a_shovel

the sun seeker wrap is a cool retro look. can anybody place what it's based on / inspired by?

The museum has not, in fact, made any indication that it would wish to cancel (to decide not to conduct or perform) its Charles Dickens exhibition. The sense of 'cancel' being used here is the dumb one.

Skeptics said SpaceX would fail, but it succeeded. Therefore, skepticism in general is wrong and SpaceX will have an annual revenue of $11 quadrillion by 2030.

I don't think the demand for second homes worth over $5 million is a major driver of construction of new units in NYC.

I keep javascript on because i want websites to not be broken by default. but if they insist, i can add their domain to my ublock filter

There's a political backlash against vaccines because of mandates too, and I think we shouldn't listen to them either.

The next administration needs to mandate the big American auto companies produce more EVs in more models in order to save them from the irrelevance they seemingly desire and arguably deserve.

They think their dog food tastes great now, not because they improved it any, but because they've forgotten the taste of human food. Karmically hilarious.

An interesting article. I wonder if there's a valid point in here buried somewhere underneath the endless obnoxious comparisons of his opponents to cultists.

I was hoping this would have some application for human solving. I gave up on Semantle because I couldn't figure out any sort of strategy.

The paragraph about the stove making dozens of breakfasts as the house collapses at the climax of the story is what always stuck with me most. It would take a better writer than me to say why it works so well, I just know it does.

Bayer dithering in particular is part of the signature look of Flipnote Studio animations, which you may recognize from animators like kekeflipnote (e.g. https://youtu.be/Ut-fJCc0zS4)

Steam doesn't need to lock down the Steam Machine to subsidize it with store purchases. The casual user could theoretically install another OS, but that doesn't matter because they won't (because they're casual users), and the dedicated user buys most of their games on Steam anyways because it's the dominant distribution platform.

I started dieting recently and I've come to understand the people who say that American portions are huge. An automat lets you sample a bunch of different stuff instead of the typical fast-food format of a main, french fries, and a drink each in a too-large portion. I'd like something like that.

I can't help but notice similarities with certain conservative attacks on puberty blockers and hormone therapy for trans people.

A general subjective notion that the evidence "isn't good enough" with no reference to the level of evidence that is typically used to approve other treatments with similar risks and benefits

The focus on randomized controlled trials as the only acceptable form of evidence, despite (or because of) their expense and length

Common and easy-to-collect indirect markers of effectiveness (presence of antibodies, lower reported suicidality) are against them, so they insist on using only rare, hard-to-collect direct markers (prevented illnesses, reduction in completed suicide attempts) despite lacking any reason to believe the results will be different

The insistence on unnecessary, lengthy trials or tests for treatments that are time-sensitive, to the point of overrunning the time when they ought to be administered (RCTs for flu vaccines that would delay them past flu season, vs insisting on a large and arbitrary minimum number of assessments before allowing puberty blockers such that puberty starts before the patient is approved). For the anti-treatment side in both cases, a long enough delay is effectively a victory that doesn't require them to prove any of their points.

So, what can we draw from these tactics? They want to make their opponents waste time and resources on long, difficult trials (the longer the better,) because every day it goes on is a day that treatment is delayed or a "temporary restriction" can continue. Plus, if they need more time, they can always push the arbitrary standard of evidence they demand arbitrarily higher. They can always demand more trials, or more specific and difficult-to-collect data.

But on some level, they know they can't say "THIS is the study that will prove vaccines/HRT are unsafe" because they understand that the results will probably not go in their favor (or, that they'd get caught if they faked it).

It seems like they understand that the evidence is against them, but that stalemate is in their favor.

Proposing a CLI command as a candidate for "simplest UI ever" is a great gag.

that's less than i was expecting. i was looking for a ps2 around then and i'd definitely have paid $150 plus shipping for all of that.

Unfortunately, nobody wanted to buy these even for a cost that would cover all the expenses spent on this project.

Makes me wonder how expensive these were to make.

I can imagine it. If I were the kind of person whose needs and desires could all be satisfied by mass-produced products sold by the top 5 or so largest retail corporations, and who did things like fill out consumer surveys for a chance to win gift cards, and who enabled all tracking in every app everywhere for convenience's sake, and who didn't care much about privacy because I had nothing to hide, I imagine that ad targeting might become effective enough that I would regularly encounter ads for products that looked interesting and which I might want to buy.

