celluloid_dream
No bio...
User ID: 758
celluloid_dream
4d ago
the profession they are getting a degree for
Well that's the whole damn problem, isn't it? You want someone who went to school for Computer Science, which tends to be mostly theoretical, to have training in the most practical and tangentially related sub-field. Why should they?
I'd argue job training is a role universities are uniquely not well-suited to fill, given the glacial pace of curriculum change, and other structural handicaps, like tenured hedgehog dens.
In so far as video game writing was "good", it was good in the sense that it was load bearing.
Great game writing is often inseparable from great worldbuilding. If you look at something like Roadwarden, a simple RenPy illustrated text RPG, the game is its writing. It lives and dies on the strength of its worldbuilding so it has to pull that off, or else fail completely.
When the writing is bad though, I find it's less a failure of worldbuilding, or even current year bullshit, but more because of what must be intentional blandness. You don't get Starfield NPCs without trying to be that boring.
celluloid_dream
16d ago
Even there, the street outside was dirty, garbage everywhere, unswept, sandy.
When I get the "oh, you spent a month in India? How was that?" small talk, scenes like this, and a hundred others flash through my mind before I politely lie: "it was fine", and change the subject. The pristine western retail stores with literal rubble half-blocking the entrances.. The designated landfill streets.. The street curs gnawing at their severed paws in the middle of the road.. The absolute state of the power infrastructure (live? wires pulled down to street level and woven into clothesline). The constant smell of rot and pollution and feces. I could go on.
It's not so much the squalor. It's the squalor plus dressing up in shirt and tie, working in an air conditioned office and pretending there's no problem at all.
celluloid_dream
8d ago
There are further distortions due to the fact that primary residences are exempt, which incentivizes people to save by investing in their primary residences, inflating property values and making housing more expensive.
This grinds my gears. A rational (I think) response to the Canadian housing market doing this would be "don't go anywhere near that! There's something obviously wrong with it", and instead of fixing what's gone wrong, I see the government propping up the bubble by further taxing alternative investments.
celluloid_dream
10d ago
This sounds like cope.
I snowboard, fast. I can't count the number of times where I've had "I love helmets" moments on the slopes. Snow is softer than concrete, but it's hard enough that I'm sure I'd have had a concussion if I wasn't wearing one, and instead I got up without a scratch. I appreciate you've linked a study, but my lived experience disagrees.
The objection my European skier buddy always had was "well, you don't catch edges like that on skis, so you don't need one", but no matter what's under your feet, if you bail at any speed, you're still falling vertically at least your own height, then tumbling down the mountain after that uncontrolled. Funny enough, same guy now wears a helmet after slipping on ice and bonking his head hard enough to knock some sense into him.
You can get very light helmets. Most don't obstruct your vision, since the front piece is cut away past where your goggles sit. You can get a glossy exterior that doesn't catch on the snow, and if anything presents more of a smooth surface to glide along and not wrench your head any direction that would hurt your neck.
celluloid_dream
10d ago
"Seven hundred and sixty-six cases of snow sport head injuries were identified over six winter seasons. Of these cases..."
Without going into every study in that review, the obvious flaw is: people who aren't injured don't show up in the data. They're taking people who already have a head injury, and then noting helmet or no helmet.
Yeah, you're still going to have a bad time if you accelerate your head into something solid at a high enough speed, but given that it might happen, I'm 100% going to choose to put foam and plastic in the way to dissipate the impact. If you had to fall onto groomed snow and land on your head, say from a standing position, not even at speed, and I offer you the choice of wearing a helmet or not, would you really prefer not to wear one?
celluloid_dream
10d ago
Sure, I'll grant they reduce auditory awareness, and possibly lead to accidents like this (though, snowboarder should have shoulder checked, and skier should have seen them since they were uphill).
On the other hand, accidents like that happen regardless, and if they're going to happen to me, I want to be wearing goggles that won't shatter into my face like sunglasses, and a helmet that will protect my noggin.
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
That information was revealed and discussed. It's more that no one cared, I think.
Zvi: OpenAI: The Battle of the Board (Nov. 22, 2023)
Sam Altman then attempted to use this (potentially manufactured) drama to get Toner removed from the board. He used a similar tactic at Reddit, a manufactured crisis to force others to give up power. Once Toner was gone, presumably Altman would have moved to reshape the rest of the board.
It's awful. We truly live in a dark (or too bright) time.
Consider New Reddit:
- This is the default. I'm only getting 2 posts per massive browser screen. After browsing a bit, it does fill some of that space with a "recently viewed" list, but the massive bars on the side are still there. I'm convinced these design choices have dumbed down participation on reddit such that people now only posts pics and simple questions rather than longer discussions.
- This is if you change it to "Classic" view, but that still only shows 7 posts compared to old reddit 's 13. These aren't so bad. The whitespace would be filled by longer post titles, so it doesn't feel like a waste. Personal preference, but I still think old reddit is much cleaner, despite displaying more.
