TwinIon

Lying might be a bit harsh. As Parag lays out in this thread that was linked above, they do work on the problem, and I believe him, because at the end of the day it is a product issue. The experience is worse if they don't address bots, so they certainly put some effort in. As Parag mentions, it's also a difficult and evolving problem. No one has solved spam on an open platform, so I don't know why anyone would expect Twitter to have done so. However, the framing of spam as a product and user experience problem doesn't imply they work that hard on getting entirely accurate numbers. They're incentivized to catch the bots that make the experience worse for users, but not very incentivized to find bots that are harmless and just boosting numbers. I doubt they have hidden numbers somewhere indicating the "real" percent of bot accounts, but they probably don't try too hard to figure that out beyond what is required for due diligence.

When it comes to pancakes, I'm a big fan of dutch babies.

Sounds good, maybe I'll check it out. I've been revisiting Lower Decks and loving it, and I'm always up for more Trek.

It was always clear that the NFTs craze was a bubble. The question now is if it was a beanie baby like fad or if the larger crypto community actually believes in them and will keep caring about them. My suspicion is that if NFTs lose their luster as potential get rich quick buys, then most people will stop caring about them entirely.

I think it's reasonable to put some onus on voters if only because it's the most direct call to action you can make that applies to everyone. It's fair to point out that the most straightforward way to fix things like this is to vote in representatives that would vote against it on our behalf. At the same time, the supremacy of unrepresentative institutions in our government makes that call to action feel almost pointless. The makeup of the Supreme Court doesn't resemble that of the country now that the last three justices appointed are there thanks to happenstance and a President that lost the popular vote. The fact that you can even have a President that got fewer votes than their opponent is itself insane. The House hasn't been resized since 1911 despite there not being any constitutional basis for keeping it the same. Still, issues in the House hardly matter thanks to the Senate, which is a complete disaster. A single Senator can hold up legislation almost indefinitely for any reason, and a simple majority can't pass anything without the minority's say so, (both issues having no constitutional basis), but then there's the even more fundamental problem where the 500k people in Wyoming have as much power as the 40M in CA. This of course extends to the constitution itself, which is so difficult to change when even a relatively small minority are against it that it's only happened once in my lifetime. Don't get me wrong. I vote in every little election, but it really is an uphill battle for the majority in this country.

I expected the court to uphold Roe in name only, and basically strip it down to nothing. At this point I need to recognize that even the "establishment" GOP is pretty far out there. Eh. If they had a real agenda to pass maybe. I just keep remembering the last time they had control of the government and couldn't even pass healthcare reform after running on it for years. The conservative agenda at a federal level is largely to do nothing. Even when in the majority they operate as an opposition party. If someone actually writes up some legislation that they're really excited by, I agree they wouldn't hold back from ending the filibuster to pass it, but that would require the GOP wants to actually do something.

I'm a programmer but I've never worked on anything close to a modern game. Even when I've had workloads that were ideally suited to multi-threading, it was still a freaking pain to get it working right. For most of what I've done, it's almost never been worthwhile, but when I have implemented it, between all the thread management involved and a lack of multi-threading throughout the entire thing, I've never seen the hypothetical improvements I was really hoping for. That said, while I feel I understand better than most the challenges in making something truly multi-threaded, I am surprised we're seeing UE5 get to this point without seemingly more threading built in from the start. It's pretty disappointing to see an i9 10900k be the limiting factor in a demo with almost no actual gameplay happening. While we certainly can't extrapolate the performance of this early demo to a generation of incoming games, I do wonder if we'll see more games be CPU limited in a future dominated by UE5 games.

From the article, it sounds less like this is a creative push to create a shared universe and more a business organization push to have all the DC stuff under one roof. That strikes me as a perfectly sensible idea. That kind of consolidation took a while even for Disney. For a while Feige was in charge of the movies, but then there were the Netflix shows which were separate from the ABC shows which were separate from some of the animated stuff ( I think). Now the TV stuff is all under Feige and production of all Marvel goes through the same hierarchy. Right now there are a bunch of different entities with different hierarchies and executives that all make DC stuff. Unifying the decision making and creation pipeline under a single business unit doesn't necessitate unifying all the output into a shared universe. It should mean that if you had a new idea for a King Shark spin-off that they could better figure out if it should be a theatrical feature, HBO Max show, CW Show, HBO movie, or whatever.

