereo you would need to buy remastered version which would not simply play louder but would overall be quieter to emphasize the volume spikes added in remastering.
I love this. It used to work like magic but something happened and now it barely recognizes birds for me. Only if they are really close. Anyone else? Maybe my hardware is failing? I also travelled and loaded other packs and wonder if I messed up my DB.
I had friend who had the same idea to do it for pixel fonts with only two colors and 16x16 canvas. It was still 2^256. Watching that thing run and trying to estimate when it would finish made me understand encryption.
There are 700+ million people living in Europe. The countries are tiny, most have bunch of official languages. The fix would be to use users selected language and not to flip flop it based on location. IP based location guessing doesn’t work even down to right country in here.
I once met this older gentleman at a wedding and when I asked about his life he said he used to be really into computers but the personal computing revolution made him sour. It turned professional field step by step into junk until there was only amateurs with their toy computers left.
It is insane to defend Sam
Altman here, but it looks to me that World goes out of their way to not to link the biometric data to identity or even save it. Sure you need to trust the black box but if the company gets taken over there is no data to for the new evil owners to access.
I’m in the middle age slump. There is more talk around me about death. Some of our parents died in their 50s and this perspective of ’this might be the last decade’ is creeping in. Yet the same person talking might have still one of their grandparent alive!
I am not so interested in the short life. I am happy today so don’t know how else to prepare for that. I keep worrying about living to a 100. Not very likely, but likely enough to be a risk worth consodering. If I am still to live for 50+ years I can’t start hating everything new that is happening. I probably need to do more learning. Need new friends and cant’t solely live the family life. More sports and active life than before. Retirement is not even on the horizon in this scenario.
I think sign up for anything is a tall order. To use a recommendation site I would need it to just start asking me questions and immediatly also start the process of visually narrowing down content suitable for me. How many ratings from me would you need to do a good rec? Is there diminishing returns after certain amount of data from the user? There should be zero barriers of entry to this kind of thing. Like quirky website you click for few minutes. You can always provide ”save your answers” button and have the sign-in flow there, although I would appreciate unique link I can bookmark more.
I’ve worked in film mastering so yes I am an outlier. My point was that industry guarding the DCP makes sense as the leaked pirate versions are not the same thing. In music world everyone can buy uncompressed CD, but with moving image end user can only get what is equivalent of a mp3. This includes the illegal channels. Blu-ray is say 1:40 compressed from raw data. Good enough for sure but not the theatre experience.
There are no high quality pirated versions though. The streaming version and even blu-ray is compressed way heavier than these DCP files. I’d buy these cinema versions of films in a heartbeat if they were availble.
Consumers can only buy that which has been manufactured. There is customer demand but nobody is forcing anyone to start a company. If you build a factory and release tons of co2 that is the concrete act destroying the planet. Blaming your clients for making you do it seems wrong. Also kicking the can down the road diffuses the responsibility and obfuscates what harm actually was done. Consumers have hard time tracking this stuff down and are amateurs vs. the manufacturers who are the experts in the process and actually can make decisions for the better.
Apple TV remote has it’s problems but at least it strives to be simple. Magically it also controls enough amplifier and projector (I don’t know how, hdmi signals?) so I don’t need to touch any other remotes on daily basis.
I mixed diseases. English is not my first language. Just checked from wikipedia that it has 20 million yearly cases and assumed it was the mostly harmless kids disease we all had (which is vaccinated against now also I learnt). Anyway why use 20 million cases against 44 athletes (number which might not be correct, but maybe in the ballpark)?
Is this quote an example of making the issue seem larger than it is? Measles ”feels” very common although at any one point I guess not that many people have it, but many see it in their family or remember experiencing it. So it feels like a large number. Saying that there are less people in some group does not make it sound that small. Why not say there are under 100 poeple or whatever the number approximately is?
I just realized that it has been ages since I saw a wacky website. So refreshing. I have been asking everyone to stop trying to reinvent the wheel, use best practices, make the content separate from the design, keep it clean, readable and accesible. And now I find myself missing the web of the past.