celluloid_dream
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User ID: 758
celluloid_dream
11mo ago
It is also rooted in me seeing that the war on drugs turns the banned drugs into a highly valuable and easily produced form of underground currency and thus directly leads to the growth of drug gangs and cartels that are, clearly, responsible for a good share of the street crime that I am seeking to curb.
This doesn't match my model of most street crime.
I'll see a drugged out fentanyl addict (when they're not bent over like this) careen into the supermarket I'm shopping at, wearing about 3 layers too many and know instantly, this guy is going to steal some shit. I make eye contact with the security guard, do a little head nod as if to indicate, "hey, you see that guy? He's going to steal some shit". The guard gives a tired sigh as if to reply, "I fucking know, dude. What do you want me to do about it?", and I shrug and go back to shopping. Couple minutes later, I see the guard following the junkie - now with hoodie pockets stuffed full of batteries - out the door. I guess that's protocol. Junkie shambles off around the corner to the alley and probably sells his whole haul to another drug addict for $10 and moves on to smashing car windows to steal cans out of the cupholders or something. That's the street crime I see.
We have gangs. It's just that they're off in another part of the city shooting each other, and playing cops & robbers with the anti-gang police task force. I'm sure their crime is connected to the druggie stealing Duracells somewhere, but it doesn't feel like it. Maybe it's different in your city.
celluloid_dream
1yr 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
1yr 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.
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
1yr ago
Funny enough, I was hiking in the woods alone last weekend and crossed paths with a woman also hiking alone. She greeted me with a somewhat exaggerated "I'm glad to see you out here!" (I was unaware of bear discourse at the time, so it went over my head).
Anyway, I didn't eat her. She didn't eat me, and we both continued on and didn't die to the best of my knowledge.
celluloid_dream
1yr 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
2yr ago
I do wonder what is the probability that "Sarah" is a pseudonym to make the agent seem more amenable to a Western customer
Obviously this. There are enough clues that "Sarah" is an Indian support rep following a strict flowchart:
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Use of the word "Kindly"
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Puzzling grammar errors and stilted professional speech (no contractions, jargon, or slang)
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"You've been pretty quiet" at the start is an automatic idle detection script - possibly misfiring
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requesting permission for everything is likely a CYA tactic so they don't get fired in the event you escalate. I've found this to be common in dealing with offshore support
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Paradoxically, making promises that both parties know is unlikely to be kept is also common: "Rest assured you will receive the by end of tomorrow."
Alternatively, it's a chat-bot trained on offshore support transcripts. God help us.
celluloid_dream
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
2yr ago
Then I guess I'll have to be optimistic based on Musk's track record with products I've personally witnessed:
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Tesla really changed the game for electric cars. They're fast, powerful, cool, techy. People want them. At least in my PNW costal city, you see them everywhere now.
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Starlink allows a friend to live in the middle of nowhere and still remote-desktop to work seamlessly. He reports that even online multiplayer gaming is doable with satellite internet.
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SpaceX developed into an (I think, as a layman) impressive technology, doing things that previously weren't possible.
Like, I look around and really do see the Teslas on the street. I really do see the Starlink satellites in the sky. I've watched SpaceX launches. Admittedly, I haven't paid any attention to the financials, so maybe it's all going to come crashing down, but people have been saying that for years, and they're still going strong.
celluloid_dream
1yr 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
2yr ago
I'm coming around to the idea that the free+advertising model was the internet's original sin. A site like Reddit, maybe the largest and second most trusted repository of human text on the internet, apparently can't make money.
Reddit must look at third party clients scraping "their" data (especially LLMs training on it), using "their" site, then reselling it at an actual profit and feel like they should get a cut. Meanwhile the mods have a good argument that they're providing much of the value, and of course it's ultimately the users' generating the content in the end.
I wonder how the net would have evolved if something like Brave's basic attention token was around back in the day, with users paying in proportion to what they consume, with mods being compensated and ultimately the site not being beholden to advertisers like it is now.
celluloid_dream
2yr ago
I'm guilty of voting to restore balance, but let me explain:
I think the voting ethics ought to be something like the original reddiquette. If a comment adds to the discussion - if it expresses something relevant clearly, even if you disagree - then you should upvote. If you can't bring yourself to do that, then at the very least, you should not downvote. In a well-behaved forum, the score of an unpopular, but valid comment should never fall below 1.
On this site (but not on Reddit for some reason) I noticed posters who play devils advocate, or disagree with the majority were regularly be downvoted below 0. Examples: ( 1 2 3, all negative at time of linking ). This is bad. These might not be quality contribution material, but they're fair comments and shouldn't be downvoted. To quote the rationalist maxim, "Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever". I see a lot of bullet holes here. I do my part to patch them up as best I can.
celluloid_dream
1yr ago
It's not even close to the scale required to address the problem. The important number is nestled in the middle of OP's post, so you might have skimmed over it. 400,000 people in 3 months. Graph of population increase vs housing completions.
Canada is taking in over a million people a year, and building maybe 1/4 of the housing (not to mention the other infrastructure) needed to support that growth.
