Khrux

I’m not sure they’re even looking inside anymore, just asking Claude what’s wrong.

To add to that, if weight loss peptides like Ozempic are working, let them work.

My mother, in her late 60s is obese. She was forced to retire early due to this, she has had lifelong self image issues due to this, and she’s very aware that it’s both robbing her ability to enjoy her later years, and years of her life. Until this year, she was staunchly against taking Ozempic due to potential side effects, but the reality is that the side effects of Obesity are so much worse.

For an analogy, there is a lot of evidence that the quantity of people who need to wear glasses has increased because in infancy, children are not looking at distant objects, and irreversible damage is occurring to their vision as a result. Of course this is something we want parents to consider in how they realise their children, but it would be monstrous to then deprive that person of glasses because the fault is societal.

Everything on your list is the equivalent of encouraging children to exercise their eyes, and is absolutely the best way to treat obesity, but medication should be considered as a treatment beyond this.

Yeah, it’s pretty acceptable in any activity where those with interest in it are predominantly of one gender, because the sample size inevitably biases them to win.

I often think about the surprising accurate assumption that many women in game development are trans women, sometimes used in transphobic rhetoric, but there is an obvious through line between people who are socialised male but feel out of place ending up in less social, online hobbies (coding and gaming) due to that blend of expectations and ostracization.

I’m a teacher and it’s pretty obvious from a young age how almost all gendered skills are entirely that way due to social expectation.

There’s a clip of Conan O’Brien playing this, and you can tell he’s definitely not a gamer, and he’s so shocked by a death animation. I don’t really understand their place in the game, they are so disproportionately violent compared to everything else, and it’s random.

There is a novel called Blood Meridian that has a lot of incredibly violent scenes to the point many consider it unfilmable, but that violence is depicted as an almost detached spectacle, the prose is externalised and the scenes are never lingered on for pleasure. It’s generally considered perhaps the most violent classic novel, but the entire metaphysics and purpose of the book exists in this violence.

When I first played tomb raider, I didn’t notice half the violent scenes, because the medium is so unnecessarily stuffed with it. It wasn’t until replaying it after seeing the Conan O’Brien interview that I really honed in on it.

In comparison to Blood Meridian, it’s so much worse. It doesn’t really have a message or a story purpose beyond showing the setting as dangerous, and it lingers on the violence, taking pleasure in the sudden violence, that has befallen our protagonist who we deeply care about and can internalise her suffering easily. We see a young woman, who we live through and care for deeply, come to a brutal, sickening end due to sheer bad luck, and then we hit restart.

I’m not even really mad about it, like it said, I’m so desensitised to video game violence that I only noticed the brutality of these scenes after seeing Conan. Perhaps the creep of violence in the medium alongside the fact that in 10 seconds, she’s fine and you do it again is enough to justify it, but it’s weird that it exists so normally in the first place.

That’s exactly it, we expected better. Regardless of if one likes his music or hates it, he’s built a brand on being a decent human being. Basically every story of him before this week has been one of positivity, I’m pretty sure his rider has always been something like a glass of water and packet of crisps, he’s donated a lot to good causes and generally stood up for those who need it.

Billionaires are parasites on society, and Kraft is the kind of man who influence global politics and facilitate ethnic cleansing to line his own pockets, and nobody is surprised by that.

Sheeran showed that the moment anything is on the line, his entire brand of kindness can be bought. I actually believe he thought he was making the non-decision in this, but that was clearly motivated by a desire to keep his brand out of a situation that is basically a for-profit genocide.

Unless he gets up on stage tomorrow’s show and makes a statement with some balls, his entire persona dissolves, and that is his brand. Sadly we all know he won’t.

It is my first distro where I’m not dual booting to Windows.

I swapped to it in May from Endeavour OS as I happened to be doing a clean install, and 90% of my PC usage nowadays is gaming, and I have never looked back, even though I thought Endeavour OS would have been the end of my Distro hopping.

I went into this lukewarm on Nolan and a massive nerd for The Odyssey, so I was primed to be unhappy with any unfaithful choice, but honestly I was absolutely blown away.

One thing that stood out to me would be the general interpretation that the sea people causing the bronze age collapse was actually the declining of an honour code that is seen in the ancient greek laws of hospitality. I’d often thought about the tonal shift between the age of heroes and the Illiad onwards, how the Caledonian Boar Hunt may have been the last key event of Heroic age, and by the end of The Oresteia and The Aeneid, the early identity of the post-bronze-age collapse Mediterranean societies are visible. The sea people concept is largely debunked now, and the collapse is generally considered to be a mix of famine, climate disasters and most importantly the collapse of relationships between the east Mediterranean states.

Nolan then taking this as Odysseus’s fear of travelling home, a changed man, to a world he changed for the worse, is particularly powerful, and his take on Athena as a manifestation of this guilt at breaking Zeus law and witnessing a very real rape and pillage of the city due to his subterfuge was good. I also think that Zendaya was very likely this interpretation’s version of Cassandra too, which is neat.

