weeblewobble

> Traditional art is 90% money laundering

Is this a real number or did you just make it up?

what are some of your favorite sculptures?

This article is the number one most active post on Culture War (Hacker) News today. I'm not sure what that says about this forum but it's not good.

I believe you (and Snowden) are catastrophizing, or in other words self-cancelling. You have chosen to dramatically curtail your self-expression out of fear of social consequences.

It seems that what you fear is being "attack[ed] publicly." If that's the case, what you fear is that others will express themselves in a way that makes you uncomfortable. Wouldn't the cause of free speech be better advanced by defending to the death their right to express themselves, rather than by casting that expression as the death knell of modern society? If your side were to "win" this culture war, a whole lot of speech would be suppressed by new social norms. Free speech for me but not for thee.

If you walk into a bar and start mouthing off, there's a decent chance you'll get punched in the face. This is bad and a crime, but I never hear anyone talk about how it's a sign of the deterioration of free speech norms. Why is that?

This is what I mean by catastrophizing. In response to speech that makes you uncomfortable you have chosen to give up on self-expression on controversial topics (except this one apparently) and martyr yourself. But no one is forcing you to do that. The arena of public discourse is still open to all comers.

To the extent that I see any coherent position in the free-speech-substack cinematic universe, it's rather anodyne: "people should be nicer to each other." True enough as far as it goes.

also a major plot in Elysium Fire by Alastair Reynolds

who said AirBnB invented house rentals? OP said they would never stay in someone else's house on vacation.

FWIW, new model macbooks have a physical escape key next to the touchbar

reminded me of this great piece of writing advice from Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder:

" I do have a trick that makes things easier for me. Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and rather fun, I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue—“Homer, I don’t want you to do that.” “Then I won’t do it.” Then the next day, when I get up, the script’s been written. It’s lousy, but it’s a script. The hard part is done. It’s like a crappy little elf has snuck into my office and badly done all my work for me, and then left with a tip of his crappy hat. All I have to do from that point on is fix it. So I’ve taken a very hard job, writing, and turned it into an easy one, rewriting, overnight. I advise all writers to do their scripts and other writing this way. And be sure to send me a small royalty every time you do it."

There's a product called LiquidPlanner built around this idea thats been around for years. A friend used to work there but I have no other affiliation. Looks like they're still kickin' https://www.liquidplanner.com/

weeblewobble's hypothesis: as an IC, your job is not to hit your deliverables but to allow your manager to hit their deliverables

in your front yard? I live in Seattle and find that hard to believe.

I downloaded this app to see what it was all about and I found it completely incomprehensible.

I've been an Audible paid subscriber for 10 years. I have 138 audiobooks in my library. At $10/month, that means I've paid Audible $1200 for ~2000 hours of "reading". Using the 25% royalties mentioned in a child comment (no idea if that's accurate) I've paid authors only $300 for all of that. That seems super low! And I imagine I'm in the top quintile in terms of paying for "books".

I think it's pretty sound in this case. A policy change that causes 1/3 of your company to resign in protest is definitionally dumb (unless you're a believer in the "I meant to do that" school of thought being suggested elsewhere in this thread).

I haven't been on there in a long time, but I remember it being really really hard to use, especially for newcomers. Tons of random crap, no ranking or voting system to bubble up things that are worth reading, lots of gore (and worse), inside jokes, spam. That's why people think of it as mysterious and inaccessible.

More like $6T. OP seems to be counting Federal Reserve actions as "stimulus packages" which is pretty non-standard if not outright wrong

I don't know the answer to your question, but if you're interested in this topic I highly recommend Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bergman. Very well-sourced and readable account of Israeli spycraft.

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

It could be that the side effect has delayed onset, so there could be many people out there who are about to have the side effect but haven't showed up in stats yet. In that case I think it makes sense to pause for a while and wait for updated numbers

Your belief that large social media platforms should be more permissive has nothing to do with the First Amendment, which is a limitation on a grant of power to a non-human entity (i.e. the Federal government). The idea that the "spirit" of the 1A constrains the actions of human individuals is somewhat perverse.

Sometimes platforms ban people I think they shouldn't. We agree on that much. I hope user pressure pushes them into more fair and transparent processes. But I strongly believe they should have the right to publish or not publish whatever they want. And on ideological grounds, I strongly oppose any weakening of the First Amendment.

