arrrg

Even the worst music videos I have seen aren’t as incoherent as this mess.

This is actually mostly down to constraints: even if you suck you will suck in some coherent consistent way that will give your music videos more structure than this mess.

Those videos are just nihilistic despair.

This tech isn’t steerable enough when it comes to creative output.

Maybe there are some nooks and crannies where this tech can be employed and actually save time/budget. Maybe. But what does not work is to just take the output and use it. There is nowhere near enough precision there.

ID cards aren’t exactly super standardized inside the EU. German ID cards have a RFID chip which basically contains all the same info that’s printed on the outside (PIN protected).

Smartphones can read that chip and the state as well as private businesses could in principle use this to do age verification – even the super minimal version of age verification that just asks for a certain age threshold and gets a binary response whether that threshold is met. (Which to me if we can achieve it is the perfect solution.)

The infrastructure is there and since 2017 those RFID chips are even actived by default when new ID cards are issued. (The cards are valid for ten years so nearly all ID cards have those active chips.)

The biggest issue currently is a network effect one: hardly anyone is using the chip so people don’t create their initial PIN, creating a UX hurdle for adoption. (If you want to use your ID card chip you have to find your initial PIN somewhere in your documents – if you didn’t throw it away – and then create your proper PIN, you can’t just start using it.)

I can sense usage increasing but exactly because of the poor initial use UX all sorts of private alternate solutions exist that are plain worse from a privacy preserving point of view. For example ones where you film your ID card from both sides (so the hologram is visible) which just suck. (You just share everything … which is just so unnecessary.)

To change this we would need a policy that requires age verification without sharing the birthdate or any other PII.

Changing your own behavior is certainly not wrong but also not a solution.

Policy changes are needed to address this problem. It’s a political problem that needs a political solution.

Lack of consistency seems entirely normal to me for a blog post.

At a certain point the information is simply redundant. The meaning of the naked number can and will easily be inferred from context. You don’t even notice it. Both while writing and also while reading. A proper proof reading will catch that (maybe, though I myself am actually hilariously bad at proof reading and miss obvious stuff all the time, so being able to properly proof read and catch things always seemed like a super power to me) but I don’t think this blog author does that (and I don’t really expect it? It’s fine …)

It totally get that there are people who will be endlessly annoyed by that – I’m also annoyed by people using quotation marks the wrong way. But it doesn’t really impact readability of the context is clear enough (as it obviously is in this case).

That’s not universally the case, no.

For example in Germany, splitting the bill is pretty normal, to the point where restaurants are adapted to it. Since this process adds some friction it is, however, also the case that someone will pay for everything and split afterwards (or variations on that theme).

Newer payment systems seem to have made that easier (e.g. mobile devices that allow waiters to initiate the payment for a subset of what a table had and allow for contactless payment). The older variant of that is the waiter going with you to the cash register that basically allows them to do the same bill splitting. The even older variant is the waiter breaking out paper and pencil and doing some addition (though I seem to remember waiters actually being annoyed if they had to do that, not so with the new solutions).

In Germany (where this happens frequently and many people expect to be able to pay separately – I don’t like it and we generally don’t handle it that way with friends, but when I’m in the restaurant with coworkers even I wouldn’t dare to stray from orthodoxy) the payment systems seem to be set up for it and enable this in a relatively frictionless way. I remember it being more complicated for everyone involved.

Basically, waiters have a list with all the items in front of them and you tell them what you had and they pick them. They can then just initiate a normal payment process and leave the rest of the table as is.

More time consuming and finicky than just someone paying everything all at once, sure, but a well worn and designed user journey you seemingly don’t have to torture those devices into making possible.

In fact, I will often be extremely apologetic when saying I want to split the bill but have noticed no eye rolls or complaints from waiters. It’s just smooth sailing. I do honestly think that was different when waiters had to do math and cross out things on bills and stuff (which I distinctly remember from my childhood/youth in the 2000s).

This is such a sad perspective.

The only path for workers to have leverage against capital is if they work together in solidarity. There is no other path. Unions are a path towards achieving that.

Doing a job at a lower wage is giving up leverage and nonsensical on its face. But makes sense that this capital perspective is taken here …

It‘s the exact opposite of selfish. It’s solidarity and efforts to denigrate solidarity and lift up stories about selfishness as the only important thing are the thing that keeps unions down.

Workers working together in solidarity is the right approach to get more power in the lopsided power dynamic between owners and workers. Owners have too much power, workers too little. Solidarity is a path towards fixing that.

The current admin has been embarrassingly bad at wielding the awesome powers of the US in a meaningful way.

Of course the US are the all-powerful juggernaut with many levers to pull to use their power. Winning battles is easy. Winning the metaphorical war is harder.

