MetaFilter

A long, long time ago
I can still remember how that website
Used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people glance
And maybe they'd be happy for a while
But November made me shiver
With every favourite I'd deliver
Bad news on the doorstep
I couldn't take one more step
I can't remember if I cried
When I read about his SpaceX... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Lanark at 10:20 AM on December 12, 2023

somehow we are to believe that the exceptions written into these laws will be enough, that surely people's health will never be endangered, that those who write and impose these laws truly just care about life

This is what happens when a person is in this kind of terrible situation and has the resources available to take her case to court, to appeal for a TRO, to fight for her rights and her health, knowing all the while that the clock is ticking and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by delfin at 7:26 AM on December 8, 2023

Should any of this make me break my habit of just sending emails to myself?

Nope.

I watched someone on Mastodon excoriating themselves for not "settling on a single note-taking system" because of all the lost opportunity it represented, and it made me sad for them. They drank the ridiculous Kool-Aid around Zettelkasten, convinced that if they'd only picked one thing to capture their thoughts those many years ago,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Pudding Yeti at 8:39 PM on December 1, 2023

In some ways this is just another rung on the ladder of abstraction, with all the usual tradeoffs that a new abstraction brings. It still takes skill and experience to effectively orchestrate the lower levels, and it takes some familiarity with the new tools to understand their limitations.

It's an interesting time, though, because right now the people who are using GPT for code generation are mostly those who already know at least the basics of software development,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by swift at 8:51 PM on November 19, 2023

also what if you didn't know whether the orchestra was playing Bethoven's 5th, or a version of that music where embedded in the music which you didnt write or understand was an integral tone that caused the head of every 1000th person who listened to the symphony to explode
posted to MetaFilter by lalochezia at 6:25 PM on November 19, 2023

Speaking from personal experience, as a developer and coder, I'm more productive than I've ever been, working in languages I didn't know how to work with, because of GPT-4.

More than ever, I'm the conductor of an Orchestra. In the past I felt like first (maybe second) violin.

Executive decisions about what to do next, where to take the code and the project, are more important and occupy more of my time.

Less time... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by carlodio at 5:57 PM on November 19, 2023

What I like about this song is that it's so utterly sad. It might be the saddest Beatles song I've ever heard. It's like the polar B-side of Free As A Bird, which was uplifting and angelic.

And it's sad not just because of the melody and the vocal but because of what it is and what it represents -- the last Beatles song, sung by a dead man, produced by men who are themselves close to the grave, with lyrics that seem readymade for... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by swift at 5:21 PM on November 2, 2023

One of the most striking thing about the SBF and FTX thing is how young and dumb all the people seem to be. Just... remarkably inexperienced, not particularly intelligent people who got high on their own supply, got way in over their head. Just so so young and dumb.
posted to MetaFilter by entropone at 4:38 AM on November 3, 2023

I just mentally replace it with 'respect'

Florida is where respect goes to die etc
posted to MetaFilter by adept256 at 6:19 PM on October 29, 2023

Do people remember Zune?

Only because of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, I think, above and beyond oldsters like me who are still bemused by Microsoft's attempts to co-opt Apple's success with the iPod.

As for Albini, well, I still admire how he broke down how and why bands with standard record-company contracts would never make their advances back, but this part jumped out at me from TFA:... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 8:51 AM on October 30, 2023

Western Infidels: "How about a simple red light that means it is speaking and a green light that means it is listening?"

"I have a cue light I can use when I'm joking if you like."
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 11:37 AM on October 27, 2023

Unfortunately, it appears to be fissioning into a bowl of far-right nuts, and a much less influential center-right party.
posted to MetaFilter by kyrademon at 8:27 AM on October 25, 2023

At the bottom of a dark Scottish loch, the Spice Girls slowly awaken.
posted to MetaFilter by credulous at 10:47 AM on October 25, 2023

My 14-year-old self is very pleased with this.


My 46-year-old self, realizing that Frances is four years older than her father was when he died, is going to be sitting in the semi-dark this evening, listening to old albums and thinking about things.
posted to MetaFilter by heyitsgogi at 10:33 AM on October 25, 2023

I turned 50 this year, and I find myself gradually withdrawing from the online and media worlds as much as possible because most of it feels like a expensive scam I don't even enjoy. Cable, long gone. Streaming services, down to three (Criterion, Kanopy and Tubi, the last two of which are free). Social media, down to one (Instagram, and it's hanging by a thread). Internet sites I comment on? This one, off and on. When I'm at home I mostly read paper books and magazines, listen to CDs and vinyl... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by The Card Cheat at 2:52 PM on October 18, 2023

the corporations would have just added ads in anyway.

I am old enough to remember the early days of cable TV, when there were no ads because you were already paying for the programming. Bravo? Ad-free. Discovery? No ads. I know it sounds like weird utopian sci-fi to the kids nowadays, but it was so good, you guys.

Anyway, it happened to that, and now it's happened to this. What will... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by phooky at 2:32 PM on October 18, 2023

Thanks everyone! I apologize for being incommunicado for a few days.

