I’m reading a book by a British author called Against the Machine which you may enjoy. It distills this pervasive unease so many have felt of this growth at all cost system that has been rapidly eating the world. The environmental, humanistic, moral, and spiritual costs of this “machine” is sometimes hard to see when it’s all we’ve known.
Society as a whole needs to decide what is to be done with the additional resources generated by on-going technological efficiencies and how the societal aspects of such will be handled.
I wish that folks would consider reducing the work week, or universal basic income --- the total amount of human labour necessary to feed, clothe, house, and entertain humanity is decreasing --- how does society handle vast swathes of the population being not just unemployed, but unemployable, and to the wealthy, unnecessary?
One view on this is to be seen in Marshall Brain's novella "Manna":
On a very related note, I can recommend Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. To quote Wiki:
> It explores Fisher's concept of "capitalist realism", which he describes as "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it."
> The book investigates what Fisher describes as the widespread effects of neoliberal ideology on popular culture, work, education, and mental health in contemporary society
Thanks added to my list. I do believe that with the inevitable obsolescence of most work the system will continue to destabilize and some alternative will arise (maybe not in my lifetime) although I’m not optimistic it won’t by dystopian.
But haven’t many countries not only imagined but tried very different alternatives to capitalism? What have we learned from those countries?
It seems to always come back to the fact that people who get power always attempt to use that power to get more resources and power, violating all their supposed values and stealing resources from the public.
Personally, I am far from enamored with the apparent equilibrium state of capitalism, if that’s what we have in the US. However, when you compare how I feel about American capitalism to how I feel about North Korean totalitarianism, Venezuelan corrupt socialism, Soviet murderous communism, Cuban destructive communism, etc etc. suddenly I appear to be a booster for capitalism.
> It seems to always come back to the fact that people who get power always attempt to use that power to get more resources and power, violating all their supposed values and stealing resources from the public.
Seems no different in capitalism.
Ever considered that the failures of other methods does not inherently mean the success of the current method.
Nobody said it did, but the other methods fail much harder. A fuckton more people died of starvation under Lenin, Stalin and Mao than will ever die of starvation in even the most right-wing capitalist country, because communist and extreme authoritarian socialist countries have all the same moral failings of their leaders as capitalism has, but also ruins their economies as well.
What is the best / most popular / user friendly terminal http client I can replace postman with. Has a history I can search, save favorites, secure etc.
I like smaller more focused tools on the terminal. You can make these all work together pretty reasonably with a little glue. Hurl, mitmproxy, httpie with http-prompt. I tend to prefer mitmproxy sessions and massaging that with Python/curl as needed for repeating and tweaking. User friendly is relative, but these tools work well. Python for tweaking http streams in mitmproxy is powerful and rather friendly for what you get in return. Mitmproxy lets you easily save flows with a bit of Puthon glue to output httpie commands giving history, and you can save mitmproxy sessions.
Slightly related: to any British readers, I have a question. In the past few weeks, I have seen more and more YouTube videos showing most of Britain outside of London as being essentially like Detroit. How bad are things really?
That assumes our knowledge of Detroit is more informed that yours of the UK ;-)
Generally there is a lot of propaganda around at the moment, so take that with a pinch of salt. The UK is not as well off as the US generally, but this does not mean there is a breakdown of society or law and order.
The propagandists would have you believe that there is a massive crime wave and social breakdown due to immigration, but what people are mostly worried about in actuality is job uncertainty and backlogged public services.
There are areas of wealth and of deprivation both inside and outside London. There is political and economic uncertainty because the UK economy is imbalanced, and most people expect a difficult few years and are sceptical that the government knows how to fix the issues (and that vested interests won't prevent the solution)
> this does not mean there is a breakdown of society or law and order.
There are some issues with (lack of) policing IMO, such as the reluctance to investigate "minor" crimes, but this is not entirely new.
> The propagandists would have you believe that there is a massive crime wave and social breakdown due to immigration, but what people are mostly worried about in actuality is job uncertainty and backlogged public services.
I think politicians like to play up immigration as an issue because it distracts attention from their real failures. Both the big parties are try to cling to consensus policies that have failed.
