15 years ago Peet’s Coffee enforced this on me, killing the WiFi after an hour despite the fact that I was the only person in the store. Haven’t been back since.
The best model I’ve seen is to just have some tables marked as “no laptop”.
I think what the person you’re responding to meant was that you can generate a fandom for the content that was generated for you. So, you can get the feeling of being in a fandom despite there being no actual other humans that know what you’re talking about.
Sure, and people might enjoy that, but I'm saying that as much as people want to have fans, people also want to be fans, and that's not compatible with everyone consuming algoslop generated for them personally. Nobody is going to walk around with a T-shirt for an algoband that has an audience of just themselves. Maybe a virtual band gets famous in the same way Hatsune Miku is famous. But that's not personalized generation, that's just an old fashioned band with different tech.
A world without fandom is one without sports. That seems deeply unlikely to me! Anyone can generate personal podcasts with NotebookLM, which people enjoyed for a bit but doesn't seem to have made any impact on actual podcasts at all.
If only there was some kind of major indicator of overall public sentiment, conducted nationally, say every four years, which might allow one to draw conclusions about the portion of the population who is either ignorant or malicious. Surely the data would show the vast majority of my countrymen are rational, thoughtful people.
Great point. The internet is both a skewed reflection of us AND it influences us. Similar to the well-known reflexivity of legacy media but much greater scale and shorter time-frame. To bolster your point even further, I'd say that no human can bifurcate their life, their thoughts, their values, as "real" versus "online". It's just too hard, so they inevitably converge - giving lie to the constant refrain that it's "just trolling" or "just online bullying" etc.
It seems the internet has profound structural issues that undermine the forces that traditionally retarded and punished ignorance and malice. If it's true that society will inexorably evolve in the direction of the internet, and if we are all helpless to stop, or even slow, this evolution, then we are well and truly fucked.
You know who's won every single selection in modern history? "None of the above." Even in the 2020 election where millions of mystery people suddenly appeared, only 155 million people voted with a voting age population of some 256 million. Some of those 101 million (the delta between voters and 'abstainers') couldn't vote, but most could.
And that, to me, indicates rather widespread rationality. Because elections are a facade. Do you want to vote for somebody who struggles to complete a single coherent sentence and has a grand vision of 'I'm quite fond of power', or for a narcissistic entertainer? Either of which who will agree on most things that people themselves disagree with, like injecting ourselves into endless conflicts around the world because the MIC needs that dough. No thanks. I'm quite happy with my 'none of the above.'
So the conclusion I'd draw is that there's two rather radical sides constantly flinging poo at each other and pretending this moment is the most important moment ever, always, while everybody else looks on from behind the glass amused at a bunch of monkeys covered in poo which, come to think of it, also works as a fine metaphor for internet discussions.
I care about consequences, not about feeling smarter than other people. I care about policies, not candidates. In particular I believe that policies like “Defund the NSF” are bad, actually.
That's a great example. NSF funding (as of 2023) is < $10 billion. So the money spent shipping weapons to Ukraine could have funded it for decades. The money spent on Iraq or Afghanistan could have funded it for centuries. But in modern politics we simply accept that politicians will endlessly blow money like this, and we then content ourselves with fighting over the table scraps that are left over for whatever our pet interests happen to be, while framing those scraps as representing the most important existential crises to have ever existed.
Don't you see how comically dysfunctional this is? If you took the amount of money we spend and actually optimized it for outcomes, the possibilities are unimaginable. But we simply are incapable of electing the sort of people who could do this, because succeeding in politics is mostly just legal corruption (and illegal, but hey that's what pardons are meant for!) on a massive scale where everybody wants their bellies buttered to the point that suddenly government receipts of $5+ trillion dollars, $14k+ for every single man/woman/child, is literally not enough to maintain the basic operation of government. All the while our 'public servants' somehow get filthy rich in office. It's just lol.
Also, tiny nit but the text at the end says the largest known prime number has over 24 million digits. While technically true, the current largest prime number in fact has over 41 million digits!
(Also, I love this. I hope you’re still hosting it once I have kids)
Hence why the previously stated remembrance doesn't hold.
As before, money only matters in a world where: You want/need people to do things for you, they won't do something for you without a favour returned in kind, and you cannot immediately return the favour.
I’m not sure I understand. Could someone not take an existing legitimate video, light and all, then manipulate it to e.g. have the president saying something else?
If you don't manipulate the visual part, lip movements wouldn't match up to what's said. If you do manipulate it that now has to respect the super special light. I don't think it'd be impossible, but it'd be far harder than a regular deepfake. And even if you succeed (or someone writes good software that can do it) the white house can still point to the original video to show that the two were presumably taken at the same time, so one of them must be fake.
It'd agree that it's a lot of effort for very marginal gain
The best model I’ve seen is to just have some tables marked as “no laptop”.
reply