Hackworth

She’ll Hunt - Banning Books

Macklemore - Fucked Up

Notably, the drummer from KISS, the actor who played Shaft, and Beyonce’s father.

I’ll second Dispatch. Enjoyed it more than I thought I would and legitimately looking forward to the next chapters.

Yeah, there’s no real data for “show signs of manic or psychotic crisis,” as far as I can tell. I just went for the low-hanging fruit, since mania is often part of bipolar (manic-depressive). But if just bipolar is sitting at 2.8% of Americans in a given year, I think it’s reasonable to say the loosely defined global stats in the article aren’t notably high.

An estimated 2.8% of U.S. adults had bipolar disorder in the past year. -NIH

Fun fact, Artax can speak in the novel.

I see a checkbox to turn on federated voting in settings. Clicking and holding a vote arrow brings up 4 options: upvote (federated), upvote (local), downvote (local), and downvote (federated). I guess federated votes may or may not be seen outside piefed? /shrug

I can pretty confidently say that 4k is noticeable if you’re sitting close to a big tv. I don’t know that 8k would ever really be noticeable, unless the screen is strapped to your face, a la VR. For most cases, 1080p is fine, and there are other factors that start to matter way more than resolution after HD. Bit-rate, compression type, dynamic range, etc.

I’m told one of the up sides to Piefed is that it anonymizes voting.

The fact that workers with expense accounts still feel they’re getting paid so little that they deserve to commit fraud says something about that stratum of employee.

Pretty much anyone who travels has to submit receipts. Most people who travel are not making bank. They’re the people who set up and stand at convention booths, sales staff support, assistants, videographers, etc. Also, most travel is a miserable ordeal. I’m not saying it’s okay to commit fraud, but let’s not equate the hourly employee “re-creating” his lost lunch receipt with a 6-figure income.

Member when Bush Jr. leaned over to Michelle Obama and said, “That was some weird shit.” after Trump’s first inauguration? It’s strange to see villain decay outside of fiction.

Cyberpunk 2077

Ladies and gentlemen, Unlit Pyre.

This is kinda the plot of Hudson Hawk.

Public perception can function like any other externality, meaning you can offload costs onto it. This is regularly done, but it’d be foolish to claim that’s the case here without more information. As it would be foolish to assume the hand of the market is gently guiding us to a better world.

Planned obsolescence, subscription degradation, ad creep, landfills full of cheap crap… It’s in their interests to sell the least useful thing for the highest price. If it costs more to put in pockets, they’ll spend a surprising amount of money trying to convince people they don’t want pockets. Or better yet, just buy up every competitor until there are only a few players and decide amongst yourselves not to make better stuff. I’m not saying that’s what happened, necessarily, it’s just not a foregone conclusion that pockets are scarce because demand is scarce.

Is the hypothesis that companies have their customers’ best interests in mind? /shrug I’m just going to base my worldview on the only data I could find rather than “I remember reading a comment.” At least until I run across new data.

I went from that to asking what level of depth they want to just giving the most concise answer I can and adding, “But there’s a lot of interesting nuance I’m leaving out.” Then if they ask for more, I give my dissertation.

Hey! An excuse to quote my namesake.

Hackworth got all the news that was appropriate to his situation in life, plus a few optional services: the latest from his favorite cartoonists and columnists around the world; the clippings on various peculiar crackpot subjects forwarded to him by his father […] A gentleman of higher rank and more far-reaching responsibilities would probably get different information written in a different way, and the top stratum of New Chuasan actually got the Times on paper, printed out by a big antique press […] Now nanotechnology had made nearly anything possible, and so the cultural role in deciding what should be done with it had become far more important than imagining what could be done with it. One of the insights of the Victorian Revivial was that it was not necessarily a good thing for everyone to read a completely different newspaper in the morning; so the higher one rose in society, the more similar one’s Times became to one’s peers’. - The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (1995)

That is to say, I agree that everyone getting different answers is an issue, and it’s been a growing problem for decades. AI’s turbo-charged it, for sure. If I want, I can just have it yes-man me all day long.

Eh, people said the exact same thing about Wikipedia in the early 2000’s. A group of randos on the internet is going to “crowd source” truth? Absurd! And the answer to that was always, “You can check the source to make sure it says what they say it says.” If you’re still checking Wikipedia sources, then you’re going to check the sources AI provides as well. All that changes about the process is how you get the list of primary sources. I don’t mind AI as a method of finding sources.

The greater issue is that people rarely check primary sources. And even when they do, the general level of education needed to read and understand those sources is a somewhat high bar. And the even greater issue is that AI-generated half-truths are currently mucking up primary sources. Add to that intentional falsehoods from governments and corporations, and it already seems significantly more difficult to get to the real data on anything post-2020.