I can't say I know anything about the league, but using drone shots during play is kinda cool, even it it's maybe not a great idea.

I think that's the point of the whole thing. IMDb TV and now FreeVee are the ad supported arm of Amazon's streaming services. It is rather annoying that I'll stream something from a company that I pay a subscription to, but because it's in a different part of the same app now I have to watch ads.

I didn't love the original, but it was quite the theater experience. I'll probably catch a showing of the first film when they re-release it. I'll definitely be seeking out the craziest format showing for the second film I can find. Bring on the 120fps 3D IMAX madness.

I'm still on board for Halo, but I'm not exactly loving it. At this point I'm just hoping that the setup for Season 2 is really solid and we can move past some of the plot lines dragging this season down. They really haven't sold the need to keep Kwan Ha's character around, but I expect we'll be seeing more of her. I also can't say that I've found all the Halsey / UNSC drama worthwhile. I complained about something similar with the first episodes, but I feel like the problem with much of the drama they're trying to gin up just doesn't change either our understanding or our feelings about her work or the UNSC. We were introduced to these people as willing to murder a child without much of a reason at all, so yeah, it's hard to escalate the overall impression that they're not great folks when you start with killing an orphaned refugee. Maybe if we were introduced to the Spartans in such a way that cemented the need for them; as humanities greatest hope against a superior foe, the brainchild of their most celebrated scientist in her desperate attempt to save the human race. Once you've established how great and important the Spartan program is, how desperate the situation and the righteousness of their cause, then the secrets surrounding its creation and the horrors inflicted on the Spartans themselves present a real quandary. Instead of tortured scientist crosses ethical lines for a perceived greater good, we get sociopath kidnaps children (and flash clones their replacements with a terminal time bomb!) in order to make better soldiers because she could. There's no discovery about these characters or even self discovery, because they all know they crossed lines and are only now kicking her out because of convenience. The show is not terrible, but I really think they did a poor job of handling the dramatic elements this season. Still, I'm a bit hopeful for the next season. While the Cortana/MC relationship isn't what I expected, I think there is a lot of potential. There's more arc available if they start out a bit antagonistic to each other. I also think the Covenant look pretty darn good, as good as I could have hoped, and it makes me excited to see more action involving them. If we can get to the battle of Reach, maybe it can put some of the lame USNC/Halsey/Kwan drama behind us and focus on a more exciting story.

I imagine it varies by show along with production company and various other deals, but I'm pretty sure a bunch of Netflix stuff has been sold to international distributors in the past. The same phenomenon has been present in Netflix shows for years. It's probably less common now that Netflix has a significant presence in so many countries, but I think it was common for them to do it in the early days.

With only one more episode to go, Moon Knight has yet to really draw me in. I think we can all agree that this show isn't selling itself on action or MCU tie ins, so it's down to the multiple personality disorder and the Egyptian gods to make it work. I can't help but feel like the insane asylum stuff is just an extremely watered down version of what we got in Legion, and I while the gods are the motivating forces at work here, they're just not terribly compelling on screen. I'll finish the show, but so far I think it's the weakest of the Disney+ MCU shows.

Interesting piece from The Verge about how bitcoin fundamentalists very much dislike the larger crypto scene. I also enjoyed the bit where Peter Thiel starts listing out bitcoins' enemies and then talks about how ESG is "a factory for naming enemies. And we should not be allowing them to do that.” To be entirely fair, I do actually have some respect for the hardcore bitcoin folk who honestly believe in its utility. So much of crypto was founded on idealism, but the majority of the scene now is a machine for finding greater fools in order to get rich quick. Of course, while I respect the idealism, I also think they're largely idiots who understand neither the system they want to replace nor the system they want to replace it with.

I find it hilarious that the likely end result of all this is likely that Disney will pay less in taxes and that taxpayers in a couple Florida counties will pay more. Talk about leaping without looking.

Anyone curious about some of the legal issues surrounding NFTs and crypto in general should give this podcast episode a listen, given that the lawyer being interviewed has worked on a bunch of crypto law for a while.

I imagine institutions like the Post or the Times have specific criteria they use, but my first pass would be that when you command a significant public audience or control something that itself is very public (like the BAYC guys), it is newsworthy to report on who you are. Exceptions should be made when such a revelation creates significant danger for the person being revealed, but it's not like this person is hiding from Putin or something. I think the first 7 paragraphs of the article do a pretty good job of explaining the newsworthiness of the account. Of course, linking directly to a home address was unnecessary and wrong. Still, if you run an account followed by a million people, you probably shouldn't expect to be entirely anonymous.

