You must pick a point in human history before the 1950s to be spend the rest of your life in. What era and place would you choose?
But I stumbled upon those, I didn't plan on acquiring them.
That's why college kids don't plan on what to make of their lives after college. They're kids! If they knew, they wouldn't need to be there. It took me a degree and a half, a number of failed creative projects and taking a job out of necessity to end up back in a completely different, adjacent career, eventually in multiple different countries. I could have predicted none of that when I started my first degree. For one, I didn't know what I didn't know, that was the entire point of university. For another, I didn't know half of the options I ended up taking even existed or were available to me. Many weren't, in fact, until a particular set of circumstances lined up.
But I'm sure glad that in the meantime I learned crucial things that made me more capable of taking advantage of those circumstances when they came by.
There's this girl I remember from that time. I was a bit older than my classmates, owing to that whole changing tracks thing, so a few gave me more credit than I deserved in some areas. This girl once walks up to me and asks me if I'll read some stuff she wrote. I didn't know how to say no, so I said yes. And it was terrible. No style, no flow, no command of language. It's a high school essay at best, corny and florid in all the wrong ways. I weaseled my way out of giving her feedback and mentally discounted her as a writer.
She's now a professional journalist involved in many high profile activist movements. I've read her stuff. It's great. Turns out the reason she was bad at it back then is she was twenty and had many years of getting good at that crap ahead of her. That's fine. It's fine to figure yourself out and learn to do things as an adult. That's supposed to be the point of higher education when it's universally accessible.
Anyway, I don't think you're wrong, for the record. I think you're right in your context. If public university wasn't basically free around here that would have been a very expensive approach to learning creative writing and figuring yourself out. At most all I'm contributing is I'm glad we do it that way over here. I spent ten years, give or take, doing that stuff and I spent between sixty and six hundred bucks a year doing it. And that's because I didn't qualify for any grants or government student aid. For some of my classmates it was free, or they even got some help for books and housing. I go to vote every time (and pay taxes) thinking that contributing to keeping that up is the most important thing I do in life.
Don't get me wrong, you could also just materialize chained up to the bottom of a mine or in the middle of a war campaign lasting 40% of your lifespan and die in a week.
It's just since the premise doesn't say you get to refuse at least this way you'd have a good chance at just absolutely smashing it and maybe bypassing some of the real nasty stuff on the way to technological advancement.
Not necessarily insurmountable, but still a good point.
You may still have an easier time getting things up and running as a slave in antiquity than as a serf in the Middle Ages, depending on where you end up. Pretty sure you'd have a better shot as a slave in antiquity than in the US or other colonial areas, both because colonialism reeeeally sucked and because you'd have relatively more valuable skills.
This take is super depressing, but like I said elsewhere, maybe it makes sense in the US. And that sucks, to be clear.
For what it's worth, I spent maybe a decade in university, bounced around a couple of things before I got my actual degree. I did not do a STEM degree, I still got a lot out of it in both soft and hard skills. Also in relationships, experience and general ability to approach situations and extract information from the world. Frankly, if your time in higher education has to be driven by a securing a specific job or goal then you're in a broken higher education system. If it leaves you in crippling debt you're also in a broken system, but I'm pretty sure you guys know that already.
I could risk a suggestion, but you seem like you are in the US and frankly what you describe does not line up with my experience of higher education pretty much at all, so I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be useful.
I'll just say that that seems like it sucks, it's not what higher education should be about and you guys should probably get around to fixing it at one point or another.
I mean, tune it just right and you can get the Industrial Revolution started a couple millenia early and maybe bypass the whole colonialism nonsense. Middle ages is too late, too much theocracy. Common knowledge gets you in grecorroman spaces, but maybe you can overshoot a touch and get some nice Phoenician traders to bankroll your plan to mass produce bycicles or Ikea-style furniture and ship it all over the Mediterranean.
Just... hope you stay healthy or that the rules let you pack a bunch of antibiotics. Or maybe learn a bunch of modern medicine before you go. Maybe prioritize the whole "discovering penicillin" thing when you get there.
Right?
We're going on a tangent here, but I feel like Western progressives, particularly with anglo backgrounds, tend to think the entire world runs by their parameters and always has. There is nothing intrinsic to the current kinds of bigotry in their societies. It's pretty arbitrary and specific, in fact.
