dleary

[I Love Lucy, Bewitched]

These are good examples of TV pushing the envelope on societal norms, but if you are discussing "pushing a political view", they rank far below "Trek's first interracial kiss".

A key difference here is you are citing one episode.

That's true, but...

These shows we are discussing are entirely centered around modern IDPol issues. It's rammed down our throats through every episode.

I have not seen the new shows. I liked reconnecting with old characters in the first few episodes of Picard S1, but didn't even finish the first season.

So I can't comment on those specifically.

But, I can comment on this:

I know when I can no longer enjoy a show because it's creators are ripping me out of the experience and away from the fictional setting

This is the EXACT SAME COMPLAINT that the people who were upset about Star Trek in the 60s had.

And it extended a lot farther than the interracial kiss. That's just a very easy and obvious landmark example to point out.

Star Trek first aired in 1966. Less than 10 years after crowds of people were held back by the National Guard, but still managed to throw rocks at and spit on little girls because of forced integration in schools.

Star Trek had a multiracial and flamboyant cast, and was frequently communicating messaging about being non-prejudiced, when the Civil Rights Act had just passed.

Trek also frequently communicated messaging about being non-interventionist and only using violence as a last resort, while the Vietnam War was ongoing and a hot-button political issue.

These were ABSOLUTELY complained about as "woke propaganda" (though not in those terms) by the conservatives of the time.

Again, I never said anything about race or gender.

I never said that you did. But you did propose, and you continue to double down on, the idea that the original Star Trek was not very political.

They had politics, yes. But not anywhere to the point to breaking the audience out of escapism and mapping their politics to the politics of the time.

Yes, the interracial kiss was VERY MUCH the politics of the time. That's why it was the FIRST interracial kiss on network television, nearly 40 years after TV networks came about. That's why it was protested/banned and the episode not shown in Southern markets.

Can you give any examples of network TV that were more political than Trek?

Current Earth politics do not belong in shows

You’re really displaying some ignorance here. Star Trek has always has a political slant.

The basic premise is about a bunch of people living in a progressive sci-fi utopia with UBI. The show is constantly preaching unity and openness. It is explicitly anti-Fascist in many episodes.

It has a multiracial cast with a flamboyant “closeted” gay actor.

And most importantly, it famously had the first interracial kiss on television. The show was banned (or, more minorly, the specific episode was banned) in several places in the South because of that.

Virtual dispatch absolutely has an overhead, but absolutely nobody in their right mind should be using COM interfaces in a critical section of code.

I could definitely be wrong, but I think C++ style "virtual dispatch" (ie, following two pointers instead of one to get to your function) doesn't really cost anything anymore, except for the extra pointers taking up cache space.

Don't all of the Windows DirectX gaming interfaces use COM? And isn't AAA gaming performance critical?

Everyone gets to choose which language they use for their personal projects.

Where are all the Racket personal projects?

N.B. I say this as someone who personally contributed small fixes to Racket in the 90s (when it was called mzscheme) and 00s (when it was called PLT-Scheme).

Opinion

The single word "opinion" is not an answer to the question I asked.

Another example: ... "Yanny or Laurel"

This is not remotely the same thing.

I can understand how someone hears "Yanny">

So can everybody else. Everyone I have heard speak on this topic has the same exact experience. Everyone "hears" one of the words 'naturally', but can easily understand how someone else could hear the other word, because the audio clip is so ambiguous.

An ambiguous audio recording, which basically everyone agrees can be interpreted multiple ways, which wikipedia explicitly documents as being ambiguous, is very different from meanings of the words "yes", "no", and "believe".

These words have concrete meanings.

You wouldn't say that "you believe the recording says Laurel". You say "I hear Laurel, but I can understand how someone else hears Yanny".

Is AI conscious? I believe "yes" [...] and in a way that somehow means I don't think anyone who believes "no" is wrong.

What does it even mean to "believe the answer is yes", but "in a way that somehow means" the direct contradiction of that is not wrong?

Do "believe", "yes", and "no" have definitions?

...

This rhetorical device sucks and gets used WAY too often.

"Does Foo have the Bar quality?"

"Yes, but first understand that when everyone else talks about Bar, I am actually talking about Baz, or maybe I'm talking about something else entirely that even I can't nail down. Oh, and also, when I say Yes, it does not mean the opposite of No. So, good luck figuring out whatever I'm trying to say."

This sounds like it should be true, but from life experience, I don't really think it is.

It would be rational for things to work that way, but personalities and emotions are not very rational.

There are some people who seem like they have everything in life going for them, and they're still pessimists, their narrative of the world is petty and ugly, or cruel.

Conversely, there are other people who have suffered tragedies that I might consider literally unbearable (i.e. suicide-worthy), and they are still optimists.

I think these are more fundamental personality traits. You can see it in siblings that grow up in essentially identical conditions, but one has a "sunny disposition" and another is anxious and worried.