I'm curious what you think the fix is? Is there another big platform that prevents brigading or harassment with any real success?

I didn't think he actually wanted to own Twitter, and it's clearly not a great financial move, but I think he's only gotten this far because for whatever reason he has decided it's a thing he wants. Besides, when thinking about his financial prospects, what's the real downside here? He could lose a hundred billion dollars of wealth and still be worth around the same as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

Here's an interesting article from Ars about how Twitter could be better, which includes some thoughts from Zuck. Basically, the idea is that content that pushes the envelope in what is allowed tends to see heightened engagement, but that's often the worst stuff. So Zuck's idea was to try and reverse that trend, and have the algorithm reduce visibility on borderline content. Of course, this was only an idea in the abstract. It's difficult to actually implement, but perhaps the bigger hurdle is that reducing engagement hurts your bottom line. It's an interesting idea. Personally, I only use the chronological feed, so I don't think any change around the algorithm would really affect my usage too much.

Finished the game the other day, after about 65 hours of total playtime. I completed basically everything there is to do. I really enjoyed it and think it's amazingly well done in nearly every area, but I feel like a lot of my complaints from Zero Dawn remain, especially as you get to the end game. The traversal is still not great, even if it's improved. Climbing is inconsistent and it just seems arbitrary where you can and can't climb, so you end up relying on the UI to show you that you can climb that rock wall but not the other one. Mounts are still dumb, slow, and easy to get stuck or at least slow you down with trees or rocks or small ledges and what not. Given the prevalence of fast travel points in the game and the speed of PS5 loading, I would more often fast travel and run then use mounts at all. I also still dislike the progression system for armor and weapons. I really wish that you could customize what kinds of ammo a given weapon shot, since that ended up mattering far more to me than if it was legendary or rare. The upgrade costs for weapons and armor was also a real pain. I'm happy that many components ended up being guaranteed drops, or guaranteed when you broke off a piece, but there was still too much RNG in finding stuff. I had to reload so many times to get Apex Splinterspines (I think thats what they're called). I also did so much freaking fishing and hunting of animals for their stupid parts. Fishing in particular sucked since you basically never caught fish during normal gameplay, the RNG on the right drops were terrible, and I kept having fish dissapear on me right before I'd catch them. Item management is still just not well done. There are too many pieces that have some crafting value but not much. I never cleared out my inventory of anything that could be used for crafting and I only sold stuff for shards twice in my entire run. It should be one button to sell everything that I don't need for crafting, and there shouldn't be any crossover on what is and isn't needed. I should also have to worry less and less about stuff as the game goes on. Why is it a skill to lower ammo crafting costs only at crafting tables? Those skills should increase what I find and decrease what I need to use so that by the end of the game I shouldn't ever worry about it. At least, that's my ideal. All that said, I didn't put in 65 hours out of boredom. I loved the game. The story was well told, the graphics are amazing, and after all the time spent I feel like there are so many gameplay avenues that I could still explore. I settled into a certain strategy, but I feel like the weapon varieties are such that I'm sure there are tons different approaches I never even tried.

To add to these takes, what we've seen for years in social media isn't direct competition, but very different models. From Instagram to Snap to TikTok to Clubhouse, it's not apps that aim to replace the established social media networks, but instead apps that serve different ends through different means. There have been attempts at direct competition, with things like Parler and Truth, but we've never seen them gain much ground. Now, I will add in the caveat that should Elon actually follow through with his threat to limit speech only to what the law requires, then we could well see Twitter crater and a more direct competitor emerge.

If I enjoyed these movies at all I'd be worried about the next two.

He has clarified before (I think) that he'll comply with all laws in a given country. So he knows that the EU and the US and India will have different restrictions on speech and they will comply with all of them. What I'd love to see someone grill him on more is his feeling on content rules at all. The first amendment allows all sorts of things. Basically everything not allowed on Twitter right now is allowed by the First Amendment. How about porn? Harassment? Deliberate misinformation? Impersonation? Terrorism? Suicide promotion? Gore? Is blocking someone infringing on their rights? What about muting them? Will they ban anyone? How about children, will they be allowed on Twitter now? The only thing he's really specified so far is that he wants to ban bots, which is the exact opposite of free speech! My guess is that most of Twitter's policies will remain in place.