I think you're conflating issues. There's the algorithm pushing garbage and then the general issues of social media itself - cyber-bullying, image crafting + social comparison, FOMO, and so on. The latter is the main driver of the negative effects in children. It's basically just taking all the normal negative issues that happen in a school environment and then bumping everything up exponentially.
Even consider your innocuous example of dinner pics. Kids are extremely insecure and prone to envy. Obviously some are going to be eating much more nicely than others on average. Think about the knock-on effects of that when suddenly that's being shoved in their face. And again that is for a behavior that you yourself offered as ostensibly harmless. In practice far worse things happen, and constantly.
Renting something at a rate that'd be purchased in less than 2 years seems very myopic to me. And yeah it depreciates, but not to zero. So if you're speaking of the breakeven point after liquidation, you're probably there in well under a year at those rental prices.
Social media, even before the era of dark patterns and 'engagement' maximization was still extremely addictive. It just had a less pronounced effect in large part because fewer people were using it. For instance there was a time when Facebook was university only and invite only.
And this is all for people that are of the 'legal age' so to speak using it. For kids, who are going to be even more insecure, have more ongoing brain development, and such - I think the idea of creating a non-addictive or non-harmful social media is basically a nonstarter. The same is true of use by adults as well, but we generally are more accepting of adults' right to engage in self destructive behaviors.
100%. I completely agree with this study's 'findings' but also agree the study is garbage.
So many studies now a days have experiments designed to confirm a hypothesis instead of challenge it. They should be doing everything possible they can to disprove their hypothesis and only accept it after all attempts at falsification fail. But of course that's in idealized science. In reality, publish or perish means you need to get something published and negative results don't get published. And so this study, like what seems to be most now a days, is designed to prove their hypothesis - which ironically proves nothing.
It's not so much about the assets as the framing, lighting, positioning and blending it all in a compelling way. For instance in the trailer I recognize the large brick building at 0:14 from a cheap/free asset pack, though I don't recall which. And look at it - it's super generic copy/paste layering with some slight variations, and seemingly baked on lighting given the identical shading per floor/layer. But put in a well lit scene with appropriate framing, and suddenly you're here thinking it's a high end custom built asset.
Now a days you can also get basically endless assets for free. Unreal gives away a new pack every few weeks or so on Fab (and has been doing this for years), KitBash3D gives occasionally gives away some amazing assets, and many more. But again none of this matters without some serious artistic and style sense. Given I recognize at least one asset there, I'd imagine a good chunk of his assets are from stuff like this. But you're not going to be able to clone anything comparable even if you had the exact assets he used. Placement and such is way more of an artistic thing than you might expect.
There's a rather large body of evidence that herbicides, glyphosate in particular, are, at the minimum, contributing to the bee collapse. You can find a ton of studies on the topic - here [1] is a random one that overviews some of the literature, though it's already quite dated. It doesn't kill them, but wrecks their gut biome and causes numerous issues that contribute to colony collapse. It also significant but, as of yet, unclear negative effects on the human gut biome.
Humanity goes through seemingly endless cycles of poisoning ourselves: lead, cigarettes, leaded fuel, asbestos, CFCs, and countless others. It's highly improbable that this trend has ended. During each of these cycles is there tends to be science claiming something is safe when it ultimately turns out not to be. In part this is due to ignorance/arrogance, but it's also because those who earn a paycheck driven by these issues have a strong motivation to 'prove' that it's safe, especially when it's not.
It seems that varroa were first discovered in North America in 1987. [1] Glyphosate use at that time was around 4,500 metric tons. By 2014 we were up to 125,000 metric tons [2]. There was an exponential increase coming after 1996 when glyphosate resistant GMO crops became a thing. I don't have an opinion on this topic one way or the other, but there seem to be quite a lot of negative correlates since then, and this is just another one. Of course correlation doesn't mean causation, but you can't completely dismiss it.
I'd expect that most corporate speak made it past their data curation, while normal people speaking normally was probably scrutinized a bit more heavily. The PC stuff is also probably quite terrified of a lot of adjectives. For instance I just used normal as an adjective, and that can be a hyper-loaded term if somebody's obsessed with trying to interpret things in the most absurdly bad faith way imaginable. By contrast corporate speak tends to have obnoxious lingo, but lingo that can't really be spun too much. Even for one of those guys, mental gymnasticing 'snappy' into being a secret dog whistle's going to be pretty hard.
The ultimate thing he's testing is not whether this drug or that can extend life expectancy by a few percent, but whether a complete lifestyle regime can indefinitely defer aging. The answer to this is almost certainly 'no', but if somehow he did succeed then confounding variables outside of his regime are not going to play a factor, because it's something far away from what anybody has achieved. And so at that point you'd be able to see 'okay, this does work' and then try to minimize it down to isolate the most key causal factors. And the mountain of data he's collecting in the interim would provide a huge head start on that.
It's not going to just affect 70 year olds. It's going to be a gradual descent downward. So just making up some numbers perhaps it's 40% or whatever of 60 year olds, 30% of 50 year olds, and so on. And then aggregated out across the population it's going to be a relatively high number, especially as fertility issues drive the average age ever higher.
