GN did a documentary on the situation from the perspective of consumer-facing companies. Seems pretty dire for them, and it's hard to see the long-range consequences, but the idea of consumers being priced out isn't too far out, which to me is a little alarming.
Yeah, while going through college I had that exact thought, I wonder if in many fields we're at a tipping point where we should be conveying what we don't know more than what we do.
Y'know it's funny how, at least in my experience, education worked.
We're handed a bunch of simplified models then build on them. The consequence being that the landscape is very narrowly revealed.
This itself is a consequence of the architecture, at least in the US we don't really specialize until college/university.
Nobody really comprehends the depth of things until then, and troublingly enough we don't understand that until we're 2-3 years in.
For instance we have DNA, right? It gets replicated in cells via mitosis and in specialized cells called gametes via meiosis, the latter form is used for sexual reproduction. That's the gist you get in High School, you might talk about the polymer, nucleotides, nucleotide construction (which are superficial)
That isn't even close to the end, just off the top of my head there are elements in the DNA that code for several processes like methylation, allow interfacing with proteins which have myriad effects like up or downregulating transcription, they can also change the local topology forming loops that facilitate the process. There's a bunch of crazy shit that happens at the histone level.
And any one of those Substituent parts is probably worth discussing for a week in lecture at least but they're glossed over for more advances classes. For instance those regulatory molecules, in sufficient concentrations, can overpower histones that keep genes turned off, and that has downstream consequences in general regulation and cell differentiation.
I think that in the long run it compromises mental rigor. It also allows people to carry with them a sense of complete understanding when it's superficial and shallow. Having never experience the depth that the real world goes to kind of limits the horizons of people that aren't naturally curious and never shows them the potential for how deep shit can really get and when it does it is still superficial by the dint of the expectation placed on students being so narrow.
I have a 2018 WRX and I was considering removing the "telematics" module and updating the head unit to something more modern so I could use Android Auto but I was thinking that through and was immediately irked by the idea that I'd then be using google in lieu of Subaru. It's already bad enough as it is. Of course the head unit probably talks to and through the phone. I suppose the benefit would be that at least the new head unit would be anonymized but the use pattern would be obvious and explicitly correlated to me.
Kinda makes me want to buy a standalone navigation system at this point.
I don't even speed, I'm just sick of the idea of being watched always and forever.
It feels like there's been a significant cinching of personal rights recently. I wonder if it has anything to do with crypto's relatively recent adoption by institutional movers. NordVPN offers crypto payments, I expect virtually every other operator would too. Seems like a good way to get adoption rolling. Tunnel to somewhere that providers will service without an ID check and stay more anonymous by the dint of the crypto exchange.
They need real, tangible, meaningful threats. Corporal or social.
Doling out talkings-to, ISS, OSS, bad grades and repeat courses are a relative joke. I spent uncountable hours in ISS for truancy, was made to walk miles to school, kicked off the bus and walk miles home, served community service, and had many talkings-to. None of it was effective.
Expulsion is treated as far too extreme and should be far more regular as both an incentive to the student and to the parents. For many of these kids school is an impediment and a detractor and they would do far better for themselves in the work environment gaining experience over the course of the 3-4 years anyways. There are far more permissive environments in workplaces than there are in school that are better suited for the nature of certain inclinations and measures than that of school. There's also the possibility of restarting vocational education, which frankly, is a good compromise. But the current system is bullshit. And the bar is so low that diplomas are given out to nearly 90% of students which is flatly wrong as from what I've seen there are a lot more people who are either academically or behaviorally unsuited for employment or voting by any reasonable standard. Setting up clear failure modes are the guidelines by which many of these people would derive structure and meaning in their education, instead they're allowed a de minimis exception and passed into the world as acceptably educated and competent when the opposite is true. And that totally erodes the meaning of the accomplishment.
I think corporal punishment makes sense when it makes sense. If a kid runs out into the road without looking it makes sense to slap em upside the head, a much milder surrogate for getting hit by a car.
I think it ceases to be a good form of punishment when it's repeatedly used. I built a resilience toward spanking. In one hand it meant that the threat of the punishment, and the punishment itself was ineffectual, and in the other to regain efficacy it would've required escalation—fortunately for me it began and ended at spanking.
I think the issues are manifold, though. People willing to step outside the line and assault and or batter students are willing to break the rules for one reason or another. For instance the aforementioned resilience.
The natural social dynamics one would reasonably expect to play out are fettered by the rules, irrespective of the nature of retaliation. Fighting in retaliation, bullying in retaliation, shunning, shaming and so forth—all beyond the pale.
Teachers and admin are then deferred to, but the tools at their disposal are, from what I experienced and saw, pretty minimal. However they carry the unnatural burden of handling belligerents while maintaining professionality is a difficult tight rope to walk, and frankly ineffectual, but this is worsened when the students can be part of a protected class. At this point the school assumes legal liability for their treatment.
With a chronic misbehavior you end up with a treatment-resistant student, and with that it saddles the parents almost exclusively with the governance of their children. This can have mixed outcomes, if you can imagine, spanning from extremely responsible to complete absenteeism.
I think in an ideal situation the prevailing culture would be one where students self-police, within reason, as they're allotted the most freedom in interacting with one another, but we've largely wrested their hands in these contexts and bred a culture of bystanders in so doing. And I think that is seriously problematic and has had long-running consequences on the culture at large.
As a vegetarian that regularly uses plant-based substitutes: I'm super reluctant to believe a market for a product like Beyond ever existed. Between Beyond and Impossible they've got this weird chimera market, especially the latter, with their too-realistic product. If meaters cared they'd switch, there wasn't really a whole lot of fence sitting I don't think—not in reality. I think people were pretty well committed. I also think the sympathetic market of vegetarians and vegans didn't find the premise of these too-realistic products especially thrilling. And I don't think that's a huge market in the first place, at least not in a large portion of the US.
