What a thumbnail

I see where you’re coming from and I actually don’t disagree: the world is shit in many ways and effective communication about it will naturally bum us out, make us anxious, or straight-up depress us.

However, we do have plenty of evidence that surveillance capitalist social media itself is responsible for declines in happiness. We understand the mechanism: the algorithm. The algorithm plays with people’s insecurities to make them anxious and keep them hooked on the apps. This is well understood at least since the late 2010s.

You can check out Netflix’s Social Dilemma, the Center for Humane Technology, Tristan Harris, or Jaron Lanier. In fact, they are the reason I quit surveillance capitalism and I’m on Lemmy.

Oh. I think he meant that you’re probably fun at parties. Which also makes me fun at parties. Come to think of it, you and I could go together to the party. Matching hats? <3

I agree that doing less can achieve certain goals.

I guess it depends on what your goal is.

If you want to avoid getting glued to the screen and being influenced by advertisements, your recommendations are spot on.

However, if you want to make it costlier for surveillance capitalism to entrance everyone, then other options might make more sense.

I agree with you! There’s a layer of irony.

A response is in! :)

Doesn’t Flash just wanna cruise sometimes? Also, it’s probably great after workouts

I loved this article.

It explains the day-to-day mechanisms of Epstein’s systematic sexual abuse machine. But it doesn’t stick with the superficial facts and gut reactions. Instead, it looks at the facts in human terms, in terms of discourse analysis, in terms of identities, in terms of how the interactions happened.

This may sound insensitive, but I think this is my favorite piece of media I’ve seen on the whole Epstein sexual abuse machine.

Thanks for sharing it

A lot of comments here assume the research is to scam people. But if we want to understand Adobe’s research, I think it’s important to keep some things in mind.

If you’re an expert in the field of computer graphics, you probably find it thrilling to be surrounded by like-minded people, surrounded by people as skilled as you or even more skilled. This is something that Adobe understands. That is why Adobe invests in hiring bright minds to do research.

Is Adobe going to use this research to create extractive products? You bet! But the research itself is open to anyone.

This is similar to how Bell Labs is a corporation and yet it gave us innovations like transistors, Unix, and languages like C and S.

In general, if you’re at the bleeding edge of your field, it’s harder to find places and communities that are enabling and motivating for your work. That is why scientists like Galileo or Kepler would work for rich patrons: the patrons would give them access to money and connections that enabled the scientific work. This is not to say that this arrangement is perfect, but it reflects the historically-grounded decisions that people often choose to take.

Whether we like it or not, today’s rich patrons are corporations (and nation states). And those are the places that today’s bright minds often choose to go to so that these bright minds stay in the bleeding edge.

Of course, I don’t want to minimize the fact that Adobe is scummy and scammy. I just want to distinguish between patrons/capitalists and bright minds. They are motivated by different things. Basically, one wants profits and the other wants to advance their field.

I think the challenge ahead of us is how to minimize things like scummy corporate behavior and how to maximize bleeding edge research. Here are some potential solutions that I like: open source and libre software, open-access scientific journals, the entrepreneurial state, and mission economies.

https://youtu.be/uBGY9-GaSdo

https://youtu.be/qtOkktTNs-k

TikTok :)

I’d like this poll to be representative. But these poll aggregators tell a different story:

• https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
• https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-silver-bulletin

I haven’t read your blog post, but I agree with your comment.

Unfortunately, Scrum is often misused. Why? Often, I think people don’t understand the problems that Scrum is trying to solve. So people implement Scrum poorly. And, when evaluation time comes, they blame everything but their lack of knowledge and skill regarding Scrum.

But Scrum is actually a framework to help you solve very common problems.

If you understand that, then Scrum becomes useful.

There’s a set of problems that teams will always have to deal with: how to choose what to work on, how to coordinate, how to know when something is done, how to see if your work actually solves the problems you’re trying to solve, how to deal with task-switching costs, how to deal with cognitive load, how to deal with complexity…

And those problems can be solved with Scrum. Or Kanban. Or any other Agile way of working.

What’s important is that it works.

Thanks for pointing that out. Indeed the goal is to make a fair comparison. Here’s a better image:

I agree with you and think it’s worthwhile to critically evaluate fonts.

So what happens if we evaluate cursive font? Well, for most people, loopy cursive is hard to read.

To understand why loopy cursive is problematic, here’s an excerpt from two experts on handwriting:

Conventional looped cursive has not held up to modern life and is being abandoned by most adults, because

• Its decorative loops and excessive joins obscure visual cues,
• It loses legibility when written quickly,
• It doesn’t reflect the writing we see in type or on screen, and
• 100% joined writing is typically slower and no more legible than writing that joins most, but not all letters.

So loopy cursive sucks, but does that mean that we should straight up ditch cursive altogether? Are there fonts that are quick to write and legible? Turns out, those same experts built a handwriting system, the Getty-Dubay system. Their writing system does not seek to “look pretty and fancy-pants” (to quote you). Instead, their writing system tries to “communicate clearly” (to quote you again). They built something logical and pragmatic.

How can you be sure of what I’m saying? Well, you be the judge!

Here’s a picture of the Getty-Dubay fonts, both print and cursive:

Here’s a comparison of different cursive fonts:

If you want more information, here’s a resource you can check out: https://handwritingsuccess.com/why-cursive/

So yeah, the way I see it, loopy cursive is hell, and italic-based cursive is the best of both worlds: italic-based cursive is fast to write and easy to read.

Totally! I really like that the article explains that Trump doesn’t lie, but he bullshits. Apparently the reason is that lying means the liar knows what’s true, while a bullshitter doesn’t care if the bullshit is true or false. This is one of the reasons Trump is unique.

I’m glad you’ve seen positive results with physical therapy.

I’d argue that a good physical therapist will understand the cause of the injury, so that they make a good treatment plan. Similarly, a good (contextual) behavior analyst will understand the causes for their patients’ difficulties, so that they can make a good treatment plan. When you know where you’re standing, it’s easier to move forward. That is why evaluation is crucial in both physical therapy and programs like AIM and PEAK.

Or we can take the process-based approach, where we stop caring about defining boxes perfectly and we start caring about patterns of thoughts and behaviors. This may sound woowoo or without empirical basis, but some of the most successful programs for verbal autism are based on these ideas, the AIM and PEAK programs.