I'm not sure how much overlap there is between the "everyone's just a consumer these days! That's awful, they should be creators!" set of posters, and the "needing fewer people to do anything at all is always a good thing, bring on the glorious AI future!" set, but I suspect it's at least non-zero and I find that rather confusing.
Yes, let's make it so anything short of world-class creative talent (if that, even, if "AI" keeps advancing) is something that's of no monetary or social value, then wonder why people don't spend more time creating stuff. You're not motivated to play violin in your bedroom for nobody, or make paintings to hang in your own closet because nobody wants them? Or, there's no need for you to build this kind of great thing for your elderly relative because an AGI can do it instead? And now you're a couch potato struggling with depression and wondering what the point of living even is? Quelle surprise!
It's as if solipsistic intrinsic motivation is shit compared to having others want or need what you can do for them, and like maybe we need the latter in order to be healthy. But no, let's race toward further reducing our value to others as fast as we can, what could go wrong?
> Setting aside pedantry about the US being a republic and not a pure democracy,
Actually political scientists routinely refer to the US as a democracy. You're splitting a hair that experts do not. The word "democracy" does not only mean direct democracy. Mentioning this non-issue at all is a signal, but maybe not the one you hoped for.
Low-effort cookiecutter propaganda put up by lost-causers hoping to one day subjugate black people again probably doesn't need to be displayed prominently in front of courthouses, yes. And once removed, we probably don't need hundreds of unimpressive near-identical statues—a few would suffice, for any value they might hold.
Penny Arcade got in hot water over a strip for being a "rape joke" that only worked if you agreed that rape is pretty much the worst thing a person can experience multiple times without necessarily dying. Like, the joke works better the worse you think rape is, it's not making light of it at all, both for the overall point of the strip and for the incongruity-based humor of the specific way the situation is phrased to land, but they got in trouble anyway (then reacted defiantly in a classical-Internet manner, like "well that's obviously fucking ridiculous, so we're going to double down to mock how plainly absurd you're being" which just made things worse, because they didn't yet understand how modern Internet mobs work, which were juuuust starting to really become A Thing right around then)
I would—or, at least, I'd seed a whole lot longer—if there were a way to let me keep seeding after I normalize the file naming and structure. As it is, I have to render most downloads un-seedable in order to actually use them.
Guessing #1 has something to do with speeding up the notoriously-slow network. Probably allows more long-term route caching or something.
#2 does seem silly.
On a semi-related note, it's not that hard to set up a private IPFS. You just need a publicly-reachable "lighthouse" node (and it's extremely low-resource, the cheapest hosted VM you can find can likely handle the task without trouble) and some light config edits. IPFS isn't (and isn't trying to be) anonymous, but you can avoid sharing with the entire IPFS network and share only with trusted peers instead. The ordinary IPFS network won't even know you're there, because you won't be connecting to it.
I guarantee they got all kinds of hate and weirdness sent their way, too. Any game with a notable userbase does, including the commercial ones. Like, weird, personal, abusive shit from people who demonstrably (it's pretty clear from their "ideas") have no idea what they're talking about and evidently have unfortunate (for everyone else, anyway) amounts of free time on their hands.
And I don't just mean "you monetized this in a way I dislike" or "boo, DRM" or "you had dozens of game-breaking bugs at launch" or whatever, which, maybe don't be a dick about it, but at least I get why those things upset people and, especially in the last case, why they might get a bit entitled-seeming about it, since they did part with money—no, it's over the tiniest, most trivial stuff, including, often, things that are the way they are for a very good reason and would piss off 100x as many people if the abusive jerk got his (or her, I guess... but realistically, it's just about always a "his") way. But no, this minor thing is wrong so you're incompetent and any idiot could do better and [some names they somehow came up with, sometimes with disturbing accuracy] who worked on that part should be fired immediately. JFC. They'll spam you with this crap, on every channel they can.
And that's if you're not a woman prominent in the project. Then you get the creeper shit, too.
There's no possible way the DF devs haven't seen their fair share of that.
(though, sure, they were ultimately able to monetize it in a way that very few passion projects of that sort ever can, and certainly not utility open source libraries—that part of the story's way different)
Oh man—is that part of it? Now that you mention it, all the leagues I used to play on were either city-run leagues or YMCA (which seems to have shifted toward the very-casual end, too, but maybe that's just our local ones) I think.
I think community colleges are one of those under-appreciated excellent institutions the US has (in addition to our institutions and systems that actually do kinda suck, compared to our peers, that get a lot more attention). They're available just about everywhere that many people live, it's pretty easy to get them to give you a chance unless you have a very recent history of being a committed academic screw-up—even if your history's a bit unusual, or you've had some screw-ups farther in the past—and in a couple years you can establish a record that represents a big step toward achieving an at-least middling life outcome, while opening up access to the next steps.
I hope the admissions process and the rest of it was still relatively painless, despite their not recognizing your school. I'm sure immigration itself was pretty unpleasant—sorry about that :-/
Do schools in other countries let kids—elementary school and up—take smartphones to school and (due to inability to harshly police it because of reluctance to take phones, since it pisses off parents) use them quite a bit in class? I was shocked to find out that's a widespread policy/practice in the US, these days, and I'd be surprised if other countries are following us off that particular very-stupid cliff.
What's the median age of first smartphone for kids coming up in other OECD states?
Social media has a much smaller effect if you have to go to the family computer to use it, or whatever, than if you've got it in your pocket all day and are checking it constantly when the teacher's not looking....