I keep telling people that the UI being similar is the least of the worries of a Windows expat. I promise all of Linux's mainstream GUIs are perfectly intuitive for a frequent Windows user. The things that are most annoying are software and hardware compatibility and not having to manually hunt for support or equivalent software.
Man, I am so glad "anarchocapitalist" is starting to stick. I can't believe they got away with the other word for as long as they did.
I mean... you may have missed how episodic television works. Ironic horror antologies have been a thing on TV since the 50s.
Looks a bit cosplay-y, honestly.
But also I've never been into Bethesda Fallout, so I'm already not as much of a target for this one, I suppose.
Well, the idea of the original post is that ALL algorithms used for any reason are bad, and the retort is to explain that a chonological feed is still a (simple) algorithm and use that to "well actually" a distinction with proprietary algorithms.
Which is fine, but nitpicky. I'd think most Masto users get that, or at least take no issue with the obvious explanation. For all I saw the majority of the response to BlueSky's idea of an algorithm marketplace where you pick and tune how your feeds are sorted was relatively well received.
But as always around here I don't doubt that with a different set of follows and even usage times the pushback on principle may be more frequent or obvious. It just hasn't been my experience and I think the "what algorithm actually means" bit is a bit deceptive.
I'm not sure what a "proper SimCity" means at this point. It's not like the SC4 team is still around, and Skylines 1 was basically taking the concepts of the SimCity reboot and implementing them on a game without the tech limitations of that release. A new "official" SimCity would have to be either basically Cities Skylines-like... or a completely different game, which at that point would defeat the purpose.
I mean, I'd play another big-budget city builder, but at this point I don't think the brand holds much weight for me.
Fair enough. D3 took a while to click for me, too, and it only did once they turned it into basically an idle game or digital bubble wrap. D4 felt a bit more MMO-y and I wasn't there for it, but I always figured they'd get to making it more D3-ish eventually and I could check it out again then.
And then the best year of gaming in a decade happened and I forgot D4 even existed. But I don't resent anybody who stuck with it. I bet I would have given it more of a go under different circumstances.
To me it felt more like a blend of new features, missing features and parts of the game that just work differently now.
I didn't even get deeply into some of the mechanics on my first run (parking, for instace) and more complexity isn't always better, so I often spent more time on these on vanilla, but if they make a beefy expansion and keep fixing bugs it may prompt me to return and see how much the balance of my old city and the process of making a new one are impacted.
A few of these are interesting and accurate (email comparisons), a few are pretty obvious and widely distributed already (privacy challenges), a few are a bit of a straw man argument (not sure "algorithms are bad" is a thing) and a few I'd caveat a little bit (quote tweets).
Going through all that would mean a whole response piece, though, so I'm more than happy to vaguely nod and move on.
Yep. Terrible analogy, a bad fit for both the tech and the use cases, tells nothing to anybody, and federation is not the biggest feature most people care about going into Mastodon anyway.
Eh... no, almost certainly not.
What they did, if you read the piece, was to ask people what it would take to justify a long list of price points, from 50 to 100. Which is a good practice for a survey question like that, because you want to know at what point people start to say "there's nothing you could do to justify a price point of 70" so you know where the breaking point is.
It doesn't even mean that they'll price it at whatever people say is the breaking point. They could see that the sweet spot is somewhere else. But if you're asking people to put something on a scale you need the scale to be bigger than the range of valid responses or you can't see what people are saying.
Deceptive headlines are deceptive.
Is it? I mean, Diablo expansions have been a thing since the very first game. I'm certainly not against DLC for the games I like if the content is good and have never been, even when the content wasn't "DL" and came in CDs.
A steel bycicle will surely work.
The problem with all of it is going to be scale. I think you're right in that you think you can just jump into the technology bit in these Yankee in King's Arthur's Court scenarios and instead you'd probably get stuck trying to revolutionize mining and material science and then die from an ingrown toenail.
Which, to his credit, Twain absolutely covers when he does the thought experiment. I'm constantly impressed that his take was "you'd cherry pick the people that are open minded enough and spend the rest of your life trying to set up an education system only to be chased away regardless because politics is a bitch".
That's still probably the right answer.