> most people expect a difficult few years and are sceptical that the government knows how to fix the issues (and that vested interests won't prevent the solution)
I agree entirely. On the other hand I think the west in general faces the same problems.
Thanks. To be more specific on what I’ve seen by YouTubers touring outside London is just boarded up shops, minimal economic hope, lots of abandoned homes again outside London. The narrative being essentially the de industrialization having now gutted the entire economy except for the well off and financial services etc. which of course shocked me cause I always pictured England as quite wealthy and having made that transition out of factory economy quite well. Which then led me to wonder if Britain is just just a few years ahead of the rest of us.
There are some high streets that are struggling, but that is mostly due to the move to online shopping and the rise of big retailers in different locations.
Unemployment has been low most of the past decade, although it is rising this year.
De-industrialisation is much exaggerated because there is a perception that the UK makes nothing because there are so few British branded consumer goods, but there are a lot of things made in the UK either foreign branded (e.g. Nissan cars) or parts or non-consumer goods (from drugs to satellites to get engines). While we are at the bottom end compared to other large developed economies, its only marginally so compare to, for example, France or Canada. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.ZS?end=2024...
I have lived in two English counties (Warwickshire and Cheshire) in the last few years, and have visited a lot of different places this summer (from Somerset to York to Liverpool to Cambridgeshire and a few other places) and overall its a pretty pleasant country to live in in terms of everyday life. A lot of places (Manchester and Coventry, for example) seem to have improved over the last decade or two.
That's the picture you'd get if there was an unemployment problem, but what we actually have is an aging population and a productivity problem: it's really telling that most people's idea of changing their working life for the better is in effect to move to a lower productivity role in the higher end of their market:
Individually making and selling things, or having their own tiny influencer brand, or leaving a company to start a one-man business.
We have a housing deficit, so abandoned houses are unusual, and mostly in places where people are moving away.
However "having transitioned quite well out of the factory economy" is definitely too rosy. We did "what the market wanted" but it turns out the market is not a strategist. And we have too large a population to exist purely as an offshore financing hub.
The southeast of England is well-off, everywhere else is less so. It has basically always been like this. There have also obviously been repeated hammerblows since 2008, with austerity (which is still happening), Brexit (a remarkable self-own), and then covid (an unprecedented upwards transfer of wealth). The political and economic establishment is also essentially monopolar, a process begun with Blair and now approaching culmination.
People just don’t have the money to spend on things. Wage growth is non-existent and prices have risen dramatically. For my own part I have get a real “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas” feeling. All we ever hear on the news is how spending will have to be cut yet again and taxes will have to go up.
Being from Northern Ireland I personally hope for unification with Ireland, although without significant changes I worry nothing much will change as Ireland has its own very similar issues.
Abandoned homes in any great number would be a real surprise. I think those videos are likely quite carefully staged.
I left the UK about four years ago but AFAICT the picture of housing over there hasn’t changed a lot - it keeps going up in price and there’s a shortage.
There are economic problems at the moment, and service provision problems in particular with the NHS. A decade of post 08 GFC austerity stripped public services and hammered government investment, which turned out to have not been that smart. Then Brexit hammered trade.
Closed-up shops have been a minor trend for a while - small shops have been failing for years due to high taxes, insane rents and being thoroughly outcompeted by the internet. Many old-fashioned high streets have become little more than strips of coffee shops and charity retailers, the former because apparently there is no limit to the appetite for coffee, the latter because they often get tax and rent concessions.
It has always been true that London is like its own country, with transport, employment and investment there dwarfing everywhere else, and tackling this to spread out the prosperity more widely has been a consistent failure of British politics for as long as I remember.
Beyond London there’s the ever expanding, fairly wealthy belt of dormitory-towns, and then there’s the rest of the country, which in my last visit did just feel run down.
I’ve been to Detroit, and I’ve read about the decline there. I don’t think the UK is anywhere near that. But it is languishing in a prolonged economic malaise.
Not noticeably any worse than over the last 15 years.
Be wary of what you are fed on YouTube (or any major social network) they are astroturfed to hell at this point.
