60 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2024
    1. Huntington is a small knit community, to where everybody knows everybody pretty much.

      But Huntington has 50k residents? It's the second most populous city in the state. It's not exactly a small town.

    1. the underlying principles of being a fan and the fanfiction community as a whole—that it’s supposed to be free

      People do more or less feel that way today, but that was not always the norm. In the past, fanzines and bound fan novels were routinely sold.

    2. hundreds of works of fanfiction

      Hundreds? More like thousands, and for Harry Potter and Star Wars, hundreds of thousands.

    3. rendered by fans who are simply obsessed with a series

      Authors of fanfic aren't necessarily 'obsessed' with a series. Some authors of fanfic haven't even seen or read the work they're writing a fic about--they might have come into contact with it through other fan works, for example. And plenty of people write fanfic for many different fandoms. They are probably not 'obsessed' with all of them--they're just writers.

    1. We could add to this the requirement that reaction qualifications, that is, qualifications that rely on the responses of customers, shouldn’t be given any weight if they rest upon customers’ prejudices about an appearance feature, where prejudices are generalisations or associations that aren’t sustained by the publicly available evidence.

      You don't want to put the law in charge of deciding whether people are pretty (even though that could be done reliably enough--"judgments of attractiveness [...] may well be enough to collect the data required for monitoring purposes"--but you do want to put the law in charge of deciding whether people's 'associations' are sufficiently "sustained by the publicly available evidence"? The latter is a way bigger minefield!

  2. Mar 2024
  3. Nov 2023
    1. Also, the original discussion concerned only non-administrative aspects of MUDding; people who might play MUDs to learn object-oriented programming, for example, are therefore not addressed by this paper.

      And so there is no category for people who play because they want to build something, which has become a popular component of games (Minecraft, Terraria, etc.).

  4. Aug 2023
    1. There is simply no reason to use an AI language model to generate recipes like this. It's easy enough to get a bunch of recipes in a machine-readable format and then just match the ones that share ingredients with the ones customers select. This is, I am sure, the approach taken by existing recipe sites that offer this feature.

      This is just a clear example of someone using AI in an application which did not need it. AI is the new blockchain.

  5. Jul 2023
    1. In non-fiction writing, Asimov particularly admired the writing style of Martin Gardner, and tried to emulate it in his own science books. On meeting Gardner for the first time in 1965, Asimov told him this, to which Gardner answered that he had based his own style on Asimov's.

      I am reminded of the story that the Mac was designed on a Cray, and the Cray was designed on a Mac.

  6. Jan 2023
    1. After carrying this song from computer to computer for years--decades!--I finally lost the file in The Great Hard Drive Crash a few years ago.

      Of course, by this point I've certainly memorized the song, so a little googling, and what do I find? It's a small world, after all.

      The original link is dead, but the wayback machine has both the linked page and the audio files archived.

  7. Apr 2022
    1. Even though he thought there were too many books to be read, and thought readers should share their findings by reporting to one another the gist of their studies, Emerson believed that reading a book was a private and solitary business. "All these books," he wrote, drawing up a list of "sacred" texts that included the Upanishads and the Pensees, "are the majestic expressions of the universal conscience, and are more to our daily purpose than this year's almanac or this day's newspaper. But they are for the closet, and are to be read on the bended knee. Their communications are not to be given or taken with the lips and the end of the tongue, but out of the glow of the cheek, and with the throbbing heart."

      From the essay "Books".

  8. Mar 2022
    1. This is something akin to fan fiction at an online appreciation site—the kind of site, it’s worth noting, where Fifty Shades of Grey got its start, before becoming the first book of pornography to make the bestseller list.

      I fear that millennials didn't invent pornography. Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin made the best-seller list in 1977 and stayed there for 35 weeks.

  9. Jan 2022
    1. In another study, for instance, Vohs and colleagues measured the extent to which a group of day laborers believed in free will, then examined their performance on the job by looking at their supervisor’s ratings. Those who believed more strongly that they were in control of their own actions showed up on time for work more frequently and were rated by supervisors as more capable. In fact, belief in free will turned out to be a better predictor of job performance than established measures such as self-professed work ethic.

