notaustinpowers

"The enemy is both strong and weak." - Ur-Fascism, 1995.

2 months agodiscuss

€200M accounts for roughly 1.6% of their €12.3B net profit in 2025.

The average EU salary is €39,808. It's equivalent to a €636 fine. Though this is based on income, not net profit so it's actually more impactful to the average person than to Temu.

notaustinpowers

2 months agodiscuss

The content being untrustworthy doesn't matter when it comes to social media, as most of what is enticing about social media nowadays isn't the content of the content. It's the fact that there is a never-ending stream of content specifically catered to maximize your dopamine to keep you scrolling.

So much of social media nowadays is just low quality clips of TV shows/movies with an AI-generated song over them. Or the same Minecraft parkour map as an AI voice recites an r/AmITheAsshole post. Or AI-generated funny videos. The quality of the content doesn't matter at all.

Anyone I've talked to about how it was all just AI just responds with something akin to "I don't care if it's AI, it's funny! Let people enjoy things!"

notaustinpowers

2 months agodiscuss

Praying for Teen Titans Battle Blitz to be listed here at some point. The version on the Internet Archive is broken unfortunately.

notaustinpowers

5 months agodiscuss

If we want to have the almost 800 military bases stationed in about 80 countries around the world, then there are some responsibilities that come with that.

notaustinpowers

5 months agodiscuss

It links his middling AI company and his failing social media company with the only company that can send the United States to space.

X failing and can't pay its debts? Welp, better give him a government bailout otherwise no more rockets for you!

notaustinpowers

6 months agodiscuss

I'm in a similar boat to you, and it's made me think a lot more about happiness and, I think this is something we may not think too much about, how our life affects our receptiveness to happiness. I'll try to explain what's helped me, and hopefully it can help you too.

There's that old phrase that happiness is a journey, not a destination. It's a state of being, a fleeting emotion. We each have our own unique flavor of happiness, but modern life is about efficiency, reproducible results, one-size fits all. It's led us to seek happiness from external sources like consumption and entertainment, that happiness is our every waking desire being met immediately. We've commodified happiness in these externalities.

What's helped me is to view my life as a garden, crafted to grow what makes me happy. Thoughtfulness, constant learning, whimsy, and slowness are some of the aspects of life that make me happy. These aren't things I do, not something I can buy, these are aspects that I find bring more happiness into my life.

Now, it's my duty to nurture these aspects of life that bring me happiness. I nurture thoughtfulness by protecting time for me to think uninterrupted and reducing compulsivity to respond to everything. I nurture constant learning by ensuring my learning is fueled by curiosity, not this anxiety of self-improvement, and that growth is expansive, not corrective. I nurture whimsy by being a little unnecessary and slightly impractical (hand-writing in a journal rather than in an app, taking small walks through a new place, not focusing on efficiency in everything). And I nurture slowness by designing friction into my life. Using analog tools, longer timelines, giving myself space to breathe through things. I schedule in slowness otherwise it gets crowded out by everything else going on.

I think you may enjoy taking some time to think about what aspects of life you appreciate and bring you happiness, find out how to nurture those aspects, and then craft your life around that. It could shed some light or help bring into perspective what your next steps should be.

notaustinpowers

6 months agodiscuss

It's a stylus and a line, a symbol representing writing. A stylus at that angle is how Edit icons are usually represented in iOS as well, so it has a visual similarity.

I won't say the new icon is amazing, it is too simple for my taste. I'm just saying, I understand why we're seeing this shift, and I understand why this icon is being used to represent Pages.

notaustinpowers

6 months agodiscuss

I get what they're trying to say, but I don't think a 14yo with their first Mac is going to know what an inkwell represents. Let alone what an inkwell is.

notaustinpowers

6 months agodiscuss

This whole thing just seems like two terrible people being terrible to each other and both vying for sympathy to be the less terrible person in this.

notaustinpowers

6 months agodiscuss

He believes germ theory is a creation of Big Pharma to push "patented pills, powders, pricks, potions, and poisons and the powerful professions of virology and vaccinology"

He believes in the miasma theory and just maintaining a healthy immune is enough to keep you from getting sick.

Just read his book, "The Real Anthony Fauci" and you'll realize that this man shouldn't be trusted to run a kindergarten nurses office.

notaustinpowers

7 months agodiscuss

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notaustinpowers

7 months agodiscuss

Planes, sports, restaurants, stores, etc are all privately-owned or publicly-traded businesses. In the social contract, it's expected that businesses offer services depending on what you're willing to pay.

Driving and public transport is not a business, it is a civil service.

Should we begin to offer tiered plans for EMS as well?

notaustinpowers

8 months agodiscuss

Health insurance payouts are socialized, but the health insurance company and healthcare providers are privatized. The insurance company and the healthcare providers are now incentivized to increase pricing of policies and services, since the cost is shared anyway.

