I guess I wasn’t as clear as I could be. I was not implying all gamers had good reaction times, pattern recognition and such. What I meant was that people who play games and consider themselves gamers are generally speaking striving to play those games better, and will often build some skills to pretty significant levels. Some of those skills will be relevant to ATC work.

To your point, this is true of many hobbies or professions and any hysteria against “gamers” being targeted with an ATC ad campaign is dumb.

Turns out this generation is just as susceptible to propaganda and misinformation as every prior generation…

I think this is a pretty good point, but it goes both ways.

I think having a younger member of congress saying that the millennial voting group is able to enact change might prompt some of them to go vote when they wouldn’t have; when they would have just given up they might now try anyway.

Someone has to stand up to all the ‘We tried voting and it didn’t do anything, so why bother’ doomer comments.

And… also… Have you seen gamers?

The comments here seem somewhat strange to me for what is likely to be a “gamer” heavy demographic. There’s a lot of ‘I should stop flying’ or otherwise implying that people who, having games as their preferred hobby, will be bad at this. Instead, gamers tend to get really good at a few specific skills such as reaction times, pattern recognition, strategy and min/maxing, etc.

About the only thing I could think making this better would be to select for speedrunners.

That way we get livestreams for APLS - Awesome Planes Landed Safely - and also raise some money for a charity or two.

For me, it was just uncomfortable more than it was fun. Most things are worth trying once.

I’d rather order in, have an edible and hang with friends at home instead of going out.

I think we need to collectively understand that freedom and privacy have a cost. That $200 phone is subsidized with the spyware baked into it and the expected income of future repairs and upgrades, ad sales, etc. a $2k phone made with modular parts and software based on open source has a much higher up-front cost, won’t be quite as sleek, will require some technical understanding, but a much lower maintenance cost.

Game consoles, phones, computers, cars and even refrigerators. If some company now considers the product a loss-leader, we should collectively shun it.

It’s a hard sell, though, when everything is super expensive and things like phones and cars are pretty much requirements for living in some places.

I’ve been high in public just once. Had a friend take me on a random adult playdate. We had a sober chaperone and the rest of us were enjoying that 2008 farm bill. It was simultaneously the most interesting and terrifying time I’ve ever had. It was nice to just exist and attempt to talk like a rational human with friends who knew what was going on, but any time someone else (like a waiter) tried to interact with me, I turned into the OP image and was like “Just act normal!”

Was a neat experience that I will never repeat.

After the first meta-game, I expected that *I* was the secret meta-meta-gamer, and started watching for details. The wigs specifically stood out, as did Sam’s stand, and about halfway through the episode I went back and looked for changes…

The wigs gained butterflies to match point totals, but it wasn’t obvious on first pass that they were the scoreboard.

The mess of the wires/details on the stand didn’t change that I could tell, or any background scenery.

I couldn’t identify anything else that seems different, but my webapp player also got mad at me for scrubbing around to look at things and stopped loading, so I might have missed something, and I haven’t given it a second full watch. Maybe there was something audible instead of visual. If there’s no super secret extra meta game discussed in the making-of next week, I think that’d be a missed opportunity.

Also loved getting Alex Horne in to do the scores between rounds. That was a neat touch.

I think the best use case for AI is the initial search phase. Using AI to create news articles, code, music, videos, etc is just slop. But asking a question and getting a starting place can be helpful. I consider AI to be the modern version of the search engine.

Just be very aware that these models make shit up all the time. So asking a factual question needs to be reviewed before trusting the answer. Otherwise you get those glue pizzas.

The catalyst there is businesses (and to a degree governments).

I used to pay attention to my physical mail. Then it was all “junk mail” and the signal-to-noise ratio got hard to manage.

I migrated the important stuff to “electronic mail”, where I had a curated list of people and entities that sent me items, so I could focus on things that were important. Then my address/mailbox became common knowledge and that filled with “spam”.

I started using SMS/text for the important stuff. But that also became a common place to send me stuff I didn’t care about, so I used specific apps on my phone that had permission to notify me when something needed attention, and now my phone gives me so many notifications I just ignore them all.

Our attention is the prize, and it won’t matter where our attention goes: The businesses will follow.

The same will hold true for connectivity. If the current internet becomes a wasteland and we migrate to Mesh, then it’s only a matter of time before corporate interests take that over too; then knitted, or fabric, or the glob.

The solution will be protections for personal identity and privacy, which have been and will be fought tooth-and-nail by the companies because they want that info so they can be where our attention is so they can make profit. I think we can also fight the profit motive, but that’ll be harder than getting protections in law… so small steps.

Honestly curious: I’m not a battery or even energy person, but this is interesting.

The charge/discharge efficiencies and rates could just mean we build networks of mixed types? “Trickle” charge/discharge via a slower battery that handles more cycles and is probably way cheaper to build (that’s the premise of Na+, right?), but have those batteries back up a more expensive high-rate bank for when power is needed in a burst? Probably a switching problem at that point, which I imagine we already deal with having solar/hydro/fossil/etc.

A Na+ bank sized to handle regular use and charge a Lithium bank when underused so that one is ready for spikes seems like a way to go.

Please and Thank You.

I want better for us, and I’m fighting for it, but I have very limited personal power to enact change.

The way “we” looked at those “third-world” countries when I was a child feels like how everyone should be looking at us. Our squalor is not that of unclean water (but that is still true in places) or of systemic violence by the government (but that is still true in places) or of lack of reliable food (but that is still true in places). We have cellphones and internet, cars and roads, and air-conditioning, so we should be happy.

