Fascinating, then, how the head of DOGE has deep financial interests in China. It’s really not out of bounds to suggest that his benefactors could’ve pulled some strings to kneecap the US.
No. No. That no longer applies, and I would argue never applies to a publicly funded entity like the federal government. When you're spending public dollars there is zero difference between incompetence and malice.
This administration has shown that it absolutely isn't incompetent. It's getting stuff done. Which means it's malice. Guaranteed. We're watching a self made disaster where few will profit, but will profit ENORMOUSLY.
I have come to prefer it. I think this comes as a combination of recent algorithms getting better (there are relatively few artifacts and they are far subtler than they once were) and because newer consoles have conditioned me to abhor any content running at less than 60 fps. The jaggedness of 24 fps grates my eyes. I’ve had my iPhone recording 60 fps video for years.
If you use ChatGPT or find it to be a compelling technology, there’s good reason to root for a reversion to the status quo. This could set back the state of the art consumer AI product quite a few months as teams reinvent the wheel in a way that doesn’t get them sued when they relaunch.
This attitude of acceptance is probably the most helpful attitude the vast majority of the time, but I was lucky enough to have parents that radically minimized their possessions in their early 60's and moved into a retirement community, and it has first and foremost been a favor to them. As they've aged a few years, they're just enjoying a wildly unencumbered existence with the bare minimum of regular maintenance chores. They're focused on spending time with the people they want to, not puttering around the house. You're right that this kind of mindset can't be forced on senior citizens and it bespeaks a certain level of affluence, but it is a wonderful way for the elderly to live. I'd encourage children to lay the seeds with their parents before they're elderly and more resistant to change.
I see the relationship coaches of this stripe all over all sorts of social media, and I just rarely if ever see insights that couldn't have been imparted by your average friendly stranger at a bar. What I mostly see are slightly-to-moderately damaged people who are articulate and engaging enough to find an audience of similarly damaged people who their experiences resonate with. This guy seems fairly innocuous (although this kind of rumination can also be unproductive!) but you see a lot of people fomenting bitterness. I would advise anyone I cared about to seek a credentialed therapist before turning to one of these self-appointed coaches.
I play Fall Guys and Warzone, both of which offer cosmetic modifications that are unlockable both through gameplay and by purchasing them. IMO, the cosmetics are little more than flair that add a little bit of fun and personal expression to the experience. Along with the "Battle Pass" model, where users are rewarded for regular play during content "Seasons", these mini-economies incentivize people to play regularly (which improves multiplayer games on a lot of levels) and incentivize the developers to continually add content. People that get these cosmetics enjoy having a distinctive profile in a social experience they spend a lot of time in and subsidize gamers that enjoy robust free experiences (e.g. kids/teens who provide a lot of excellent competition). It's all a win-win-win-win in my book.
I'm 41 years old and have fond memories of the old days of packaged buy-once games, but the modern battle pass/cosmetic standard seems like a much more realistic way of having a consistently updated experience with strong engagement year-round.
Yeah the Rambo skin was worth $10 and it added to the experience.
I don’t mind paying extra for it.
However Warzone is a prime example of cosmetics affecting the game - remember any of the scandals (DMR-gate of Dec 2020), when the desire to sell weapon blueprints / Battle Pass pushes the designers overpower the new weapons. It’s subtle but very toxic.
Or the Roze skin. Even if that one wasn’t intentional they can’t change/remove it now because people paid for it.
Yeah, there's room to quibble when it comes to Warzone, but it really doesn't add up to much in my view. The most gamebreaking advantages - The Roze skin and the broken Mac-10 blueprint - were basically accidents when it was a fairly young game (< a year old), and almost all of them were freebies included in the basic battle pass (so essentially free for anyone that plays regularly). Statistical anomolies still come around and "break" the game every once in a while, but it's really reached a point where most of the main weapons are well balanced
to the point that I often think I would have been best off sticking with some of the first guns I levelled up.
Most blueprints effectively just make levelling up new weapons a more pleasant experience, maybe saving you 1 - 2 hours for $20.
yeah I kinda hated the idea of the free to play model at first but since getting more into multiplayer games I think free to play model help keep them healthy and populated so it seems like a win-win to me. I'm glad not every game uses that model though.
This line of argument doesn't hold up to the slightest scrutiny. First of all, it's quite pedantic and naive to assume that governments and medical bodies in the richest and most advanced countries haven't worked through similar issues of causality with innumerable other diseases. More to the point, the peaks in COVID deaths magically align with proportionately large spikes in all cause mortality not seen in prior years that have yet to be explained by anything else.
Here in New Zealand a gang member was shot to death and was recorded as a covid death because he tested positive posthumously. This is apparently in line with international practices. If you don't see the absurdity in that then I don't know what to say.
It’s not really true if you read further into it. Think about it - if you get nasty infection while under surgery - was cause of death surgery or infection.
