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People are taking issue with the claim that media apparatuses are controlled by Capital, but its literally true. The profit motive requires any media source to optimize based on what is profitable while also handing over editorial control to the owners of these media companies.If the main sponsor of a small town paper does something egregious, is it in the paper's interest to report on that if it means losing their funding? Of course not. That is the mechanism for control of media. Like social media censorship for ad placement, any media falls victim to the preferences of their patrons.

The language issues are indicative of the bigger problem facing the AI Pin, ChatGPT, and frankly, every other AI product out there: you can’t see how it works, so it’s impossible to figure out how to use it. AI boosters say that’s the point, that the tech just works and you shouldn’t have to know how to use it, but oh boy, is that not the world we live in. Meanwhile, our phones are constant feedback machines — colored buttons telling us what to tap, instant activity every time we touch or pinch or scroll. You can see your options and what happens when you pick one. With AI, you don’t get any of that. Using the AI Pin feels like wishing on a star: you just close your eyes and hope for the best. Most of the time, nothing happens.

I think the newest comfort is not exactly a relationship with Jesus Christ as Lord but the desire for routine, structure, rules, and the quiet, wholesome aesthetic of being church goers.

I really appreciate your input; there's a difference between Christianity and Churchianity. Hard to articulate, but can be felt quite obviously once you're in the faith

Design Engineers tend to work on products and systems that involve adapting and using complex scientific and mathematical techniques. In essence, they work on high technical challenges that requires strong design consideration

tech has a tendency to consolidate roles. Interaction Designers, UX Designers, UI Designers, and Visual Designers became Product Designers. Graphic Designers, Illustrators, Communications Designers, and Marketing Designers became Brand Designers.

Design Engineers have deep knowledge in technological systems while scaling interface quality. They naturally fit in design crit or reviewing code with engineering.

three core areas Design Engineering is the top candidate for leading: product architecture, design infrastructure, and 0-1 R&D.

Design Engineers have the right skills to explore aspects such as information architecture of a product and also understand the technical logic of how such things function.

contributing to component libraries, building internal tools to increase efficiency, or prototyping new patterns and interactions to inform the future of their software.

When you’re dealing with an interaction with a Language Server Protocol (LSP) or layout engine for a site builder, you have to build the prototype in code.

Exploring new product directions can be a need for an early stage company needing to pivot in direction or an established company looking for new growth opportunities.

It’s uncertain if every company needs a Design Engineer. However, I am confident authoring environments or work with complex interactions/ data need Design Engineers. Snap, Retool, Replit, Uber, Square, Open AI, and The Browser Company are a few examples of companies that have Design Engineers on their software teams.

The New Yorker contains empty frames that can be filled by whatever a series of unknown adtech companies decide is the best fit for me based on the slice of my browsing history they collect, like little spies with snippets of information. If it were a direct partnership to share advertising slots, at least we could imply that a reader of both may see them as similarly trustworthy organizations, given that they read both. But this is not a decision between the New Yorker and the Times. There may be a dozen other companies involved in selecting the ad, most of which a typical user has never heard of. How much do you, reader, trust Adara, Dataxu, GumGum, MadHive, Operative, SRAX, Strossle, TelMar, or Vertoz?

As important as it is for users to confirm who is collecting their data and for what purpose, it is more important that there are limits on the use and distribution of collected information. This sea of data is simply too much to keep track of.

Bloomberg reporters are evaluated and receive bonuses tied to reporting market-moving news. They’re incentivized financially to make mountains out of molehills, and craters out of divots, to maximize the immediate effect of their reporting on stock prices. And Bloomberg appends these stock price movements right there in their reports, to drive home the notion that Bloomberg publishes market-moving news, so maybe you too should spend over $2,000 per month on a Bloomberg Terminal so that you can receive news reports from Bloomberg minutes before the general public, and buy, sell, and short stocks based on that news

kjellsbells 33 minutes ago | next [–] I've often wondered if the traditions around warfare that we read about in ancient classics like the Iliad were intended to reduce PTSD. For example, after every military action, there are always games and feasts, with a lot of communal time with fellow survivors and some "play re-enactment" like boxing matches or running races. The soldiers never, ever just demobilize and go home to their homesteads. Mental phenomena like disturbing dreams are taken seriously (albeit through the lens of the religious practice of the time) and openly discussed.

when they aren’t hallucinating, what they’re capable of is still impressive, though it’s a bit like watching a dog walk around on two legs — fun, but not exactly an efficient way to get around.

