Of course provenance matters in appreciation of art.
Of course it doesn’t. Do you need to know who painted something, and who owned it, to know whether you like it or not?
People who buy art absolutely care if the artwork they paid for is genuine. Collectors absolutely care if they can prove they own something that others don’t.
Yes, and fuck those people.
Grow so big that a local town council has meetings where they argue about your size, and how much pollution you cause.
Or is that yo mamma?
It doesn’t necessarily have to be a datacenter. They’re just convenient for big companies spending huge amounts of money.
All a datacenter is is rows buildings filled with rows filled with racks filled with computers. Those computers could be distributed around the world in smaller buildings, or even sharing space with existing buildings that do other things. It’s not the fact that the data is stored in buildings filled with rows filled with racks that makes the data safely stored. In fact, that single location means that the data is more vulnerable than if it was stored in a more distributed way.
Having said that, keeping a lot of computers in a single building often does make it cheaper to run them because of easier maintenance and economies of scale. That means the data can be stored more cheaply, and it can be accessed more quickly.
But yeah, some datacenters is probably fine. I don’t think people were complaining much about Google’s various datacenters before they went wild on their AI push, and they had dozens of DCs spread around the world. What’s bad is that the current push is for many, many more DCs being built way too quickly in places that aren’t appropriate (because they can’t get enough power for example), for a purpose that people aren’t behind.
I saw someone yesterday with a big wheel who I was sure was about to bail. He was unicycling down a pretty steep street. He managed to make it down the street and turn the corner, but it looked like a real struggle.
I know from riding a fixie that for streets that aren’t too steep it’s not hard, you just have to effectively “pedal backwards”, allowing slowing the pedals down as they come up behind you. But, I don’t know what a unicyclist can do on a very steep street. What I would do on a fixie doesn’t work because it requires small skid-stops, which means you need a front wheel.
What would you do on a steep hill? I assume that by the time you realize it’s too steep you’re already going pretty fast, so just bailing would be difficult.
NFTs are stupid. Provenance only matters when it comes to the ownership of art. For the real purpose of art, the viewing and appreciation of art, it doesn’t matter at all.
For digital art, provenance only matters if someone wants to create artificial scarcity by applying intellectual property laws to art. Trying to make digital things artificially scarce is stupid.
Getting out appropriately would have been reversing to the place where it entered the flex-posted area, not simply smashing through them.
Remove Teslas from that and now what are the stats?
As usual, anything Musk touches turns to shit, including self-driving cars.
That’s not likely. What is likely is that computers that can still work with very small memory footprints become more popular. Microsoft is going to scramble. Apple is going to raise prices, and has already started selling cell phones on payment plans. Linux can often be better at running with low-memory setups, and those are going to be more and more popular.
Yeah, that’s another part of it. Plus the magic of trying to reverse engineer the recommendation algorithms to know what it is that will get your video in front of people.
To a certain extent, a lot of streamers do a lot more stuff than actors.
Actors book a job, so some acting, maybe do a promo tour for their movie, that’s it.
Most “influencers” or streamers at least start out doing everything themselves. They need to understand the streaming tech, know how to configure OBS studio, how to edit video, understand the camera, the lighting, if they’re using make up they’re doing it themselves, they need to know how to do their own marketing, etc. And, if they’re live-streaming they need to develop the skill of interacting with their audience while they’re doing something else. Without that parasocial relationship with the audience, they don’t get big, so they need to stay on top of what their chat is saying. Sometimes that’s on top of doing something else like playing a demanding video game.
So, I think streamers / influencers are often doing a more impressive job than actors. For many streamers / influencers I’m much less interested in them. I often have less respect for the way they make money, since it’s so vapid and consumerist. On the other hand, I do admit that it can be a lot of work to master all those domains.
I’ve always hated the “blue, indigo, violet” end of the English words for the rainbow. I only recently found out that the 7 colours of the rainbow in English is especially BS.
At the beginning of Newton’s time, there were thought to be 5 colours in the rainbow: red, yellow, green, blue and violet. Newton added Orange and Indigo because he thought (for spiritual reasons) there should be 7 colours. There were 7 days of the week, 7 planets (known at that time), 7 notes in the (western) musical scale, etc.