Couple that in with laws that hamper the effectiveness of health insurance (can't negotiate drug pricing, denial of necessary care, absurdly high deductibles) and many quickly see that health insurance really just feels like a scam.

The regulations are in the favor of the insurance providers and major healthcare corporations. There have been decades of erosions to regulations on both the patient and healthcare provider side.

Couple that in with the recent announcement that many nursing and healthcare degrees are no longer considered "professional degrees" and are therefore now further restricting access to these career fields, US healthcare is about to get a lot worse.

notaustinpowers

8 months agodiscuss

Backdoors exist for everyone or they exist for no one, this technology isn't one that has room for a gray area to debate. If it can be deployed to public servant devices, it can be deployed to your device.

notaustinpowers

8 months agodiscuss

I think the main sticking point is this:

  ‘We’re happy to let them build whatever they want as long as it doesn’t hurt Rebble’

Eric mentions that they want to release free weather APIs so apps that show weather don't need to require the user to add an API key. As well as voice-to-text transcriptions. Rebble offers both of those services as a paid subscription. That would hurt Rebble's bottom line.

At the end of the day, Rebble built a business on top of scraped Pebble App Store data & open source code. They continued to keep their code open source. Eric paid fees to gain the rights to any code that wasn't open source.

The Pebble App Store data was never theirs. The underlying Pebble code was never theirs. The common library isn't theirs, Eric bought it from the maintainers.

It really does suck that the Rebble developers could lose a decent source of income. But that's what happens when you build your business on open source technology that you don't own.

But also, they must have some big balls to claim that all of the data they scraped from the Pebble App Store is THEIR data. I'd like to see the agreements from the pre-Rebble devs attesting to that.

notaustinpowers

2 years agodiscuss

I agree with you on that, it's a different input method and (therefore) will always come with it's quirks whether it's analog or digital. Digital art, music, animation, etc are incredible feats in their own right.

From knowing and being close with a lot of artists, the main complaint I hear about this ad is that it comes across as a destruction of the analog form to "make way" for the digital. Both of them can exist as they cater to different forms of artistic expression. This doesn't inherently make one better than the other. It comes across as a very bad take to artists that digital art is better than analog art, and analog art is on it's way to being destroyed.

I get it that this may just all be artists and myself reading too much into this. But that's art! We read into things waaayyyy too much sometimes.

notaustinpowers

2 years agodiscuss

> By the same logic, two pro gamers play the same video game should always achieve the exact same score.

Both of those comparisons you've made have the human element included in them. The gamers don't follow the exact same path in a speedrun. The authors don't have the exact same instructions on what book to write.

If a musician plucks the iPad violin strings to make an A note, it will sound the same across all iPads, across all artists, every time without fail. But if that same musician plucks an A note on a violin, it will sound different every time, across different musicians, different violins, different pressures, different techniques, etc.

Ask a music lover which they'd prefer. An orchestra consisting of pre-recorded music from 80 iPads played over loudspeakers or a live symphony orchestra?

notaustinpowers

2 years agodiscuss

This conversation isn't about "convenience of carrying a single thing vs. many of them". This discussion isn't about portability. Musicians don't carry their pianos or an orchestra with them to Trader Joes.

On your other point: Correct, there is INCREDIBLE art out there that is only possible thanks to technology. EDM music, 3D animation, the hyperpop genre (RIP Sophie), etc. The insinuation of the ad, however, is that those "old" ways to create art are no longer needed, the iPad does it all!!

Give two jazz artists the same music sheet and an iPad and tell them to recreate it and they'll both make music that sounds the exact same, because the iPad doesn't allow them to insert those little things like I mentioned in my previous comment.

Give those same two jazz artists the same music sheet but give them a full orchestra and they'll both be unique.

This doesn't make digital art less artistically valuable. I'm saying that technologies such as the iPad, which inherently remove the ability for human uniqueness to be included, insinuating that physical methods of artistic expression are outdated is both demeaning to artists, and frankly a dangerous method of thinking when it comes to art.

notaustinpowers

2 years agodiscuss

Ah, the classic "You criticize technology and yet you have a smartphone, checkmate".

There are genuine uses for this technology, but symbolically showing that pianos, violins, paints, etc are out of date by crushing them, replacing them with an iPad removes any of the "humanity" from it.

If I swipe a violin string on an iPad, it's going to sound the exact same no matter what. But if I play a real violin I have control over the vibrato (I guess, I'm not a violinist), I can start a note slowly and then quickly cut it off for effect, or slowly fade out a note by relieving pressure on the strings. The real thing allows for artists to put their heart and their soul into the music. An iPad can only immitate the note in it's most pristine, mathematic, sterile form.

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