In a world with probably over 8 billion humans, people are so desperately lonely, they view a machine built to trick them into thinking it’s sentient as the best option for conversation.

For a certain definition of PR, this is true. Most of the cultural associations of the seasons come from ‘classic’ literature, most of which, in the English-speaking world, came from England and New England. How many places in the Southern US actually get a leaf colour change in fall? The cultural touchstones defining the associations of seasons were written in places where the winters are dreary and cold and summers are a bit hot sometimes but not usually too horrible, and certainly not likely to kill you. Try telling someone living in the South of the US that summer is the best season, see how many warning shots they fire past your nose.

Derek doesn’t look like that at night. You’re seeing him because he’s out during the day after a full work shift. How good are you going to look if you have to stay up until 03:00 for an appointment?

I’m not such a fan of this view anymorr. Many of the people who go into the military actually believe they are going to do good things for the world but are ignorant of how much evil they will be asked to do most of the time, or like the idea of being of service but can’t get into other, better forms of service because those organizations prefer those who have gone to a university or work on a volunteer basis.

I did not. I’ll have to check that out.

When reddit did the nonsense with the API I saw the term reddfugee.

Everyone behind the silver car at the parking lot entrance is illegally blocking the road. Regardless of the car culture problem or OP’s disingenuous use of a CoViD era image out of context, those people needed to go away. If you can’t get your coffee without parking in the street, you don’t get coffee at that location at that time. Safety is more important than someone getting their sugar/caffeine fix.

Asking a question and answering it in the next sentence… is there a word for that?

Don’t forget the third thing ads tell you: ‘Our product is, at best, no better than our competitors’, and quite possibly much worse, otherwise we wouldn’t have to spend so much on controlling our reputation.’

Kinetica - a racing game where the ‘vehicles’ are people in mechanical suits that make them look like sexy mecha, racing to old techno

Bloody Roar - a series of fighting games where you fight as people who can suddenly shift into other forms, some recognizable animals and some abstract, and with the ability in some arenas to kick people through walls or over ledges into new arenas

Forsaken - 3D hover vehicle battles

Tiny Tank - a game where you play as a sweary AI tank

Megaman Legends 1 and 2 - Megaman as a 3d adventure game with a storyline and characters

Gitaroo Man - a rhythm game I enjoyed, later imitated by some others

Shadow of the Colossus - more known but not cared for these days. A game in which there are only boss battles. A subtly told story. Part of the ICO universe.

Titan Souls - One boy, one bow, one arrow that can be magically recalled to the bow, and giant stone destroyers that he must conquer with nothing more. Kind of a 2D Shadow of the Colossus

BPM: Bullets Per Minute - everyone has the idea for a rhythm FPS. This is the only one that does a good job of it.

Receiver - a game in which you don’t just hit R to reload, but have to go through the full manual of arms, dropping the clip, holstering the weapon, loading each round into the clip, drawing the weapon, seating the clip, racking the round, checking the chamber to make sure it fed correctly, aiming, firing, clearing the jam, all while worrying about killer robots.

Valley - a movement game that has such an amazing feeling of freedom in its movement

Tunnet - lovecraftian network technician game

Never heard of those two being opposed.

The trade-off of security is widely known to be convenience, not privacy.

Which Douglas Rushkoff book is this concept again? I’ve lost track.

The internet keeps dying again and again. It started as a research project turned into a way to aid research. Then the sphere grew as nerds found a space to connect with other nerds. It was a community space where people knew each other. The only big source of trouble was each year, in September, when a new crop of kids gained access to the internet at their college. They had to be educated in the social structures and ethos of the culture they were stepping into.

Then, in the early nineties, the spirit of the internet died, in the Eternal September, as ISPs encouraged non-nerds to enter the cyber world. The community was flooded with more new people than could ever be trained to follow the cultural standards that had been established, and so they simply overwhelmed the capacity of the society to maintain itself.

Then those people began creating a new culture, a multiculture, with communities and sites forming around anyone with a bit of passion they wanted to share with the world wide web. People taught themselves web development just to share pictures of their families and poetry about their favorite trees.

