I’ve noticed pretty much zero disruption on Firefox with uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock despite Google’s best efforts. Every time I thought I’d eventually be paying Google the Danegeld to avoid the firehose of spam I’ve been pleasantly surprised.

It depends on the artistic and technological intent I think. Valve (tube) amplifiers are inferior to any modern amplifier in every way you could actually measure with an oscilloscope yet people still build them and valves are still produced they same way they were in the 1950s because the imperfections they produce in the sound can sound pleasant, which is down to psychoacoustic factors which have subjective as well as objective components. A photo that looks exactly like what we’d see naturally is one potential goal but it’s not the only one in my opinion.

IP maximalists really screwed the pooch by inventing the term ‘piracy’ for copyright infringement, they made the act sound ten times cooler.

There’s enough astroturf on Reddit for a continent’s worth of obnoxious suburban fake lawns.

Yeah I’ve no love for Musk but Twitter is full of pretty unpleasant people in general and it made political journalism worse by encouraging low-effort hot takes over slower more thoughtful content. I won’t miss it when it’s gone.

My problem isn’t really with its politics (I’m quite left-wing myself these days) but its personalities, you can be politically progressive without having the mentality of a schoolyard bully and that’s what Twitter was fundamentally about, bullying the main character of the day.

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Depends on the monitor, my one has a 3.5mm jack to get analogue audio out of the HDMI input which I use to get audio from my Xbox to the rest of my setup.

Good for them, doesn’t change the fact I find driving at 20 mph very frustrating compared to 30 mph for that reason.

I think this policy will fail to be honest; while I’m not in Wales any more Oxford where I live now is a supposed ‘cycling city’ with most roads at 20 mph and honestly I hate being on the road there either in a car or on a bike; I get the bus in even though it’s often flaky. Driving you’re sat between second and third gear the whole time so you’re either revving too hard and wasting petrol or the car naturally speeds up so you’re spending a lot of attention on not getting fined rather than keeping it on the road, and when you’re cycling the cars that do keep to 20 mph linger beside you for what feels subjectively a lot longer when they overtake which isn’t fun either and the tiny bike lines make you feel vulnerable to traffic. I had a lot of near misses when I did it regularly and Oxford is a very small city, the idea of cycling somewhere like Cardiff would be terrifying to me.

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That’s fundamentally why you can’t replace a software engineer with ChatGPT, only a software engineer has the skillset to verify the code isn’t shit even if it superficially works.

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Where I’m from if you’re out on bail or not (and what conditions are attached) is up to the court or the police depending on where you’re currently at in the justice system, you don’t pay anything regardless of your wealth.

I prefer this system as the reasons whether or not someone ought to be bailed don’t really have a lot to do with wealth usually so it seems unfair to make it a factor, but I can certainly see the reasoning to put a number on it as I suspect it does dissuade people breaking their bail conditions.

Getting people angry drives engagement, YouTube probably thinks you’re going hate-watch it and make them more tasty, tasty ad impressions that way.

Scared people for the most part. While I’m not American myself I grew up in an adjacent (Calvinistic Baptist) worldview and I cannot emphasise enough how much fear plays a role in that worldview. It’s pretty much a socially transmissible anxiety disorder in my experience, the evangelical worldview is ironically very well evolved to spread from one person to another because it directly hijacks your scepticism by upping the stakes too high for your brain to process it properly. You’re not allowed to express the fear though because that would be evidence you’re not really saved.

I’m not making excuses for them at all, I mean I’m very aggressively pro-LGBT rights and I grew up in that world so it’s definitely possible to escape it. What I am saying though in the spirit of ‘know your enemy’ is that in many cases these people from age five upwards will have been taught they are utterly disgusting in the eyes of god and deserve after they die to forever be tortured gruesomely beyond the power of English words to express because they were born human and are therefore guilty of original sin. These people see themselves as having been measured by the supreme creator of the universe and been found personally, individually beneath contempt. The only way you can escape your completely just fate of being eternally consciously tortured is if God predestined you to be saved and you’re one of the limited few that Jesus’s sacrifice actually applied to, in this world most of humanity exists only to be burned for the glory of God and if you ever fall away from the worldview you were never saved to begin with.

Again, I’m in no way excusing their bigotry which I loathe especially deeply having seen it at closer quarters than most. This is what we’re dealing with though from a purely practical point of view, if you or I are wrong then we’re just wrong but if these people are wrong then they will suffer a fate many times worse than death. This is why encounters with evangelicals are really intense for the most part, and why they’re so needlessly horrible from a secular perspective. While they’d never admit it in a million years the ideology is pretty trauma-driven for many of its adherents whether it’s the fear of hell, fear of losing their entire community even though they don’t believe any more, fear of rejection over some stupid theological difference (this lot make the revolutionary left look broad-church by comparison when it comes to factionalism) or any of the other fears that sound completely insane outside of that community but subjectively are very real.

‘A big table lookup’ isn’t what’s going on here, go and look up what backpropagation and gradient descent are if you want to know what’s actually happening.

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Yeah the Tories in the UK which were once the mainstream right are now sucking deeply on the crack pipe of Republican culture wars because after thirteen years in power it’s all they have left.

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To be fair I follow Reddit drama occasionally I’m in no position to criticise.