That’s wrong. Wearing headphones is not banned. Isolating yourself to a degree where you cannot hear warning signals (emergency vehicles, car horns) is (10 € fine), though that’s not the same as being able to hear all traffic sounds (which would be non-sensical, given that cars are and have been for a very long time quite sound isolating. Horns and emergency vehicles are two of the only things that really get through.)

In practice this means that police won’t do anything about people wearing headphones. Wearing them is totally fine. However, if you get into an accident you might get a larger part of the blame if it’s determined that you not hearing so well contributed to the accident. (The rules of the road do have a general clause that you need to pay sufficient attention – so anything distracting might get you to shoulder more of a blame in case of an accident, even if it isn’t explicitly banned. Use common sense …)

As I said, cars are inherently quite isolating, so car-centric maniacs better try not to legislate my right to wear headphones while riding the bike aways while they sit in their sound dampened boxes, casually overtaking me with too little distance.

(I strongly suggest to never turn on noise isolation while riding the human powered kind of bike and I also recommend either turning on the pass-through mode or just putting in the earphone on the side away from the road.)

At least with social networks the network effect is a powerful force. Foregrounding regulatory burden in that context is nonsensical. (That does not apply in the same way to models.)

It seems to me that demonstrated leverage actually is different from theoretical leverage. I do think that is a crucial difference.

Machines aren’t humans. Your first have to argue that an analogy between machine and human even makes any kind of sense.

That‘s the magic trick you are doing with your analogy. You just assume that human/machine analogy is true.

That doesn’t make sense. In the medium term this will strengthen efforts in China, Japan, India and the EU to move away from fossil fuel dependence much more quickly.

It is interesting to consider what we talk about when we talk about whether an image was photoshopped because I do actually think that is a fuzzy line and different people may think of different things.

I always assumed this discussion was about exceedingly crass color shifts, the removal or creation of elements not in the original image, not some dodging and cropping.

I’m a bit confused about the claim that the image was altered.

Sometimes skies look like that and grass looks like that and (the right) film is more than capable of capturing that with the appropriate saturation. Especially Velvia. Velvia is probably even cranking up the saturation, to levels you would not see like that with the naked eye.

Here is a landscape photographer showing their own favorite Velvia photographs: https://www.macfilos.com/2022/12/02/vivid-velvia-ten-fujifil...

Look at that first Tuscany image. The colors are a near perfect match. With the others the colors - especially the greens – can also be a lot more muted, however that seems to be down to darker greens as a starting point and also the light/weather (less saturation when it’s overcast and there is no direct light).

On close examination of the wallpaper (to a level of detail not visible on early 2000s screens) also shows all the hallmarks of a real photograph with remarkably little retouching.

On the left and especially the right you can see ugly clutter behind the hills which is only not distracting if you don’t examine the photo to closely. Anyone who photographs landscapes knows the issue of hard to hide clutter that nevertheless from my perspective also grounds the photograph in the real world.

Also clearly visible on the hills: tracks/paths through the hills. This is also something hard to avoid in landscape photography, though you try to minimize it with perspective. The same applies as to the clutter: my view is that this grounds the photograph as an actual photo.

Third hallmark of photography: the foreground grass is all out of focus! This is often hard to avoid. Techniques like focus stacking now exist, but as a single photograph that is often a trade off you have to make if your landscape shows both things close by and far away.

So, yeah, looks 100% like a real photograph and shows what a look Velvia is, mostly.

Dresden is truly blessed with cinemas and has four European Network cinemas. Three of those have assigned seating, though none do price discrimination based on where you sit. Culturally the assigned seating isn’t taken very seriously in those four cinemas, though, to the point where staff in one cinema sometimes tells visitors that they can sit somewhere else if they want to. In practice we still try to get seats where we want to sit and stick to them (front/middle, away from other people), though if people come in and sit right behind us we might change rows.

With new ticketing systems and online booking being introduced I think there has been a shift towards assigned seating. I remember the first time I was in a Dresden European Network cinema (Schauburg in 2015, that’s the oldest cinema in Dresden, 1927) and there either being no assigned seating or a seat printed on the ticket that no one cared about. We also weren’t asked where we wanted to sit. That has changed with a new ticketing system and now we are always asked about where we want to sit.

I think these ticketing systems come with assigned seating and that’s also a factor in assigned seating being introduced.

Notably, the one cinema that doesn’t have assigned seating also doesn’t offer online booking or reservations at all.

The four big multiplex cinemas in the city have assigned seating and do price discrimination based on where you sit – so it’s taken somewhat more seriously there.

So, yeah, my guess would be that the role online ticketing and the respective software/service/devices those cinemas use for that do all play a role in what role assigned seating plays and those can also trigger a cultural shift from sit where you want to assigned seating. (I have vivid childhood memories of my hometown long before online booking with price discrimination sections but no assigned seating in cinemas.)