Our squalor is in the apathy and even antipathy a bulk of our fellow citizens have towards others.

The fix is education and awareness, but the means of enacting it have been hijacked. How do I reach someone on the west coast to be kind when I can’t touch them from the east coast?

There was a post recently, and I’ll link it if I can find it again, about Kevin and his truck, and how helping others builds community. Very wholesome. Community has been lost here outside of the uber-wealthy (they all know each other), or the “poor” who need it to survive. The “middle class” has lost the plot.

There’s nothing sweeter than the pain of catching up…

The large section is also just a low effort version. I’m sure this could have been inserted instead as a collapsed section, a comment, document metadata, .1 sized font, Alt text on a single pixel image, or any number of other ways to disguise the prompt.

It’s an arms race for defenders, and even someone paying attention might not notice. Not to mention, you don’t even have to open the document. If it’s in a SharePoint library, or attached to an email, there’s a good chance it’s in scope for whatever random ‘assistance’ copilot will attempt automatically

No to throw around the ‘in name only’ epithet, but was he a democrat? or was that convenient label at the time? As a self-serving pig, he would chose the label that got him the most attention.

Disregarding the “left” vs “liberal” vs “democrat” disambiguation, since it doesn’t really matter in US politics at this moment, I’d suggest, when discussing “leadership”, that a Democratic person wants what is best for society as a whole while the current flavor of Republican wants what is best for the wealthy class.

I can’t think of a Mr. Trump example where he advocated for the working class without it being a transparent grift.

My point, though, is not “do I hate trump?” but instead a thought experiment of “what if trump was actually a Democrat?” If he was a wealthy-ish person advocating for the lower classes to get aid, reduce wealth inequality, improve climate management and various other “democratic” values, then yes, I would support him.

Current trump can get fucked regardless of his label.

A different take: If he was a Democrat, would he have the same opinions? If he existed as current, he would not be a democrat, but maybe his experiences were caused him to develop in other directions.

If Trump espoused democratic values, and was for things like universal healthcare, higher wages, privacy and personal autonomy, hadn’t been a sex pest, wasn’t a grifter and on and on and on… then no, I might not despise him.

Not that Jason above was in any way being sincere in the question.

Had this stock started being included in normal people’s 401ks or pensions yet?

Some of my meager wealth is in that kind of place. And while I want nothing to do with SpaceX, I think it will be forced on me soon. I only get the choice of vanguard x, y or z.

That was my understanding of the long term scheme, and the goal of the various rule changes allowing this stock to be included in indexes early.

Adding on to that: Sometimes these indie devs, who made a cool thing as a passion project and get rewarded with life-changing money via sales, then go on to continually update the thing since they can now devote time to passion. Thinking Minecraft, Terraria, Vampire Survivors, Stardew Valley as my personal “I have sunk hundreds of hours into this title” games. That $3 game might have good bones and just need time to flesh it out.

Also the communities will rally around devs that don’t use predatory pricing and cash-grabs. I know I’m not the only one who bought more copies of some of these games (or their OSTs, donation DLCs, Patreon, etc) to gift or even just as a thank-you when something updated and gave me more content or more polished experience.

My game list were so popular it was almost cliche, but we can’t really predict what the next great thing will be until it’s there and pricing your new best-seller at $3 means you get exposure and good will.

I still need to play that one. I played Reverie a few years ago and that was an amazing game that is still in my top recommendations.

Unrelated to StarCraft, but this triggered a memory from my childhood that I had to go research to figure out what the hell it was, so I thought I’d share.

I got to play StarCraft at a friends house, never owned it until I had a job and bought my own copy of SC2, my version of ‘StarCraft at home’ was “Battle Realms” if I got the game right. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHP3xUZ6ifc&t=2793s

I’m pretty sure the Lotus Clan had some corrupting/stealing mechanic that I abused, where I could take over enemy buildings and make my own version of their units. I remember turtling against the CPU players as being incredibly satisfying when I swept over them with their own units.

Might just be every RTS game where you can abuse economy in general when facing CPU players, but rolling across the map is always fun.

I think you missed my point.

• We conflate Privacy with Anonymity. I have no expectation of privacy in public, but this is another nail in the coffin for anonymity ; and I used to have an expectation of anonymity.

–

When I grew up, I could roam the local mall without an expectation that I was being recorded in perpetuity. My movements were recorded, sure, but stored for only as long as needed to prevent shoplifting or other criminal activity. I was anonymous unless there was a reason to look into my actions.

This is a not a new thing and I doubt you ever complained about being caught on countless CCTVs before.

CCTV is <100 years old and I’m rapidly approaching half that. CCTV was a shoplifting deterrent when I was a youth. Now it’s a weapon and it’s no longer CC.

Modern cloud-based video storage is no longer owned and operated by a single business or person. It’s all Amazon or Microslop or Meta and they will happily sell access to law enforcement or palantir or probably anyone who asks with a large enough check.

Anonymity is the ability to be a nobody. In the 90’s, we could expect that we were nobodies unless we did something worth noting. Recordings of us were ephemeral and irrelevant; overwritten next week.

Now they will be forever, and machine learning, face recognition, and processing power to correlate multiple data sources means that things you do today can be used against you in 30 years. I hope you can see that.

It’s not really the glasses themselves that worries me, it’s the rest of the tech stack. The glasses just add new vectors to the problem.