I see it as an anti feature, like a website’s ability to create a pop up without any user interaction or navigate without the user clicking such that the back button doesn’t go to the previous url but instead to some point you scrolled to in the site.

Just like when a news website pops up a request to send notifications. Um fuck no? I’m not sitting around waiting for new propaganda to drop such that I want to know immediately when something comes out.

It’s also a tactic of bullshitters to say a whole bunch of stuff in series, just put something out there and quickly move on to the next thing, making it sound like they have a lot of substance but hoping the quick change doesn’t give anyone much of a chance to pull on any of the threads of what they said or look close enough to realize that there is little to no substance behind any of it.

Ancient Aliens and Alex Jones both also use that.

And it’s a pain in the ass to unravel because people who don’t want to look more closely and just want to believe think there’s a list of things that need to be disproven if you wait and let the speaker finish or don’t question him about it directly because the believers don’t feel like they have the expertise to rebut counterpoints (so shelve them instead of discarding) and instead just want to go down the list. Which is fair, though it would be nice if they applied that same skepticism to that list of points in the first place.

But this seems like an effective counter for that strategy. Just pick an item on the list that doesn’t sound right and keep pulling on that thread with the person that said it on the first place rather than the disciples blindly following. Then they’ll see it’s not just their lack of expertise getting in the way of arguing back against counterpoints, it’s the whole thing lacking any real substance at all.

I’m the type that when I see descriptions like “be the hero of your own Star Wars story” for a tourist destination, I immediately think it’s going to be some cheesy oversold experience because you can’t really mass produce a main character role.

First of all, just the resources that would be required for the one on one time that would be involved is unrealistic for any scale beyond small groups.

Second, they aren’t like DMs that can roll with whatever their characters design; “your own story” needs to be pigeon holed into a limited set of choices they can prepare for, especially if there’s supposed to be high production value involved and special effects.

Third, of course any interactive elements are going to be ridiculously easy. They’d rather deal with people disappointed at how easy it is than people (especially kids) frustrated that they can’t do something.

So I knew right at the start of this video that it wasn’t my kind of thing.

But this thing didn’t even live up to the cheesy experience I would have expected. Seems like they bit off way more than they could chew with the initial idea but then we costs ballooned, they could only cut features and offerings while increasing the price, leaving it as an overpriced but underwhelming thing, in the end.

So much corporate shit is like this now. I think it’s just another symptom of the problems capitalism brings. Under capitalism, you get a mix of people who want to do a thing and make money from it and people who want to make money and think doing a thing will get them that money. Those that are focused on the thing will generally produce something of much higher quality than those focused on the money they’ll make. One asks, “is this good? Could it be better?” while the other asks, “is this good enough? Could it be cheaper?”

She touches on the other aspect in the video a bit, but could have gone a bit further (though I understand why she didn’t): the misleading marketing. Social media marketers with conflicted interests between being honest with their audience and keeping the providers of the free shit happy so the free shit keeps flowing. She touches on that aspect.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those trolls defending Disney are paid by Disney, maybe directly maybe indirectly. I’m not aware of any regulation against hiring people to pretend to like your product online. I’m not sure that would even technically count as advertisement, if truth in advertisement even matters anymore these days.

Jenny has integrity, at least as far as I can tell. Those “influencers” that don’t are scum, whether they are doing it for free shit or getting paid to do it directly.

This isn’t really about safety, it’s about gun manufacturer profits.

Could consider the AI itself to be art, any by extension anything it produces is a part of that art.

Though, combined with the other commenter’s point about it involving work from the prompter as well (or “work” tbf, since not all AI output requires tweaking if you get lucky), makes me wonder.

If someone creates a tool that is a work of art and another person uses that tool to create another work of art, how much of that 2nd work belongs to the 2nd artist and how much belongs to the tool maker?

Same thing with skills and technique. I got better at doing random landscape paintings after watching Bob Ross do it. I applied the techniques but might have never known them in the first place if not for Bob. How much of that art is mine vs Bob’s?

Not saying AI is entirely equivalent to these scenarios or that anything should change based on the answers to the questions. They are mostly philosophical and interesting to consider IMO.

I wish we had UBI so that this whole topic wasn’t so existential for people who depend on selling art to survive (which was difficult even before generative AI was a thing).

Which is funny because if you need an accessory of some sort to establish your identity, that feels less real to me than someone who is comfortable with themselves without any accessories.

I really hate how many people see insecurity and think, “that’s what strength looks like!”

I consider the razors pseudo logic.

Uh which war was that?

Regardless of what they are asking, you should have that conversation for your own sake, not just theirs. Though I’d also argue that if you are going to get married, you should want to do it for their sake, too. And if you resent them for not speaking their mind, don’t marry them.

Most of them were cases where I wasn’t surprised they had data but a bit surprised they shared it.

I think my phone came with a sonos app installed, though not certain about that. I got rid of it if it was, though I can’t say if the most recent update from them was before or after that.

But a few of them I’m not really sure why they are on there. There was another one that I didn’t list that just had the label “IDK”, not sure if that’s a real name or “I don’t know”. I’m assuming they came from effective fingerprinting/tracking.

I might look into an addon that fakes some of the information the browser sends like OS version and resolution. Maybe that will make fingerprinting harder.