If Elon Musk did this because he wanted to (not make a statement, just to achieve some other goal he has) then that‘s not really art. If he did it to make a statement about how different rules apply to billionaires and he wanted to point that out then that to me would be an interesting artistic expression, sure (though he probably wouldn’t do that).

For well more than a century artists like Duchamp (e.g. Fountain from 1917) have been playing around with what turns something into art and makes it valued and where then line between art/not art is and what that has to do with explicit and implicit rules.

To me graffiti in its contemporary form in general but also specifically Banksy is a pretty natural continuation from that discourse that fits right in. That to me has always been the additional layer to any work by Banksy, whatever other (often obvious) statement the artwork might make.

Just goes to show the power of his art. I don’t find that bit the least bit surprising but this inconsistency always has been at the heart of his art for me and to a large extent also what his work is about.

Yeah, and that is precisely the point.

This contradiction at the heart of it does a lot of work and is a very valuable part of the art. This contradiction has led me to think a lot about rules and their role in society and to what extent pure strict rules based societies are a worthwhile goal and on the other hand what it means of we make exceptions.

What evidence is this claim based on?

I‘m a bit confused by your statement. In Afghanistan a NATO coalition fought in the war. 456 British, 301 French, 158 Canadian and 54 German soldiers died.

Besides that I’m really unsure why you think that more military power would have helped. I really do believe that in a general sense this is true: since WWII the US has won every battle but lost every war. And that’s not down to an inability to be tactically extremely successful. It‘s down to taking on war aims that are impossible to achieve or at least extremely difficult and (most notably currently) being strategically totally lost.

The amount of suffering the regime in Iran and the US administration are willing to accept and can bear is probably wildly disproportionate and much higher on the side of Iran.

That also substantially weakens any leverage the US has.

A mere slight increase in gas prices and slight threat to the economy can already substantially weaken US will to fight …

Doxxing (and the moral judgements attached to it) is a relatively new and not widespread concept.

You can’t just say “but this is doxxing” and expect people to know what you are talking about and also attach the same negative label to it as you do the same way you would when you call out murder or theft.

I personally don’t find “doxxing” that useful as a concept and as a guidepost to what I consider ethical or not. People who use the concept tend to be extremely zealous with at, to a point where anything identifying anyone is doxxing (and doxxing is to those people self-evidently unethical) and that just doesn’t seem useful or practical to me at all.

As to this particular case: if you create something as corrosive, destructive and powerful as Bitcoin society should know you. You don’t get to hide in anonymity at all.

It seems unlikely to me that this conspiracy (conducting a war intent on closing the strait while communicating something else) is anything more than a post-hoc rationalization.

Obviously all actions the US takes have knock on effects elsewhere but those effects tend to become quite unpredictable and also weaker the further you are away from the place where the action happens.

We could talk for days about the knock on effects of the Iran war and sort through them and how all the different actors in the world will react and whether that’s on balance good or bad for the US … but it’s all a bit cute, right?

Making up sources as a journalist and being found out will result in a professional death sentence. It’s simply completely irredeemably unacceptable. That’s why it can be a convention that journalists don’t provide their raw sources.

Berlinale screenings are open to the public and tickets cost between 15 € and 20 €. You have to be quick when ticket sales open every day but when I did that one year I watched about four films every day and could get tickets for nearly all the films I wanted, even if some were in large but truly soulless venues (“Uber Eats Music Hall“, the name alone is disgustingly dystopian). Though I also attended some film premieres with Q&As and all at the great Zoo Palast cinema. There is also an audience award and you can vote for your favorites – but also obviously a jury prize. But juries can be hit and miss and also always idiosyncratic. Unpredictable. And I think that’s beautiful. Including being annoyed about your favorite film not winning.

As always with any kind of film festival you are exposed to the bleeding edge - so yeah, you are going to see some bad films. That’s part of it. Though I noticed that even bad films – especially well made ones that I think are totally misguided in the ideas they express – help me broaden my horizons, understand myself better and maybe also understand the world better.

So yeah, long story short, I don’t think film as an art form is dead and it also won’t be in the next century or so. Maybe certain films won’t be made in the future – I’m currently mostly sad about practically no mid-budget films being made – but I’m totally certain that there will always be great films.

Your reference to prompting is pretty disgusting since you try to shift the blame to the user. All the prompts were crystal clear. Trying to shift any blame on user error is non-sensical stupidity or dumb manipulation in this case.

Also, might I recommend looking at the way the world is, not the way the world might be. This is one of the ugly AI tendrils this disgusting industry is putting into everything, bringing ruin to the world. This is the actual reality of it, making the world a dumber, less interesting more stupid place.

Democracy also includes sometimes things not happening the way you want to … happens to me all the time, too.

Obviously free (and not merely democratic societies) need strong protections of minorities and broad freedoms, but I don’t see free speech implementations in Europe broadly infringing on that.