Yeah I just can’t stop getting ragebaited by the Electron hate. All Electron haters are free to develop their own efficient, pleasant looking, cross-platform native app instead since it’s so easy

But why do they want to do that, is the question

This is fucking crazy, way crazier than it’s getting credit for. Very sentient behavior ngl

I think how I feel about collecting hobbies depends immensely on what is being collected and how it is used. If someone is collecting old books and actually reading them, then even if they buy $10,000 books, as long as they aren’t trying to show it off on the basis of price - I have zero issue with such a thing.

Like it’s fine if they want to show off that the book is really rare, explain why it’s rare, how hard if was to find, what’s special about it, etc. And then if as a result of that I can infer it must have been expensive, I’m not grossed out. But if they come at from the angle of “this book is 10 grand and that’s why you should be impressed by it and transitively be impressed by me”, that’s nasty and pisses me off.

I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with collection-based hobbies, although I do think that in general they are not really impressive hobbies and should not be misinterpreted as a skill or something to be “proud of”. But I think this is just a conflation being made because the word “hobby” does too much double duty nowadays. We use it to describe things that are simple, as well as things that are complex; impressive and unimpressive, skilled and unskilled, creative and consumption. “Hobby” usually just means literally anything I regularly do that isn’t required of me. And as a result it carries baggage from it’s various applications in between themselves, like using the same spoon for your curry and your soup and your ice cream.

If we taboo that word, then I think people collecting things is freed from hobby-connotations like:

• “this is something for me to be proud of”
• “this is something that makes me an impressive person”
• “this is something that demonstrates a skill or ability beyond that of the uninitiated”

And we can see collecting for what it is: nothing more than liking a thing, and wanting to have it around to admire/contemplate/use. I think collecting can be a very respectable demonstration of someone understanding what is important to themselves, and in being able to take joy in simple things or the same things over and over. The dark side of collection is obviously hoarding, void-filling, status-signaling, addictive behavior. But the light-side of it is cherishing things that being you joy, putting them somewhere where you regularly appreciate and protect them, sharing that joy with others. It can be very humble, vulnerable, and in fact can be very anti consumerist/hoarding/void-filling/status-signaling.

Like anything, I think it’s all in the way it’s done. But I don’t think you need to be working on something or demonstrating a skill with it, or producing something, in order for the collecting to be respectable.

I mean, I think it’s less about people having interests that I don’t, and more about just the realistic car culture. There are people who are into cars in a cool, healthy way. But in my experience, the majority of them ARE sad, empty people who don’t know who they are, and are trying to buy a personality, who think having money makes them good and that showing their money via their car to others makes others perceive them as good. They are often very childish people trying to impress others and fill some kind of void in themselves that they don’t know how to fill. I say this knowing at least 5 pretty intense “car guys”. It IS very sad to observe, and they don’t even seem to enjoy their “hobby” (which really just consists of inventing new reasons to spend more money) themselves. It’s just a continual race to one-up your friends cars, get more likes on Instagram, or emulate something they saw on YouTube, or reconfigure something, or trade this car for a different car, like a high-rpm hedonic treadmill. Just objectively speaking, these people all seem pretty depressed. Admittedly they have other shared traits that make my sample not rigorous. But even the common social conception of car people seems to agree. A lot of them are obnoxious losers, even their own community has a whole bunch of archetypes that they agree are obnoxious losers.

I think there are many very cool ways to be into cars. It’s just than the majority of people who are actually into cars, are not into them in those cool ways. It’s like how playing a guitar, fundamentally and intrinsically, is a pretty cool interest to have…but if 70% of guitar players you know are lonely shells of people with underdeveloped personalities who only started playing guitar to flex their wealth on others and because they thought it would make girls want to fuck them - you might say “guitarist culture is sad”.

Thank you for saying this. I’m seeing this thinking, have people used native apps recently? They’re not as great as people say. Have they tried coding a UI in a native library instead of the holy HTML CSS JS trifecta? It’s usually fairly miserable and usually extremely non-customizable by comparison.

All this hating on Electron, hating on UE5, etc. really rubs me the wrong way. Firstly because people talk about optimization and “the good old days” while ignoring that we have completely different requirements these days. The new Witcher game isn’t fucking Quake. It’s gonna use some hardware. What do you want people to do? Implement custom rendering engines for every game? That’s the same as saying you want less games, because most teams literally cannot do that for various reasons, and the same applies to the Electron apps.

Like, I get it. Things should be optimized. But I feel like “software is unoptimized now” is mostly a meme propagated by tech and gaming YouTubers who don’t really know what they’re talking about, through an audience of wannabes who don’t really know what they’re talking about. People whining about le yandere dev toothbrush!1!1! And le undertale dialogue if statements!1!1!. E.g I remember hearing people saying that because borderlands has a cel-shaded effect it should be cheaper to render - a completely wrong and backwards statement.

