Are they? As the article OP shares suggests, these films quietly make us compare our lives to what is portrayed on screen. This is advertisement 101: display people in enviable positions to portray a sense of longing for a lifestyle that one would not normally seek. A food commercial isn’t selling you a product, it’s trying to make you hungry.

If all you wanted out of these rom coms is the portrayal of a carefree life, you could just watch pharmaceutical, banking, or insurance ads.

Looks like I’m installing Linux tonight.

The average human considers the Pythagorean theorem “sophistication”. Let’s not take our education for granted.

The benefit of AI is overblown for a majority of product tiers. Remember how everything was supposed to be block chain? And metaverse? And web 3.0? And dot.com? This is just the next tech trend for dumb VCs to throw money at.

The educated and the well-travelled may have a broader set of view points to see how many different ideas and values work (or don’t work) in practice.

I don’t disagree on some just lacking empathy. But I also think not all education creates exposure to a wide range of ideas and values that stick (or the education is just too narrow), so you’ll still find plenty of people who are educated on paper, but not cognizant of a broad set of world views. I also think we are too quick to label foreign ideas==bad ourselves. Empathy is a two way street. The key in navigating this may be in identifying when an idea comes in good faith or if it is hostile.

Other than making sure to be wearing your glasses if you are near sighted enough that your local licence requires it, glasses are an irrelevant factor. It’s not like you are going into active combat duty…

What about the right to be forgotten? Where is that feature? Why isn’t Microsoft making and marketing a version of Windows with something like “Windows Forget”?

I’ll tell you why: no opportunity to double dip by collecting and selling your personal data.

To be fair the possibility of compromise was enough not to do it. Being sure of compromise doesn’t change that math all that much.

Right. Microsoft themselves just announced a feature to disable screenshoting some webpages in Edge, which is a complete 180 from recall.

I expect windows to be split into two tiers of products again: the free version that is paid for by ads/tracking/AI bloatware possibly even mandatory cloud connectivity, and an enterprise version with all off that off, but that is paid.

Left, right… These are meaningless labels when progressives / social democrats / libertarians have to join forces against authoritarian trash of any kind.

that government should have zero to do with marriage

Uhh… Marriage is a government affair before anything else. It’s a legal status, that comes with default clauses on a wide range of issues, from wills, property ownership, parental rights, taxes, power of attorney… All secular stuff. I think you mean to keep the church out of the government’s affairs?

Right? The concert is not the problem. The problem is who is paying for it/who is deserving of this (or any other) company benefit.

Though I guess there is an argument to be had that the performers are enabling class exploitation instead of standing in solidarity. Then again, it’s entirely plausible that the performers don’t know any of these details.

Calling it the “Googlenet” now. The rest of us that don’t suck Google dick can stay on the actual Internet.

We’ve got these things called “social media” that are built expressly for the purpose of influencing people to buy more stuff (literally in the name: influencers). And if it can get people to part with their money, you can be sure the same tools can be used to get people to vote against their own interests.

We thought the internet was a tool to spread democracy. We were wrong. The Internet is a tool used to undermine democracy, so long as people using the Internet are not strongly inoculated against organized interests, foreign, and domestic.

The noise complaints and landing safety issues are definitely a problem, but the cost savings potential and sustainability/safety effects of taking delivery trucks (or your car to the mall) off the road is a huge win.

I can see how noise and landing safety issues delivering to your property can really stall this. However, landing to an approved and managed community mailbox (or rooftop delivery zone in dense areas) might avoid some of those issues.

Just wait till the advertisers find out the eyeballs they are paying for are also just AI sock puppets. Enshitification strikes again.

Nothing is going to change until people die because of this shit.

Can’t tell if you are joking. I know a lot of junior developers who think this is a legitimate solution.

It gains value because people want it and people want it because it gains value

This describes pretty much all moneys.

Cryptocurrencies have a lot of problems, but being a medium of exchange without intrinsic value is not one of them.

They don’t. Just like “AI” has been co-opoted to mean “algorithm”.

Large groups of humans turn everything they touch into shit.