Spatial - Your World Awaits
Saved
r/copypasta - Queer platonic group chat
copypasta with a caricature of an SJW texting a friend that they're being problematic for not threading a very confusing PC needle
Dr. Bronners the best soap is now at Costco
Is this the highest rated album with over 500 reviews? (4.39)
Virtual reality for philanthropy: A promising tool to innovate fundraising | Judgment and Decision Making | Cambridge Core
People feel stronger emotions when they can see a vivid, immersive VR depiction of people who need help.
The International Committee of the Red Cross conducted an experimental study to examine whether virtual reality (VR) could be used to improve fundraising efforts. Results showed that VR led to an increase in donations and a higher reported likelihood of becoming regular donors. Additionally, emotional feelings and quality of the experience were improved, and a physiological increase in arousal was observed. This study provides evidence that VR could be an effective tool to innovate fundraising.
“Recycle Me!” Product Anthropomorphism Can Increase Recycling Behavior | Journal of the Association for Consumer Research
People empathize with humanlike products. When they need to dispose them, recycling feels more humane than throwing them away.
This text presents research that suggests anthropomorphizing product characteristics can lead to increased consumer recycling. Five studies, including lab and online studies and a field experiment, were conducted to explore the connection between anthropomorphism and recycling. The results suggest that anthropomorphism elicits both affective (empathy) and cognitive reactions (an abstract construal level) which can lead to increased recycling. The implications of this research for sustainable consumption and addressing climate change are discussed.
The Show of Delights - This American Life
On motivation @rahshank on Twitter:
there was a ‘this american life’ episode from a couple yrs back that played again on the radio yesterday. it was inspired by the poet Ross Gay who wrote a book called the book of delights which is about the discipline of understanding and seeking delight
Branding a city: What makes a successful design?
Jeremie and his team spent time in the city to understand its “soul”, and conducted surveys that asked thousands of businesses, residents and visitors about their aspirations and perceptions of Christchurch. They discovered that its image as the “Garden City” was important, as well as being a good place to balance work and leisure, leading them to create the promise: “Christchurch is a playground for people.”
On perfectionism
I will never know where I am going to hit until I actually throw the dart. If I spend a ton of time thinking about how I am going to throw the dart and never throw it, I might be doing a whole lot of work that isn’t actually helping.
Self-oriented perfectionism refers to having unrealistic expectations and standards for oneself that lead to perfectionistic motivation. In other words, we lie to ourselves: "If only I could do just a little bit better." (Perfectionism, in this case, somehow became my one great excuse for procrastination: because of my intention to perfect, I can always keep polishing my stuff instead of putting it out in the world.)
Socially prescribed perfectionism is characterized by developing perfectionistic motivations due actual or perceived high expectations of significant others. That is, we get told these lies by the ones that matter most to us. Parents who push their children to be successful in certain endeavors (such as athletics or academics) provide an example of what often causes this type of perfectionism, as the children feel that they must meet their parents' lofty expectations.
Other-oriented perfectionism is having unrealistic expectations and standards for others that in turn pressure them to have perfectionistic motivations of their own. Which means, sadly, that we tell these lies back to others, although sometimes unconsciously.
Excellencism is a term coined by the psychologist Patrick Gaudreau. It means still setting high standards but not beating yourself up about it if you do not meet them. Hank Green summarizes this pretty well: 80%. Do your best to get it 80% of the way to as good as you can make it and go no further. Just do not try to get it to 100%. There are healthier goals than perfect and getting it done is already success. Because your thing is always going to look imperfect to you, the chance of you learning more from those 80% feedback is always higher. You may learn from perfecting those 20%, but you also may not.
Throwing that dart requires courage. Not beating yourself up requires courage. Especially when you just started and are still new to whatever you are doing. You just know that your thing is objectively not that good, not even close to being excellent. And you might fail, miserably sometimes, but remember this: failure is not weakness. Have compassion for yourself the same way that you would have compassion for someone else. Accept your own occasional failure the same way that you would accept someone else’s. If it makes you feel any better, imperfection is what makes us human. And there is nothing wrong with that.
What was the best premise for the worst movie you've seen?
Barry Series-Finale Recap: Sound and Fury
There’s a consistency to the moral universe of this series, and in this finale, one pattern holds true: Those who deny their true selves will be punished, while those who endure the pain of seeing themselves with clear eyes will be shown mercy.
daviddao/awful-ai: 😈Awful AI is a curated list to track current scary usages of AI - hoping to raise awareness
Picasso on Intuition, How Creativity Works, and Where Ideas Come From
To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing… When I find myself facing a blank page, that’s always going through my head. What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.
Nietzsche on How to Find Yourself and the True Value of Education
Let the young soul survey its own life with a view of the following question: “What have you truly loved thus far? What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time?” Assemble these revered objects in a row before you and perhaps they will reveal a law by their nature and their order: the fundamental law of your very self.
Was anyone here on the boat when Cameron Robbins jumped?
Damon Lindelof ‘Shocked and Appalled’ Over ‘Lost’ Racism and Toxic Workplace Allegations: ‘I Failed’ to Provide Safety and Comfort
Apple has been openly building technology for its new mixed reality headset for years
Everyone Died on Succession
But that central conflict between siblings, stemming from being raised as attack dogs always poised to bite each other, never wavered. It's what ultimately lost them Waystar, and what ultimately eroded their souls.
need on Twitter
Writing summaries is more important than reading more books — Andreas Fragner
The Political Spectrum Does Exist: A Reply to Hyrum Lewis
People subscribe to a set of beliefs because they identify themselves as members of a tribe—the left-wing or right-wing tribe. Thus they support whatever policy their team happens to support at a given moment. As Lewis puts it, “if the right-wing team is currently in favor of tax cuts and opposed to abortion, then those who identify with that team will adopt those positions as a matter of social conformity, not because both are expressions of some underlying principle.”