You'll need to explain this a little bit more, because the TC article seems to indicate the issue is that he is accused of targeted harassment. I doubt you could design a poll to make people vote 85% in favor of targeted harassment.

All social media moderation is "banning people for saying stuff people don't like". Most people don't like e.g. spam, or death threats, or racism, so social media offer communication platforms where those kinds of speech are restricted, with varying degrees of effort and success. The goal of banning Vance would be to have a social media site that moderates against the kinds of things Vance says.

Note that David never actually addresses the “far right” label on its merits — he just pivots to calling it overused, trying to direct your attention elsewhere like a magician distracting the audience as he performs a trick.

I'm not sure he's bringing it up for that reason. He thinks the label is losing its power because it really is losing power over him, because he's becoming more comfortable with it and beginning to accept it. Keep an eye out for if he starts to call himself a fascist "ironically".

Another way of looking at it is that the library of Babel would be less useful than an equivalent quantity of blank paper. For example, you could use it to print books in English instead of gibberish. Multiple copies of those books, even.

AP article: https://apnews.com/article/un-general-assembly-israel-netany...

It was not immediately clear if that happened, or to what extent. AP journalists inside Gaza saw no immediate evidence of Netanyahu’s speech being broadcast on phones there.

nobody's ever accused youtube of being too transparent with creators

This response is very confused. Lack of interest in the field would result in fewer female applicants, but you're describing equal numbers of applicants. This situation where women are half as likely as men to be qualified is just sexism.

The idea that airlines are passing on qualified white candidates to hire unqualified black candidates to fill a diversity quota, because there aren't enough qualified black candidates to fill it honestly, is a white supremacist conspiracy theory. Real life DEI programs don't let them do that. To a white supremacist, any number of black pilots is "just a few too many" to have hired honestly, and so there must be some hypothetical white people being "stolen" from. See GP.

His point is not that black people are less capable but that DEI policies [cause] looser standards

These ideas are equivalent. The belief that employers are lowering their standards in order to include more black people is based on the idea that any additional black person hired must necessarily be less competent than a hypothetical white person who could have been hired instead of them; that is, white supremacy. In Kirk's words: "You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously."

They don't believe that there are black people who are qualified but weren't hired because of, for example, discrimination, because they don't believe "discrimination" exists per se, they just think of not hiring black people as logical meritocratic decision-making.

Something I've noticed from automatic palette mappings is that they tend to produce large blocks of gray that a human artist would never consider. You can see it in the water for most mappings in this sample, and even some grayish-brown grass for sRGB. It makes sense mathematically, since gray is the "average" color, and pixel art palettes are typically much more saturated than the average colors in a 24-bit RGB image. It looks ugly regardless.

CAM16-UCS looks the best because it avoids this. It gives us peach-and-pink water that matches the "feel" of the original image better. I wonder if it's designed to saturate the image to match the palette?

Distorted Face getting in means that Open Eye Crying Laughing Face still has a chance. Maybe we could get some Deep Fried Variation Selectors with it too.

Here's a question to ponder: Why aren't American convenience stores already like Japanese convenience stores? I distrust cultural explanations because humans are basicly the same everywhere. Given the choice, quite a lot of people would prefer a Japanese-style 7-Eleven over an average American convenience store. I think this is the key:

Challenges include the difficulty of transporting fresh food to locations in the United States far from city centers. In Japan, the average convenience store receives multiple fresh-food deliveries per day. [...] In the United States, Mr. Dacus said, fresh food often means hot food that can be frozen and cooked on site, eliminating the need for multiple daily deliveries.

Japan is a much more urbanized country, with more foot traffic to support impulse stops to buy a snack. Even outside of pedestrianized areas, it's a shorter trip to get supplies from a central regional location to individual stores.

My local high-quality American convenience store chain is QuikTrip. If you go to their Wikipedia page and check the map of their stores, you'll see they have stores in Arizona and stores in the Carolinas, but they have no truly rural locations. It's all islands surrounding major metro areas. This suggests that the transport time from some central distributor is a major factor in where they put stores.