      Could this not have gone the other direction, though? A person who is often subjected to forces outside his control which prevents him arriving at work on time might profess less belief in free will than one who--similarly through chance--succeeds at arriving on time for work. We are inclined to attribute our successes to our efforts and our failures to external causes, after all.

    2. Many scientists say that the American physiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1980s that we have no free will. It was already known that electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she, for example, moves her hand; Libet showed that this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move. The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.

      This could only demonstrate that there is no such thing as free will if a person is a distinct entity from her brain--as though the brain "decides for her" what she will do, while the "person" is merely carried along for the ride.

      That's absurd, of course. The brain is the person, or anyway the most substantial part of what we'd consider the person to be, so when your brain makes a decision, you are making that decision. If consciousness is a post-hoc reconstruction of mental processes, then so much for consciousness--and if your conception of free will depends on consciousness not looking like that, then so much for free will, but it doesn't have to be that way.

  10. Dec 2021
    1. The system focuses solely on action modelling, letting go of most classic categories pertaining to space, time and visual perspective commonly seen in game ontologies.

      These classic categories do have some value, though--they let you find a game based on a description, screenshot, or video--in principle, at least.

    1. Dr. Schildkraut’s research has suggested that even a relatively gentle lockdown drill can “slightly” decrease students’ sense of safety at school, she said. But she argued that the drills were necessary because adolescents who participated in them reported “feeling more prepared and more empowered,” she said. “It is better to have it and not need it, then need it and not have it.”

      The question, though, is whether the students in fact have anything of value, when they need it. When you're skydiving, a broken parachute isn't better than no parachute. But it's easier to notice that you have no parachute at all--and rectify it.

    1. If you can’t sit still in your home or workplace, go to the park or book a relaxing day at the spa. Ms. Dodgen-Magee encourages people to host boredom parties, during which a host invites over a few friends to … be bored together.

      This is weird. I guess the goal is to use the word boredom in a surprising way, but surprising isn't always good.

      Boredom isn't a positive state to be in. Wiktionary defines being bored as being "mildly annoyed and restless through having nothing to do", which sounds about right. The point of this article, I think, is exactly that we need not be bored just because we aren't working on some task. That we needn't feel guilty for taking downtime.

  11. Aug 2021
    1. break counter * 2;

      This seems to violate the rule stated previously that using a semicolon will cause an expression to become a statement and return no value.

  12. Apr 2021
    1. So you might ask, If these really smart philosophers can’t agree on what wisdom says, why should I pay them any attention? The answer is—because it’s the best shot you’ve got.

      The religious might argue that it is not, in fact, the best shot you've got. Or the scientists, for that matter.

    2. You don’t want simply to be at the mercy of ac-cident in your opinions—for your views to be decided by irrelevant matters such as whom you happen to know or where you were brought up. You want to believe for good reasons.

      Schoenfield2014 argues that it may be okay to believe for accidental reasons.

  13. Mar 2020
    1. Median household income in 1969 was about $68,000 in today's dollars (adjusted for inflation). Today, it's slightly lower, $64,000, even though there's been a rise in two-income families. But households were larger then. Per person, each of us has about 20 percent more income than a typical person did in 1969.

      About 30% dual-income in 1969 and about 50% in 2019. So in 1969, 1.3 incomes was $68k, and in 2019 1.5 incomes is $64k. So people are working more and earning less, but it's okay because they can't afford to have kids, anyway!

    2. A round trip New York–London air ticket cost $550 back then, about what it costs now.

      Everyday items like a roundtrip New York-London ticket are much cheaper. Exotic things like housing and education, on the other hand...

    3. Roe v. Wade
    4. home solar, solar power from photovoltaics and wind power

      Alternative energy, which boomers don't like as much as younger people do. Home solar is not popular with boomers, says Pew.

    5. And music.

      In 2019, charting musicians averaged about 30 years old.

    6. And movies.

      Written by, on average, not boomers.