Life here isn’t great for a lot of people but it’s not super terrible either for the most part, we have broadly the same problems as many western nations (aging population, corporations running amok, slow and expensive infrastructure development, expensive housing, low wage growth).
We are still a safe wealthy western democracy though.
This is a somewhat silly question because you could probably get anecdotal replies of all kinds to it. Some things are different to how they used to be, and in some cases different in ways that feel bad. For example, there are more empty shops in the town centre where I live compared to 20 years ago, which for some people evokes a strong emotional reaction and a sense of loss.
My own personal experience tends to back up what the data here show (no significant changes really) - I teach in a large secondary school and really, kids today are not massively different from how they've ever been. They face challenges in navigating the vast amounts of information and misinformation presented nowadays, but we do try to educate them as best as possible in respect of this.
Appreciate it. Yeah I knew it was a very subjective question. I guess the reason I was shocked was prior I watched British shows like grand design and all I saw was rolling green hills and idyllic life outside the capital. Then in quick succession I watch some YouTubers doing walking tours outside of London and railing against the decline and neglect. So I was just curious what the locals opinion is. That said the same debates are happening here and half the time I feel people are describing different planets.
Yeah I can imagine - although probably in any town you could go out and find a nice bit with nice houses and shops, and equally, you could find a bit where shops are closed and houses look a bit run down.
If I'm honest with you, I wonder if you need to think more critically about what you're watching? Grand Designs is designed to evoke envy (mostly) as well as some of the difficulties involved, which keeps people watching. I don't really watch YouTube but people generally seem more predicated towards watching things that evoke feelings of danger, anger, loss, worry, that sort of thing. In both cases you are being shown a version of the truth that results in the programme maker gaining somehow (money, views, whatever).
I'm only saying this off the back of your few comments here though, so apologies if I'm wide of the mark.
Detroit is known as a place with lots of abandoned buildings and I don’t think something similar exists in the UK. There are poor regions but AFIAK they don’t look like Detroit. Many high street shops are closed but it doesn’t mean that everything is bad. High street shops were hit hard first by COVID lockdowns then by high inflation (people can afford less) but rents continued to be high. It sad to see a row of boarded shops but it’s not everywhere and eventually landlords probably will reduce rent prices.
You seem to be picking on a US city as an example of (something) and attempting to apply (something) to the entirety of the UK that isn't a particular city in the UK.
Are you sure that is a wise comparison? I'm certain that Youtube is a source of information, but are you sure it is a useful one?
I live next door to a park and have just stuffed shit loads of cash into an American cruise company as a passenger (P&O - British name, American owner).
Sorry didn’t mean to pick on anyone. Even Detroit I heard has had somewhat a recovery in the last decade or so. I guess what stoked my unsettled curiosity was if the narrative of de-industrializion of the west and its impact on the social fabric was worse than I thought.
I wish there was something for the app. I haven't tried it recently but you could kind of stop the shorts being displayed for a brief period of time before it re-asserted itself. And I already pay for ad-free youtube wish it was at least a premium feature but obviously makes no sense from corporate point of view.
I wish there was something for the app on the AppleTV.
I’m a Premium subscriber as well. In theory, they have nothing to gain from pushing shorts on me or increasing my engagement. It should be all about making the user happy. Yet paying users seem to have to deal with these decisions that are driven by ad-funded users.
I tend to want videos that are about 4 minutes long (what used to be the norm). Now it seems like most of the videos recommended to me are 10-60 minutes long, with the average one being 15-20 minutes. When I’m looking for something shorter it seems like Shorts are the only option. However those are usually either too short, or too long to be in the Shorts format without having control over the video on the TV.
Their perverted incentive structures created this mess. They should just have the one normal format for videos, have auto-play that people can opt-in to if they’re into that, and let people making videos of whatever length is best for the content without forcing videos to either be artificially long or short in an effort to optimize for the monetization algorithm.
