This is completely wild to me. I honestly do most of my clothes shopping through Instagram/Facebook ads. I enjoy that targeted advertising shows me new products and companies that I'm interested in, often very niche stuff that I don't come across otherwise. I would so much rather see that than ads for life insurance, penis pills, ambulance chasers, or whatever other bullcrap goes to the lowest common denominator. The ads that get read on podcasts are a great example of this.
If I'm going to pay for something by watching ads, I much rather watch fewer, higher value, more targeted ads. Untargeted ads are less valuable (to me, the advertiser, and the ad publisher), so I would have to see a lot more of them to pay for the content I consume.
I'm really not big on advertising. I dislike ads as much as anyone, especially when they're obnoxious and intrusive.
But I feel like a lot of people, on here especially, have this "all advertising is the devil period lalalala" attitude, but it does have real value. People don't like that it's been taken to a psychologically manipulative science of big brands being shoved down your throat. But I have genuinely found the ad experience on FB/IG to be the best there ever was. I do legitimately find out about things that I end up buying and liking and people ask where I got it and laugh when I say "a Facebook ad."
The article does a good job of explaining that it's still a non-trivial problem even if you are allowed to distribute the weight unevenly, but I do agree that what is happening here is much more specific than a "shape," which is simply geometry without any density information.
Put another way, most things precisely constructed with that same exact shape (of the outer hull, which is usually what is meant by shape) would not exhibit this property.
But people used to manage those satisfactorily even before the advent of instant long-range communication systems. They still managed to keep each other updated and alerted about important events.
There's got to be a logical fallacy for "people did x before y technology." Yes they did. And we still collectively found out that we could do it better with that thing, and that is the new standard. But you're free to go back to delivering letters by horse if that suits you.
I can post a story on Instagram, and somebody that I have't talked to in years might reply and we have a conversation and reconnect, or maybe it's just a simple gesture, but it's still meaningful and appreciated. But if I said "well I'm here on Mastodon now and anyone who truly matters will come find me," that's just not happening. And then I'm frustrated and complain about being lonely and yell at everyone to switch to Mastodon. Really bringing people together. But at least I didn't have to stomach seeing an ad that might actually pertain to my signaled interests.
I can relate to the common man that's just never been able to muster up the energy to give a crap. I use what the people I know use. I've felt way more annoyance towards that one friend using some obscure platform than I ever have about Mark Zuckberg "sharing my data." Truly two kinds of people on this issue.
I also ditched WhatsApp long ago. And while I probably "lost" a few connections with people I knew from other countries, I stay managed to stay in touch with people who are important to me. Either because they downloaded Signal just to talk to me (I have a few friends who like to emphasize passive aggressively that every time we talk, LOL), or use Apple Messages, SMS or good old email.
It might seem a little bit deceptive that an attraction called the Sphere does not quite pull off even a hemisphere of "payload," but the same compromise has been reached by most dome theaters.
This paragraph is bizarre to me, framed from a presumably extremely niche "Sphere-as-dome-theater" perspective. I would think that, for most people, the Sphere is the exterior part and it delivers and is every bit as innovative as anyone who has seen a picture of it would say. I don't understand the effort to downplay that and say "oh forget that part it's actually just a not-even-spherical dome theater."
I was certainly surprised when I saw images of the inside, and upon reflection wasn't sure exactly what I had had in mind or how that would have worked with the realities of infrastructure needs for a venue like that.
But still, it feels weird to express a sentiment of "well it didn't really live up to the sphere thing" while dismissing the massive obvious spherical component that was the innovative work of engineering/tech/art/whatever.
> "well it didn't really live up to the sphere thing"
I never thought it didn't live up to being a Sphere. The outside is definitely a big ass sphere of impressive proportions. To me, that impressive size (for whatever it's worth) never relied on the interior screen also being that size.
Having visited it, I found the exterior even more impressive when standing near it. Aerial photos don't really convey just how damn big the thing is due to the frame of reference being nearby Vegas casino buildings. Vegas casino towers tend to be larger than they look and farther apart than one might assume.
However, on watching their demo movie Postcards From Earth, I now think the Sphere is a poor venue for theatrical story-telling due to poor contrast, self-illumination and being too big and too wide. The size and edge-to-edge arc are so extreme they introduce challenges which significantly reduce the quality of any theatrical presentation. Basically they went overboard on maximizing the 'curb-appeal' first-impact of building. So much so, they basically fucked any chance of it ever being a high-quality venue for wide format movies. I'd much rather see a wide format movie on an Omnimax screen than the Sphere.
That's kind of Vegas in a nutshell, right? It's first and foremost about superficial glitz and glamour. Nothing wrong with that really, and they sure are good at it.
I saw Eagles at Sphere with my family (part of the fun of that trip was realizing that both of those entities explicitly [perhaps vehemently] do not use an article in the name and thus that is grammatically correct).
I agree that it is a very strange venue that doesn't seem to know what audience it's going for. Band culture, and generally the types of acts that play to a seated crowd, is more about the performance than over-the-top and overwhelming visual stimuli. Dance music culture, the people that love that, prefers a flat open dancefloor. As you mention, it's not really built for moviegoers either. But it is still a really impressive and enjoyable experience and I hope they can figure it out.
(And just be clear, my paraphrase that you quoted was referring to the original article)
It's still gonna be hallucinatory AI slop. For the same reasons it makes uninteresting quests and boring planets. It's lazy and it can't replace actual writing and art.
AI is great for getting tasks done where you can pull the information you need out of the slop. For quality immersive entertainment it's not there.
That's interesting. I didn't consider that it was AI at any point while reading it, and I don't use it very much. Going back I see what people are saying but I think it's more cohesive and compelling than what AI would write.
I agree that it's more of a "key takeaways" than a critical review but I appreciated that the author didn't make it about themself.
Based on your attitude I know I’m safe to note something, something potentially all but irrelevant in the coming years: as soon as I saw the artwork I did a reverse image search and concluded it was likely generated.
I am unable to articulate exactly why, but it seemed to take away from the piece. Weird huh? (non sarcastic)
Very cool. Interesting bit about Heaven's Gate. I was young when it happened and have a vague memory of reading a Time magazine article with a cross-sectional drawing of the building with people in beds in different rooms.
Reading up on Wikipedia, I don't understand how they got from "sleeping in tents and sleeping bags and begging in the streets" in 1975, to "stopped recruiting and became reclusive" in 1976, to purchasing land, renting a $7000 house with cash, and operating a cutting-edge web design firm in the mid-90s.
Cults will surprise you. When like-minded people are willing to put everything they have into a project, 18 hours a day with no breaks, they can accomplish a lot.
Oh I've seen Wild Wild Country, that made sense to me and there's a logical thread to follow. Osho was also (for some time) a legitimately intelligent and charismatic leader/writer/philosopher able to rally smart people.
The story here on Wikipedia paints a picture of a destitute super-fringe cult that disappears for 20 years and then emerges with some level of tech wizardry and no mention of anyone that was responsible for that. There is an HBO docuseries.