It's not a lazy argument, you're just tired of hearing it. It's actually a very strong argument. "quasi-public", "maybe Twitch isn't a great example", "maybe not legally... yet", "some forthcoming legal doctrine"-- these are weak qualifiers. What are you proposing, exactly? How many users is a service allowed to have before their content moderation policies are nationalized?

Somewhat ironically, whatever you're proposing would almost certainly require weakening the first amendment. Personally, I'd prefer a strong first amendment (which is concrete and actually means something) to the nebulous "spirit of the 1A".

I think your estimates are way, way off. I doubt the average college student eats leftover pizza once a week, let alone pizza that's been left out all night.

If cultural institutions are captured and weaponized by people whose views represent <10% of society, won't the rest of society simply choose new cultural institutions to care about?

This seems to me to be already underway. Right wing media has been around for decades, and more recently youtube, podcasts, substack, etc. have provided a platform for a huge number of cultural institutions opposed to the tyrannical 10%.

So what's the problem?

Well, I think the problem is that it's not <10%. Sure, some of the more extreme examples of woke-ism would have very little broad support. And sure, the aforementioned ecosystem of alternative cultural institutions are incentivized to make sure those examples get as much exposure as possible. But the "steelman" version of woke-ism probably has 40-50% support in the US. The steelman version of anti-wokism probably has around the same support level.

So we're at a stalemate. The old-guard of tyrannical college elite institutions and the new breed of alternative working class everyman institutions co-exist in the same attention marketplace, competing and trading blows.

So again I ask, what's the problem?

Very peculiar sentence. The word "distraction" is quoted but the rest of the sentence, the strongest claim, is not quoted.

Where does the "are choosing to learn computer science and programming as opposed to working on other subjects" come from? It is implicitly attributed to "some schools", but which schools? did they really say that, or is the author paraphrasing something they said? or is it the author's interpretation or guess of their motivation?

Or perhaps this is viral marketing, or in other words, BS.

I find it very cool that you were there for something like this.

How was it funded? Seems very expensive.

Were regular people excited about it? Was there a meaningful change in day to day life after it was completed?

I really dislike this advice, I think it encourages people to be shallow and superficial. This quote from Parks and Recreation captures it nicely

Ron (sitting down next to Leslie at the Senior’s Ball): Everything ok, Knope?

Leslie: My boyfriend is a lawyer, and he’s smart and interesting and there are a lot of things about him I really like. But he acted like a real jerk today. I don’t know, it’s something about the way he treats people or something.

Ron: He’s a tourist. He vacations in people’s lives, takes pictures puts them in his scrapbook and moves on. All he’s interested in are stories.

Leslie: Ha.

Ron: Basically, Leslie, he’s selfish, and you’re not, and that’s why you don’t like him.

Also see this response/critique by Hofstadter and Dennett (OCRed so a bit mangled, you have to jump around a little bit.

http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-24-what-is-it-l...

I do think this is bad UX. The warning message (which basically says "this button doesn't do what it says it does") is commingled with a bunch of other less-important warning messages.

It's also a bit ambiguous-- it seems to be focused on how it will change the settings and last modified date. I could see how one could read that as "this action will create a copy of your files [and then delete the old ones] rather than moving them directly", warning you that your file metadata will be impacted.

There's also the problem that these warnings are everywhere in AWS console so you develop a bit of blindness to them.

So they have a pretty much wrong button name ("Edit Storage Class" --> "Copy to a different storage class") with an ambiguous warning message commingled with a bunch of other warning messages. I'd call that bad UX.

That being said, 8 months is too long for this bill to be considered AWS' fault. and the fact that he's been working really hard on his movie is irrelevant and comes off as whiny

This thread is really eye-opening about how stagnant the discourse around free speech/wokeness/political correctness has been. Four years later and the conversation would be exactly the same today.

I think they mean it's important to them to respect the laws of Europe.

This seems to sort of elide the extremely popular and lucrative media ecosystem of the "IDW"/"free speech movement"/anti-woke movement.

Certainly it's true that the Overton window has shifted in large sections of the legacy media, but the Overton window always existed. The idea that its illegitimate for a private organization to shift their personal Overton window seems vaguely authoritarian to me.

Anyway it's never been easier to grow, reach, and monetize your personal audience (substack, podcasts, etc.) without gatekeepers.