I went into the film already guarded against the visual style. I’d have loved to have seen an authentic approach at bronze age style from talented art directors and production designers, and I had similar feelings about the muted and gloomy colour palette. I still have these feelings; everyone looked like a monochrome Roman, not even a classical Greek, but seeing the direction as a whole, I understand the choice. The somber narrative, editing style, soundtrack, etc, all serve the same tone that the muted and stripped by colour and art style do.

That said, I’m shocked at the lack of spears in this film. Everyone fights with short swords and no shields, which is basically a Hollywood fantasy in any time in history, but this is the iconic era of spears. I counted one use of a spear, despite several war scenes, and almost every death at the hands of a weapon would have been prevented with a shield.

As a fun side fact, people who play VR combat games like Blade and Sorcery often start using swords and default to spears and clubs, because they’re incredibly intuitive to untrained people compared to swords, which have a far more tactical skill ceiling, making them the default of soldiers right through the era of knights with swords.

Another fun side fact. Ajax, a 5th Century BCE poem about the PTSD driven suicide of Ajax the Greater towards the end of the Trojan war, was performed to 500 marines in 2008, I think by Al Pacino, Donald Sutherland, and Michael J. Fox, and was remarked to resonate incredibly strongly with the audience. Myth from the Trojan was onwards suddenly really cares about consequence, particularly in regards to the human condition.

My other pet peeve is the sound design of the weapons (Odysseus’s incredible bow string sound excluded). This was a very ‘swish and pew’. Back in the early 2010s, I stumbled across a Skyrim mod that changed the bow sounds (example here) and I was amazed how much more satisfying it was, not just from a realism point, but just a pleasant resonant heavy sound, like how shooter games have hit marker sounds. Not just was every launched arrow (including from Odysseus) very whistly, but so was every sword swing. For a film with otherwise incredible sound design (so good I’d peg it for winning the oscar this year), every fight was a bland cartoony swish fest.

I also thought the massacre of the suitors was a little bit unwarranted in it’s action set piece style. It makes sense that a trained warrior king who spent a decade in a bloody war would be a better combatant and a bunch of immature suitors, but I think it just overstepped my suspension of disbelief a few times, in a way the monsterous and magical elements didn’t.

My closing thought is that this may be one of the best adaptations of Greek myth at all. It’s ability to take the tonal shift that is the Trojan war and its concluding breaking of Zeus’s Law and the sack of the temple of Athena, pointing that to the beginning of the end of Mycenaean Greece, and its neighbours, and then tying that so incredibly to Odysseyus’s character arc and PTSD is so well done. The fact that my cirques are so specific and nit-picky is a testament to the strength of this film.

TLDR: I think AI is coming for teaching (for better or worse), but not coming to replace us, because the teacher:student ratio is already as poor as can be.

I’m a teacher. Giving a serious answer, AI is likely going to be very involved in this industry over the next decade, purely for it’s ability to track and scaffold individual learning better than one adult doing the same for 30 people, but that would require a shift to even more digital learning, which takes the “how” of teaching out of the hands of a teacher in a way it currently is not.

That said, I don’t actually think it’s coming for my job precisely because there is 1 teacher to every 30 students. If you compare us to how cashiers have been replaced by self service tills, teachers have already been stripped to a minimal coverage of the classroom, and you cannot have 30 students independently working, because children and teenagers are predominantly motivated to avoid working. I’m this regard, it can only supplement our job, as they can’t meaningfully cut the adult to student ratio further for safety reasons.

Also, although I think it’ll start to be seen in the next 10 years, I’m not sure where it would come in. State schools do not have the budget, energy or time to experiment with individualised AI learning support, and private schools prefer to maintain older styles of teaching for a long time, as they prioritise the development of attitude and trust over academic scores as not only does it supplement academic scores, but it is what the corporate employers of privately educated students seek above merit.

This is a really good point but I feel there is a double edged sword here. Loads of old school bigoted nerds love star trek because for whatever reason they actually don’t pick up on the compassionate, far left messaging.

It was also different when 50 years ago, a black woman as bridge officer was scandal to right wing sensationalist media.

The overt and sometimes performative progressive details that are present now push the boundaries in a similar manner to the old boring change, while being much more noticeable to the rest of the audience.

I have an ADHD diagnosis, and I do think this is 60% just being better at diagnosing it, but I do also believe ADHD is sort of on the rise.

There is an incredible book called Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté, which is the significant book on ADHD in the same way that The Body Keeps the Score is for trauma, which delves into the potential ADHD causes beyond it being hereditary.

Of course modern dopamine-consumerist culture is part of the problem, but it largely makes ADHD symptoms obvious, and various unmet attention needs in early childhood are significantly more linked to developing ADHD, not to fault the parent or other caregiver who may not have the availability or ability to provide that attention due to modern societal demands. It’s been some years since I read it but I really remember one part clearly; it’s basically impossible to test nature Vs nurture in separated-at-birth twins because the act of separating twins at birth spikes the likelihood of having ADHD so much.