It was my brother, the lawyer, who pointed out that what I had experienced sounded a lot like a coerced confession. “I read enough transcripts of bad interrogations in law school to understand that anyone can be convinced that they have a very narrow set of terrible options,” he said. When I posed this theory to Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies coerced confessions, he agreed.

“If someone is trying to get you to be compliant, they do it incrementally, in a series of small steps that take you farther and farther from what you know to be true,” he said. “It’s not about breaking the will. They were altering the sense of reality.” And when you haven’t done anything wrong, the risk of cooperating feels minimal, he added. An innocent person thinks everything will get sorted out. It also mattered that I was kept on the phone for so long. People start to break down cognitively after a few hours of interrogation. “At that point, they’re not thinking straight. They feel the need to put an end to the situation at all costs,” Kassin said.

Imagine being able to see through walls, or to understand the strength of radio waves emanating from you Wi-Fi router. You'll be able to see which piece of furniture or wall is blocking the signal from getting a reliable connection to that one device in your home constantly getting disconnected.

Imagine never losing your keys or wallet ever again. Like a hint in a video game, the headset will simply highlight its exact location in the house for you through the walls.

Not many people realize Vision Pro’s visual augmentation in passthrough mode is actually a step backward from human vision in many respects. Perhaps that’s part of the reason so many people greet this technology as dystopian? After all, who wants to volunteer to have degraded eyes on the real world? Even for floating windows or the promise of cool virtual worlds to visit, that’s a tall order

Android phones still don’t have this effect. It’s not because they don’t have high-enough frame rates or low-enough latency for touch input. It’s just that the math is off for putting everything together to create the illusion of direct manipulation. The physics aren’t quite right. It’s no longer about hardware specs (although that was a factor working against Android in the early years). It’s about craftsmanship

There are a lot of ideas in the Vision Pro, and they’re all executed with the kind of thoughtful intention that few other companies can ever deliver at all, let alone on the first iteration. But the shocking thing is that Apple may have inadvertently revealed that some of these core ideas are actually dead ends — that they can’t ever be executed well enough to become mainstream. This is the best video passthrough headset ever made, and that might mean camera-based mixed reality passthrough could just be a road to nowhere. This is the best hand- and eye-tracking ever, and it feels like the mouse, keyboard, and touchscreen are going to remain undefeated for years to come. There is so much technology in this thing that feels like magic when it works and frustrates you completely when it doesn’t.

seriously, some of the best cinema is in pornography. If you ignore the money shots, like Bijou by Wakefield Poole, it’s psychedelic gay porn, and it’s just remarkable. It’s interesting because, starting off with the ’90s, there was a pantheon, and there still is a pantheon, so Bergman and Fassbinder, they were at the top of the National Film Theater, as it was called back then, which showed Italian horror, it was on the trash heap. And now, of course, it’s high up because of Mr Luca and his film. So I’m waiting for pornography to get to that, maybe he’ll do a remake of Bijou, I don’t know. I always enjoyed films which were seen as disreputable. There was always okay, this is interesting, let’s look for the trash. I think part of the filmmaker’s job is to be a bit like a vulture, a scavenger, to find things that people would turn their noses up at. So I think you can find great filmmaking anywhere.

Yes, it's something you'll need to cure, but while they're occurring, it's much like being sick with a cold. You don't get mad at yourself for sneezing, so you shouldn't try to fight your thoughts or see them as a bad part of your personality while you're still dealing with your disorder.

Acceptance is crucial. These thoughts are not in your control, and not something you should expect to control. Learn to accept that they're a natural part of the disorder and that when you treat your disorder you'll have fewer of these thoughts.

Now researchers report that they have used artificial intelligence to discover a new class of antibiotic candidates. A team at the laboratory of James Collins of the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University used a type of AI known as deep learning to screen millions of compounds for antibiotic activity. They then tested 283 promising compounds in mice and found several that were effective against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant enterococci—some of the most stubbornly hard-to-kill pathogens. Unlike a typical AI model, which operates as an inscrutable “black box,” it was possible to follow this model’s reasoning and understand the biochemistry behind it.

Siri also had a cumbersome design that made it time-consuming to add new features, said Mr. Burkey, who was given the job of improving Siri in 2014. Siri’s database contains a gigantic list of words, including the names of musical artists and locations like restaurants, in nearly two dozen languages.That made it “one big snowball,” he said. If someone wanted to add a word to Siri’s database, he added, “it goes in one big pile.”So seemingly simple updates, like adding some new phrases to the data set, would require rebuilding the entire database, which could take up to six weeks, Mr. Burkey said. Adding more complex features like new search tools could take nearly a year. That meant there was no path for Siri to become a creative assistant like ChatGPT, he said.