    7. Our generation may have failed in the execution, but we did not fail in ambition.

      And the participation award goes to...

    8. It's taken a lot of work. The EPA's founding in 1970. 1972's Clean Water Act. The Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter in 1972. 1980's Superfund law. 1987's Montreal Protocol (banning chlorofluorocarbons).

      "...the 1992 Kyoto Protocol (that we pulled out of)."

    9. Millennials face some very serious environmental issues—the two warmest years in history are 2016 and 2019; there are 330 billion pounds of plastic garbage floating in our oceans; and an estimated 200 species go extinct every single day. Very little is being done about it because of politics.

      "...because of boomer politicians."

    10. In 1981, a young black man was lynched in Mobile, Alabama, by the Ku Klux Klan.

      "...by boomers."

    11. The only number that's really up is rape, which has more than doubled to 420 per million. But that jump needs some context. Back in 1969, less than one-third of rapes perpetrated by people known to the victim were reported. Now that number has more than doubled. Survivors may also be better able to identify assaults as crimes due to cultural changes like the #MeToo movement, the National Sexual Violence Resource Center has noted. So at least some of the increase may be because we're counting better.

      "More rapists, too! The official statistics aren't everything!"

    12. In 1969, the murder rate was about 70 people per million vs. 50 now. The burglary rate was 9,841 vs. 3,760 now, a 62 percent drop.

      "You can tell we were the greatest generation because we had so many more criminals!"

    13. What about the fact that boomers get an outsized proportion of government benefits such as Social Security and Medicare, what some call boomer socialism? Well, that's true—but would millennials rather we went back to the old system where the older generation lived with their adult kids who cared for them? Didn't think so.

      Or, shorter: "that's true".

    14. We dealt with those crises and cleaned up some of the messes previous generations had left us, like depletion of the ozone layer and the nicotine epidemic.

      If you're going to take credit for everything that happened since 1960, then you should also be taking the blame for ozone depletion.

    15. Student loans? Student loan debt is $1.6 trillion. Over the next 30 years, boomers will pass down $68 trillion as part of the "Great Wealth Transfer." That should cover it for many borrowers (the timing may suck, though).

      On the other hand, the people who are in line to get $68 trillion in inheritances are probably largely not the ones carrying crushing student loan debt.

    16. The Great Recession? Nothing compared with the Great Depression (although the way the markets have been behaving lately, you may get there yet).

      The Great Depression was decades before boomers were born, though.

  14. Jan 2020
    1. Mr. Trump authorized the killing at about 5 p.m. on Thursday, officials said.

      Describing it as "the killing" leaves little question of the opinion of the authors.

  15. Mar 2019
    1. (at least right now)

      This is very worrying. For a document that lays out how bad it is if your personal knowledge repository must rely on some company's existence to conclude with the implication that in the future the tool won't work in offline mode is distressing.

  16. Apr 2018
    1. TheVflagmaybedirectlyresetbymeansoftheCLV(clearoverflow)instruction.Oddly,thereisnoequivalentinstructiontosettheflag.OnespecialfeatureoftheVflag:onsome650xchips,theVflagcanbesetbyhardware.Thereisapinonthechipthatcanbe usedsothatanexternallogicsignalwilltriggertheVflag.

      What is the use of this feature?

    Annotators

    1. And even though this seems to violate all sorts of cherished physical assumptions, Einstein needn’t move over – relativity isn’t called into question, because only a portion of the signal is affected.

      Surely messaging at FTL speeds is still impossible, so this must be either a misreporting or else the whole thing is nonsense.

    1. We published everything we learned, as we learned it.

      "Publish everything as soon as you learn it" is not a description of responsible journalism.

  17. Oct 2017
    1. Multiple administration officials told me there was a lengthy debate inside the Trump administration about the summit, but officials close to Trump were concerned the president did not want to stay in the region for so long and worried he could get cranky, leading to unpredictable or undiplomatic behavior.
  18. Jul 2017
    1. This is a very useless article. A paragraph-by-paragraph summary:

      Geeks like scifi.

