I’ve become increasingly disturbed by tech industry focus on the home user space. It’s a bit of cognitive dissonance, being a home user myself. Gaming has always been a popular driver in the segment. Seems lately it might be the only one. VR has partnered with tech and gaming to create an entire industry ecosystem that keeps things dumbed-down and people safely ensconced in self-absorbed cocoons.
“What would it be like if other social goals were afforded the same leeway and endless hype cycles we give to VR?”
I became a fan of his only recently, and haven’t scratched the surface in reading his work yet. Probably never will. His is one of those few legacies truly larger than life.
Professor Gene Parker on campus, May 18, 2017. (Photo by Jean Lachat)
He was waiting for Webb’s 1st images. Not to worry, Eugene – she’s up and running.
Not exactly an update per se, but more of a background piece. This is why NASA and the space programs are so important. New technology is rarely limited to one application or industry. This is just another in a long list of great examples of space programs enabling terrestrial miracles.
Light is light, here on earth, as it is in heaven.
Einstein had a trick or two up his sleeve. A few weeks ago I posted a little screed about how I viewed Twitter’s posting policies, based on a long-running analysis of personally-provided hate speech. Those conclusions about how social media drives it’s revenue numbers, now get backed up by the Meta™ monster, previously known as Facebook, once again. The interesting thing this time is, who’s pointing the finger:
That’s right: DIE mutherfuckers!
Having cheated the grim reaper more than my fair share of times over the years, I can tell you with absolute certainty, there are far too many alive today who believe their life is somehow more important than somebody else’s. We all get to talk about it online these days, but guess who decides the rightness or wrongness of any of it?
The previous post alluded to how the social media industry protects and fuels their business enabling entertainers to scrape money off the bottom of the Internet trashcan. The problem with all these money-for-nothing schemes is an irreconcilable imbalance between the number of people going after easy, legal online money and the overall supply of it in viewer’s pockets. It’s a really big game in the good ‘ol US of A: Make it Internet easy and cheap, grab the gold and keep them coming back.
Supply and demand concepts apply to all sorts of things in the economic sphere. Americans seem to have plenty to waste on entertainment, so the demand is insatiable. The scam/grift squeeze moves up to middle management in high-speed digital communications entertainment these days. Now every Tom, Dick and Harry is doing a podcast about everything imaginable and most every broadcast outlet streams Youtube™ channels sucking up advert pennies around the clock. That’s just the news and infotainment crap.
Streaming services are little removed from last century coal company Pinkerton’s pushing striking miners off the tracks by force when it comes to the big players like musicians and Hollywood types. You wanna work here, you gotta shop at the company store. They just do it with a keyboard nowadays. Kanye’s trying to fight back, oblivious to the fact that he is just as fucked as everybody else here in Corporate America.
Good luck, but I don’t think the Internet is going away any time soon.
It’s just another one of the Big Tech Capitalist Social Control networks. Religion falling out of favor in that vein recently needs help! Have you heard the Trump cult is trying to start a new social media platform of it’s own? It’s gonna be hard gettin’ this shyt done these days without one. Religion and Social Media have become almost interchangeable thermostats in the context of today’s political heat. The levers of power are in government, and the adjustment knobs have moved to social media.
Look at the posting rules for Facebook, Twitter™, Youtube, whatever. They all say pretty much the same things. The usual anti-social behavior surrounding things like hate speech, threats of violence, etc. are of course, strictly prohibited. But their devil is in the details, and how those rules are interpreted, applied and enforced in entirely arbitrary ways to enable censorship, narrative control and maximum monetization.
My entire Twitter™ history is on record here, for all to see – not just the spooks, deciding what they do and don’t like as it might relate to their revenue numbers. I spent almost two years hurling depraved insults at every MAGA/Conservative/Repuglican target, for any random reason coming to my attention, on a more than weekly basis, up to and including the highest government officials, sports celebrities, commoners, anybody smelling repug or covidiot, to me. It’s all right there.
A few missteps with death suggestions garnered deserved 24-hour lock discipline during the course of those 2 years and 130-some tweets. But the only time it was considered serious enough for more time and ultimately a permanent suspension was when the targets were entertainment industry people. This is the algorithm cash-flow area where the bottom feeders generating the most money-for-nothing dwell. Those two tweets (Weiss and Piro) were not even all that salacious or evil. But they hit the big ad$ followings.
It’s been well known ever since Spraytan Stalin started governing by tweet, celebrities and high-ranking politicians enjoyed special media moderation status, for obviou$ rea$on$. Too bad we come to find out some tend towards the less than average intelligence group. So have fun with that social media folks! Just remember alot of what you see there is well prepared and curated for you.
Free speech is fine, as long as it doesn’t reflect badly on the bottom line.
It’ll be awhile yet before we start real ops. In the meantime I stumbled across this Q&A piece doing an excellent job de-mystifying alot of the science tech on this thing.
-7°K or it gets noisy.
James Webb Space Telescope has locked onto guide star in crucial milestone.
Can we get Zuckerboy to develop a real bubble? Convince everybody to use them and we’ll have Covid and every conceivable new mutant already beat! Now when we gonna get the Meta Bubble Protest goin’?! Freedom in the Metaverse!!
“And as Meta’s Andrew Bosworth reportedly acknowledged in a memo last year, moderating the “toxic environment” in virtual reality “at any meaningful scale is practically impossible.”
Good, bad or otherwise, they are at the root of all goings on, good, bad or otherwise. New modes of communication supporting our evolving high-tech society have challenged accepted norms of human behavior, resulting in the currently unacceptable state of online interaction.
Spotify now forms the communication battle lines between truth and falsehood in the malleable minds of viewers and stakeholders everywhere. The problem is not just “Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives.” as Mitchel opines. Rather, so-called responsible celebrities with followers who believe them, deliberately tell lies and spread misinformation. That’s not just irresponsible. It is dishonest, anti-social and wholly abhorrent. The only reason they do it is to improves their own social and/or political standing with likes, re-tweets, followers, marketing money and all the associated bullshit that goes along with sensational social media – at the expense of public health! The scary part to me is whether or not they actually believe this shyt themselves! Who knows!? Vaxxed politicians feigning privacy rights only further illustrates the hypocrisy.
As usual, it’s just a new angle on an old issue. The danger in communications mediums nowadays is they have become ubiquitous and fast. It’s everywhere, everybody has a cellphone and there is no throttle or filter. The conservatives learned this first in their rush to exploit an untenable political situation. The gatekeepers chose to cash in, rather than modulate.
Too much truth has always been bad for conservative politicians. Now they have an effective means of overwriting it in etch-a-sketch Facebook™ minds.
Fuck Joe Rogan and his selfish, misinformed egotistical, fuckwit podcast.
This is what I’m talking about. There certainly is no dearth of depressing political news to process, but occasionally I find hope in the young folks coming up in the system. Every so often I see one of these young ladies doing the STEM thing in amazingly impressive fashion and feel less pessimistic. Katie Melbourne is on a long trajectory to success of the highest order.
To bend another tired old saw, opinions are like assholes – everybody has one. I’m pretty sure judges are the only ones who get paid by the government for theirs. So what happens when a whole lot of amateur opinion holders share dangerously misinformed ideas?
I remember on the Ikonos gig how everybody was always worried about how long it would last. Most were probably worried more about their jobs than the spacecraft. Turned out we had plenty of fuel. The less-than-perfectly-crafted reaction wheels eventually doomed it. Looks like Webb also has plenty of fuel to work with, going forward.
Those words have always been met with joyous anticipation for military members everywhere. This particular deployment will happen only once, marking an auspicious new beginning for space exploration.
