07mk
5hr ago
Its a sad situation but nothing here seems unique or even too particularly culture war.
Without commenting on anything about the actual facts of the situation, I think the very fact that one side of the metaphorical culture war believes that it's particularly culture war means that it's necessarily culture war. As in the case of Floyd & Chauvin, it doesn't matter if the killed/killer were unfairly treated because of their race or status or whatever, all that matters is that enough people on any given side believe that it's particularly culture war, and it seems evident to me that enough people do, among the people who do know about it. The absolute total number of people knowing about it is also, of course, particularly culture war, due to how issues like this tend to get covered in mainstream media, and it seems to me that the people who do know about it are trying to increase that absolute total number, which is, again, also particularly culture war.
I feel like whatever issue there is with child actors will just be part of a larger trend with actors in general with AI. We may look back at the 20th-early 21st centuries with their actors performing in front of a camera to be displayed on a screen with quaint curiosity and a bit of horror like how we today look back at Buster Keaton hanging off a train for films in the early 20th century. I.e. we just no longer need to place real humans in such dangerous or effortful situations anymore, thanks to being able to show the same thing using computers.
I think the bigger thing may be social media celebrities, which will also be easy to fake, but which will naturally draw people - including children - in who are attracted to fame. The photos and videos might be computer-generated, but the faces and voices will be that of real, likely fame-hunting, humans, again including children. I don't know how we would or could protect children from early fame from such things. As someone else alluded to here, they'll most likely be "groomed" by the "algorithm" to creating and even enjoying creating certain types of content that I personally don't think would be good for there to be more of for society or for the children in question.
A reign of terror a la Scott Alexander China that just dictates how the algorithms work might work, but I can't see that being likely in the United States or even particularly desirable, as the cure may be worse than the disease. Age limits on social media are being tried in various places, but I'm skeptical that they can work without some massive cultural shift, which also seems unlikely. When the "winners" of social media are, almost by definition, high status, it's going to be hard to get people in general not to want to ape them, especially given the far lower costs of attempting compared to e.g. trying to become an actor, musician, or professional athlete.
Maybe the only way out is through, by sticking each of us in our own personal Matrix.
07mk
1d ago
Were there actual death threats, and how much more than the background default amount? I didn't see any actual examples of any of the "hate" directed her way in that Teen Vogue article, and my past experience with checking what are claimed as "death threats" tells me that I should presume that they're almost all death wishes rather than death threats.
07mk
1d ago
Given that this is known, what are the odds that at least one of the nuclear powers has major population centers/rich areas of South America as some of their auto-attack targets if shit hits the fan? Nukes aren't exactly cheap things you can just throw around willy-nilly on a whim, so perhaps it wouldn't be worth it. But I know that if I were in charge, I'd try to make sure we've got a few reserved for targeting places that are of strategic non-importance for (1) spite (the big reason) and (2) making sure that they don't have advantages over us for the Mad Max-esque post-apocalypse. Better to be Immortan Joe than a War Boy. I might even devote some intelligence resources to tracking the top X richest individuals on Earth at all times and make sure that their latest-available/best-guess coordinates are targeted.
07mk
1d ago
I've never heard of cooking bacon in water in my life. Growing up my Slavic parents would cook hot dogs in water but that's basically the only meat I've ever seen cooked by boiling as far as I can remember (I'm not counting stock here).
A friend of mine recommended cooking bacon in shallow water in the frying pan, as he said it got him the crispiest, most evenly-done bacon he's ever cooked in his life. I tried it a few times, but I could never get it to be any better than just frying on the pan normally. And in any case, the cooking process meant all the water boiled off anyway, so it doesn't apply here. My friend is Russian-born, though I believe he got this technique in his adulthood, long after he left behind Russia for America.
I've come to the conclusion that baking is the best method, though I have to be careful about the smoke triggering alarm.
07mk
1d ago
In general I think it would be great for game companies to have to release the code open source if they're going to stop supporting something, even an old version of a game.
In the long run, this might just be technologically obviated. If we live in a world where we can just tell Claude Opus 420.69 to reverse-engineer the server software and also the client software to be identical to the actual client software except with whatever encryption and security checks stripped out, and it actually generates that software successfully and cheaply, then all we really need is to prevent government interference. Of course, this could create a DRM cat-and-mouse game where the game devs program their games such that the security checks are so fundamentally built into the game that it's impossible to make a version of the client software that's meaningfully the same but with the security checks stripped out.
07mk
1d ago
GOT would be harder because the end wasn’t terrible it was just bad relative to the earlier work.
This is the second most offensive opinion I've read on this website.
07mk
3d ago
Mathematicians can say whatever they want
A legacy mathematician would use the word "proof" only to describe [("Refl is a value of type 0 + 0 = 0")]
(emphasis added)
So it seems like you're walking back the claim you made about what a (legacy) mathematician would say. Again, a legacy mathematician or any mathematician wouldn't describe that as a "proof."
07mk
3d ago
The native vocabulary is "3 is a value of type Nat" or "Refl is a value of type 0 + 0 = 0". A legacy mathematician would use the word "proof" only to describe the latter, and think it odd to use the word for the former.
Neither of these would be considered a "proof" by a mathematician. Those are just statements of fact. A mathematical proof is a logical argument of deduction that shows that some statement must be true if some set of premises are true. Statements of fact are used in proofs, but a single statement of fact wouldn't actually constitute a proof.
07mk
3d ago
As long as every $250 bill is coated with peanut residue. Let's put some eugenics into the mix.
07mk
4d ago
They should make that one again, but put Al Gore on it.
