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I'm glad I'm not the only one who got increasingly more frustrated and perplexed by that bizarre piece in the times about Geller's new life as a tour guide to the museum of himself. It was written in such a slippery way that even after bringing up Randi it wasn't made clear that yes: Uri Geller was full of shit and always knew it. It felt more like well maybe he *can* bend spoons with his mind, even if other people can do it just by tricking you? Isn't he a nice and charming guy? I will give… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 6:52 AM on July 19, 2023

So this David Grusch guy is full of shit right? This feels like a con to me, but I have no evidence besides my gut feeling that sorry, no, there are no visitors from space.
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 11:14 AM on July 17, 2023

The speed of light sucks, y'all

yeah thats the thing about this. if we have been communicating with aliens since like the 40s (and it wasn't just post-nuclear age cold war paranoia), then why don't we have access to the fancy FTL tech, or the infinite energy sources that would be required by such tech. And the answer isn't "the evil corporations are keeping it secret". At least someone involved would see it as a way to become rich as croesus.
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 11:22 AM on July 17, 2023

> its super-pervy

yeah what's up with that. you know you don't HAVE to have *functional* brothels in a game. imagine if they cut the horniness from their games, CD Projekt Red might have bandwidth to fix some of the bugs before release.
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 6:57 AM on July 13, 2023

> Really the only contemporary mainstream games that are legitimately masterpieces, IMO, are the 2 Switch Zelda games (but I get why people bounce off these as well).

Screaming in Sekiro (also last of us part 2 is a masterpiece)
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 1:37 PM on July 13, 2023

i suspect there’s a lot of internal division within hollywood ownership because there’s definitely a contingent that wants their studios to win the classic awards (oscars, emmys, golden globes) as well as get rich and there’re those who just want to throw slop at the hogs and sleep on a bed of gold. call it the tlc vs hbo divide. as the content dries up the hbo and apple tv execs will be pushing to go to the bargaining table with the union but the tlc and bravo types will be fighting to let the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 5:54 AM on July 13, 2023

i’ll never understand how i spent so much time at the mall without more than 5 or 10 dollars in my pocket at once but i guess that’s why i had to get good at street fighter. the better you are the fewer quarters you spend. in a central florida summer in the 90s there was nowhere else to go than the mall if you were broke, hated the beach and wanted to get out of the house but not out of air conditioning. someone mentioned feeling comfortable at malls still and i completely get it. walking… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 5:55 AM on July 7, 2023

Threads just randomly including tons of people I've never followed was such an annoying experience (getting all kinds of weird shit, like bizarre christian influencers and instagram thirstposting models that I don't follow, presumably because people I do follow follow them on insta?) that I deactivated. Realizing I don't need more social media at all.
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 11:43 AM on July 6, 2023

Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads

Don't you dare use my precious trade secrets like "hiring the people I laid off in a fit of pique" and "hosting a message board"!!! And don't email my wife.
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 11:56 AM on July 6, 2023

I'm still halfway convinced that Musk's Twitter takeover coinciding with Dorsey's attempt to launch a replacement microblogging site is all just what they call a "work"

I think we should never forget that Musk was forced to buy Twitter at a huge markup compared to its value at the time and that he tried everything he could to get out of it. I don't see him as capable of that kind of scheming (but also that kind of scheming costing him… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 12:36 PM on July 6, 2023

i think it obvious people should learn to write by hand, something that continues to be desirable even on digital devices. i do believe that writing by hand engages the mind more intimately with the word, although why this is i’m not sure. but cursive? fuck off! do you make them use a quill? or even a fountain pen? ballpoint was born for block printing which i always found faster than cursive and much much more legible even to myself. this is a pointless exercise in politics by dying generations,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 5:57 AM on July 4, 2023

Tolstoy could never have written War and Peace by printing individual letters.

pynchon wrote gravity’s rainbow in tiny block printed manuscript. cursive is not necessarily faster than print
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 11:30 AM on July 4, 2023

OK, if you insist, Tolstoy could not have written War and Peace and Anna Karenina and Resurrection and 18 novellas and some dozens of stories and a couple of dozen fables and a half-dozen plays and a couple of dozen volumes of philosophy, by block printing. What's Pynchon's total oeuvre again?