Not quite true AFAICT. You'll have to register as an android developer and use your own signing keys, or use some sketchilly acquired/disseminated signing keys. The apps don't have to be actually published/acquired through the app store, but their authorship signature has to be able to be tracked back to _someone_ in Google's big DB. Someone may even just decide to include their keys into Revanced manager to allow it to keep working; we don't know what Google will do if someone just brazenly says "sure, I'm a registered android developer, and yeah, my signing keys are used to sign tons of apps that all seem to be named 'Revanced' on many people's phones. What of it?" Maybe Google will try to ban them, maybe they won't. They've not released any explanation of what they'll actually do once all apps have to be signed.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, that was how I understood the recent announcements.
I don’t get shorts at all. They’re just such a bag of shite. Like at least reels and TikTok have decent content sometimes. YT shorts are always so crappy.
For me it didn't take long for the algorithm to zero in on what I find interesting and only show me that. Part of the reason I disabled history, I find shorts waaaay too addictive. I blink twice and two hours went by, no thanks.
YouTube has gotten so bad recently, I started to watch it in Firefox mobile instead. On Android, I have Tampermonkey with GoodTube installed, and it not only blocks ads, but also removes Shorts, and a few other annoyances.
seriously. there is nothing more infuriating then an app (which you pay a subscription for) gaslighting you into feeding you more slop even if you click "i dont want to see this" a thousand times. nice placebo button.
i can imagine the smug face on some manager at google that gets himself off to engagement metrics at night because his life is so miserable. i wish these people could be named and shamed, but they hide behind a faceless corporation
i think my situation is quite niche - i host a lot of social gatherings for friends at my place and most of the time we like to play music videos on the TV either in the background or actively sharing our music tastes with each other
adblocking YT on a TV is a PITA. i'd rather have it just work, to not interrupt the vibes
If you have an android smart tv, you can install TizenTube. Takes a couple of hours to figure out the installation (poorly documented), but works flawlessly after that.
https://github.com/reisxd/TizenTube
Pretty easy if you just hook a laptop to the TV. Honestly way nicer ux queueing up videos with an actual keyboard vs tapping out single characters at a time with a remote.
Just do as the other commenter pointed out and install an alternate youtube frontend on your TV. I'd recommend https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube. Then you'll never see another ad again (including those sneaky ones that are embedded in the videos).
And you can use the youtube app on your phone to search for videos and prepare playlists.
does super-resolution refer to the image processing technique of interpolating/hallucinating higher resolutions? if so, is this a common/respected part of evidence gathering?
Super resolution refers to imaging below the refraction limit, more or less by having the receiving sensor within a wavelength or two of the material being imaged, allowing you to use the nearfield (which doesn't have a diffraction limit, but which also doesn't propagate beyond a couple wavelengths) instead of the farfield (which does, and does).
It's unrelated to the nvidia marketing term for ai filtering of images.
Nvidia's DLSS Super Resolution doesn't do anything with bypassing the diffraction limit, but does go beyond the single image nyquist limit by undersampling the input render, jittering the projection matrix each frame, and reconstructing higher resolution with frame history. It's reconstructing real extra detail. Some parts of it like handling disocclusion areas between frames etc. are fully hallucinated though.
With camera movement and things like gaps between camera sensor elements acting as the undersampling, their video super resolution may be learning similar ways of legitimately reconstructing at a higher res from temporal data, though it also hallucinates some in and is dealing with already compressed video where a lot of that might be lost.
I'm not sure if their video super resolution actually does this kind of temporal stuff though or it is just a repeated image upscale, but some of the AI video upscalers do and get much better upscaling on longer windows of frames than when run frame by frame without context.
But they say they used ML analysis too in the abstract
> Using super-resolution microscopy,25
we characterized their unique molecular composition and dynamics in dissociated neurons,26
enabling Ca 2+ propagation over distances. Utilizing imaging and machine-learning-based27
analysis, we confirmed the in situ presence of DNTs connecting dendrites to other dendrites28
whose anatomical features are distinguished from synaptic dendritic spines
What’s the recommendation for the simplest blogging setup to say s3? Req: 0 javascript, simple css, absolutely minimal functions for blogs. My ideal is I open a text file on my Mac in vi, type my thoughts and then save and run some script to publish it and it gets the style and date and index entry automatically.