      I like scifi, too.

      "We create it because we can."

      Hackers exist.

      We use the internet for a lot of things, and hackers exist.

      People use technology on the road.

      People use technology at the beach.

      People use technology while chasing Pokemon over a cliff.

      "...all tech companies serious about ethical grounding need to be hiring folks with backgrounds in areas like anthropology, psychology and philosophy."

      It'd be nice if tech were more "thoughtful in its engagement with our lives and the world".

      People should consider the impact of technology? Well, obviously. But Bajarin offers not the slightest idea of how to do that, or what a more responsible tech world might look like.

      Except insofar as ethics falls within the domain of philosophy, he doesn't give any reason "Why We Need the Liberal Arts in Technology's Age of Distraction". What do students of classics have to teach us about Instagram? How does literary theory apply to consuming facebook posts? What can an anthropologist do for tumblr? Tell us!

  19. Jan 2017
    1. Itistimefortheengineerstogobacktoengineering.

      I do not think it is precisely Norman's intent here, but: I have seen a number of times the attitude that when engineers (programmers, geeks of some stripe) have invented something useful, they ought to get out of the way so that the important people can take advantage of it. In a discussion on the use of git by authors and other non-programmers, I saw more than once a comment to the effect of "as usual, programmers ruined a great idea by making something no one can use"--the quality of git's design aside, the tool was made and found useful by the programmers, who after all invented it for their own use.

      This isn't to say that I don't agree that people familiar with other disciplines have much to contribute to the technical fields. In "Space for Poets", published in the March 1979 issue of OMNI, Trudy E. Bell makes the case that room should be made on the space shuttle for not only scientists but also for humanists, including poets. The point is compelling, though it presupposes a thriving shuttle program that unfortunately never materialized.

    Annotators

    1. The fourth level at which religion can be found in video games, is the ritual level: playerswho are involved in in-game behavior that is traditionally associated with religion.

      This is the most interesting idea in the article. I would frame it somewhat differently, however: this seems to conflate religious actions by the player character with religious actions by the player.

      The observation that players can engage in religious behavior in the digital space is a good one. These may be sincere religious activities that take place in-game, or the semblance thereof, performed for dramatic reasons.

      Sincere religious activities may be explicit, e.g. evangelism in a multiplayer game, or implicit, e.g. choosing the player character's actions according to the player's own religious imperative. The memorials mentioned in the article probably fall under this category, with religion broadly construed.

      Anthony's section on allopolitical games (p. 41) is relevant.

    2. The fourth step is external research, the gathering of all out-game information that is notprovided by the developers of the game themselves

      This step combines ethnography (e.g. watching playthroughs by other players) with a study of the existing literature, which seems an oddly careless combination for a process that somehow distinguished between 'playing the game' and 'playing the game, but really paying attention this time'.

    3. In the third step, external reading, the gamer/researcher must become less of a gamer andmore of a researcher. His or her identity as a researcher takes over from his or her identity as aplayer.

      However, those materials (e.g. novels) are intended to be experienced by the players of the game as players of the game. For games with a focus on world-building, this kind of 'research' is in fact an ordinary component of 'play'.

    4. The second step is internal research: collection of all the in-game information, for example(the list is not exhaustive), texts, audio, video, pictures, NPC stories, and such like.

      It is not clear how this step is differentiated from the first step. Reading the in-game text, talking to the NPCs, and other such actions are an ordinary part of playing the game, surely. If the first step involves "playing the game multiple times (playthroughs), including main quest (mission) and side quests (missions), reaching every possible ending", then what remains to do? This only makes sense if, in the first step, you are meant to play the game repeatedly without paying any particular attention to it, so that you miss all the little details.

    5. Methodology of Studying Religion in Digital Games

      The approach outlined in this section seems reasonable enough, but has no specific relationship to the study of religion in games. It is also a rather obvious approach: first, study the source material (i.e. the game); next, study other primary source material from the creator of the game; last, study secondary materials.

