blivet

Reddit’s value has never been in the “average redditor” or the “popular subs”. The real value is in the niche tail of communities and the fact that they have such a massive amount of people that even if “only” 10% of their users were decent people, it still meant that they had enough decent people to talk with something to contribute.

Yeah, I don’t use Reddit any longer, but it was really great that there were active subs devoted to incredibly obscure topics. If you wanted to talk about something, chances were that thousands of other people did too.

Yes, the whole thing is especially frustrating because the app was quite nice. Harriette did a really good job really quickly.

I think governmental organizations should do the same. It’s absurd that FEMA or whoever essentially has to rely of Elon’s goodwill.

Yes, that’s pretty much where I’m at.

If the quality of AI-generated content degrades to the point where it’s useless that is also fine with me.

So in order for data to be useful to AIs, AI-generated content will have to be flagged as such. Sounds good to me.

I was thinking pretty much the same thing. He’s got the sensibility of a teenage boy. He thinks things like the letter X and the color black are totally cool, and he thinks naming his company “Space-Sex” and one of its spacecraft “Big Fuckin’ Rocket” is the height of humor.

I get the feeling that both the original and the sequel are the kind of film where word of mouth just doesn’t do it for some reason. I had a friend years ago who mentioned that she had never seen Blade Runner, and immediately followed that by saying not to bother telling her how good it was.

Blade Runner. It did very poorly at the box office, and the critics were lukewarm at best, but I loved it. I was a big fan of Philip K. Dick, so a film by Ridley Scott based on one of his novels was right up my alley. I dragged my friend to see it the week it came out, and I was blown away. Even back then I wasn’t alone. It almost immediately became a cult film that regularly played in smaller repertory theaters.

I remember reading an interview with Arthur C. Clarke back then where he mentioned that he had recently spoken with Stanley Kubrick, and Kubrick had said that Blade Runner was the most visually beautiful film he had ever seen.

Up to a point. Google+ was invite only for so long that by the time it became available to the general public no one cared anymore. When people signed in with their new accounts they couldn’t find anyone they knew, and they never came back.

Really stupid on Google’s part, because they launched at a time when people were angry with Facebook for selling private user data, and a lot of users probably would have moved to G+ if they had been able to.

Yes, I signed in out of curiosity, and I was completely disoriented because there was no feed of just the people I followed. I kept clicking around, thinking I was missing something obvious.

That’s just privacy protection. I own a few domains, and none of the whois information points to me personally.

One reason might be that they couldn’t even be bothered to say what the moment they enjoyed was.

Yes, the name of the company, the logo, and the idea of “tweets” are all a charming evocation of a world filled with brief messages. Twitter has problems, but branding isn’t one of them.

I think we are in the midst of a worldwide epidemic of mental illness, and even the wealthiest and most powerful are not immune.

if you are saying that Sontag is wrong to use “magma” as “foundation”… I would have to say on what basis you claim that?

A foundation is usually a stable structure, not a liquid.

I like to think so, but a lot of intelligent people pick up on the meaning of words from context, and sometimes they get it wrong. I remember reading that Susan Sontag used the word “magma” as if it meant something like “foundation” or “basis”.

Yeah, I think it was Scorsese who said that he did “one for them, and one for me”.

I think it’s strange that it’s categorized as a comedy, though. It has some really funny moments, but on the whole I would call it a very intense drama.

I agree with your points about ease of use, but even back when ISPs provided Usenet access, it was still pretty niche. Most people weren’t even aware that it existed. It was covered in the old “Internet for Dummies” sorts of books back in the 90s, but I’ve never met anyone IRL who used it, not even back when I worked at a university.