i don’t know if pynchon moved to typewriters or computers but he’s put out a more than a few thousand more pages since V and GR. That’s not the point though.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 7:13 AM on July 6, 2023

I think we should have to learn to use T9 texting. It forced economy of thought and ensured we only sent the most succinct expression of our ideas.
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 8:58 AM on July 6, 2023

Highlights has already had a big right wing controversy. I’m betting that you can’t find a copy of it in conservative charter schools these days
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 6:16 AM on July 4, 2023

Biden fucked this from the beginning. If he had done universal loan forgiveness for all federal student loans and made it immediate, instead of having to fill out paperwork and wait for approval, it would have been a fait accompli. The supremes could rule however they wanted, the loans would be gone. Instead they went with the "reasonable" means tested compromise bullshit in an effort to make it more likely to stand up to a lawsuit. When will the democrats get that the conservatives… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 11:06 AM on June 30, 2023

The roberts court is easily the worst court of the post-jim crow era. ghouls. i wish only ill upon the ruling majority.
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 8:34 PM on June 29, 2023

If you're say 40 today, and your ancestors came to America before the end of slavery, whether as slaves or as white people, then there's a good chance at least one of your 128 5th great grand parents or your 256 6th great grand parents was involved in slavery or a slave holder. It's not about holding individuals accountable for the sins of their distant relatives, which is absurd, but holding society accountable for the injustices it allowed, and that it continues to multiply by avoiding… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 7:48 AM on June 27, 2023

Did the CIA ever do anything that didn't suck?
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 6:14 AM on June 26, 2023

Plato and Aristotle, after all, spoke from the vantage of a privileged position in a slaveholding society. Nonetheless, Aristotle, at least, allowed for the possibility that genuine leisure could someday be extended to everyone, noting that if the instruments of production were to operate on their own (what we now call automation), craftsmen “would not need assistants and masters would not need slaves. »

This to me is key. The dream of true communism… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 6:37 AM on June 25, 2023

If anyone has been watching "The Other Two", this is more proof that becoming a billionaire breaks your brain
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 8:50 AM on June 23, 2023

> US Supreme court justices make $268,300 a year, while the Chief Justice makes $280,500. Not sure why they're being bought, other than basic human greed.

The gulf in wealth inequality is so great that $268k a year, while it seems like a lot to most of the world, feels like nothing if you're hobnobbing with the politicos in DC.
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 10:39 AM on June 21, 2023

> And failing that, how about we just apply federal law on bribing public officials and put some justices in jail. Because if millions of dollars in unreported gifts isn't enough to get them step down from the court, I'm ok with arresting them.

The supremes themselves have done a good job at making this basically impossible by restricting bribes and corruptions to explicit quid-pro-quos. You have to literally say, in a way that can be proved, "if you vote X I… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 10:04 AM on June 22, 2023

Interesting list, seems like it has a ton of recency bias, although I haven't read many of the ones from the 2010s or 2020s so I'm glad to have learned about them. I would have definitely included Rubyfruit Jungle, and Cheever's Falconer, but maybe those were just influential on me and not in general. I guess Isherwood's Berlin Stories is not postwar, exactly.
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 9:51 AM on June 22, 2023

One thing I don't get about this is how anyone is farming enough zoanite to make so many damn things. I keep having to crawl down into the depths to mine zoanite just to autobuild basic shit, or go kill zoanite warriors to get stuff to trade at the fabricator. The hours people are putting into this game are bonkers!
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 9:35 AM on June 16, 2023

> the mapping tool won't let you place markers in/on solid stone.