Eep, just looked up the exact figure and yeah the median age is now just about 40. So if something affects 10% of people over 40 then it'd affect 5% of all people. So you can bring my made up numbers above way down, and still end up with 5%.
I agree with you, but I think it's also easy to see where people like the person you're responding to are coming from. Corporations have become pretty nasty in modern times. It's no longer really about offering the best product for the best price, but instead coercing and exploiting people so much as possible to squeeze every single penny out of them, offering as little as possible in return, and then somehow turning everything into rent.
Age is often a factor here. If you're older then you've known a different world of capitalism than what's being put on display in contemporary times. By contrast for younger people, this sketchiness is all they've ever known.
Why would you say that? I'm not a fan of the guy, because I think he's searching for unicorns, but he is 100% engaging in pure science. Hypothesis, experiment, data, falsify, repeat.
It seems extremely common as people age. Your body just starts to break down as we get older and this is one, amongst many, ways that this manifests. A quick search suggests it shows up in about 50% of people over 70. [1]
Venezuela was much more like a coup than a military action. The military didn't meaningfully resist, anti-air weaponry did not fire - and the US knew it wasn't going to fire because otherwise there would've been choppers getting fragged left and right. And then we kind of waved off that Nobel Prize winner lady who wanted war, to say nothing of the Guido guy, let Maduro's VP take over, and she instantly become a US puppet but otherwise kept Maduroing along as usual. Interestingly her father was killed by the Venezuelan intelligence services, which was created by Chavez, and Maduro was Chavez's hand-picked successor. She sounds kind of like a Gorbachev, whose formative years were spent under the joys of Stalin. Consequences of bad actions can, and often do, manifest only decades later.
Anyhow, point being - you're not going to get anything like that in most countries. Iran should make that clear enough. North Korea is orders of magnitude stronger than Iran, and Iran is already basically unbeatable simply because they were prepared for a decapitation strike which is pretty much our only card - Americans would never tolerate a real ground war which would entail hundreds of thousands dying. And this is all just ignoring the fact that North Korea also has nuclear weapons.
Yeah, I've been quite skeptical of LLMs, but I was wrong. The new models are capable of generating good quality code reasonably reliably. They still do some dumb things, but it's becoming more capable of one-shotting non-trivial stuff. I've no idea what software development will look like in a decade beyond absolutely nothing whatsoever what it looks like today. Even if we get sublinear progress from now on out, the current SOTA is already enough to redefine coding.
In general I expect the value of software, as a thing in and of itself, to sharply decline. With no barriers to entry, having software that just does something competently will no longer be worth much of anything. It's unclear what that will mean in the bigger picture. It'll also be interesting if this proves correct, given that software companies are largely the ones dumping so much money into this. Another probable outcome is major damage to the support-as-a-service model which again is going to directly affect many of the companies directly enabling this.
I guess the logic is that if you control the systems creating this, you control everything they're used for. But it seems equally obvious that free/local models will catch up to the SOTA today - and eventually tomorrow, so that's not a particularly realistic vision for the future.
Does this affect anybody? It seems they didn't reset your Fable usage so this only applies to people who didn't hit their 50%-of-plan limit with Fable and I can't imagine that's many people given how this thing eats through tokens like that's its job. On Pro I generally could not complete a single plan+execution cycle without hitting my token cap, so that 50% of weekly limit got eaten up fast and I assume that's the typical case.
I suppose it benefits people whose weekly reset is sometime between now and the 12th? Feels like vibe management, because I find this part of the promo more annoying than not.
Citizenship is quite politicized in the US, but in Asia (and probably most of the world) most immigrants will never obtain citizenship. There are many reasons for this I can get into if you want, but it's a tangent. All this generally entails, as opposed to permanent residency, is that your children won't be citizens by default, you can't vote, and that you need to occasionally notify immigration of where you live. On the other issue - yeah you can 100% not interact with locals if you choose.
Any position that's hiring foreigners is going to have multiple foreigners. And it creates a scenario where, by default, foreigners will hang out with foreigners and locals will hang out with locals. The same is true outside of work as there tend to be large expat communities everywhere and even schools/communities almost entirely for expats.
Immigrants (especially in Asia) are never going to blend in with the local population naturally. The cultures are so far removed that you'll never 'fit in.' That doesn't mean you can't make local friends and acquaintances, but that you can choose not to. And yeah I'd highly recommend almost anywhere in Asia to people, including China. It's an amazing place to raise children - ironic given Asia's at the forefront of the global fertility crisis.
It's nothing what like you probably imagine if you've never been. You can find about a zillion videos of people vlogging about their life in Asia. Here [1] is some random video from an American in China. Granted, he speaks crazy good Chinese so it's a different perspective than the one I'm talking about, but he can hit on more issues re:China. I've visited China, but never lived there. He's been there 16 years.
Even consider your innocuous example of dinner pics. Kids are extremely insecure and prone to envy. Obviously some are going to be eating much more nicely than others on average. Think about the knock-on effects of that when suddenly that's being shoved in their face. And again that is for a behavior that you yourself offered as ostensibly harmless. In practice far worse things happen, and constantly.