I have looked into it, and what I said is absolutely true. From your linked article,
> "The clinical criteria will continue to be guided by WHO definition which is basically to report any death where the person had an acute Covid-19 infection regardless of what the cause of death might be," Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield told RNZ.
The death was reported as a "death with covid" in accordance with WHO guidelines. Again, if you don't see the absurdity then you can't be helped.
> Think about it - if you get nasty infection while under surgery - was cause of death surgery or infection.
How on earth is this relevant? The victim was not showing symptoms and did not undergo surgery.
It's important to record died with covid. We might later find out there's a mental component. Maybe he experienced covid madness and undertook riskier behavior.
There is still the determination that he was shot, so it's not like we are going to forever think these deaths were just attributed to covid.
> More to the point, the peaks in COVID deaths magically align with proportionately large spikes in all cause mortality not seen in prior years that have yet to be explained by anything else.
The person you responded to mentioned all-cause mortality. Remove the base rate, then you're left with excess deaths. How do you explain excess deaths if they are not covid?
And that's not to say an explanation other than covid is impossible, but it would need to be compelling.
> How do you explain excess deaths if they are not covid?
Delayed medical care because of Covid fear. I missed my annual physical two years ago and ended up with a heart attack I barely survived last October. People were delaying routine screenings such as mammograms, physicals, and other preventative care.
There are also increases in suicide, deaths of despair, especially in younger people. Addiction especially.
Nobody wants to talk about vaccine injuries and related deaths. But that is non-zero.
If you just look at the all-cause mortality increase, it neatly works around this problem, and looking at it that way gives a staggeringly higher number than the official tolls
I feel like TikTok is significantly underdiscussed, almost like the tech and business press are assuming it's a flash-in-the-pan more similar to Snapchat than Facebook. It is almost certainly having a major impact on the business of some of the most prominent publicly traded companies in the US, yet there are just a handful of articles discussing their impact on Facebook's disastrous quarterly results.
The aspect that worries me the most is the recommendation: Facebook and Twitter discovered a little late that they had the ability to to influence opinion with simple tweaks. That raised internal questions and that model is under close surveillance by people who have talked about those questions in public and who I know have and would raise, at least internally, their concerns. People can explore the updates from their friends and can identity ommissions. Snap is more secretive, but their employees are loud Californians who can about justice, they have access to journalists if they feel the need to push back. Users can also see updates from their friends and people their follow without just having to trust the flow.
I don’t believe that TikTok has a similar internal culture of debate. I haven’t seen anything published by their academic team. I don’t believe that you can check on your friend’s page to see what they posted lately. They are examples of topics that they have favoured or censored that was worrisome and they didn’t adress the controversy. The pool of possible content is much larger so there’s more opportunity to fill strategically.
I know people who work for one but not the other, so I understand that this influence my judgement but I believe that their are objective difference in company values and product design that make TikTok more able to manipulate.
I haven’t seen anyone discuss that, and I have plenty of people who discuss those questions profesionally in my feed.
>but their employees are loud Californians who can about justice
In my experience, Californians care about justice the same way they care about anything, fashion. Only the injustices that are fashionable to be against ever get any attention.
If you need proof they don't care about justice look no further than they fact the keep electing Peloci.
The users of TikTok are mostly teenagers and young adults, that's why. Nearly everybody in journalism is late 20s or 30+. They just don't get it, though to be fair vine had a similar type of content and that failed.
I'm in my mid-40s: there's nothing deep or mysterious to "get" about TikTok. It's short-form video snips/vignettes, mainly of people showing off for their friends, trying to cash in on short-lived audio trends and meme pipelines, and sometimes both. It reminds me of the kind of bravado/showing off my peers in middle- and high-school did: because that's essentially what it is. Edit for more context: I happen to be dating someone who is a young adult (early/mid-20s), so I have even more context/insight into what makes this app interesting to them: I stand by what I wrote.
Those late 20s and up journalists get it, but they recognize (correctly) that like all social networks of this sort the early adopters (kids/young adults) are going to turn into adults with spending power and either change the nature of the platform or move on to something else. In either case, what TikTok is now is largely irrelevant (not to mention trite and shallow).
> I'm in my mid-40s: there's nothing deep or mysterious to "get" about TikTok. It's short-form video snips/vignettes, mainly of people showing off for their friends, trying to cash in on short-lived audio trends and meme pipelines, and sometimes both.
What this misses is that TikTok is a radically different experience for different people.
For some people, this description is very accurate. For other people, they would barely recognize TikTok on the basis of this description.
This is what has led to so many mis-representations of TikTok in the media, and the misunderstandings that result from that.
TikTok has a very good algorithm for suggesting content for users, and this can end up with different users being exposed to radically different subsets of content offered through TikTok: in scientific terms, it’s very easy to get stuck in different local minima.