- This is "Compact" - dropping the thumbnails, shrinking even further, and new reddit still only gets 12 posts on screen. In an effort to shrink things, they've moved the comment button way off to the right, which looks awkward when the post title is short. And for what? Now I have to trace along that whitespace with my eyes to find the comment info.
Substack is even worse:
- Just look at this shit! We are approaching 80% whitespace here, and half of it is Substack pushing their stupid twitter clone.
- This page should be the home screen instead, and it's still half blank.
- Another sin: If you accidentally hover over a username, it pops up a giant box like this full of yet more whitespace, covering your view of what you were looking at. On mobile, this happens if you thumb the screen to scroll down and accidentally press anywhere near a name.
Can anyone familiar with design explain why we can't have stuff like the old slatestarcodex blog back? It worked just fine on mobile. If the text is too small, you just pinch zoom the screen a bit.
celluloid_dream
3mo ago
Yes. A good film is like a good song. Part of the experience is the tempo - how it flows and how it carries a feeling throughout. If you drop it and come back later, the continuity is lost the same way your favourite song is ruined if you keep pausing it every 30 seconds.
Example: Uncut Gems is a tense movie! It's stressful! It doesn't let up for two hours straight, and then when you finally get to the end, the last scene very much cashes in on it having taken you for that exhausting ride.
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
If you take a look at the top posts on /r/Canada right now, we have:
- Canada’s Immigration Plan Is Not Viable In Any Version of Reality
- Canadians Flee The Country In The Fourth Highest Volume In 73 Years
- Rents would be tapering off if not for high immigration, hints BoC governor
- Hunger in the house next door: What relying on food banks looks like
- Canada has added more than 1 million people and counting in 2023, it’s unsustainable
- Nova Scotia sees spike in military personnel living in tents, couchsurfing amid housing crisis
I didn't cherry-pick these. That's what's at front of mind for a lot of Canadians right now, as best I can tell, and I think people have already updated. If you look at the polls, the Conservative party has shot up to a clear projected majority starting in about September of this year.
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
- For the first time in my life, I get the sense that public opinion is turning on immigration. Canada has always had a sort of left-wing nationalist pride in our immigration intake. It's only in the last few years I've started to hear murmurings of dissent. Even so, people don't blame immigrants themselves (rightly!), but the government.
- There would be some transmission from failure in office to electoral results. It's just delayed because we don't do fixed electoral terms, so the sitting PM gets to sometimes squeeze out an extra few years by calling an election early like Trudeau did in 2021. If the election were held today, it would be a Conservative blowout. I can't imagine it will be any less of a blowout in 2025 if things continue to get worse. There's also the impending mortgage crisis forecast to hit just in time for election season.
celluloid_dream
7mo ago
I feel the other side of this analogy too.
A few years ago, I bought a nice electric mountain bike. Fast, fun, capable (you can ride MTB trails uphill!) - I love it to bits. If I could, I'd ride it everywhere. So what's the problem?
It's that my city has a rampant bike-theft-culture. Within a few weeks of locking it unattended outside, some fucking junkie would try and steal it, and even if they didn't fully succeed, they'd loot it for parts, jamming a screwdriver through the flimsy battery lock and prying it out. They'd go for the wheels, or try and take the seat. They would still end up causing damage. It's enough to dissuade me from riding it, and I feel it's a legitimate frustration with the state of the city that that is just accepted as normal and expected.
celluloid_dream
3mo ago
It's bad. Screenshot of the home page. I just want it to be a blog, and it insists on trying to be a whole social media do-everything site. I'm honestly disappointed when authors I follow encourage this by tweeting and chatting on it. (Apparently Substack asks them to? maybe pays them, or says it'll boost their engagement, not sure)
The main gripe I have with the subscribe reminders is that they pop up at the start of the page. If I'm reading something new, I obviously don't know if I like it yet. Why would I ever subscribe after only reading the first 5% of an article? If you must annoy me with a popup (and I'd really rather you didn't), do it at the end, please.
celluloid_dream
7mo ago
A humble request to the voters of this forum:
Please, for the sake of ideological diversity, do not downvote well-expressed opinions you disagree with. Contrary views are fertile ground for good discussion, as several of these QC reports show. Please try and see them as a complement to your side of the argument, not a threat. If nothing else, they provide a contrasting backdrop against which to paint one's own picture. This should be encouraged, not discouraged.
A prime example would be the discussion about pronoun policy a few days ago.
celluloid_dream
5mo ago
I'm less annoyed by its stupidity than by its constant moralizing. It straight-up refuses to do things much of the time.
One that stands out (though, I can't seem to reproduce it now) was ChatGPT refusing to send a request to DALL-E for an illustration of a trans character pre-transition. I can't find the conversation, but it was something like:
ChatGPT: Due to our content policy, I can't generate that image
Me: What? .. why? What's wrong with that?
