ranprieur

I still do it. Spotify is good for making playlists but I don't use it for listening. I collect mp3s, bought on Bandcamp or downloaded from Soulseek, and listen on an old Sansa Clip mp3 player.

Reading is declining because of computers, which are a much more fragile and dependent technology than text on paper.

A supplement called genistein mitigates the risk:

https://www.med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/04/marijuana...

I did this, with a regular chest freezer and a thermostat. It used hardly any energy, but it was hard to clean and died after about five years.

This isn't new to AI. The same kind of thing happens in movie test screenings, or with autotune. If something is intended for a large audience, there's always an incentive to remove the weird stuff.

This is better than nothing, but the big advantage of the UBI is that there is no bureaucracy deciding who gets it and doesn't get it. If there are any conditions on the income, then there's a constant danger that the program will become another tool of control.

AI doesn't need to drive a tractor. It needs to orchestrate the systems and people who do.

Pure dystopia.

I've been making music videos with a very satisfying creative process: Use AI to make a ton of images, pick the very best ones, and carefully arrange them in the right order. Example: https://youtu.be/r-_dJNgt3SM

This article fails to mention why the currency circulated so fast. It was depreciating: it was defined as gradually losing value, so hoarding didn't work, and the people with money had a strong incentive to spend it. The article makes it sound like these currencies worked because they were local. They worked because they depreciated, and it's possible to do this on a national level.

Other writings about this: A book chapter, The Currency of Cooperation: https://ascentofhumanity.com/text/chapter-7-02/

And a short piece about Brakteaten money: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Brakteaten_Money

The most fundamental freedom is the freedom to do nothing.

Because he's jealous?

A great book on this subject is In The Absence of the Sacred by Jerry Mander. He argues convincingly that the correct biological metaphor for technological progress is not evolution, but inbreeding. We are turning our attention more and more into worlds of our own construction.

Still, there's a lot of cool technology out there, and a lot of room to use it better.

I agree with the author: Heroes II is my favorite of the series, just for the innocent vibe. Also, Heroes IV is underrated. It got bad reviews because it came out buggy, but the bugs were fixed in updates, and of all the HOMM games, it has the best soundtrack.

Because the medical system doesn't.

I like this idea, but my problem is with the word "successful". Setting constraints rather than chasing goals leads to doing interesting things. But there's no guarantee you'll ever be recognized or rewarded.

"Efficiency" is selfishness. It's a word for when people in power want to give less and get more.

Key sentence: "When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized instead for efficiency, they break."

There's some good stuff here, but some of it is just wrong. Sometimes the person with the loudest laugh is laughing the most authentically.

This all makes more sense if you go through the article, and every time you see the word "work", substitute "work for money".

When I was young, every time I got a 20-20 prescription, my eyes got worse. When I stopped going to the optometrist, my eyes stopped getting worse. Now I wear glasses that only correct to around 20-40. I take them off for reading, and I have weaker glasses for the computer screen. Supposedly I have astigmatism but I use no astigmatism correction and can see fine.

it’s not a desire but a necessity.

Speak for yourself. I love sleep and wish I could sleep more. Sometimes I think the only purpose of being awake is to get food and shelter for more sleep.

Nice idea. We need a technology that doesn't just look at mouse movement to help you do nothing, but reads your brainwaves.

Disenchantment was well underway in the 1600s, and arguably peaked in the 1700s, the Age of Reason, before it was partly undone by Romanticism. The disenchantment narrative goes back at least as far as Chaucer: https://aeon.co/essays/enlightenment-does-not-demand-disench...

If you want to go back the age of magic, try the 900s, or better yet, prehistory.

Yes, it repeats itself so much I kept thinking I had accidentally scrolled up.

This has similar ideas to this review that was posted here a few weeks ago:

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/marshall-sahlins-n...

This article mentions a study that found almost no correlation between people who self-report having high self-control, and people who actually do well on tests measuring self-control:

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/1/15/16863374/wi...

The most likely explanation is that people who report high self-control are really experiencing less temptation.

A psychological factor he doesn't mention: A lot of players, if they absolutely need to make a play to not lose the game, will dig deeper and play better. If the game is not on the line right now, they won't play as well.

Photorealism does not equal immersion. Immersion happens in the mind, not the eyes. The games I've been most immersed in were made in the 90s, when the graphics were not as good but the gameplay was better.

This discussion is completely about propositional statements, as if that's the only way to know anything. I would say, don't let mere words change your sense of what's real.

I don't buy the idea that changing camel to rope is about pleasing rich people, because a rope can still nowhere near get through the eye of a needle.

But a rope is qualitatively the same kind of thing as a thread; so if camel is the right word, the message is that what gets into the kingdom of God is a whole different kind of thing than money.