“I know, I know, but it was this or we’d have to stop bombing brown people and tell the poors we’d give them food. It was the politically responsible thing to do.”

Because President’s Day is for buying stuff. Clearly what we need is to allow stores to set up in polling places to get it to be a holiday. /s

The problem is not seeing a problem with any of that before the bit about talking to spooky foreigners.

The rich and powerful having this much control over our government, communications, and our economic lives in general is THE problem. Full stop. What they decide to do with that power is beside the point. There’s no such thing as a good king.

Accidentally deleted comment, here it is again:

Enterprise (the last of the 90s era of trek shows) is a prequel which is set I think about 100 years after the Vulcans make first contact with humans. You get a little of that initial meeting, but mostly the show only talks about their relationship up until that point as historical context for their current situation. Basically, the Vulcans stuck around Earth to help out and keep an eye on humanity to try to make sure they were “ready” for warp travel. Although they don’t directly share any science behind their more developed warp technology.

I don’t get the sense that there was ever really a popular backlash to them being there, but there seemed to be a little resentment at least within the space program about how they felt that the Vulcans were being too paternalistic and holding them back. When they finally make the call to go on their first interstellar mission in the first episode, it’s against the recommendations of the cautious Vulcan delegation to Earth.

The series itself is kind of a mixed bag. This is sort of the start of TV Trek turning more towards action shlock, but there were still plenty of good episodes in there and it was interesting seeing the process of the federation coming together from disparate civilizations that had to work through their differences. It’s definitely a different feeling than showing up to a planet, meeting some weird aliens, then never talking to them again.

Enterprise (the last of the 90s era of trek shows) is a prequel which is set I think about 100 years after the Vulcans make first contact with humans. You get a little of that initial meeting, but mostly the show only talks about their relationship up until that point as historical context for their current situation. Basically, the Vulcans stuck around Earth to help out and keep an eye on humanity to try to make sure they were “ready” for warp travel. Although they don’t directly share any science behind their more developed warp technology.

I don’t get the sense that there was ever really a popular backlash to them being there, but there seemed to be a little resentment at least within the space program about how they felt that the Vulcans were being too paternalistic and holding them back. When they finally make the call to go on their first interstellar mission in the first episode, it’s against the recommendations of the cautious Vulcan delegation to Earth.

The series itself is kind of a mixed bag. This is sort of the start of TV Trek turning more towards action shlock, but there were still plenty of good episodes in there and it was interesting seeing the process of the federation coming together from disparate civilizations that had to work through their differences. It’s definitely a different feeling than showing up to a planet, meeting some weird aliens, then never talking to them again.

Does Star Trek count? I would be remiss for not bringing up Star Trek given the opportunity to insert it into a conversation. I bet the aliens will love that.

I know you’re joking and that there’s a lot of garbage videos out there, but what possible value would there be in sending a novel per second? Can anyone read a novel per second? It only makes sense to use the higher bandwidth to send higher density information like video, audio, or interactive media like games.

Tis the season for floating stuff in drinks. Summer by contrast is the season for putting stuff on the glass of your drink.

And if it took ads on the pause screen to get you to see the issues with growth capitalism,

I don’t know why you’d assume that. I’m pretty staunchly communist from a mix of seeing our current problems and understanding history enough to know that this didn’t start yesterday. But if it takes companies being really obviously greedy for some consumers to see anything is wrong, it doesn’t hurt to try to focus their anger to a productive understanding of the problem rather than whatever other nonsense they might get drawn to.

As far as alternatives. I’m always up front with people in saying that I don’t have precise answers for what our future ought to be after capitalism. That’s a difficult problem and up to everyone to work together to figure that out. But there is no future where we stick with capitalism. Or at least, not one we’d want to live in for very long. It’s a cruel system and it’s going to be responsible for ending the human habitable environment if we don’t do something about that. People need to understand this and they need to understand that tweaking around the edges isn’t going to fix the issue.

The thing about if they were ok with a reasonable profit is a thought experiment or rhetorical device more than it’s a proposed solution. It’d be nice if it worked that way. Capitalists want us to think things do or could work that way. Hence corporations saying they NEED to cut costs or raise prices while continuing to make increasing profits. But it’s important to understand why it could never work that way, at least for very long.