Issues like abortion, tax policy, immigration, criminal justice, and environmental regulation are mostly unrelated, so believing that (say) abortion is immoral, shouldn’t commit you to believe that (say) taxes are too high. Yet as Lewis points out, people’s opinions on these issues tend to travel together, as it were. Tribalism is a good explanation for why many Americans’ constellation of policy positions often are what they are: people first come to identify with a political party and only later do they come to accept all or most of its policy positions, even when the issues themselves are orthogonal to each other.
to approach the left/right split it might be best to start by wholly abstracting from political practice in order to enter the realm of political theory. In this context, political practice refers to the actions of politicians, social movements, and other political actors in the real world. Political theory, meanwhile, refers to the written or spoken articulation of political doctrines, either by writers (in their treatises) or politicians (in their speeches). Practice refers to what political actors actually do; theory refers to the normative justifications given for what ought to be done.
The main distinction between left and right is that the left advances a politics of egalitarianism, while the right opposes the left and attempts to defend some other value—tradition, for example, or individual freedom, or public order.
whatever its language, form, and following, it makes the assumption that there are unjustified inequalities which those on the right see as sacred or inviolable or natural or inevitable and that these should be reduced or abolished.
Consider some of the political ideologies we now refer to as leftist: socialism, radical feminism, and anti-racism. The three of them share a commitment to eradicating some system of power that is deemed to be unequal and hence unjust—respectively wealth, gender, and racial inequality.
leftists derive more egalitarian policy prescriptions from their view of equality than conservatives do, even if both can agree that all humans are of equal moral worth.
this analysis of the left/right split works best at the level of theory, as an ideal-type representation of both camps. The left claims to fight on behalf of equality, while the right claims to oppose the left and fight on behalf of individual freedom, or of social order, or some other value different from equality. In practice, both sides often fail to live up to their ideals; sometimes they even betray them entirely.
Across both time and space, leftists have sought to promote some strong version of equality, while rightists have sought to defeat the left and defend some other primary value.
Theories are helpful to the extent that they explain certain phenomena, and the left/right political spectrum does explain two of the main political-philosophic camps in modern history: those whose highest value is equality, and those whose highest value is both different from equality and, in their view, at odds with it.
Ron DeSantis is running for president.
"Even a cursory dip into the statistics of social and economic well-being reveals that Florida falls short in almost any measure that matters to the lives of its citizens. More than four years into the DeSantis governorship, Florida continues to languish toward the bottom of state rankings assessing the quality of health care, school funding, long-term elder care, and other areas key to a successful society," Kleinknecht said. Teacher salaries are among the lowest, unemployment benefits are stingier than any other state’s, and wage theft flourishes.
Tears of the Kingdom’s bridge physics are impressive - Polygon
“There is a problem within the games industry where we don’t value institutional knowledge,” Moon said. “Companies will prioritize bringing someone from outside rather than keeping their junior or mid-level developers and training them up. We are shooting ourselves in the foot by not valuing that institutional knowledge. You can really see it in Tears of the Kingdom. It’s an advancement of what made Breath of the Wild special.”
Just found out this "straight" older man I've been topping is massively anti-LGBT
PolitiFact - Fact-checking Ron DeSantis' 2024 presidential campaign kickoff on Twitter Spaces with Elon Musk
Critical race theory is a broad set of ideas about systemic bias and privilege. The theory, which has existed in academia for decades, holds that racism is part of a broader pattern in America: It is woven into laws, and it shows up in who gets a job interview, the sorts of home loans people are offered, how they are treated by police, and other facets of daily life large and small
Detroit is Techno City, and techno is Black
In Praise of Idleness, by Bertrand Russell | Harper's Magazine
Originally written in 1932! From the Harper's Magazine archives.
I believed all that I was told and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.
what a man earns he usually spends, and in spending he gives employment. As long as a man spends his income he puts just as much bread into people’s mouths in spending as he takes out of other people’s mouths in earning. The real villain, from this point of view, is the man who saves. If he merely puts his savings in a stocking, like the proverbial French peasant, it is obvious that they do not give employment. If he invests his savings the matter is less obvious, and different cases arise.
In view of the fact that the bulk of the expenditure of most civilized governments consists in payments for past wars and preparation for future wars, the man who lends his money to a government is in the same position as the bad men in Shakespeare who hire murderers. The net result of the man’s economical habits is to increase the armed forces of the State to which he lends his savings. Obviously it would be better if he spent the money, even if he spent it on drink or gambling.
In these days, however, no one will deny that most enterprises fail. That means that a large amount of human labor, which might have been devoted to producing something which could be enjoyed, was expended on producing machines which, when produced, lay idle and did no good to anyone.
If he spent his money, say, in giving parties for his friends, they (we may hope) would get pleasure, and so would all those on whom he spent money, such as the butcher, the baker, and the bootlegger. But if he spends it (let us say) upon laying down rails for surface cars in some place where surface cars turn out to be not wanted, he has diverted a mass of labor into channels where it gives pleasure to no one
Leveraging ChatGPT as a PM: part I (designing A/B experiments)
Advanced ChatGPT: Full Guide
Making Our Hearts Sing - Discussion on Hacker News
A lot of people see software as a list of features, hardware as a list of specs. But when you think about how much time we spend with these things, maybe they just aren’t that utilitarian. We think of buildings not just as volumes of conditioned air — but also as something architected, as something that can have a profound effect on how you feel, something that can have value in itself (historical buildings and such).