Wait, you read a CEO statement and believed her? Watch as everything she said turns out to be false. This is an old corporate tactic, put women in power positions just to push them under a bus. Her job is to kill Xbox and take the fall. Microsoft doesn’t want a gaming division anymore. This is why all they do is shutdown studios. They only got in because they feared Sony consoles would compete as cheap computers on the corporate market. It was never meant to go this far.

Oh boy, they weren’t fuzzy. Some film outclass the clarity and sharpness of modern OLED, even when it was for B category low budget movies, just that most people watched a 4 week old piece of film in bumfuck middle of nowhere cinema. With a scratched up and badly calibrated focus lens and dirty and deteriorated film over a dirty screen.

Anyways, the biggest problem that physical media solves is not the number of pixels, but the bitrate. Tons of information, specially about color, is lost to streaming compression. Pixel density equation means that the quality of what you see is rarely distinguishable between 1080p, 2k and 4k, depending on how far away you sit from the screen and how big it is. For the typical seating accommodation at home and commercial theaters, you won’t notice a significant change within FHD and UHD. However, you can definitely tell the difference between the 10Mbps 4k (down to as little as 2Mbps if your connection sucks) that you get from Netflix¹ and the steady 32Mbps that Blu-ray can give you.

¹: BTW, it doesn’t matter how fast your internet connection is, the data transferred can get to you at as high speed as you want, but the bitrate of the video file inside the container that the streaming services give you is usually hard capped rather low anyway.

The proponent is a rather successful and rational investor. This was satire, meant to evoke the idea that, if AI was all that the con men are selling, it would collapse the economy. It is not and everyone knows it, but the point is to highlight the idiocy and try to wake up people to the absurdity. I see it akin to what “a modest proposal” was. To nudge the most radical AI ideologues into understanding the dead economy and ghost GDP concepts. If the economy becomes detached from human reality, it will crumble and collapse.

You know this saying in ICT: Everyone has a development environment, a lucky few also have a separate production environment.

I witnessed it first hand on IBM, three in the morning, troubleshooting a database problem for a big client. Engineer writes up a script to try and solve the issue, I was the systems operator. Tells me to just run it on the mainframe.

“Wait, was this tested at all?”

“Client authorized it, they just want the downtime gone. Send it.”

So I just ran an untested script that fundamentally changed everything on the production database, written by a sleep deprived engineer that just wanted to go back to sleep. Granted, it worked, that one engineer was an old rockstar who had been with the client for over a decade. But the next three weeks were dedicated to tiptoeing around the changes of this one script and testing everything, in production, to make sure that the solution was viable long term and it didn’t break anything unseen. We all knew better, but everyone agreed and did it anyways.

My problem with Spotify shuffle was that it always ended up throwing a similar order of songs. The same group of songs would end up in the same general position on the playlist every time. It’s not random, and it stands to reason that people doesn’t actually want real random order. But it was super obvious, noticeable and quite annoying to hit the same songs at the same time on your walk every single time. They even admitted publicly that their shuffle function sucks.

In what I’ve seen, the best masons are on construction sites planning the work before hand. The inexperienced and newby masons mix mortar and carry bricks around. The top elder guys lead the prep work planing when and where stuff needs to be for what is being built. But once the machine starts mixing the cement all those guys do is lay bricks.

They don’t shovel, they don’t mix mortar, they don’t carry materials. Just laying brick after brick until they run out of materials or the construction is done. It’s quite mesmerizing to see a good contractor working efficiently, rare but fascinating.

You have to be the worst scumbag on the planet if a patent troll looks decent standing next to you.

Traffic segregation, car free zones, public transport, lower speed limits, car size based taxing, stricter driver license conditions, three strike limitations, temporal license suspensions schemes, these are all measurements that would reduce car accidents just as much, and could be implemented within the next week anywhere at very low cost. It’s not a pipe dream, it’s a lack of political will.

It doesn’t take several billion dollars of R&D onto a tech that will never work outside of 1% of the road network and could actually not reduce cars accidents at all once it faces real world conditions.

If the goal is to reduce traffic accidents, this is the most expensive, slowest and inefficient way to do it.

EDIT: Autonomous driving will solve traffic and traffic deaths as much as EVs are going to solve global warning. They are plausible lies that techno oligarchs use to distract from the real causes of the problems they purport to solve and are actually just new money funnels for the oil industrial complex.

“We can’t stop killing children in the short term, so we are not gonnna do anything to stop the kid killing machine. To stop the kid killing machine would be a pipe dream. Instead, we have this automated machine that kills children, slower.”

That is a wild take, but the orphan crushing machine must keep churning, I suppose.

I can get you one better. There won’t be car accidents if there aren’t any cars. Car free cities, or walkable cities are preferable. We don’t need safer drivers, we need more public transport.

Apology for hitting kids is wild. An expansion of services will only raise frequency of accidents. Waymo only works in pristine infrastructure conditions. As it moves away from these conditions, accidents will rise. Then we will understand if these technology is actually better than human drivers.

First of all, I want to start by saying that as a psychologist I love when people correct me about things I’ve studied extensively. No better feeling.