But then, the spirit of the internet died. Advertisers wanted to take advantage of the new space to which everyone seemed to be devoting so much attention. They started monetizing sites. Creating sites became less and less about sharing your passion, and more and more about generating ad revenue.

And the internet persisted. Despite the disgust of the users, nothing seemed to stop the influx of capital into the community. And then came encryption, allowing people to even buy and sell things online. The internet died again, becoming a giant mall, a place you went to find stuff to buy rather than people to talk to.

And then came social media. It took the idea loved by so many of the early pioneers of the internet, that everyone could have their own site, dedicated to whatever they loved most, and centralized it. Friendster, sixdegrees, MySpace, and so on. With this change, the spirit of the web died again, commercializing even the idea of your personal page, your digital representation of yourself.

It has died. It will die again. Nothing can be relied upon.

It all has meaning. I used high density language because I didn’t want to spend a long time on the response, which I admit does require a certain level of experience with the concepts to be readable. Was there something you’d like me to expand into simpler language to make it clearer for you?

Possibly the same way Fallout Boy and System of a down can be grouped. There is a phenomenon in music ‘similarity’ systems (remember Pandora?) that, because the process of actually analyzing music and classifying it is work, tries to offload the work to elsewhere, and often what really happens is things get grouped not by qualitative similarities like mood, rhythmic complexity, tone etc. but by the quantitative and easy ‘these two were liked by the same group of people, aged X~Y, so they must be similar.’

Young men are not some new phenomenon. Their desire, in a word, is agency.

As the world has grown more interconnected, the world has become more visible. This has created a crippling awareness of their place in the grand scheme. Nietzsche’s void has opened beneath them and, in the ignorance expected of youth, they grasp at what is presented to them. Selling hope to the desperate, even false hope, is lucrative, so there is no shortage of hucksters and charlatans offering it to them.

The ultimate problem is that there is no pleasant truth. When faced with the existential horror of being, the truth doesn’t help. You cannot focus on learning to be a better version of yourself when facing raw terror. A comforting lie will get you to tomorrow. Truth will send you to the long, dark night.

So, when offered a pretense of agency, in almost any form, they take it. Some pretend that the problem is simply women. Some say it’s other ‘races.’ Some say it’s this or that ideology, whether economic, social, sexual, psychological, or anything else. They all just want to feel like they can make a difference, just like everyone else.

You don’t actually have to converse. I get by with ‘Hei’ and ‘Takk’ on most transactions, and sometimes just with a nod or two. You can go through the whole process without ever even looking up from your phone if you like.

And it doesn’t really go any faster. You still have to scan the same stuff, probably no faster than someone who has experience doing it every day as their job. You have to bag it, which sometimes can be done by a bagger in a normal lane, so parallelism grants possible speed there. The machines also have lag, sometimes not letting you scan your next item until the last one has nicely settled on the bagging scale. And if you want to buy an age-restricted item, or if there’s anything that doesn’t go perfectly, you have to wait for the human to come over and handle it anyway, which can be a long or a short wait, but still dead time.

Worst of all, though, is the machine talking at me. If you hate a cashier talking to you I don’t know how you can tolerate a machine making you listen to it explain how to do the painfully obvious, while simultaneously preventing you from doing the thing you aren’t being paid to do. That part alone generally is going to make it slower than a normal cashier.

I’d recommend Pavel. He has an excellent work ethic.

Or Tubular

The high level view of ‘copying’ is purely abstracted, and not very useful. It’s a layperson’s understanding. Copy A and call it B makes a thing called B that contains the same data as A. Anything deeper than that will be completely language dependent. Whether a copy is a copy or a reference depends on language and implementation.

Unless you mean how data physically is copied/recalled at the hardware level… that’s language agnostic and happens in mostly just a few ways.

Battling anything is built of two parts, making it immoral, and making it illegal. Making it illegal makes it easier to argue that it’s immoral, because many people take cues for their morality from legality, but if you want to keep it illegal you have to maintain the cultural belief in its immorality. Each reinforces the other.