Some examples from mine if anyone is curious. I never use the fb sso or any of that shit, nor did I ever explicitly consent to any of these services sharing anything with fb.

• Spotify
• bookings .com
• ebay (haven’t touched my account there in over a decade but they still had data to send this year)
• windy .com
• duolingo
• tinder
• my bank
• opera
• sonos (I can’t think of any time I’ve ever even interacted with this one)
• samsung wallet (another one I never even set up)
• Uber eats
• calorie counter
• mediacom usa and euro (?)

Also, if you remove access via messenger app, it will show a confirm message without closing the screen. Clicking x goes back and it’s not on the list anymore. Whether they are actually leaving it disconnected or just hiding it, who knows.

Some of these services I didn’t use the same email that I used for fb, too, or any email at all.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie should be required reading for everyone. It’s full of things that are so obvious in hindsight but go against our natural instincts so we blunder through attempts to persuade not realizing that we might be increasing resistance rather than decreasing it.

Like the whole, “you might be right but you’re still an asshole” thing. Being correct just isn’t enough. In some cases you get crucified and then after some time has passed, the point you were trying to convince others of becomes the popular accepted fact. And they might even still hate you after coming around on the point you were trying to make.

That book won’t turn you into a persuasive guru, but it will help avoid many of the pitfalls that make debates turn ugly or individuals stubborn.

Or, on the flip side, you can use the inverse of the lessons to become a more effective troll and learn how to act like you’re arguing one thing while really trying to rile people up or convince them of the opposite. I say this not so much to suggest it but because knowing about this can make you less susceptible to it (and it’s already a part of the Russian troll farm MO).

Yeah, I was going to mention race conditions as soon as I saw the parent comment. Though I’d guess most cases where the debugger “fixes” the issue while print statements don’t are also race conditions, just the race isn’t tight enough that that extra IO time changes the result.

Best way to be thorough with concurrency testing IMO involves using synchronization to deliberately check the results of each potential race going either way. Of course, this is an exponential problem if you really want to be thorough (like some races could be based on thread 1 getting one specific instruction in between two specific instructions in thread 2, or maybe a race involves more than 2 threads, which would make it exponentially grow the exponential problem).

But a trick for print statement debugging race conditions is to keep your message short. Even better if you can just send a dword to some fast logger asynchronously (though be careful to not introduce more race conditions with this!).

This is one of the reasons why concurrency is hard even for those who understand it well.

I once lived in an apartment where the bathtub drain was pretty plugged. It would drain but every shower was done in a slowly rising puddle. I tried draino but it didn’t make a difference.

I eventually had a roommate move in and noticed right away that the tub drained better, asked him how he fixed it. He used the plunger. It blew my mind because up until that moment, I had thought a plunger was specifically for use with toilets.

Now I have a toilet plunger plus a smaller sink plunger since the size of the standard one can be awkward to use on a sink, plus the whole not wanting to use something that’s been in the toilet on things outside of the toilet.

Not that I’ve even had a plugged toilet in years, and, having a bidet, it’s even less likely going forward.

For a while Amazon would estimate a time range and the delivery guy would never show up during that window. But sometimes it would do something like this: original estimate was 11am - 4pm, 4pm would pass with no delivery, then at 6pm, it would update to like 2pm - 5pm. Then it would show up at like 8pm.

They seem to have gotten better lately though.

I wish more businesses would use Canada Post to deliver in Canada. They’ve got these great community mailboxes with larger ones for secure package delivery. They just drop the key to the big one in your smaller mailbox that works similarly to locked apartment complex mailboxes. It’s way better than worrying if someone will grab the box in front of my door or if the delivery guy will even drop it at the right door.

I put off watching that for a long time because I didn’t really like the Harley Quinn character and her obsession with Joker and that whole abusive relationship they had, compounded by all the people who treated Harley and Joker like it was a relationship goal.

But I was very pleasantly surprised when I did eventually give it a shot. Yeah, it does include some Harley and J stuff, but they kinda had to because of how ingrained that relationship was into Harley’s pop culture identity. But it is done well. The series is one of my favorite in the Batman mythos.

It’s also kinda interesting how Ivy seems to be holding up better morally than Batman himself does. She’s an environmental warrior while he’s a status quo warrior, and that billionaire side of him holds up less and less well as it becomes more and more apparent that even billionaire philanthropists are really just taking credit for giving away wealth they shouldn’t have had in the first place.

I also wonder if there would be more doctors if they didn’t have such an abusive onboarding process that doesn’t necessarily ever get any better after they finish their residence.

It seems like there’s a vicious cycle going on where the crazy hours lead to burnout, which leads to some people leaving, which then leads to more crazy hours to try to make up for the shortage.

His reaction might have made it into the top 5 reactions to the shots as far as severity of results. The only other reactions that weren’t just words that I’m aware of are the SS eventually noticing and shooting the guy (plus increasing security), the one cop that shot the guy’s gun, and maybe Trump himself getting PTSD. So Jack Black might have had the 4th most severe reaction by cancelling that tour and rethinking any future collaborations.

Hindsight is 20/20 but he probably should have just cancelled a show or two and then would have seen that the whole thing was dropped because it wasn’t generating any sympathy for Trump (quite the opposite, the main sentiments I saw were “sucks he missed” and “we really shouldn’t say that it sucks he missed, even though a lot of us are thinking that”).