That said. Yes, pareidolia and apophenia are related phenomena. However, the term apophenia is almost exclusively used in a psychiatric context (less so by economists and staticians). So, yes, Wikipedia can be and is often wrong. In this particular instance I can notice that the affirmation “Pareidolia is a type of apophenia involving the perception of images or sounds in random stimuli.” or “Pareidolia is a specific but common type of apophenia” as it appears today in the English article (only article to affirm such, it is not present in French, Spanish puts the affirmation into question with a ‘citation needed’, most other languages are stubs who link the articles together but without the affirmation) for apophenia, lacks any sort of source. They are related and we suspect they might come from the same underlying neural mechanisms, but they are distinctly different phenomena. To call one a type of the other is an epistemological error without any proper academic source to back it up.

I am, however, sure that in the context of internet discussions, my expertise is about as good as the perception of anyone who just learned about the word a few days ago.

Coincidentally, to believe adamantly, against any evidence or factual authority that pareidolia is apophenia might actually be classified as apophenia…

EDIT: Just noticed that one of the sources used by the wikipedia article quotes the wikipedia article to claim that apophenia is audio pareidolia. Ultimate circularity achieved. If the source is “Wikipedia said so”, you’ve lost the plot.

Exactly, they do believe it. It’s not a vague feeling that is kind of funny but they actually still know logically it isn’t true. For the person with apophenia, it is true. The gambler does believe in the pattern of the numbers and their luck is due to come. It is not a vague feeling, it is a belief that has overridden their contact with reality. It can be non pathological or sub clinical, as in, it doesn’t affect their day to day life and causes no suffering to themselves or others. But they absolutely believe it and behave accordingly to said belief.

It is a clinical term, it doesn’t describe a feeling. If you are not disconnected from reality you do not have apophenia. It can be sub clinical or non pathological, but it is not a vague feeling. It is a concrete belief. I’m sorry if I’m harsh with this. I just hate pop appropriation of psychological terms. They always end up distorted into tiktok garbage.

Depends, why do you believe you are seeing more often a particular word?

The reason defines whether it is apophenia or not. If you are delusional that it is an alien entity trying to communicate secret information to you in particular, by exposing you to a word more frequently, that’s apophenia. If you know it is the frequency illusion and just find it kinda funny how it feels, then it isn’t. Anyways, it is more often associated with the perception of patterns of causality in things that are random or banal. I’m of the opinion that this comic in particular is not a good representation of apophenia, other than the fact that the protagonist is certainly disconnected from reality.

Yeah, I don’t think you understand Calibre at all, because you are somehow annoyed by it. I get it. But there’s no e-reader on the market that supports Calibre. Quite the contrary, there’s a titanic effort from the Calibre team (it’s been several people since 2009) to reverse engineer support with every single e-reader and tablet in the market that should not be minimized. You’re also painting a picture as if somehow Calibre is the Windows of e-book and everyone hates it but is forced to use it, when in reality that is not at all the case. Yes, it has quirks and people have constructive criticisms, but calling a guy’s name “rough” is not positive criticism. Overall, most people appreciate and like Calibre for what it has achieved and enabled for readers all around the world.

Again, it’s fine if you don’t like it, don’t understand it, and don’t want to understand it. But that doesn’t excuse insulting a person who actively is making your petty life a bit easier and free from corporate control. It takes a very weird person to feel like commenting negatively on someone’s name is somehow appropriate, it’s bully attitude. If that is all the criticism you can bring to a discussion of software, save it for yourself and stop replying. You’re all over this thread complaining, completely unprovoked like a little wuss. No one is forcing you to use Calibre, it just so happen that no one has done anything better, as you yourself admitted in another comment.

Good, so if you know what needs to be fixed it should be easy for you to make a new alternative, with modern web UX, self-hosting in mind and NO quirks whatsoever.

Really, it’s so easy to insult those who are making solutions when you have never contributed at all. There’s constructive criticisms, but calling people who are fronting free labor for your benefit as nerd aliens is not it.

Was just going to comment the same thing. OpenAI has Theranos written all over its face.

Calibre is so old that it’s use case and architecture precedes the current popularity of self-hosting. It is as old as the premiere of the very first e-ink reader in 2006. It’s not obtuse or weird, it was just the way things were done 20 years ago. The problem is that adapting it to work as a self hosted app or even multi user sync requires rewritting all of its backend from scratch with fundamentally different principles and use cases in mind. And guess what? Everyone is way too lazy to face that massive undertaking. Thus the hobbled together solutions.

Fortunately, one way backup to a NAS works perfectly fine to keep libraries secure. It’s not this way out of caprice, and the Dev is definitely not an nerd alien.

There have been attempts to create modernized replacements for calibre. But they all fall through because, Calibre already does 99% of what they want to achieve. That one percent is covered by addons and shoddy workarounds? Yes. But that’s an effort to reward analysis any Dev is faced with. Calibre does much more than what the average user need, and they keep adding features. Because they’re not catering to one particular user but a community of a complex mix of users. Developing software is hard, rebuilding 20 years of features is daunting.

It’s OK, these stages are not supposed to be sequential. They can go through them in any order, and even cyclically return to other stages. Even full acceptance can be relapsed from time to time.

150 million, what?

Individual users, prompts, prompts per second, accounts, installs, subscriptions bought?

Numbers on their own have no meaning. This is still rubbish trying to cosplay as information. Active copilot users means nothing until explained how the number is calculated.