The article mentions that the main pumping unit could draw water from 8 hydrants at once. So 7000 ft of total hose to get to 8 hydrants sounds like it makes sense.

I wonder if maybe it can't even use hydrants that are too near each other in the plumbing graph.

no, you need to explain why you thought

What kind of purity test bullshit rhetoric are you using here? Whenever you find yourself saying, “you need to explain yourself”, step back and question things.

Have you tried reading the thread instead of jumping on a guy for wrongspeak?

The Soviet connection is really not that hard to follow. They were discussing development cycles. Whether China, which is a communist country with a “5 year economic plan”, is successful due to that 5 year plan.

So it’s very relevant to mention the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a communist country, it “invented” the 5 year economic plan, and it failed spectacularly.

That’s a separate concern.

Every command that you issue to the ssd returns a response. It would be nice to have a bunch of performance counters that tell us where the time went with each of the commands we give it.

GPUs have this already.

You're using hydrogen in a balloon. Where its very low density is a boon.

Hydrogen gas also has very low energy density. To store enough of it to be useful, it has to be pressurized/liquified, which requires the expensive storage solutions.

Thank you for this good description.

But we know, with absolute certainty, from the Dominion lawsuit subpoenas, that Tucker Carlson was privately telling people that Trump was awful, while publicly saying the opposite.

His private texts include, "We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can't wait.”

And

"I hate him passionately. ... I can't handle much more of this”.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tucker-carlson-endorses-donald-...

He was sending these texts while publicly repeating the standard Fox News lines about how great Trump is, etc.

How can you ever consider him honest, after this?

I had PRK done at Stanford in 2007 or 2008.

Now it's nearly 20 years later, and I just turned 48.

My vision has deteriorated from "old age" enough now that I might have considered getting the procedure done again. Touch-ups are/were free at the Stanford clinic.

My vision has not deteriorated in the past 5 years or so, I am farsighted enough now that it is more comfortable to hold fine print things at arms length to read. And things far away are a bit blurry again.

But, I now think that getting eye surgery now to fix your vision is a bad move if glasses can correct it.

It's really just a strategy decision in the 'game of life'.

"Pretty soon", we are going to have wearable AR goggles that actually work.

When that threshold is crossed, "everyone" is going to have AR glasses, just like "everyone" has a smart phone right now.

Since you're going to be wearing glasses in a few years anyway, why risk the surgery?

Are you sure? My Bosch dishwasher has wifi connectivity and a companion app.

That headline is a stunning achievement. I honestly wish there were some way to better call attention to it.

I would have missed it if it weren't for your comment.

The retractable cable is overkill. I remodeled my house a couple of years ago and replace most of the wall outlets with the kind that have 2 AC outlets and 2 usb ports, a USB-A and a USB-C.

How much dressing do you make at once, and for how many single-person large salads? Can you tell us the size/weight of the tube of paste and the anchovy tin?

I agree that anchovy is the secret, but I don’t use nearly this much for two salads, for me and my wife. I use half a jar of filets, which I more or less mince/mash. Do you leave big chunks in the dressing from the chopped filets? If so, I would guess that they are maybe a quarter the size of a caper, do you go bigger?

Do you make a lot of dressing and save it? We make it fresh every time, which also makes the batch size smaller.

I think it's far from useless... Because it helps to focus on what could possibly be happening. It's not "true enough for an 8 year old's purposes", it is the actual truth.

The air is being accelerated downwards by the airplane. Newton's third law. To stay aloft, the airplane has to manufacture a counteracting force to gravity. And the only way to do that is by accelerating something downwards.

So, we can discuss whether or not the curvature of the airfoil matters, or the angle of attack matters, but the simple fact is that a lot of air has to be accelerated downwards somehow for the plane to stay up.

And the more magical descriptions of lift, including the broken Bernoulli airfoil model that was accepted for so long, are easy to discount once you focus on this important fact.

If a work is older than 200 years and worth reading, then original editions are going to be valuable.

But it will also be out of copyright so the cost of getting a “new” copy is basically just the cost of printing.

You misremember… That episode is about helping someone move, not giving them a ride to the airport.

“A Deepness in the Sky”, by Vernor Vinge. Excellent book, with a concept very close to this as an element.

You don’t need to read “A Fire Upon the Deep” first… the stories are more or less unrelated except for setting. (There is one character who is sort of in both, but going into detail about what that means would spoil it too much).

Both are excellent and worth the time. Skip the other Vinge books until you are sure you want to read everything he wrote, they are “merely” 8/10 instead of 10/10.

Vinge was a CS professor who really made sure everything “fit” together in his works. Although “A Fire Upon the Deep”, started in the late 80s and published in 1992, posits that civilizations much more advanced and capable than ours would be communicating primarily through something like Usenet, which feels a little quaint.

