trafficante

Vagueposting is a different beast. There’s almost never any intention of informing etc; it’s just: QT a trending semi-controversial topic, tack on something like “imagine not knowing the real reason behind this”, and the replies are jammed full of competitive theories as to what the OP was implying.

It’s fundamentally just another way of boosting account engagement metrics by encouraging repliers to signal that they are smart and clued-in. But it seems to work exceptionally well because it’s inescapable at the moment.

I wonder if Apple will be able to bridge the biggest gap between their hardware and Meta’s: the price gap

The new Ray Ban AR glasses retail at a Meta subsidized $800 - has Apple ever released subsidized hardware?

I remember when the Vision Pro’s BoM got leaked prior to announcement and people calculated out the pre-bulk discount cost at around $2500 (iirc). I saw crazy posts predicting it would get subsidized down to $2k, some saying they’d eat R&D and price it at hw cost, and a few realists claiming $2750-3000 was a more realistic target. It launched at $3500.

If history is any guide, it won’t matter if Apple Glass 1.0 is a generation and a half above whatever Meta is selling if they keep going with the 5x price differential.

Eye of the Temple has some of the coolest VR-specific movement tricks I’ve ever seen.

If you’re getting close to your IRL boundary, it sets up a rolling log as part of a puzzle. To stay on a real forward-moving rolling log, you have to walk backwards to maintain balance. So in context of the game, you’re convincingly moving “forwards” while in reality you’re walking backwards.

Pretty sure I took off the headset and geeked out at everyone in the house first time I realized what was happening.

This isn’t just good news for the oldies. Gen Z in particular seems at first glance to be balding earlier and at higher rates. I had no idea what the heck “Norwood” meant until some young Zoomer guy clued me in.

FWIW, American Descendants of Slaves (ADoS) have an average European genetic admixture of ~24%.[1]

1. https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(14)00476-5

Pretty sure Trump won the national popular vote this last time around though? And there’s a strong (politically neutral) argument that Clinton could have pulled off an EC win in 2016 if she had taken Trump more seriously - eg: she never once campaigned in Wisconsin [1].

Going back a bit further, and somewhat tying into the topic of the thread, 2016 Trump owes his GOP nomination (and thus indirectly the Presidency) to a Clinton/DNC op designed to weaken the Republican field.[2] That’s not to say that Trump didn’t eventually resonate with the GOP base, but the powerbrokers of the RNC absolutely didn’t want him and yet their counterparts at the DNC were heavily in favor of putting Trump front and center everywhere.

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/clinton-losing-wisconsin-res...

2. https://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaig...

-American women are winning hard at college

-Chinese men once said in a survey that they feel threatened by high achieving women

-Therefore men as a group are most at fault for the decline in marriage and TFR

Has anyone written on this issue dispassionately? The marriage/reproduction rate for the entire developed world is cratering and we get “blessed” with a choice of three explanatory viewpoints: incel, femcel, purely economic factors

I do believe economic factors are the single largest culprit, but there’s obviously more to the story when you look at the U-shaped income/TFR curve or the utter failure of nearly all family-formation economic policies across the globe.

This baby brained “men bad” or “women bad” discourse belongs in the dumpster.

>> Who would go to Mars without a way back?

For a reasonable chance of being forever immortalized as one of the first humans to step foot on another planet?

Granted, I myself will never get the opportunity so it’s easy for me to say “oh hell yes I’d sign up in a heartbeat”.

I wish there was a sane and humane way of shutting off the infinite supply of out-of-state (and, increasingly, international) transients. Our homeless programs here in Portland are absolutely overwhelmed with people who arrive here daily from all across the country. Recent arrivals have been either a plurality or an outright majority of our homeless population for many years now.

I’d absolutely choose going all-in on affordable housing over a return to the war on drugs or doubling down on catastrophic decrim. But without limits on in-migration for social programs, the idea seems frustratingly doomed from the start.

If this wasn’t a cynical joke, I sincerely beg you to cover your eyes, plug your ears, and never again ask how the sausage is made.

The older I get, the more I can empathize with Cypher from the first Matrix movie. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.

Remember about a decade ago, when you’d read about YouTube’s algorithm creating an “alt-right pipeline”?

