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blancNoir

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What's been driving me nuts is they took away the ability to toggle comments to the right of the video, so you could scroll them while viewing instead of having comments below the video necessitating scrolling the video out of view while reading comments. I thought that toggle was relatively new too.

For long, unbroken, takes I would additionally recommend Bi Gan's 2018 film Long Day's Journey into Night whose second part features an hour long take over various open terrain and enclosures. I would recommend it in any case, as it's a beautiful film by a highly creative young director who was inspired by Tarkovsky to become a filmmaker.

I'd also suggest Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a seminal work of the logical positivist movement. Influenced by Frege's predicate calculus, the aim of the Tractatus was to determine an isomorphic relationship between language, thought, and external states of affairs. An axiomatic attempt to reveal a potentially ideal logical language, that is not interested in meaning per se, but merely an accurate reflection of the world. A closed system that essentially excludes non-falsifiable metaphysical question. Famously concluding with the instruction: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Part of Wittgenstein's project, even in its early aggressively logical form, was philosophy as a therapeutic. That is, the metaphysical questions concerning god, being, essence, and forms that had inspired thousands of years worth of fevered conversation, could be finally be quieted. That's not to say they couldn't be meditated on, but were not in the domain of his logical language, and so silence. Again, I think early Wittgenstein sometimes gets misinterpreted, "...therefore one cannot speak" does not, to me, mean that it can't be considered or one must forgo spirituality, just that it couldn't be spoken of within the project of the Tractatus.

Logical empiricism was ultimately a dead end as the criteria for even verifying empirical truth has long been contentious philosophically, and was further critiqued by contemporaries such as Quine who attacked the premise of the analytic/synthetic distinction (think Hume's fork, which Kant tried to solve) and Popper who cited the problem of induction to critique the fundamental premises of the positivists verificationism.

Wittgenstein is an interesting case, as the Tractatus is considered an early work of his, profoundly influential to analytic philosphy at the time, yet his later work, Philosophical Investigations is sometimes seen to retract the dogmatism found in the Tractatus. I tend to take the view that it's a continuation of his thought, rather than a retraction of his earlier work. Crudely, whereas his former thought represented a narrowly axiomatic definition of language and its truth value, PI investigates, among many other ideas, language as an activity, or game, that has meaning dependent on the context of its use, languages as families. Granted, Wittgenstein is a complex thinker and these are simply my interpretations.

It's also curious to note that as positivism was beginning to fall out of favor around the time of the second world war, a continental thinker such as Heidegger, whose thought luxuriated in the kind of metaphysical questions the positivists necessarily eschewed, rose to prominence and was infamously sanctioned by the NSDAP to philosophize about their presumed "destiny". Bit of a tangent, but I think the historical context is relevant, as often philosophical movements are birthed from pre- and post-war attitudes.

from the article

"While neither Uber nor Grubhub turns a profit delivering food, they are nonetheless venture-backed and raking in mountains of cash: Grubhub reported revenue of $362.98 million during the first quarter this year, a year-over-year increase of more than 12%. Uber Eats’ revenue surged 53% from the same quarter a year ago, to $819 million.

Restaurants, meanwhile, are facing utter devastation. The restaurant industry lost 5.5 million jobs nationwide in April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In L.A., the overall unemployment rate now stands at 24%, an increase from 4.7% in February."

edit: additional context from article

Check out the movie with Jon Hamm, Marjorie Prime, screenplay by Jordan Harrison. Without spoiling too much, there's a company that can create holographic projections of loved ones which a woman's family gives to her as a gift which is a hologram of her deceased husband, but when he was a young man. The interesting part, narratively, is that while the holograms are near perfect physical recreations, their personalities and memories must be trained by those who knew them, family/friends which raises the question of how we're perceived in fragmentary and contradictory pieces depending on whose doing the training and the amalgamation of a person that's ultimately constructed from these parallax accounts. The writing is actually quite strong and the only scifi aspect is the holograms so I wouldn't say there's much of scifi crutch. I know it's not PKD and there are similar Black Mirror episodes, but I thought the drama itself was robust and displayed the range of Jon Hamm to be someone other than Don Draper.

From the article:

"When you opt out of facial recognition on Facebook, the company will delete your template, meaning it will have no original reference point for your face and therefore cannot find your face at all."

...

When people turn off their face recognition setting, we can no longer create a face template for them for any purpose, including A.I. research,” the spokesperson told OneZero.

From the article:

"In addition to tightening its hate speech rules, YouTube announced it would also tweak its recommendation algorithm, the automated software that shows users videos based on their interests and past viewing habits. This algorithm is responsible for more than 70 percent of overall time spent on YouTube, and has been a major engine for the platform’s growth. But it has also drawn accusations of leading users down rabbit holes filled with extreme and divisive content, in an attempt to keep them watching and drive up the site’s usage numbers."

Here's what Moxie Marlinspike has to say about the drawbacks of XMPP.

https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

"XMPP is an example of a federated protocol that advertises itself as a “living standard.” Despite its capacity for protocol “extensions,” however, it’s undeniable that XMPP still largely resembles a synchronous protocol with limited support for rich media, which can’t realistically be deployed on mobile devices. If XMPP is so extensible, why haven’t those extensions quickly brought it up to speed with the modern world?

Like any federated protocol, extensions don’t mean much unless everyone applies them, and that’s an almost impossible task in a truly federated landscape. What we have instead is a complicated morass of XEPs that aren’t consistently applied anywhere. The implications of that are severe, because someone’s choice to use an XMPP client or server that doesn’t support video or some other arbitrary feature doesn’t only affect them, it affects everyone who tries to communicate with them. It creates a climate of uncertainty, never knowing whether things will work or not. In the consumer space, fractured client support is often worse than no client support at all, because consistency is incredibly important for creating a compelling user experience."