So for many users, TikTok will
not involve “showing off to friends”, will not involve audio trends, and will not involve memes at all.
These users would describe it as containing short-form video content relevant to whatever their particular niche or interest may be.
Yes, the algorithm is a poor algorithm that overfits. It is not a good algorithm by any reasonable measure, unless the intent specifically is to commit users to such a funnel.
Whether the content is stupid cat videos or a DIY isn't relevant to my original point: it's short-form video content developed by people attempting to cash in on some meme (or niche), and very much in the vein of showing off for one's peers. Some like to think that if it's not an audio meme, but rather an undergrad waxing poetic about just learning Schrodinger's Equation or some handy person displaying his DIY skills that it's not about cashing in/showing off. But it is.
Of course the intent is to commit users to a funnel or funnels.
I still don’t think you get that when you complain about the content being trite or juvenile or commercial(?), you’re outing yourself as someone who will stop to watch that kind of stuff.
If you were writing this in 2019 I would agree with you.
This perception is just already 3 years old now and so that social network has already gotten its additional audiences and many of those high schoolers (and their influencers) have grown up.
There is a similarity of looking at Facebook in 2005 and looking at Facebook in 2008, and add in a much faster adoption cycle and infrastructure.
OTOH what happens to companies with teen users who grow up is that they lose their userbase and they die out along with other big influences of that current generation. You just don't have the time to stare at ticktock for 3 hours at 25 years old that you had at 15 years old, whether you are at the top or the bottom of the economic ladder. We see that trend in every social network.
In one large segment it has turned into a streaming platform like twitch, as in a side screen and additional chat people keep up while also streaming on twitch
I dont see a vine-like fate for tiktok
Bytedance is so much better positioned as well and already monetizing it
I'm not much younger and tried it after some HN thread. Basically the algorithm is really good, as it should be on more platforms. So if you don't like memes and dance and beauty contents, you won't get that. It can be just DIY videos, niche musicians and short science videos if that's what you want to see.
I don't think it's shallow. I've learned a lot from it. It just gives you what you want to watch and what you want to watch may be based on the idea that you have about the platform.
The algorithm is really good! At overfitting. Snark aside, what you describe is short form videos intended to show off or cash in to a trend: that it’s not stupid cat videos, or dance-offs or whatever doesn’t change that.
There is absolutely a strong 20s-30s and even 40s userbase on TikTok. “The Algorithm”, though, is very very good at only showing people what they want to see, so much so that two people can have wildly different experiences.
For example, my TikTok is full of LGBTQ+, PNW housing complaints, DnD and religion.
Edit: and a good percentage of them are around 30.
I wonder if the accessibility as far as the media goes to Facebook staff and willingness to engage with the press exposes Facebook a bit more than TikTok.
I think you are each using nationalist a different way. I'm pretty sure the GP meant it as "buy American" nationalists and you meant it as "I want an ethnostate" nationalists.
Nobody cares because (it is perceived that) there is no political discourse on TikTok yet.
It was the same for Twitter and Facebook. Then Trump happened and People With Important Jobs started paying attention to them. There has not been such a catalyst event for TikTok yet. Like with Zoom, there is a vague feeling among the security-paranoid that the Chinese are leveraging it for data-gathering, but as long as they get bazillion videos of teenagers pulling faces, who cares?
In my country (Philippines), TikTok has been one of the main sources of political misinformation besides Facebook and YouTube (for a lesser degree). It's gotten so bad that it's impacting the coming national election wherein the platform of the currently leading candidate is focused on the glorification of the past dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
It 100% depends on what you like. I've been using tiktok forever and a day and all I see is funny stuff that is relevant to me. Very obscure niche things that have 1000 hearts - it's scary good at recommending relevant content.
If you are seeing political content, it's just because you told the algorithm that you enjoy interacting with that type of content.
To me the best explanation for this is as mutually-assured-destruction insurance if Microsoft takes the biggest title in the Activision portfolio, Call of Duty, away from Playstation.
As a Sony fan, I'm cautiously optimistic that the relationship could be more fruitful than that. I don't know what Sony's creative secrets are, but they seem good at ushering high quality, interesting games with broad appeal into existence, sort of akin to what you see at HBO or Pixar. I would love to see them exert that influence on a big multiplatform game.
That's hours of "testimony" from conspiracy theorists who all have long records of making flagrantly incorrect statements on COVID. Johnson's big leadoff panelist was a Texas cardiologist who is far from a respected authority in epidemiology and seems to be courting attention by disputing every best practice that ER doctors and the scientific community have agreed works best with acute COVID patients and hyping up silver bullet drugs that have shown limited effectiveness in the best studies. I recommend everyone look up "Dr. Peter Mcullough" and getting a whiff of his reputation before investing any of their time in that panel.