Agreed. I really hate it when people see the problems in the world, fall for misanthropy, and blame everyone, most of whom are blameless beyond their failure to put their lives at risk to change things.

People are great. We’ve done great things. We’re a species who’s defining advantage is cooperation. None of what we see today would be possible if most of us were greedy, hateful, idiots.

People can be lead astray. but who can blame them? We’ve created a world more complicated than any one of us could fully understand. It’s bad enough that a handful of psychopaths can take advantage of that, we don’t need to add to it by making it seem like everyone’s at fault for not instantly bashing their heads in.

I’m not terribly sympathetic to arguments about covering costs when it comes to corporations. If they were just looking to cover costs or even just make a reasonable profit, there are all sorts of arrangements we could come up with that would be acceptable to most people.

But they’re not trying to do that. Profit isn’t enough for a corporation. They need to make the most profit. And then after that they somehow need to make more than the most.

So they put in ads. But that’s not enough and oh look there are more places we haven’t put in ads, we should fix that. Oh look, our studies show that if we make the ads more obnoxious in these ways they increase this number by 3%. Oh wait, we have all this info we got from spying on people, why don’t we sell that too? Hey guys, we’ve heard you about the ads. Have we got a solution for you! For a small protection payment subscription fee of $10/month, you can get rid of those pesky ads we know you don’t like! Oooh sorry everyone, the price of the subscription went up again. We promise this is all necessary. Oh by the way, we’re adding ads back into the service. But don’t worry, wait until you hear about our NEW subscription tier! (I don’t think that last one’s happened with YT premium yet, but it’s happened with cable and most of streaming at this point, so I wouldn’t put it past them.)

There’s no way we can have nice things while this is the driving force organizing where our resources go.

Imagine all the cool stuff we could be doing if we weren’t wasting the time of hundreds of engineers figuring out how to shove ads in people’s faces.

Sort of? I know meme was a word before the internet usage of it took off, but what I described is how it has been used in the space of internet memes for over a decade. And that usage ends up just being a more specific definition than the broader one. An internet meme is a subset of the academic concept of a meme.

It seems only recently people on the internet have started more casually using it in the way I described.

An example that’s particularly confusing to me: I play a bunch of strategy games. Sometimes people will call a particular strategy a “meme” when they just mean it’s bad. It doesn’t carry any kind of extra meaning with it. It’s not going to convey any other ideas. They’ve just swapped out one word for a word that means something else for seemingly no reason other than laziness.

idk, doesn’t really matter that much. It’s just one of those little things that rubs me the wrong way.

At this point I’ve seen people use meme for something as generic as something being funny, something being bad, literally just images of tweets, etc.

To me a meme is exactly: A visually assisted joke format. Where the visual provides both the structure of the joke and carries with it some extra cultural understanding that enhances the joke if people understand it. And in order for it to be a meme and not just a comic or something, it needs to be reused to make other jokes with the same format. Optionally, the very act of reusing it can itself add shared meaning in a meta sense.

Question: Does Google Scholar only list published papers from reputable journals or does it just grab anything people throw out there? We have already seen that some journals will publish complete nonsense without looking at it. AI or not, there’s a core problem with how academic work gets peer reviewed and published at the moment.

Similarly, Rick Rolling is eternal. It’s kind of got a negative feedback loop. If it gets overused, people stop using it for a while, which just makes people more susceptible to it when it pops up again.

Is this Italy’s version of athletes being sponsored by Mc Donald’s or Coke?

I hope this is just a joke and she didn’t dox her mom for internet points.

That’s a problem for the poors and whoever is holding the bag after I retire.

No. But not because AI isn’t gonna get better, but because hype is an ever moving goal post. Nobody gets excited about what’s already possible. Hype lives on vague promises of some amazing future that is right around the corner we promise. Then by the time it becomes apparent that a lot of the claims were nonsense and the actual developments were steadier and less dramatic, they’ve already moved onto new wild claims.