07mk
4d ago
Quarters are low-value enough (approximately 0.25 USD, if my math is correct) that fraud detection by humans is probably a very low priority. A counterfeiter would have to make a truly large mass of them to make it worth the production costs, and laundering all that without arousing suspicion has got to be some back-breaking labor, which defeats the purpose of counterfeiting. So given the low chance of loss and the low amount of loss from letting a counterfeit quarter through, most people don't find it worth the effort to try to detect it, unless some other alarms get raised.
07mk
4d ago
Combine that with livestreaming, and it seems like there's some major opportunity for growth here.
07mk
4d ago
Hm, perhaps the trophy hunting business could be improved with a sort of minimum caliber/destructiveness requirement on all weapons used for the hunting.
07mk
4d ago
Independence Day was 1996, not 1986. For a really good underrated McTiernan film closet to that, I recommend Last Action Hero from 93, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger with middle-aged Charles Dance (Tywin Lannister in Game of Thrones) as the villain. It was overshadowed by the Jurassic Park juggernaut, but it's a fantastic meta comedy action film parody. Feels a decade or two ahead of its time, as this kind of self-referential satires became far more common in this century than the last.
07mk
4d ago
I remember 2014 being the year of Gamergate and Ferguson, but I don't recall anything about ants.
(Emphasis added) Evidently, you do.
07mk
4d ago
According to the Wikipedia article, it seems that there was a "Cecil Effect" in Zimbabwe after the affair, where westerners hunting lions there became less common than otherwise would have been expected, resulting in less pleasant lives for the locals due to more lions and less money. I don't know much about the trophy hunting business, but what little I know about it from podcasts and radio shows makes me not surprised; it always seemed to me that westerners paying huge sums of money to hunt exotic animals in Africa was almost an unalloyed good, with the only significant downsides being for the individual animals themselves and other westerners who care more about optics or suffering of animals than about the suffering of other humans. The "I consent! I consent! I don't!" meme comes to mind.
07mk
4d ago
Anyone remember the affair of Cecil the Lion that was also around that time (seems like about a year before the affair of Harambe)? I recalled that it caused a bunch of drama online similar to Harambe, and then suddenly no one ever talked about it again. I'm always reminded of it when I run into Jimmy Kimmel on the news or social media, because he famously shed tears on his show while talking about the affair. I think these and Kony, referenced in another comment, stick to memories for being some of the earlier examples of social media hot flashes that tore through the internets and then went away, which became very common and even the default in the past decade.
With 2014 online drama being defined by the affair of reproductively viable worker ants, I wonder if future historians will think we just had a really strange animal-loving phase in the mid-2010s.
07mk
5d ago
usual unsavory types that caused the original high denomination bills to go out of circulation, I don't imagine the average American would have much use for these.
I feel like this might be part of the point. Because the USD is so popular and the 100 dollar bill is the highest value denomination, it has become one of the de facto standards for criminal financial transactions and thus featured heavily in films and TV shows and music. As a result, Benjamin Franklin has become even more immortalized, to the point that his first name is used interchangeably with $100 in some contexts. The $250 bill would likely supplant that, and thus Donald Trump's face would be featured heavily in future films and shows about crime, and perhaps there would even be a song called "All About the Donalds." All of which would probably make Trump's ego very happy.
07mk
5d ago
Fair point on the chuddiness and the lack of requirement of instantiation. That's a level of postmodernism than even I thought possible.
But for the other point, there's arbitrarily often and there's arbitrarily often. Given the limits of biology, I don't think it's possible for a human to change genders in a literally infinitely small amount of time, and, as such, however often a human were to change their/xir/zir/etc gender in their/xir/zir/etc finite lifespan, it would only sum up to a finite number. As such, all that does is to have another finite number to be multiplied by, which means the result is still finite.
07mk
5d ago
A lot of people seem to have this mythical idea about "attractiveness" or "good looks" or "being pretty" or "beauty" or etc. that exists as a concept outside of human judgment, as if how "attractive" someone is isn't defined by how many and how hard other people actually are "attracted" to them. I think this sort of thinking is especially encouraged in women, which is why the idea that "all women are 10s" is so common among women. And why the idea "straight men will judge you, a straight woman, as less attractive" registers as something different from "you, a straight woman, is less attractive."
07mk
5d ago
The twist is that Male Lead is the monster, and the climax is his grotesquely personified id rapaciously chasing Female Lead through a hellscape maze of his own creation. A surface-level analysis might fault the film for once again portraying male sexual frustration in a negative light, and yeah, that element is certainly there, but film (at least indie film) like all modern art is meant to challenge the viewer. On some level, one ought to reflect on how much of a monster one becomes on the inside when Stacy rejects you. I think the film earns it.
I'm reminded of a Spongebob meme I saw a while ago, a comic made up of screenshots where, IIRC, Spongebob is ordering from Squidward, with alternating frames, saying, "In my medieval fantasy story, it turns out that the church is actually evil," "How original," "And the demons are actually the good guys!" "Daring, are we?" It's quite possible and even likely that there's some valuable insight and even challenge there, but this is such well-trod ground that comports with the general thrust of basically all media in the mainstream that this description, in itself, makes it sound boring, if not tiresome. That said, it all comes down to the execution, of course.
I wasn't handed a script when I was studying for my driver's permit/license, but this very thing was exactly what was drilled into me as the thing to do when pulled over by the police. Both hands glued to the wheel unless or until instructed otherwise. In general, the fact that you need to always show both your hands, don't reach for something that's hidden, and don't make sudden movements are what I'd consider the basic "script" for interacting with police which I had picked up growing up. I didn't grow up in an environment that had much police interaction, and I haven't had any meaningful interaction with police as an adult, so I can't remember where I picked up this "script," though.
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