In total, Canada witnessed about 800,000 housing starts over the 2021-2023 period, whereas over this same period, Canada’s population grew by over 2.5 million. The fact that the CMHC forecasts fewer than 224,000 starts in 2024 and only 232,000 in 2025 does not bode well for housing affordability in Canada, particularly in the context of continuing rapid population growth.
I've been totally mesmerized by ChatGPT4's writing capabilities lately, having used it to generate hours upon hours of entertainment somewhere in the gray area between a TTRPG and collaborative fanfic. I give it the outline of a scene, tell it what the characters do. If there's combat or uncertainty, I have it evaluate using the game rules and their character sheets. Mostly though, it reads like a choose-your-own-adventure novel with all possibilities open.
Consider this tavern-meet scene from the Cyberpunk universe: I think this is pretty fucking good. GPT's prose is not high art, but it's a damn sight better than what I could manage. If I played a live game with friends, we would not narrate this well. If we played a PbP or written game, I'd still forget to colour the similes with elements of each character's backstory like GPT did without my even asking.
It's empowering to be able to orchestrate tropey pulp so quickly. Normally I'm a slow writer (seconding @PatellaFarmer 's comment a while ago ), and not a good one - both for fiction and nonfiction. I'll agonize over word choice, phrasing, go back, edit too much, and it'll still come out awful (e.g. this post).
With GPT though, I'm like Mickey in Fantasia's Sorcerer's Apprentice and god, it's fun! "Have two characters enage in a fierce argument reflecting their core moral differences". "Write a climactic battle scene, every action heightened to the stuff of legend", "Do a silly montage anime music video (AMV) set to an angsty alt-rock song (Paramore, MCR or something) Cut the lyrics with descriptions of each clip as you write the next few days of story." Call me easily amused, I guess.
Maybe I'll get bored eventually, but for now, I'm astonished at how addicting it is. A quick ctrl+F of my inputs says I made 422 requests on one session alone: great value for the monthly subscription. I found myself staying up late several nights to wait for the next quota rollover. It's like that just one more episode feeling of a good TV show, but the next episode never disappoints, because you can tell the writers to go back and fix it straight away. Then they do!
Of course, it's not without flaws. Given the limited context window, ChatGPT behaves kinda like "Skeleton Jelly", forgetting details you haven't mentioned recently. You have to act as its script supervisor and fix continuity when it inevitably screws up. I mitigate this by keeping a running "save file" prompt of character stats, appearance, the story so far. So long as I keep that up to date and re-prompt it, it does all right, at the cost of re-using the same descriptive words more than it should.
There are also quirks I wish I didn't have to burn requests correcting. Like, for whatever reason - my prompting? its training data? - dialogue tends to drift into therapy-speak. Characters validate each others' feelings and everyone is super happy and supportive. I have to keep pulling on the reins to maintain tension and conflict.
Anyway, I highly recommend trying some stories with it if you like narrative crafting or TTRPGs but otherwise can't write.
celluloid_dream
6mo ago
Does anyone have insight into the business model of food delivery apps? (Doordash, UberEats, Deliveroo, etc.)
Right now, I can order restaurant food delivered at half price with a coupon deal, maybe 60% after the driver's tip. In order to qualify for the deals, I must have it delivered, so if I want half price food from the Thai place on my block, I have to go through one of the apps and get some international student (always an international student) to go in and pick it up, then ride his (always his) scooter ~100m around the block and hand it to me.
I would prefer to pick it up myself, but this invariably voids the deal, and it doubles in price.
Who is paying for this absurdity?
- It can't be the restaurant. Restaurant margins are notoriously thin, and if they could be doing a pad see ew at $7, not $15, I'm sure the normal price would be lower. I can't get the deal direct through the restaurant either. Has to go through the app.
- It can't be the delivery person. Even if they're getting paid literally nothing but tips, I'm still saving money on the food. Also, my area has a minimum wage law, which means they must be getting at least that much when they're on the clock.
- Must be the app companies, right? I'm eating VC capital for dinner every night, and it's cheaper than cooking for myself. But how is this at all sustainable? The restaurants and delivery drivers use all the apps, so they're not capturing market share. They're just burning money. Are they stupid?
celluloid_dream
2yr ago
Huge mistake in my opinion. Can't speak for others, but to me, a sign-in wall means I just stop interacting with that content altogether, and if I get linked there by mistake, I'll curse the site under my breath and close the tab. I can forgive Facebook because it's mostly aiming to be a more tight knit community site for local groups/friends/relatives. Instagram, Reddit, and especially Twitter have no excuse. Gut feeling is it's mortgaging the site's future for short term metrics.
celluloid_dream
8mo ago
I wish there was more cultural demand for, not exactly hardball questions, but a surprise quiz here and there to let voters know the candidate isn't completely out to lunch.
"Yes, thank you for delivering your prepared remarks on immigration and the southern border, but if you don't mind, could you please name the President of Mexico?"
celluloid_dream
1yr 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.
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
1yr 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.
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.
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