ConstableJelly

I think that's a neat idea, but we could instead, collectively, just do better at following other cars at a safe distance. I know it's impractical to expect all drivers on the road everywhere to change their behavior, but it's also persistently frustrating as someone who has for years frequently been stuck in traffic to see 95% of drivers insist on following less than a car-length behind. Following too closely to enable decision-making or accommodate other drivers is the cause of like 98% of both traffic accidents and congestion, according to my completely anecdotal and made up research.

Exactly what I immediately thought of.

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/06a73aad-0ef6-4664-8247-25c19d84cae9

I'll tell you something about heroin for me. I did very very poorly in school, until I started doing narcotics. Then I went to the top of my class because my mind was so restless and turbulent and I could not sit still. […] I'd probably today be diagnosed as ADHD, I was bouncing off the walls. I couldn't sit still, I just wanted to get in the woods. […] I started doing heroin, I went to the top of my class. Suddenly I could sit still, I could read, and I could concentrate, I could listen to what people were saying, things made sense to me. […] It worked for me. And if it still worked, I'd still be doing it. […] It killed my brother, and it destroys your relationships. It hollows out your whole life. You have a one-dimensional life. I was a bundle of appetites and it was a full time job to feed them, with drugs and sex and alcohol and extreme behavior.

Is he implying that an ADHD diagnosis would have been frivolous for him because...he self-medicated with heroin and it worked out dandy?? Hasn't he publicly criticized the rate of ADHD diagnoses and related medications?

It was the fifth time that Mr. Braun had been arrested since Mr. Trump commuted his 10-year sentence just before leaving office in 2021, which was among a raft of last-minute clemencies granted to those with ties to the president. Mr. Braun’s sentence was commuted after his family used a connection with Charles Kushner, the father of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law who was a senior White House adviser, to get the matter before Mr. Trump.

That episode highlighted Mr. Trump’s ad hoc process for granting clemency, favoring defendants who have gained access to the White House, often with scant vetting of their criminal histories. At the end of his first term, Mr. Trump granted clemency to a number of allies and well-connected people, including his longtime strategist Stephen K. Bannon and Elliott Broidy, a top fund-raiser.

Love a new youtube rec.

This is a really cool idea though. I'm actually playing F.I.S.T. right now and I've absentmindedly noticed some neat details in the environment backgrounds. Might slow myself down to a stroll in one of the city areas and take a closer look.

Been thinking about this type of thing a lot, especially as my older child is reaching an age where his friends are being allowed to play things like Roblox. Finding myself needing to explain gambling-adjacent risks, design patterns intended to capture rather than entertain or delight, and general digital citizenship.

Because he doesn't have a ton of experience, I think he finds it unnatural to believe people like game makers might act deceptively or even maliciously. And I imagine he's skeptical that his attention could even be manipulated the way games try.

Even "educational" games like Prodigy, endorsed by and used in his school, are lousy with operant conditioning and flow state design (and by some credible accounts are not even educationally valuable). I drew a line immediately against spending money within games and he's so far been accepting of it. But the temptation is all over the place.

I think the argument is that even if you're not consciously noticing it, your brain picks it up and that's part of the unsettling feeling you get. Is that true? I don't know. I was unsettled as hell watching Hereditary, but there's a lot more unsettling content besides the quasi-noticeable woman in the corner of the ceiling.

I'm glad to see It Follows included in the essay though. Watching characters converse in the grass, in the sunlight, in a scenario that in almost all other horror movies would be a tension-relieving safe scene, until you notice another character, blurry and deep in the distance, walking robotically on a straight path toward the central characters, still gives me chills. It remains one of my favorite effects, and is a top-tier reason why I love horror movies even though I don't love feeling tense or scared.

There are multiple sources referenced to weave a new commentary about the relationship between video games and labor for both players and creators 🤷.

Because email federation is inherent to everyone's understanding of how that service works. And perhaps more importantly, email "instances" are run by corporations. Laymen are not signing up on a "server" or "instance," they're signing up for Google, Apple, or Microsoft - the service they get aligns to a company that provides it. Nearly every single service that anyone has ever signed up for online has followed the same essential process: go to fixed url, create id and password, gain access.

It's easy to underestimate, especially in communities like this, how enigmatic the entire infrastructure of the internet is to the general population. Think of those videos where people are asked what "the cloud" is: they pause and ponder and then guess "satellites?" because they've never even wondered about it. I'm guessing that for many people, something like Twitter is just something that lives in their app store that they can choose to "enable" on their phone by installing it.

People know that software is "made up of code," but they don't understand what that means. The idea that an "application" is a collection of services run by code, that there are app servers and web servers, that there are backends and frontends, is completely unknown to (I'd guess) a significant majority of people. And if someone doesn't understand that, it's honestly near impossible to understand what anything in the fediverse is.

And most importantly: this is not any user's fault. IT and the Internet developed so quickly, and it was made so seamlessly accessible by corporations who at first just wanted their services to be adopted, and then wanted everything even more deliberately opaque so those users were more likely to feel locked in and dependent while the services themselves tail-spun in degradation.

We need more, and more accessible, and friendlier, tech literacy in general. The complexity of our world is running away from us ("I have a foreboding [of a time...] when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues" - Carl Sagan) and we simply can't deeply understand many of the things that directly impact us. But because of its ubiquity, IT may be the best chance people have of getting better at understanding.

I fear Matthew Vaughn has just lost his grip on the humanity that so brilliantly balanced the silly stories he likes to tell. Stardust is one of my all-time favorite movies, and Kick-Ass, X-Men First Class, and Kingsman are some of the most entertaining blockbuster flicks available, where the action is satisfyingly contextualized through excellent character work.

But his last three movies just don't have the right equation. From what I remember, Argyle started out really strongly but seriously devolved after the halfway point. I think he's indulging too much in the overwrought spectacle that he first toed the line of at the end of the first Kingsman.

Lincoln was a great biopic. Hyperfocusing on one pivotal moment in the man's illustrious life, and using the complexity of those circumstances to explore his intelligence and charisma from all angles was so much more effective than the whole-life-in-fast-forward approach so many other biopics follow.

Plus Daniel Day Lewis in peak form. Just an indescribably good performance.

Truly I wish that lawsuit the best. I still think the tone of the article is off, but certainly I may be guilty of the same.

Thanks for taking the time. Hard to keep from sinking too deep into despondency.