> My oldest plays baseball, he started in kindergarten, and has played all the way to high school now. He loves the game, but we also made sure it was a game, not a job. All kids in his class who could afford it were on travel teams, starting in first grade. All but three have private coaches for whatever position they specialize in. . . starting in first grade. The parents sponsored tournaments. The parents made sure their travel team attended tournaments that college scouts or colleges sponsored. Starting in first grade. The kids on his school team (town population of around 1000, school k-12 enrollment is around 400) have literally played or practiced baseball every weekend, barring some holiday weekends, since they were 5 years old. That is not an exaggeration, it is a statement of fact.
This is one thing I've noticed about kids' sports, too, now that I have (youngish) kids and I'm trying to find sports for them. What used to be the low-end leagues—which were a bit serious, but not too much—seem to mostly be gone, with a new ultra-casual tier that didn't exist before replacing it, and then... nothing, until you're looking at really serious leagues with lots of travel and a huge time-commitment ([EDIT] yes, even for like 1st-graders).
All I can figure is parents' preferences changed—more of the half-serious players are pushed into the very-serious leagues now, for whatever reason, and the kinds of kids/parents who were always kinda unreliable and didn't seem to really have their hearts in it in the old-style somewhat-serious leagues are happier with the more-casual, even-lower-time-commitment replacement, leaving insufficient demand for what used to be just standard youth sports leagues.
You're in a bubble. It's nowhere near that hard to get into non-elite universities, which the vast majority of college-bound students attend. Just keeping your grades up and doing well on a standardized test will get you into a good (well-regarded in at least some fields, very well-known at least regionally) state school—and the ones in the next couple tiers under that are even more lax. Then there are community colleges—ask nicely and they'll probably let you in at least on a probational basis, even if your grades were incredibly bad in high school and you don't have much else going for you.
And that's for the students that go at all.
[EDIT] Incidentally, from tales told by my various teacher friends, the students who genuinely have crazy-busy schedules are almost always the ones who are extremely into playing two or more sports. Even half-serious participation (so, maaaaybe gunning to play college ball, plus the mostly-delusional but fairly-common parental aspirations of having a pro-league kid) means being in a league that makes you travel a lot, and lots and lots of practice, for each sport, plus extra training camps and shit like that. I believe tales of some schools where the students are stressed over academics and non-sports extracurriculars (plus the single requisite sport to keep Harvard from binning your application) but out in the vast reaches of non-elite America, only a few students have very-high schedule pressure, and most (not all, but most) of those are because of a strong focus on sports.
I still suspect that yes, it was under-diagnosed or overlooked for a long time, but that ultimately it's a disorder that is, for most people who have it, a result of a fairly-large section of the ordinary human brain-development spectrum being badly mis-matched with modern society, in a way that it hadn't been in the (perhaps somewhat distant) past. Since differences in brain development aren't really considered disorders unless they cause a problem in ordinary life, if ordinary life itself changes to put different sorts of demands on people, then it seems plausible that could create disorders where there were none before. I'm pretty sure that's a lot of what's going on with AD(H)D.
I mean, if you look at early 20th century jobs most similar to office jobs today, they look from the outside, and are depicted by contemporary media, as crushingly dull—but, they had the benefit of also being highly repetitive, stack of papers to go through, do the thing you do, put it in the outbox, move to the next stack. Now everything's every bit as dull, but we're also expected to juggle a much broader set of not-terribly-similar tasks, often taking on little bits of what used to be the jobs of entire, dedicated humans before computerization "freed" companies to smear those tasks across their entire workforce. That seems like a recipe for failure for someone with ADHD-brain.
> So in that case, why not let the government just take over any company it sees fit?
Well, seizing is rather different than regulating, for one thing, and for another, because most of the time I'd probably think it was a bad idea. I do think it's an option that should be on the table in some circumstances. Just that it's probably wises rarely to use it.
I didn't write that I thought the government ought to interfere with businesses constantly, to extremes, in all sorts of ways. I just think the justification for their ability to do so, if they want, falls out how incorporation works, and what a corporation is.
> If you’re okay with the government controlling any legal organization do yoh feel the same way about government controlling churches? Advocacy groups?
I'd rather they didn't take them over, if that's what your suggesting, but they in fact regulate tons of things about these organizations, including, specifically, speech.
I wouldn't want them to—again, that's separate—but yeah, maybe, since they're also effectively chartered by the government (as they pretty much can't exist in any useful way absent special government support of some kind or another—but then, same goes for corporations).
I mean, they do in fact already dictate a lot about how both unions and corporations can operate, so yeah, prohibiting endorsement of candidates using union resources doesn't seem entirely crazy to me. Though, again, I'd rather they didn't.
> Surely you don't think it would be legal for Congress to pass a law preventing newspaper publishers from, for example, endorsing presidential candidates?
Nah, but I also reckon there's a reason the press is mentioned specifically in that amendment.
Yes, let's make it so anything short of world-class creative talent (if that, even, if "AI" keeps advancing) is something that's of no monetary or social value, then wonder why people don't spend more time creating stuff. You're not motivated to play violin in your bedroom for nobody, or make paintings to hang in your own closet because nobody wants them? Or, there's no need for you to build this kind of great thing for your elderly relative because an AGI can do it instead? And now you're a couch potato struggling with depression and wondering what the point of living even is? Quelle surprise!
It's as if solipsistic intrinsic motivation is shit compared to having others want or need what you can do for them, and like maybe we need the latter in order to be healthy. But no, let's race toward further reducing our value to others as fast as we can, what could go wrong?