But, Newton’s blue isn’t our blue today. For newton, the colour “blue” is what we currently call “cyan”, so the 7 colours of the rainbow were really red, orange, yellow, green, cyan (blue), blue (indigo) and violet. That makes a lot more sense.
But, there really could be arbitrarily many colours in the rainbow. We could have “rust” as a colour, in between red and orange, or “gold” in between orange and yellow. We could even have a spectrum that didn’t include “green” but included “lime” which is between today’s yellow and green, and cyan on the other side, and no “green” at all.
We used to have that adage about how anonymity made people worse on the internet
Many of us have been saying that’s untrue ever since people started claiming it was real.
All you need to do is go to Facebook to see people being horrible under their own names.
It’s true. It’s also true that for our ancestors who toiled in farm fields picking weeds by hand, or risked being mangled by machines in a factory, a cubicle would seem like absolute luxury.
But, comparing ourselves to previous generations of office workers, the only thing that seems similar to what “knowledge workers” have to deal with today are the typing pool / secretarial pool / steno pool from ye olde days:
One place I worked was so overcrowded and loud that everybody on my team was wearing headphones all day long, just to preserve their sanity.
The level of noise and the fact everybody wore headphones to overcome it meant that often the best way to chat with the person sitting within a metre of your desk was by text over signal / google messenger, etc.
That’s the purpose of meetings and meeting rooms.
We had meetings and meeting rooms, but we only went there for required meetings.
I think the kinds of things they were trying to make happen were those informal discussions you sometimes get. That was part of the purpose of having pool tables, ping pong, break rooms with snacks, etc. It was a place where people could bump into each-other without an agenda and talk about what they were interested in without sticking to an agenda.
But, they didn’t seem to realize that the physical space was much less than half the requirement. The other half is that people feel happy, safe, energized, confident, relaxed, optimistic, etc. If you’re stressed out all day because your workspace is way too crowded and lacks privacy, you’re not going to want to do that. If you’re worried you’re going to be hit in the next round of layoffs, you’re not going to want to do that. If you’re getting stack ranked against your teammates and put in the lower half of the stack, you’re not going to have the confidence to bring up your ideas.
It’s also not a coincidence that a cubicle is designed so your back is to the entrance, whereas most offices are set up so that the person sits behind a desk facing the door.
If you compare it with Gold
Which you shouldn’t do because gold is a very volatile commodity. It went down from 2012 to 2018, then up from 2018 to 2024, then it went up extremely quickly since 2024. Gold is just something people put money in based on FOMO, or based on fears of stock market crashes, or based on other “vibes”.
In addition, a lot of the world’s gold is simply held in the form of jewelry in India. It’s not even used as a direct “investment”, it’s just a pretty, shiny metal.
the USD moved in lockstep until the US left the Gold [Standard]
You’ll never guess why that happened… although if you look at the name of the standard, it might give you a clue.
which is why a single blue collar salary that used to be enough for a good house, a car and the expenses for a family of 5 in the 60s
In the US. You know, essentially the only industrialized country that escaped from WWII with its manufacturing infrastructure intact, and was, as a result, supplying the entire world while everyone else was rebuilding.
The UK was another victor in WWII along with the US, but their workers weren’t living in luxury. Rationing of meat ended in 1954 in the UK, nearly 10 years after the war. If you want to know what it was like in the UK in the post-war period, just look at stories of the early lives of the members of the Beatles.
In the US, the post war period not only followed the war, but also the great depression. The great depression ended with the New Deal, which shifted a lot of power from the rich to the workers. Workers from 1945 to the 1970s or so greatly benefited from those policies.
So, this 1960s family with 5 kids, a car and a good house on a worker’s salary wasn’t typical. It was probably the best off that workers were in the world since European workers who survived the black plague – and all it took was a devastating world war that destroyed the infrastructure of most of the world’s developed countries, other than the USA, plus a devastating depression lasting a decade that forced the government to institute programs that gave workers benefits.
(Oh yeah, and it only applied to white Americans.)
Who cares?
You don’t need NFTs to ensure artists get paid. You don’t need intellectual property laws to ensure that artists get paid. Most of the best art in history was made before intellectual property was a thing, and the artists who made that art generally were paid.