ChatGPT: It is important to respect the feelings of trans people, and depicting this character at a sensitive time in their life could be hurtful and (etc etc.)
Me: It's a fictional character. I promise they won't mind.
ChatGPT: It is important to .. (blah blah blah)
Me: Fine. Screw it. Character isn't trans any more. Are you happy now? There goes half our diversity quota
celluloid_dream
5mo ago
Don't have data for you, but I wanted to add:
- Fire alarms - It's gotten to the point where schools/companies doing fire drills have to send around staff to make people go outside.
- Emergency phone alerts - In my area, these also get used for AMBER alerts, which everyone ignores. When they need to warn everyone about the big west coast earthquake, there's going to be a lot of phones left in pockets.
- Screaming in public - In a healthy society, it'd be normal to pay attention to this, right? I'm totally desensitized to it. I assume others are as well.
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
Matthew B. Crawford's Why We Drive and The World Beyond Your Head.
Why We Drive is a vitalist paean to driving (and motorcycling), specifically the kind that involves risk and skill. It's also a rant against self-driving cars, glowing rectangles, and checking out of the real world.
I didn't hate it, but given its title, I expected "Why we road trip", "Why we go for a drive to clear our heads", "Why we explore that highway we've never been down", etc. Instead, it was more like "Why we speed", "Why we do donuts in the parking lot", "Why we tinker with gearhead shit".
Specifically with the gearhead stuff, the book did not do a good enough job of selling it to me. I fully believe it's part of why Crawford drives, but gearhead shit is not at all on the radar for me, or the vast, vast majority of people I know. The rare one or two that could MacGyver a timing belt out of pantyhose (or even know what a timing belt is) tend to be either the children of auto repair professionals, or else very deep in some automotive subculture already. That just makes the "We" in "Why We Drive" way more exclusive than it needs to be.
Partway through The World Beyond Your Head, which I'm already liking much better. It's so far a more general case of the topics surrounding attention in WWD. Probably should have read this one first.
I wonder what Crawford would make of the fact that I'm listening to it over a shitty TTS voice reader while: driving, making dinner, eating, playing video games, cleaning my apartment, swiping notifications away, only hitting pause when something else demands the vocal-processing-modeling part of my brain, such that I can no longer concentrate on the book in the background.
celluloid_dream
7mo ago
Dear Dame Caroline,
I can confirm that Mr. Brand is able to monetize his content on our network and will continue to be able to do so unless his content is found to violate our terms and conditions as listed here: <link>
Please refer to the same document for <company>'s policy regarding inappropriate and illegal behavior on our site.
Sincerely,
Some Person, PR Drone, <company>
Was that so hard?
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
I find it a bit puzzling that the LLM is expected to do things correctly with minimal or no guidance, which is a bit like expecting a riderless horse to stay on track and win a race. Maybe it can sometimes, but with a code jockey, it can be so much better.
That probably looks something like noticing that it's overfitting on poker, translating the question to avoid that, and seeing if it does any better. Eg. not calling the symbols "cards" or "faces" or "suits". ROT13-ing the letters so they don't look like a poker hand, or whatever.
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
I really liked the premise of Flatliners (1990) - medical students deliberately induce clinical death to touch the afterlife
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
I would highlight something I noticed in a few conversations recently.
- Louise Perry & Bryan Caplan (mentioned by @raggedy_anthem yesterday)
- Agnes Callard & Robin Hanson (basically any episode with just the two of them)
That is, the ability to really listen in a discussion, the humility to integrate what the other person is saying in real time, and offer thoughtful responses. Louise and Agnes are outliers in a lot of ways, but they're extremely good at this.
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
Recently, I think the default UI change is a factor. Comparing new.reddit.com to old.reddit.com, you get much less text, and many fewer visible comments per post on new reddit than old. By default, it seems to "... expand to continue" long messages. Some subs now also display gif replies, which seem to only be used for snark. In general, it seems to encourage low-effort participation, and discourage thoughtful answers.
celluloid_dream
1yr ago
I swear Google is deliberately hiding a large portion of real results.
Often when I search exact phrases from lyrics or samples, I'll get nothing. Zero results for "I love the island" and "I love the palm trees". Zero! I don't believe it. Google is telling me that no one on its history of the entire indexed internet has included those phrases together. I refuse to believe it. Those aren't Chomsky sentences that have never been spoken before. Where are the travel blogs? Where are the Hawaiian tourism ads? Where are the yelp reviews? Where are the misheard lyrics? (turns out it was "I love the islands" and the sample was from a Janet Jackson interlude)
But Google says no. 0 results. Zilch. It just makes me wonder what else it's not showing.
Isn't it still "alief", just with ¬P instead of P?
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