I think this is from Graeber’s essay “There Never was a West”, and he does such a good job assaulting the idea that there is some coherent vision of what “The West” is in comparison to everyone else.

The underlying thread in all of his anthropological anarchism is that there are a thousand ways cultures have made (and thus we could make) society work, we just have to decide to change. If this sounds obvious to you, that’s good - because it doesn’t sound obvious to the horde of people clinging to capitalism as if divine market forces are sacrosanct and all human suffering derived from it is inevitable.

The big issue with this show is the writing isn’t good enough to be better than GoT and it’s trying to pull off the same epic scale story.

Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a hundred times more fun. Westeros is a great setting and telling a smaller story with self-deprecating humor means the show isn’t constantly getting compared to GoT.

On a related note, not having to know literally everything a public person has done before feeling safe to express even the most basic support for their work.

I appreciate the accountability, I don’t want to support bad people, but back in the day it was like “I enjoyed that album” and then you went back to living your life. Lack of information made separating the art from the artist the default and it made enjoying new stuff take so much less effort.

I agree that this is extremely simplified, however your radio example implies physicists only do physics for money and nobody would have explored the applications of radio waves without a profit motive which seems at odds with… Well, literally every scientist I’ve ever met.

You don’t think people would volunteer to maintain sewers or collect garbage if the alternative was shit/trash everywhere?

To me it just looks like an easy way to do your community a service.

Assuming detectives count, Criminal Record? I don’t know, I just looked it up, I don’t actually have Apple stuff. I’d be really surprised if there wasn’t more on it, even if it’s not original programming.

Edit: Slow Horses too perhaps? Although it’s more domestic intelligence shit, it’s in the same vein.

There’s copaganda everywhere. Cop shows are like the cosmic background radiation of TV. Cheap, trope heavy, the plots and characters basically write themselves.

Thanks for the rec!

Upvote for Jesse Welles. I appreciate his music can be topical, but also humorous and chill. Maybe not the sort of protest songs you play to fire people up, but definitely ones that will get their message stuck in your head.

Yeah, couldn’t care less if Chrome is faster when it is controlled by Google and actively working against extensions.

Not to mention we crossed a performance line maybe 10 years ago where browser engines on modern processors are basically trivial. Once we started having 8+ threads and the browsers got smart enough to leverage them, I’d bet bandwidth (or memory if you have many tabs), is a way more typical bottleneck.

I wish they wouldn’t call this a reboot, it’s almost the entire OG cast, for one, and IIRC these four episodes are all they’re doing. This review criticises it for feeling like a reunion special but that’s what it is.

I’ll watch the episodes, but I think it’s silly to expect anything more than a nostalgia bomb.

I read the post, but as I mentioned elsewhere, how are devs (or malicious commercial thieves looking for public domain code) supposed to detect this code is an LLM creation when all of the obvious signs they mention are stripped?

A ban on people using an LLM in secret is unenforceable and the code output can be indistinguishable from a human’s, especially when a real human that understands the change is there to baby it and write commit messages etc.

Fuck you, Ellison and Paramount. I’d rather watch the franchise die than turn into fanfic for fascists anyway.

How are the devs or anyone else supposed to tell that though, if all the LLM trappings are absent?

That seems pretty good to me? I hate LLMs, but this policy is basically “if it’s obviously LLM garbage or you don’t understand it, it will be rejected” and I’m not sure it’s practical to do better.

People will use LLMs behind the scenes, but if they are able to write a coherent justification with clear understanding of the code, receive feedback from devs and rework it, as well as submitting code that is well structured etc. it’s not really any different than any other PR.

I don’t hate the Kelvinverse movies, I appreciate they’re in a separate timeline and they can be fun popcorn movies. Movie Trek is always a different angle.

That said, I wonder what Star Trek Discovery looks like if it was trying to follow TV Trek’s footsteps instead of being JJ-esque lensflare and martial arts. Seems like they had to make a few crappy shows just to triangulate that people want to take their time and get to know a crew like they did in the older series.

I watched the pilot for this show and it didn’t really grab me, did it get good eventually?

No, that women will dress provocatively and then shame people that actually look at them.

Yeah, it’s really hard to judge a stage set that’s obviously incomplete and unlit. This could end up looking great… Or it could end up as a cringe inducing memory for years to come.