But honestly I think the largest contributor to increased ADHD cases is not that we’re better at diagnosing it, it’s that modern society increasingly warrants its diagnoses. 12000 years ago ADHD traits weren’t a disorder, as much as having different physical strength or height to your peers isn’t. Modern capitalist society demands an efficiency of its workforce and ADHD is an inherently inefficient trait, and therefore suddenly warrants treatment.

Don’t get me wrong, medication is incredible, and has turned days I’ve barely been able to get out of bed into productive days, but that’s still valuing being productive.

Left the chat*

I’ve seen quite a lot recently saying a particularly distracting aspect of phones isn’t that they’re a screen and a visual stimulus, but a tool and a haptic stimulus.

An increasingly popular way to combat checking your phone while watching TV is to busy your hands with something. If this works and is widely adopted, we won’t need shows to have second-screen writing repetition; our brains tell our hands to use the tool, and it just so happens that the tool is full of text and speech and occupies the language center of our brains, meaning we stop listening to the show.

Also, a whole separate thing I often think about, before 2010, there were very few high budget TV shows. TV was made on a much smaller budget than film, and the writing often took a hit too, and that was just the reality of watching TV. They were also designed to hook people who were clicking around channels with lots of recaps and narrative refreshers, for people tuning in halfway through, this is like the second-screen writing issues we complain about now on steroids, straight to TV movies were also terrible for this.

Movies that were designed for Cinema revenue weren’t impacted by this or course, but even DVD revenue movies often have simpler plots and reiterate their narratives for people who are half watching while chatting or stoned or whatever.

That’s still incredibly low, I’d have assumed an enormous increase.

I can’t picture a service which beats Spotify in what they offer which isn’t just the same business model but more ethical.

Discovering music for free is an enormous benefit, and the fact that Spotify has practically all mainstream music is nice. People often cite that one quote by Gabe Newell that is “Piracy is not an economic problem. It is a service problem”, as a highlight for steam, but largely Spotify offers what consumers want in a way Netflix or Audible can’t. They have everything you want and guide your discovery in even more, and as long as their encroaching enshittification doesn’t undercut this service, they will continue to underpay artists and fund immoral activities.

The developer of Ultrakill, Hakita, said something which I’ve often thought about. “You should support indies if you can, but culture shouldn’t exist only for those who can afford it. ULTRAKILL wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t had easy access to movies, music and games growing up. If you don’t have money, you can support via word of mouth”. There are plenty of independent things I financially support, particularly things I attend in person in the city I live in. I may spend £100 per month paying for art and entertainment all said and done, and when that’s spent, I will pirate everything else.

I split a Spotify family plan between 6 friends, I think that’s about £3.50 per month, and I pay for no other media services. With video, I run a jellyfin server with a “parent friendly” interface, so they can have “netflix with everything”, which I have at my place too. I don’t read that much any more, if it’s physical I just go to the library and if it’s an audiobook I’ll just pirate it. The benefit here is that even if I’m on a reading binge, that’s not even a book a week. With Spotify, I often pick something and play it via song radio, which is probably 50/50 music I know and new music. Sometimes I just stick albums on, but it’s not like that’s harder. If I had a locally hosted music repository that I’d “paid for”, I could enjoy albums, but not as easily have a radio like discovery experience.

One day, a pirate tool may appear that rivals Spotify, but until that day, I can’t see myself moving away from it.

Go to your local live music, drag shows, theatres, independent cinemas and libraries. Don’t feel obligated to pay for any internet service.

Yeah, he looked like he did on the left through the entire 2010s without changing appearance much, from Narnia 3 to Midsommar. This is absolutely styling above just growing up.

Without arguing politics, the world is sliding very quickly towards facism and being on guard against it is incredibly important. I’m not buying a laptop and putting money in the pockets of someone who may then donate to or fund facism. None of that applies to a developer of a free open source software whose political ideal world is not rapidly approaching.

I agree. Provided you aren’t betraying your own values in the work you do, there’s no shame in not taking pride in how you sell your labour. Be are not defined by our jobs.

I’ve used ChatGPT a little, particularly a few years ago but still on rare occasion now. I won’t bother giving it this prompt and wasting the processing but it probably won’t be biased, I’ve been really really surprised with how critical it is of itself. I think by the nature of the dataset it’s trained on (i.e. basically everything), it’s not really showing any major bias at the moment. It matches my energy and decries capitalism, AI, OpenAI, Sam Altmann etc in a cartoonish, toadie way.

Sadly I don’t think being an AI engineer is quite as bullshit, the obvious allegory is someone who provides the syllabus and marks the exams, rather than just doing addition for rich people.

I cannot believe character.ai was valued at over a billion.

^bubble