Fun fact, you can navigate the depths by selecting the map for Hyrule. The depths are the exact inverse of Hyrule, water is impassable rock walls, mountains are valleys, etc., and every light root is in the same place as a shrine above ground. When dealing with a tricky spot in the depths, I just switch the map to the surface one and follow along the shore of the rivers and lakes. (and i see now that others said this above)
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 7:50 PM on June 16, 2023

> That "swimming through matter" mechanic I've seen a lot.. how much matter can you go through? Can you get to the surface from a cavern using that?

ascend will take you as far as it goes the next empty space. it's usually how i exit a cave, and there are places where you can leave the depths by ascending to the surface. you just have to be close enough to the (flattish) surface above you for ascend to reach it.
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 8:03 PM on June 16, 2023

How are the stable diffusion models trained? The way I would assume it's done is lots of cheap labor that takes input images and assigns them adjectives (marking images as assertive or compassionate or beautiful). Like if you got a CAPTCHA that said: "choose the images that are angry". That's immediately just going to encode existing cultural biases into the model, and I'm not sure if there's a way around it. You *have* to have human intervention at the beginning to train the model to… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 7:45 AM on June 14, 2023

I think it would be fantastic if reddit shut down completely (except for the people who lose their jobs becuase of it, that would suck). Let's go back to small forums run by hobbyists on ad-hoc phpBB sites. Let us put an end to winning internet points with pictures of cleavage and clever captions. Genuinely it would be a better world. Search engines can be the "aggregators". But while reddit exists, it costs many millions of dollars a year to run, and the venture capitalists want their… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 12:39 PM on June 12, 2023

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't taking the sub private mean the people subscribed to the subreddit can continue to interact, but it is dark to everyone outside that group?

No, at least not in the way they did it. Plenty of subreddits I've 'joined' are just gone now. I think only the mods can see them.
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 2:12 PM on June 12, 2023

Interestingly, reddit seems kind of improved today. Both in response times (after the brief outage this morning) and also the recommended stuff I'm getting from subs I'm not part of. Typically I'd see a "popular on reddit now" post that was some garbage from /r/funny or whatever, and now I'm finding all sorts of other subreddits I didn't know about because the huge sub activity is gone and they're crawling to the top.
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 2:36 PM on June 12, 2023

>100 queries per minute? Are you serious? That's for every API request for every user that uses the app/bot, because the API key is per APP, not per user, and the reddit API is notoriously inefficient. That literally isn't enough to run a personal app that *nobody*else uses.

No, it's 100 api calls per OAuth token, which are issued per user.
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 3:09 PM on June 12, 2023

So your proposal then is that users of 3rd party apps seek out and acquire their own OAuth tokens

this is how login works for most apps today. oauth is like when you login with your gmail account to another site. it’s the industry standard and allows 3rd party apps to support accounts from oauth providers without worrying about having access to user credentials. also it’s really 1000 requests over 10 minutes, to allow for “burstiness”
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 3:20 PM on June 12, 2023

i dunno maybe i interpreted it wrong. 100 req per minute total instead of per oauth user is pretty restrictive
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 3:40 PM on June 12, 2023

One fewer orange man in politics
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 8:36 AM on June 12, 2023

it's funny i was just thinking that jedi survivor, despite having great combat, suffered because the "worlds" were really just single maps and there were only a few of them, with not much in them. Like if you took a spaceship from mars to earth but only ever saw about 10 square miles of colorado. But *1,000* worlds? There's no way that's going to have much attention to detail. Too many worlds!
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 6:31 AM on June 12, 2023

People are getting really mad about this but apps like Apollo are ad free, and Reddit is Fun serves *its own* ads on top of reddit content. Either way those are apps that Reddit is literally losing money on. It's incredible to me that they ever allowed it. Quarter after quarter looking at their massive cloud bill and seeing millions and millions of api requests that simply lose them money. The classic metafilter line: if it's free you are the product is turned on its head here. It costs a ton of… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 6:58 AM on June 1, 2023

> It implies that no good service can remain good for very long if it's run by capitalists.