Resist being context-collapsed to a one-dimensional being.

Technologists intervene in our present realities and forge the future, and in doing so, choose how best to model the world and impress their will upon it. The public must insist that technologists are responsible for thinking about the human implications of their work.

You will find in every case that these technologies were only possible because of active decisions taken by governments, corporations, and individuals. They never just “happened”, whatever that might mean. People make history happen, and by reading history, you can see yourself as one of those people. What better motivation could there be for working to make things happen yourself?

The umwelt theory states that the mind and the world are inseparable because it is the mind that interprets the world for the organism. Because of the individuality and uniqueness of the history of every single organism, the umwelten of different organisms differ.

Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time. Having seen Google at its best, I find this new reality depressing.

The Ai Pin makes the same conceptual mistake behind all the assistants that preceded it: to treat all people as if they were so utterly helpless and clueless to manage even basic stuff. And to grossly miscalculate which tasks people find tedious and willing to delegate to a machine. These assistants want to assist with stuff people have no problem doing themselves, and they do so through an interaction model that ultimately makes things more awkward, impractical, and longer to accomplish. (On the other hand, it’s a good interaction model for people who have different types of motoric or visual disabilities and need assistance when sending and receiving messages, collecting information, etc.).

Instead there’s this urge to create The Next Big Thing that will be a hit for everyone, everywhere. And to create it in one fell swoop, skipping all the steps that might help you really get there.

Once you come to the realization/acceptance that no one – not even the interested, motivated, and committed — has the kind of focused attention available for your thing that you assume they have, you will have a much better chance of capturing and sustaining any of it at all.

Ask as few actions of your audience as possible, and provide as little information to support those actions as possible. Everything else that you could put on your screen is a distraction.

I like to break down reality into different layers. There’s physical reality, biological reality, social reality, and emotional reality.

“Physical reality” includes not just abstract theories about physics but also our embodied intuitions of how the physical world works, e.g. that I can’t walk through a wall, travel backwards in time, or move clouds with my mind. These are assumptions I need not test repeatedly to see whether they’re still true

It’s safe to assume that you are going to age and die and that you need food and water to survive. But the parameters can be tuned quite a bit—some people get by with extreme fasting or very little sleep, and plenty of people think we’ll eventually cure aging, cancer, and other biological problems.

Social and emotional reality are the most malleable, and I think these are the areas where people take too many things for granted.

Remember that all of our rules, laws, and social conventions are made up. Even the literal concept of a corridor is something that a guy came up with in 1597.

it’s not just that there are exceptions to the pattern, it’s that the pattern applies to people in the past, and social reality is always changing. In particular, social reality is changing more quickly than ever because of the internet. Most people still don’t appreciate how much power the internet gives us: for accessing information, for sharing ideas, for connecting with people who share your interests and goals.

Examples of social realities that people take for granted but which are subject to change (and have already changed a lot): I need to go to college in order to have a well-paying career I need to pay for a course in order to learn about X The broadest form of this is “I need permission from someone with authority in order to do what I want to do”. I guess we can be forgiven for believing this, since this is what elementary school looked like for many of us: you had to get a hall pass in order to leave the classroom to drink water. So of course you’ll believe that “getting permission” is the default mode of navigating the world.

Tumblr has attempted a variety of new monetization strategies, including Live, a sponsored post feature called Blaze, an ad-free subscription, and a paid content feature called Post Plus. Their success has apparently been mixed. Mullenweg called Post Plus the subject of a viral “misinformation” campaign that suggested monetizing fan content could lead to lawsuits, producing a backlash that included — Mullenweg said — threats against creators who used it. “Since then we’ve gotten better at managing attacks and threats, with new tools and a bigger Trust & Safety team, but Post Plus never recovered,” he said.

it seems that by the time men begin dating, they are relatively “limited in their ability and willingness to be fully emotionally present and available,” he said.Navigating interpersonal relationships in a time of evolving gender norms and expectations “requires a level of emotional sensitivity that I think some men probably just lack, or they don’t have the experience,” he added. He had recently read about a high school creative writing assignment in which boys and girls were asked to imagine a day from the perspective of the opposite sex. While girls wrote detailed essays showing they had already spent significant time thinking about the subject, many boys simply refused to do the exercise or did so resentfully. Mr. Cox likened that to heterosexual relationships today: “The girls do extra, and the boys do little or nothing.”