    6. Despite its interesting nature, Anthony’stypology cannot – as we will see – cover all cases of religion in video games or ofscholarly research of them.

      Bosman does not make explicit any examples which this typology does not cover; he does not mention it again. The statement is accurate, but beside the point. Bosman's system is more akin to Ferdig's than Anthony's, describing the religious content rather than the category of game, so his categories are orthogonal to Anthony's.

    7. video gamesare digital systems that have the following features

      This seems to be a misreading of Ryan. She enumerates these four elements as "properties of digital systems . . . that [she regards] as the most relevant for narrative and textuality", but does not, I think, expect that all games should exhibit every property.

    8. What is a video game?

      It will be nice when the day comes that articles about video games needn't spend a few pages meditating on the nature of their subjects. I don't feel that this section contributes substantially to the main work of the article; the discussion on how to study religion in video games, and the framework for its description, would not have suffered if the details of the definition of 'video game' were neglected.

    1. The Mass Effect series (BioWare, 2007–) may be one of the best ex-amples of t his type. Some have noted that the overarching game riffs on the Christ narrative; the protagonist, a space warrior named Shepherd, dies and is reborn to save humanity.

      While I don't disagree with the observation, describing Commander Shepard as "a space warrior named Shepherd" is both inaccurate and shallow.

    Annotators

  20. Dec 2016
    1. Warped Space11 was notable for a report on the Chicago convention, and a letter from Leslie Fish, a professional writer and singer, who was to make many contributions to fanzines. Leslie wrote that she did not know about Star Trekfandom until she attended the Chicago convention.

      In Trek fandom, Leslie Fish would become notable for several K/S works, including "Shelter", published the following year in Warped Space 20.

    2. This issue had a story by Paula Block titled, "The Quality of Mercy, or Spock Must NOT Die!"

      The title of this story surely refers to Blish's "Spock Must Die!", published in 1970. It would be good to know if the story is a response to that book.

    3. Another item of interest in the first issue of Spockanaliawas "The Territory of Rigel," a Ni Var poem by Dorothy Jones. She explained the poem as follows: "'Ni Var' literally means 'two form,' and it is basically a piece comparing and contrasting two aspects of the same thing."
    4. Meanwhile, Spockanalia5 ran an important article, "Concerning Sehlats" by Lee Burwasser. In this piece, the author looks at precedents in nature to see what sort of animal would have six-inch fangs. The author concludes, "And so our portrait of the sehlat: a carnivore or just possibly tushed omnivore, general shape that of a giant panda, size on the order of an Alaskan brown bear, highly intelligent, and despite the six-inch fangs, of a patient and gentle disposition.... Question: did the sehlat belong toSpock, or was Spock in the care of the sehlat?" The Star Trekproduction staff read this article, and animators incorporated many of the suggestions into the drawing of the sehlat I-Chaya in the animated episode, "Yesteryear."
    5. But thehighlight of Eridani Triad2, was the article, "The Vulcan Love Story, or Being in Pon FarrMeans Never Having to Say You're Sorry," by Doris Beetem. This witty article analyzed all the fanzine stories written and published that had the same general plot:that is, girl-meets-Spock, girl-beds-Spock. The article attributed Spock's attraction to the theory that Spock fit the "Gothic Hero" prototype in romantic fiction, and asserted that therefore it was natural for fans to fantasize about Spock along those lines (and to write up their fantasies as stories).
    1. Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, "Are my songs literature?"

      In a 1965 interview, Dylan was asked "Do you think of yourself primarily as a singer or a poet?". He responded, "Oh, I think of myself more as a song and dance man, y'know."

    1. Now,thesuggestedexecutiontimeforaBASICprogrammaticsolutiontoPuzzle15is7minutes,4seconds.That'sontheVectra.IfyouareprogrammingonaTandy1000,youcouldexpectthesameprogramtoexecuteinabout28minutes.So,ifyoursolutiontakesoveranhour,youmighttrytospeeditupsomewhat.

      How times have changed! Project Euler suggested run times of less than a minute, but here the author blithely suggests that waiting an hour for your solution may be too much.

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