Then you factor in the costs and it's Beyond insanity.
And frankly I don't know if Beyond was doing anything legitimately novel. Impossible was over-engineering their burger to the extent that I wouldn't eat one from any restaurant because I couldn't tell whether it was be'f or beef. Beyond just seemed to be nu-gardein which I'll grant you—it's a Monsanto subsidiary—but the product is palettable, consistent, and available almost universally and has been as long as I've been on the diet, 12 years.
It definitely feels like it is gone. Of course I'm largely talking about the applications that I use, e.g. MS Word which is still using the searchless 1980s character map and has a crazy esoteric add-on installation process. It's hilariously bad when we consider the half-screen UI which obscures a considerable amount of the ribbon.
The UX is also awful.
But I think this is a compounding problem that spans generations of applications. Consider the page convention — a great deal of the writing content we typically publish, at a societal level, will be digital-only so why are we still defaulting to paper document formats? Why is it so fucking hard to set a picture in?
And it's that kind of ossification and familiar demand that reinforces the continuum that we see, I think. And when a company does get creative and sees some breakthrough success it is constrained to nascency before it gets swallowed by conglomerate interests and strangled.
And Google's alternative ecosystem has all of these parallels. It's crazy to see these monolithic companies floundering like this. That's what I don't understand.
I would think the argument for this is that it would enable and facilitate more advanced environments.
There's also plenty of games with fully explorable environments, I think it's more of a scale and utility consideration. I can't think of what use I'd have for exploring an office complex in GTA other than to hear Rockstar's parodical office banter. But Morrowind had reason for it to exist in most contexts.
Other games have intrinsically explorable interiors like NMS, and Enshrouded. Elden Ring was pretty open in this regard as well. And Zelda. I'm sure there are many others. TES doesn't fall into this due to the way interiors are structured which is a door teleports you to an interior level, ostensibly to save on poly budget, which again, concerning scale is an important consideration in both terms of meaning and effort in-context.
This doesn't seem to be doing much to build upon that, I think we could procedurally scatter empty shell buildings with low-mid assets already with a pretty decent degree of efficiency?
Isn't yield relative? Take a bell pepper for instance, perhaps one grown in x soil another in y, the nutrient contents will vary even if one is clonal.
There have been some rumblings about the nutrient qualities of certain food goods. You also hear about European vs. American vs. garden-grown in terms of qualitative differences. I've even seen it quantitated, indeed there was a documentary surrounding this [0]. There's a researcher that took historical records of micronutrient measures and compared them against modern cultivars, finding a decline in the per-volume contents.
I think it begs several questions about modern practices in agriculture beyond increased volume yield which is too often in the limelight. It just reminds me of Pika, which is associated with micronutrient deficiencies.
There isn't presently a good solution to this. I think regulations like that will probably have downstream effects, kicking the can down the road.
Google is already bad enough at government collusion, divulging data, as are other infrastructure providers.
Best-case is gutting Alphabet and breaking it up to the effect of decentralization of its pieces.
I think if anything regulating the current instruments would just harden their social/political position which furthers their interests more than anything.
I didn't read the writeup. The result was pretty gnarly. The active area on a phone left me scrolling up and down and I had to go very slow once I got purchase on the knob or it would rotate back after a quarter turn.
I think you have a point, at the resolution of personal liability shit is and has been cooked. Without being able to hold people to account for their misdeeds, misdeeds are de facto allowed and especially when you can obfuscate information. It's Goodhart's law in action, the sector looks good because we're shooting for targets in a heuristic measure but the reality is glum.
Worse is when fundamentals are [effectively] meaningless and everyone is a betting and hoping to pass it on to the greatest fool, even worse when that greater fool is the general public who are too with their own lives to fixate on the intractable nuances of the effects that Algerian hornet slayers are having on the price of tangerines which is buoying banana prices in Rwanada because legislation was passed last week in Kentucky.
Paradoxically, scale and complexity, but also psuedocomplexity (read:obscurantism) drive us towards these heuristics and effectively incentivise deeper cycles of Goodhart derangement. I expect this is a peculiar aspect of America's largess, though. The American cultural diaspora is actually pretty diverse from my experience.
I expect that r.i.c.e. was overfit. Asian imports are called riceburners, ostensibly because asian cultures consume a lot of rice. I guess it could be contrived as racist, but it's relatively harmless in the scope of things...
I'm speculating further: but the imports were cheap and had a thriving aftermarket of bolt-on parts e.g. body and turbo kits. The low barrier of entry afforded opportunities for anybody to play. Ricing was probably a perjorative issued by domestic enthusiasts that was adopted ironically by Asian import enthusiasts. If you can imagine there was a lot of diversity, people who would bolt up body kits to clapped out Civics to people that would push 700hp with extensively tuned cars with no adornments. I think in particular ricing was the more aesthetically motivated of the crowd.
This was later adopted by computer enthusiasts that like to add embelishments to their desktops, things like rainmeter/rocketdock and Windows/Linux skins and etc...
It was the smartphone. Not necessarily the phones themselves, but the wide reaching accessibility. Internet users skyrocketed and if phoneposters we're any indication of the aggregate impact - the quality of conversation deteriorated. And yes, mobile accessible platforms caused a sort of gravity and viola.
Also I'm reasonably sure this is just a truism. "Schismogenesis" in addition to the fact that everybody wants to be on the same page with their community. The nature of the internet in that it's basically just a huge, permanent log of interactions just allows us to observe this shit more easily and remark on it in post.