The monkey's paw curls. Wish granted... but in the form of Palantir, Flock, etc. tracking your every move so those cash transactions can be just as anonymous as a credit card transaction.
I use miniflux and like it. Still, this post got me thinking.
I’d like to try out a feature where by self-hosted instance learns what I like and highlights relevant posts in my feed. Then I can go through the other ones later.
Main things are that I would control what feeds go in and there is no monetization incentive since it’s self-hosted.
> Consider some statistics on the American childhood, drawn from children aged 8-12: 62% have not walked/biked somewhere (a store, park, school) without an adult
At least in the US, my guess for the cause of this is goes something like:
1. Housing is expensive.
2. People move to where housing is cheap (ie plenty of land, easy to build). In the last few decades that's more often than not been in the south.
3. Big population changes in those areas demand more schools.
4. Big school is built on the edge of town, because that's where the land is and one school has better economies of scale than multiple neighborhood schools
5. No one lives close to the school anymore, so everyone has to drive.
Throw in the sprawl that often accompanies new development in areas with wide open land and its easy to see how we end up here.
I live in Brookline, MA (in the North, next to Boston) and it's very much a walk-to-school town. The structural reason for that is our schools are in the neighborhoods, have been around for a long time, and there's nowhere "on the edge of town" to build a new one. Our town has financial pressures like everyone else and I few government's are able to resist the temptation of cost savings---we just don't have the option to build that way. Thank goodness.
Inner city, especially in the oldest and most established, is an outlier experience. My friends on Melrose drive to their schools, and here in Southern NH it's driving or buses.
The main reason I wouldn't let our gradeschooler walk/ride .5 miles to school is a lack of consistent sidewalks and drivers who are constantly distracted and/or road raged.
> Inner city, especially in the oldest and most established, is an outlier experience.
Totally right. I called out the south explicitly, but the same stuff is true in suburbs. We lived in Nashua for 5y and it was just as you describe.
I'd submit though that the lack of sidewalks and dangerous drivers aren't really a cause, rather a symptom of the same cause: towns laid out in such a way where things are too far to walk and so everyone must drive to everything.
I've been doing this with ublock origin step by step by zapping elements and defaulting to javascript off. At this point most of the breadcrumbs/headings/sidebars/recirculation/carousels/etc. are hidden by default on the sites I go to. If I gather I'm missing something I just flip the switch.
Granted that's not user-friendly, so I don't suggeset it for the typical person. I do think though the typical person would come to love the sort of web that I experience, so it's cool that there's a plugin now. Also the AI scraping (eg on LI) is interesting.
I used to assume that the average Joe would be amazed at the way my Youtube/Facebook/whatever looks and works, with no ads and with a lot of annoyances removed. Then I saw, more than once, people complaining that THE ADS were gone, and then I gave up. The average of the whole population of humans is a very dumbed down version of what I always imagined the average would be.
> Today, the only naked bodies that many Americans will likely ever see are their own, a partner’s, or those on a screen. Gone are our unvarnished points of physical comparison—the ordinary, unposed figures of other people. In their place, we’re left with the curated ideals of social-media posts, AI-generated advertising, and pornography. The loss may seem trivial, but it also may change how people see themselves.
I think the theme of "how we see ourselves" is the defining theme of our age. Never before have we been bombarded with so much imagery while at the same time being seeing so little of real life.
Most public debates aren't a matter of truth seeking, and haven't been for a long time (two examples below). Rather, it's a platform for people to make their case to the audience.
That said, the level of respect and orderliness of the debates below is something I'd like to see more of.
I've recently been updating my library of movies to use the theatrical posters. It seems in the last ~10y or so there's been a bunch of "remade" posters for old movies---I presume from Netflix trying to get people to click.
It's neat to sort the movies by time and see how the styles change. Makes it feel more real than when each cover has the same modern look.
A common model is for startups to use publicly available data to build their first model/device. Those devices then collect more application-specific data and use that to iterate design.
Not hard to see how piles of ecg data could be useful.
Most books have little to say and you can, in fact, get most of what it has to offer in one reading. It’s worth your while to find the books that reveal more to you on each reread, especially rereads at different points in your life. The books that do this for a lot of people over a few generations are, to a first approximation, what we call “classics”
Of course there’s still the challenge of identifying which books are classics. And of course there’s value in reading non-classics——whether you’re reading for entertainment or for wisdom.
Still, we’ve got limited time and I’ll more often gamble my reading hour on a classic than something new.
I’ve just been reading some of Vernor Vinge’s books and they’ve certainly hit different the second time around (A Deepness in the Sky, A Fire Upon the Deep).
I think it really is mostly that I’ve changed. It’s been a slow change that has been hard to notice from the inside, but one that becomes quite stark when re-experiencing a fixed point such as a book.
Corollary: If you're reading books that divulge all on first reading, or don't reward re-reading, try finding a better class of books (and/or authors, genres, topics, etc.).
I want to be able to buy over the internet as anonymously as when I use cash in the real world.
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