You can set up any static site generator (like Astro or Hugo) with a pre-made blog template. Then you'll just have to write posts in markdown files and the generator will handle the rest.
(Or you can write a custom template in any of those, they both don't add any JS or anything else to your page by default unless you explicitly add it. I like Astro more since it's basically just HTML with extra features unlike Hugo which uses a separate templating language, but they're all pretty much the same)
You can deploy it automatically and completely for free on platforms like GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages, which are pretty easy to set up and will automatically build and deploy new versions of your site on every git push.
I think the sense of loss and fear is undeniable for most. None of it is unprecedented, although probably never has the potential for both been more extreme than with AI. The spiritual/psychological solution is always the same though, fully surrender to the loss and fear, then find a way to transcend it.
I often find myself asking the same pair of questions "What are you doing? No, that's this situation's name, what is this really?", and it usually leads to "this is nonesense, it's paying civilizational debt based on a series of decisions that thousands of people made with no clue of where it would lead". Which then is usually followed with "what should you be doing?"...which depending on the day usually ends up being half-jokingly: "I should be living in a small community far from capitalistic excess."
Total newb here - but lets say i want to make a terminal based video game (think old school text / visuals / menus), will something like Libghostty be something relevant to that?
To expand on the other replies: There are two very different tasks here.
This library would be for the task of taking a received ECMA-48 character stream and turning that into a series of actions on some sort of model of a terminal's display, keyboard, and mouse.
You are looking at a library for the (roughly) inverse task of taking a model of UI widgets and turning that into a transmitted ECMA-48 character stream.
I imagine if you wanted to make a self-contained application so non-command-line users can play it, then maybe you could use it. Otherwise, probably out of scope of the game itself.
I’m not sure if I’m joking or not, but the difference between your two examples is one of them is a choice and the other is not. Maybe we’re going to enter a new era of microorganism ethics (or morality?).
Microorganisms get interesting because they’re simple enough that we can see all the parts involved, but complex enough that we can see what looks like intentionality in their actions. We consider them Alive, but we also know all the mechanisms making them seem that way - there’s nowhere for the ghost to hide. They’re a fascinating case for ethics, especially since there’s effectively no way we could operate in this world without both relying on them and killing them in droves, because they’re also parts of the mechanism almost anywhere we look at biology. Hell, human cells are outnumbered 10:1 - by number, we’re outvoted.
Yeah I think if ethics are involved it has to be based on intentions and hence choice. Accidentally stepping on a few million microorganisms is probably ethically ok. Building your civilization in the “enslavement” of gazzilions of microorganisms might be more ethically discussion worthy. I do wonder how plants are different than microorganisms if at all since obviously we farm and eat them.
With microorganisms it’s particularly interesting because the time and space scales are so different there’s no coherent narrative between humans and bacteria - it’d be like a species of sentient space nebulas seeding a promising planet with proto-humans so we’d eventually plant fruit trees there or something. In one sense, yes, if you were one of the eventual resulting humans, you’re the result of an alien species enslaving humans to do their bidding, but you’re living your entire life just generally doing what you’d do as a human totally unaware of your apparent enslavement and with no apparent restrictions on your movement or decision-space. I’m not an ethicist - anything that doesn’t involve the full consent of all parties gives me pause, but I’m not quite sure what the conversation there looks like.
Well these humans would be totally ignorant of what’s going on but that I think would be besides the point because the space nebula would know what they’re doing!
And then one of the space nebula decided to take the form of their creation. Thus it came down to earth to walk amongst them humans as one of them and this is how linus became benevolent dictator for life.
Plants are orders of magnitude more complex than microorganisms and we "intentionally kill/enslave" them in huge amounts. If you think it's ethically questionable to "enslave" microorganisms, what do you think of eating plant based food, and how do you propose we live?
No, that’s precisely what creates the dilemma - do you have a moral or ethical right to take the life of a sentient being to save your own? Do you have a right to do so repeatedly over time? What makes your life worth more than those you’re taking?
I should have been more clear, I meant our choice as in we did not choose or coerce them to be in our gut but we would have chosen to use them in our civilization’s infrastructure.