A service can remain good, surely. A community however can't be run with one eye on the quarterly earnings statement. Reddit tries to make people believe it's a community, but it's not, it's a business whose users aren't even the customers. If it helps the profit margin, they'll cut you out.
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 4:02 PM on June 1, 2023

Reddit premium already exists for $6/month

Apollo devs were claiming that they would have to raise the price to around $2.50 a month to afford the API charges, but that was too expensive. I'm not really sure why they didn't just raise the price for their customers and deal with the churn before just shutting down entirely. Or just rate limit their users a bit if they're producing more than a few hundred api calls a minute. But after reading the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 8:27 PM on June 11, 2023

the thing about kacynzski was that a bombing campaign wouldn't have stopped the march of technology transforming humanity into the horrible state we find it, almost nothing would have stopped it, so instead it just inflicted pain and death on people who were just going about their lives. there are many things he could have done besides kill people. i did read his manifesto, years ago, and it reminded me a lot of jacques ellul's work, which i think he cribbed a lot from, with a dose of unhinged.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 7:32 PM on June 10, 2023

A lot of acquiantances are epic lib posting about this like "finally we got him" and I'm glad they can enjoy this but we've been through so many "no way he can get out of this one" moments since 2015 that I'm completely unable to think this will move the needle. Right now he could be literally dead and enough people would support him they'd nominate his corpse for the presidency.
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 7:15 AM on June 9, 2023

the few times i’ve tried a vr headset i’ve found them exhausting when they weren’t making me sick to my stomach. this thing is some kind of dystopian horror show with that terrifying grimace of simulated eyes, so i’d basically never want to ever use it without the door closed, but if the infinite screen experience is really good and if you can use it for a few hours without getting sick, i could see doing my job with a device like this, or watching movies. not for 3.5k!!! though
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 5:06 AM on June 6, 2023

oh people are going to buy it. i’m always surprised by how many people got oculus headsets when you had to also buy a serious gpu to run them. like i’m sitting here thinking that i want to try it out because there’s this bizarre itch in me that wants to buy it. i already stare at a screen all day to pay my mortgage, what if i could sit on the patio and have my work soaring in the sky, etc. and the idea of simulating a movie theater sounds really appealing to me, and i mostly watch movies alone… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 5:33 AM on June 6, 2023

> Why the fuck are they releasing such a janky thing in the form factor? You have to keep the thing plugged into a battery? Is this a joke?

There's definitely herd behavior going on in big tech. Facebook has invested like 10 billion dollars or more into VR, Microsoft has the HoloLens, so Apple probably thinks: well, we've got to get to this market too before it's completely captured. There are probably some non negligible number of people within Apple who think: but… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 6:46 AM on June 6, 2023

> watching movies & consuming media is actually an interesting use case for my cybertruck w/ FSD.

You just introduced the horrible reality that people are GOING to wear this while driving since it has passthrough. I give it 12 months before we see videos of some guy in a tesla wearing the vision pro on the 101
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 7:21 AM on June 6, 2023

> I’m having more and more difficulty getting excited about it because instead of being a tool, an extension of our human abilities (McLuhan again) it is becoming a blindfold and handcuffs locking us into ourselves, fed by what they want us to see.

We should never forget that in Snow Crash the Metaverse was a cautionary tale, it was a damn dystopia. The masters of the universe read that book and thought: but what if it wasn't? Because I guess they're too insane to… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 9:35 AM on June 6, 2023

My instinct is that if it really took all the development that Apple did (or the majority of it) to hit the level of viability for the tech then Meta never had a chance. It wasn't just the R&D on this device, it was the years of building technology – and capacity! – in hardware and software design, and, critically, chip design that set them up for this.

Yeah. Facebook has to use off the shelf components to build its headsets. They have some… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 3:45 PM on June 8, 2023

It can detect the pattern to the arithmetic because there’s usually several different instances of the same question-structure available, enough to flag those parts as variable.

it’s remarkable how quickly we turn to explanations that imply cognitive processes. it detects and flags nothing, it simply uses the input text to generate new text by continuously calculating the likely new text based on the whole of the prompt (this ability to use the whole… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 5:46 AM on June 4, 2023

ChatGPT would probably make a better supreme court justice than Brett Kavanaugh, I'll give it that
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 1:41 PM on June 5, 2023

"spare the rod, spoil the child" is from Butler's Hudibras, a satirical poem.

There's some stuff about "the rod" in Proverbs. Proverbs is old testament, and Christ declared a new testament. The old laws are out, and Christianity has always picked what it cares about in them vs what it wants to ignore (you certainly can eat all the cloven hoofed meat you want as a Christian). I think it's pretty arguable whether corporal punishment of children is… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dis_integration at 2:45 PM on May 31, 2023