Without making any judgments on the alt-right label, it was absolutely a real thing. Many documented cases showing how a fresh account could go from “Sesame Street, cooking videos, and CNN” on the default feed - and, within ~10 relatively innocuous clicks down the suggested video rabbit hole, the home feed would be full of Alex Jones tier stuff.

TikTok is heavily reminiscent of the old YouTube. Just taking a few steps down the Free Palestine recommendation road will get you into “Happy Birthday, Uncle Adolf” videos (hyperbolic, but only slightly).

I don’t blame certain parties for getting rather nervous over that. But I wish we could have some honesty from elected officials about why TikTok is suddenly such a pressing issue again.

Whatever happens, I hope they’ve learned from YouTube’s earlier mistakes. In trying to break the alt-right pipeline, they ended up breaking the entire recommendation engine for years (tbf it’s a lot better now).

Your frustration is understandable, particularly in this situation where the critical failures weren’t the fault of outsourced engineers.

But we really need to pump the brakes on the whole “everything must be in the passive voice and overly euphemized to the point of nigh-incomprehensibility”. If anything, it contributes to the click-bait problem.

I see: “Boeing outsourced to $9/hr SWE” and immediately start thinking about a dangerous corporate culture that prioritizes profits over lives. I’d argue most people probably interpret the headline in a similar fashion.

Just because some already-inclined reactionaries wrongly jump to “India lol” doesn’t mean the publication has some moral responsibility to contort the headline into something less effective that will get even more dramatically outcompeted by click bait headlines that actually bait racists (“Deadly Boeing crash was running Indian software”).

When the Democrats hold power, this crisis will be exploited to enact heavy taxes on 401ks and the like (recent think tank white papers are creating ground work for this).

When the Republicans hold power, this crisis will be exploited to cut Social Security for Gen X and younger and take an axe to other entitlement programs.

Yep, once your brain gets over the immediate novelty of VR, it’s very difficult to get back that “Ready Player One” feeling due to the absence of sensory feedback.

If/once they get it working though, society will shift fast.

There’s an XR app called Brink Traveler that’s full of handcrafted photogrammetry recreations of scenic landmarks. On especially gloomy PNW winter days, I’ll lug a heat lamp to my kitchen and let it warm up the tiled stone a bit, put a floor fan on random oscillation, toss on some good headphones, load up a sunny desert location in VR, and just lounge on the warm stone floor for an hour.

My conscious brain “knows” this isn’t real and just visuals alone can’t fool it anymore, but after about 15 minutes of visuals + sensory input matching, it stops caring entirely. I’ve caught myself reflexively squinting at the virtual sun even though my headset doesn’t have HDR.

Same thing with my nephew, though he did pick up on the cars.

He also was very confused by the “Ronald Reagan? The ACTOR??” joke but immediately thought that BTTF2 Mogul-Biff was supposed to be Trump.

Seems like a fun afternoon project to get this hooked into one of the Skyrim TTS mods. I previously messed around with elevenlabs, but it had too much latency and would be somewhat expensive long term so I’m excited to try local and free.

I’m sure I have a lot of reading up to do first, but is it a safe assumption that I’d be better served running this on an m2 mbp rather than tax out my desktop’s poor 3070 running it on top of Skyrim VR?

The think-tank -> influencer/trad media pipeline has been optimized to the point where it successfully has captured the long tail of most potential public political discourse.

On virtually any hot button topic, ready made points, counterpoints, and counter-counterpoints have already been disseminated and tested via the crucible of social media.

I don’t even bother engaging in impromptu debates anymore, because it feels like extremely lame high level chess where everyone knows all possible openers and defenses 72 moves out.

What is causing the healthcare staffing issues? Is this all still related to Covid?

Every single healthcare and adjacent person I’ve spoken to in the past year and a half has nigh-universally expressed a sense of impending doom.

My PMC doctor, who I’ve been with since 2017, abruptly quit and left the field entirely. The office is part of a big healthcare conglomerate, but it’s been several months and I’m still being told I won’t have a new official PMC until sometime in the spring of next year!

Feels like something in healthcare is seriously broken with no plans to fix the problem.