It’s incredible how gamers think they understand rendering technology just because they play a lot of video games. And similarly I don’t like when developers (and probably a lot of non-developers) make a lot of assumptions about other people’s apps. See the complaints about Spotify memory usage. We don’t know anything about how Spotify works internally. There could be an algorithm running to determine which songs to queue up next which is analyzing multiple songs at once, or all sorts of other things. It’s so presumptuous to just look at an app in Task Manager and be like “pathetic, I could do better”, especially if it runs without problems on your device. And maybe it is built with Electron? So what? That just means that you’re paying some RAM in order to get an always updated UI that is matching what you get everywhere else. Like are we just gonna neglect that Electron provides a basically fully homogenous experience across all platforms with no extra code needed? We’re just gonna act like that’s worth nothing? It’s so entitled to say “nooooo I need you to spend an extra $2M/yr paying a Windows 8 UI dev team so that the Windows 8 Native App can have a full ten years of service and it can use 80 MB instead of 1 GB of RAM so that way I can also use this app and 200 other glorious native apps all simultaneously but also I don’t want to pay any more for the product and I don’t care if you’re a solo developer because back in my day solo developers authored papers about their custom algorithms and if you don’t do that but with my new 100x more demanding requirements you’re trash”.

I agree with the sentiment of this article but it seems pretty poorly written, and isn’t really researched or citing anything, and the headline is a lie. It basically just says:

“Google removed reviews to make HBO more money so that Google can make more money”

And then repeats that literally like 70 times in varying degrees of wordiness, each time acting as though it’s a deep and cutting observation, while also explaining that their title was a blatant lie. The entire thesis of the article is that the film studios didn’t need to request anything, it was just two parties acting in mutual interest. This is a drastically less earth-shattering bit of journalism than the title makes it sound.

Was expecting an actual journalistic exposé, instead got a high-schooler essay.

Tarantino is mad that something isn’t a stupidly over the top parody of itself dreamt up by a 7 year old boy whose entire ethos is to imitate his troubled older brother. What a surprise. Go back to making your pretentious overrated last movie so you can go away forever. Reeeeee

Parkour fans rejoice as skill finally becomes useful

I’m white and I wear shorts - hah! It’s funny because it’s true!!!

Yeah this is the kind of thing where you really need statistics. This sticks out because it’s a prominent example of something new, an autonomous vehicle, doing something notable - killing an animal for the first time (or at least one of the very first well-publicized times on record).

For people’s reaction to this to be that this is because it’s an autonomous vehicle is the same sort of cognitive bias that causes things like, " The first person to get a math problem wrong in class was a girl so it seems like girls are bad at math". When of course it could be that the probability of boys and girls getting problems wrong is equal, and that the girl was simply the first one to get a unlucky roll on the dice of the universe. It could even be that boys are more likely to get problems wrong, and the girl was especially unlucky. It could in fact be that girls are more likely to get problems wrong, too, but this single instance doesn’t give us enough evidence for that. It could be that boys actually have gotten more problems wrong, but we only hear about the girl getting the problem wrong due to sociological biases, or vice versa. Etc.

I get that we shouldn’t trust corporations, and it’s not fun to defend a corporation, but it is important to defend rational thinking. And the rational way to approach this is to employ statistical methods to judge whether a vehicle being autonomous truly makes it a bigger risk to animals in the road or not. Any other line of reasoning is not right for this kind of problem.

Yeah. Reddit is technologically very bland. It’s “easy” to make a Reddit clone - the community is what makes it tick. But YouTube needs crazy levels of infrastructure to provide the full experience that it does. When Reddit collapses there’s places to migrate to. But if YouTube collapses it’s just a loss.

Seriously. What candidate is it that this innocent perfect figure here represents? Which politician is it that is like this?

It kind of sounds like you’re talking about it purely as a thought experiment or as something to inspire other philosophical thinking. But I think the issue most people have with the simulation theory is when people think that it’s actually the way that the world is or think that it’s worth investigating the way that the world is just because it theoretically could be the way the world is. But theoretically the world could have been created by the god of the Bible or any of the other million explanations proposed by the million other religions that have existed. Almost every religion proposes a hypothesis that could indeed explain reality, but just because it could explain reality doesn’t mean it’s reasonable to investigate it.

I agree with you that all the questions you raised are interesting and worth thinking about, but none of that really relates to thinking that we actually live in a simulation. You’re just using the idea that we live in a simulation as inspiration to start thinking about these other ideas. But actually thinking that we live in a simulation is much less reasonable.

Heard about this story a few days ago and it’s pretty annoying that none of these so-called news agencies could be bothered to provide the extremely relevant pictures of the thing. It’s sooooo much worse than I imagined. It ain’t “child like” that’s a straight up child sex doll. I was thinking maybe it was some dubious anime loli looking thing, which would still have been bad, but this is crazy. Good job France for taking serious action against this scumbag company. Shein, Temu and the like are such filth and this sort of thing exemplifies why. Their sketchiness leaves room for things like this to exist. Saving this for next time the ignorant people in my life insist that buying clothes on Shein is not bad.

Bruh. This is truly surprising. I feel like for a phone like this, it must be like 90% of the target market that would hate this? Seems like an unimaginably bad business decision. Of course, if FB gave them enough money, then this is kinda like taking a bribe to stop competing.

Yep, even on the side of the right ideas, half the people still got there via the same wrong methods that the people on the wrong side use. They just coincidentally happened to land on the right side instead. It is quite disheartening, exactly

You are wise indeed, but if you had gone even further on your journey of discovery, you would find that actually you are also wrong and my opinion is even more right. Unfortunately, the proof is too large to fit in this comment, so you will have to struggle in your idiot’s slumber for some time longer until you discover the vital truth that I cannot be bothered to supply even a passing hint of a justification for

A deep insight indeed. I often think that paradoxically, people’s feelings would be better off without others trying to preemptively take care of those feelings. Of course, there is a balance.

I opened this article thinking it was gonna be something cool about space travel 🥲