NB that Vinge was the one who popularized the concept of “the technological Singularity”. His books have interesting authors notes where he talks about coming up with ways to write about a far future when he believes that the Singularity is right on track for 2050-2100.

The company said they were going to do something, they got threatened by the current administration, and then the company reversed course.

Please name a single comparable situation in the last 20 years where the Democratic president was the one threatening a company and the company reversed course.

Imagine if the tip of your finger could just bend back. It would be way harder to know what you’re touching!

I don’t think so. I have hitchhikers thumb, so my thumbs do bend backwards. They don’t feel disadvantaged in terms of touching compared to my other fingers.

Yes, Chrome was great. Google search was also great.

That’s the nature of enshittification, and a core tactic of monopolists: give your customers something for free (or below cost) until you have killed the competition, and then exploit your “customers” (victims).

Google's search and ad monopoly do not matter

Some questions:

When Google used its search monopoly to promote Chrome in a way that no other company is capable of (a link on the Google search main page), did that have some impact, or zero impact?

When Google used its ad monopoly to give Chrome free ad placement… That is, when the Chrome team was able to ‘buy’ keywords for free that Firefox, IE, and Opera had to pay 5 cents per click for… Did that have some impact, or zero impact?

Oops, sorry, you’re right. The biggest browser was IE. The same rhetorical argument holds… IE isn’t even on death’s door. It’s so dead that I forgot about it.

What I’m taking issue with is you disagreeing with the GP assertion that Facebook made purposeful business decisions.

I agree that a Facebook had a powerful incentive to act this way. But they didn’t have to. The fact that they chose to reflects on their moral character.

Internal leaks let us know that Facebook has pretty advanced sentiment analysis internally. They knew that they were (are) making people miserable. They know that outrage causes engagement.

Other internal leaks let us know that Facebook was aware of how much disinformation was (is) being used on their platform to influence elections. To attack democracy.

They didn’t just look the other way, which would be reason enough to condemn them. They helped. When they saw how much money the propagandists were willing to pay, they built improved tools to better help them propagandize.

After the UK was shattered by the Brexit lies, when Facebook were called in front of parliament and congress to explain themselves over the Cambridge Analytica and related misinformation campaigns, they stalled, they lied, they played semantic word games to avoid admitting what is clearly stated in the leaked memos.

These were all choices. People should be held accountable for making awful choices.

Even if those choices result in them making a lot of money.

It sounds kind of crazy to even have to say that, doesn’t it? But that is where we are, partly because of arguments like yours from otherwise well-meaning people.

Don’t absolve them. Hold them accountable.

Zuckerberg wants to own the whole world and thinks you’re an idiot for trusting him. An egocentic sociopath who can’t imagine trusting anyone else because he knows what he will do when you give him your trust.

This is crazy.

You’re saying that Facebook was somehow helpless to avoid changing from a “friends feed” to an ad-maximizing outrage-inducing misinformation machine because of web2.0 communication technology?

Someone invented XmlHttpRequest and Facebook was like, “well that’s the ballgame, I guess we have to suck now?”

...except Chrome was not and is not an illegal enterprise.

The charges were against search and ads.

The textbook definition of “monopolistic behavior” is “using your monopoly in one sector to extend your power in another sector”.

It’s not illegal to have a monopoly. That can happen if you are completely innocent, just because no competitors choose to compete with you.

It’s illegal to abuse the power of your monopoly.

What was the biggest browser when Chrome launched? It was Firefox. Where are they now? On death’s door.

What was the biggest commercial browser when Chrome launched? It was Opera. Where are they now? Also on death’s door.

Do you ever remember seeing ads for Chrome in any of Googles other offerings?

A better question would be, “Before 2020 or so, do you think it was possible to use Google Search without having Chrome advertised to you?”

Chrome got special treatment above and beyond anything available to anyone else. Even more than anyone else with an unlimited Google ad budget. It got special placement in the Google search interface. “Try chrome!” On the otherwise bare Google search page. You know, the one that was famously minimalistic and “ad-free”.

Google leveraged its search and ads pseudo-monopolies to help Chrome become its own pseudo+monopoly.

And now that Chrome is its own pseudo-monopoly, what is their behavior?

Well, now, you can’t install (good) ad blockers anymore. Does that benefit users, or is that abusing their browser monopoly to help Google’s other business lines?

And until approximately yesterday, they were saying they were going to disable third party cookies. That’s nice. It probably would help some users. Note that it will definitely hurt Google’s competitors.

And it’s interesting timing, isn’t it? They could have done this, to help users, at any point in the past 15 years, but they only decided to do it recently, when their search and ad businesses are a little shaky compared to where they used to be.

Google absolutely used its search and ad monopolies to build a browser monopoly. And now that they have a browser monopoly, they’re using the power of that monopoly to act in ways contrary to their users interests.