Can’t speak for the grandparent poster, but I’ve heard/read enough casual claims of “donating plasma reduces microplastic load in the blood” that it’s been somewhere in the far back of my mind to research further. I already donate blood regularly and would immediately hop on the plasma train if these sorts of claims panned out.

Particularly since I have extended family members who have seen great results from a round of apheresis treatment to reduce their LDL. And apparently some long covid sufferers have also found relief from this type of “blood cleansing” treatment.

Interesting point about gaming input latency: I haven’t been really interested in twitchy flatscreen FPS since the early days of Overwatch 1 and my VR stuff is mostly bottlenecked by network and decode latency.

Is there a term for people who aren’t especially sensitive to refresh rates?

I notice a difference in frame times fairly easily due to the stuttering, but can barely tell the difference between even 30-60hz on a flatscreen game (I do notice a difference when my desktop is <60hz though).

I’m a bit more sensitive in VR, but still can’t readily notice a difference above ~80hz. Sometimes I’ll clock it up to 120hz, but only for games that kick on motion smoothing since I can easily notice the difference between frame doubled 60hz vs 45hz.

I feel like I’m a freak or something for not being able to instantly perceive high refresh rates.

I’m confused why the authors of the original study pegged education as only explaining 5% of the gap, functionally unchanged since the 70s when the labor market was far more favorable towards blue collar work.

As far as I’m aware, there’s a 12-50% gap (depending on level of degree) in educational attainment between black and white men[1]. Seems odd to reduce that effect down to a static 5%, particularly when talking about average wages.

1. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-challenges-facing-bla...

Apropos of nothing else, it sure has been…interesting to witness nearly all of the big name right wing (and many of the larger fringe right wing) accounts on X immediately abandon the America First rhetoric and time travel back to the year 2015.

Not sure if your hypothetical was meant to be a reference to the absolutely hilarious classic “Gilbert Gottfried reads 50 Shades of Gray”, but it has me wondering how much of the inherent comedy comes from “the voice” and how much comes from the idea that the man himself sat down and recorded those lines.

https://youtu.be/XkLqAlIETkA (Extremely NSFW without headphones)

Sure, “trust nobody” is a literal impossibility even if you’re way off the grid like Ted K. But I don’t see many people pushing that sort of extreme ideal as a response to the replication crisis or the fraud coming out of highest levels of soft sciences.

You just end up having to treat sci-news the same way most of us likely already treat regular news media: with heavy suspicion by default for any unfamiliar topic. Reverse Gell-Mann Amnesia, I suppose.

It’s not particularly good for one’s mental well-being, but it’s a rare person who can go back to being blissfully ignorant of something this widespread.

Mini-rant: I just now realized that the Andrew Tates of the world have made it nigh impossible to casually drop a pop-culture reference to the Matrix in these sorts of convos.

Same here in the burbs of Portland: ~$8k/month with a six figure buy-in. And that’s for a place aimed strictly at “professional class” Boomers - I can think of at least 2-3 other retirement places that are significantly more expensive.

More than anything else, THIS is what I think will ultimately kick off a housing crash. These “retirement” prices are clearly designed to squeeze the Boomers of their housing equity.

Largely because, as others have said, the best case scenario is that the US at least partially funded the lab’s research.

Worst case scenario, it was made in a lab but not a Chinese one. I don’t personally subscribe to this belief due to lack of any direct evidence - but in this case, it’s pretty obvious why the narrative would want to stay very far away from a lab origin story.

As a relatively uninvested onlooker with regards to “NATO bad/good” (but heavily leaning to “bad”): I found this to be a surprisingly compelling counter argument to the anti-NATO messaging on James Baker making false promises regarding expansion etc.

Just wanted to give props to a well-crafted argument - even if I’m a bit irked for apparently getting caught in the “countries act like people” cognitive shortcut that usually drives me nuts when it’s about economics.

It seems to be absolutely everywhere now.

Currently spending the weekend packing for my first move in 5-6 years and, no exaggeration, every single new contract (lease, utilities, garbage, etc) had a forced arbitration clause.

When did these things become universally forced? I distinctly recall arbitration clauses being Big Corp Only things not too long ago - and in many cases, they allowed you to opt-out. Now it’s just a standard part of every boilerplate contract that you have to sign away your rights.