It is Electrasy's "Morning Afterglow." Now I just need to find the album/single...
posted to Ask MetaFilter by LouMac at 8:23 AM on March 8, 2004

I just feel the need to drop a link to this video of David Attenborough applying his unique skills to something a little closer to home.
posted to MetaFilter by firechicago at 10:30 AM on October 16, 2023

Be...sure...

Be sure to - okay it's something really important!

Next word...drink. Be sure to drink...your...Ovaltine? God damn it!
posted to MetaFilter by Naberius at 2:37 PM on October 12, 2023

They've also managed to work out the title of the scroll, which is "Ad Serve Homo". Sounds promising!
posted to MetaFilter by phooky at 2:33 PM on October 12, 2023

I think we have a right, even a responsibility, to demand that self-driving cars do 10x _better_ than human-driven cars

Mark my words: like it or not, it'll be the actuaries that make the final determination on this.
posted to MetaFilter by tclark at 2:42 PM on October 12, 2023

I think we have a right, even a responsibility, to demand that self-driving cars do 10x _better_ than human-driven cars before we allow them to use the roads we've all paid for, before we allow them to displace countless jobs and livlihoods, and before the people making them because they're cool and interesting are allowed to make a bunch of money from being allowed to take these things.
posted to MetaFilter by amtho at 1:51 PM on October 12, 2023

Yeah, flying American means you're getting a bunch of sales spiels for their credit card. It's at pretty much every stage. Even the flight attendants have to try to sell them in flight. It's annoying as hell.
posted to MetaFilter by azpenguin at 4:36 PM on October 9, 2023

They chalk that up to the fact that each piece of microplastic in the ocean could have a different life history

Plastic sample 4105812: A tentative truce has been made with the colony, as it has rapidly developed from stone age levels to producing rudimentary nuclear weapons. Some time between 6:20pm and 8:07pm on October 5th they cracked the code of quantum computing and have offered to exchange information for a larger piece of a Mountain Dew... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by AzraelBrown at 6:00 AM on October 9, 2023

Hey ice-nine wasn't so bad.
posted to MetaFilter by Carillon at 12:10 AM on October 9, 2023

(I'm sorry, I didn't intend for this to end up so long, or so involved)

My father died 12 years ago, and in a very strange turn, I was actually home. I'd come back, bringing my wife and her parents so that everyone could meet each other. My dad was supposed to come from Kalamazoo to Chicago for the weekend, but fell sick with something he'd been hospitalized before (which, funny enough, I'd also been home for, years before that). I wanted to drop everything and go to... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 6:07 PM on September 4, 2021

I agree with Anne Lamott on this:

"You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better."
posted to MetaFilter by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:29 AM on October 8, 2023

My absolute first memory is of my father beating my mother with an oak dining-room chair as she tried to protect me from him with her body when I was a toddler. He was a handsome smooth-talking con artist who could sweet-talk almost anyone into one of his schemes. He abandoned my mother with 3 children on my 6th birthday, leaving her alone with three children at the age of 22, in 1961. He promptly absconded to California, where Canadian child support laws, as pathetic as they were then, were... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by PareidoliaticBoy at 11:17 PM on October 7, 2023

god forbid we speak ill of the dead. It's such bullshit.

I agree, but have been in a kind of mental funk where I can see the utility in sugar-coating someone's passing. If we had truly honest assessments, I don't think it would generally go well.

I'm thinking of what I'd write about my parents; something along the lines of "They had kids far too young and spent most of their adult lives emotionally stunted because of it.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ickster at 3:26 PM on October 7, 2023

Houston doesn't have basements because the land value is low

It doesn't need basements because it doesn't freeze and where it does the frost line is less than 6 inches deep. If you didn't have a basement in top half of the US your house would get thrown around by frost heave. Basements aren't about space or land value, they literally anchor the houses into the ground.
posted to MetaFilter by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 3:09 PM on September 30, 2023

Houston and and NY/NJ have very different geology and very different associated flood risks.
Houston is built on thousands of feet of water saturated clay - those downtown skyscrapers have foundations that go down almost as far as the towers go up - they're effectively floating.
NY City is built on some of the hardest rock you can imagine.
Underground structures in Houston will flood from all directions, NY underground floods from above - it should be far... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by thatwhichfalls at 11:44 AM on September 30, 2023

New York infrastructure has been put off for 40 years. The train tunnels, in particular, have just continued to deteriorate

Fun fact... if the subways stopped running their pumps, they'd flood within a week just from ground water seep. Hard to prevent flooding from torrential rains under those circumstances.

It would definitely help if the federal and state governments supported NYC transit more.
posted to MetaFilter by kokaku at 6:03 AM on September 30, 2023

My Favorite Year or GTFO.
posted to MetaFilter by HillbillyInBC at 1:12 PM on September 24, 2023

Oh man, I'm slightly disappointed this isn't the Matt LeBlanc Lost In Space,

A friend of mine observes that if you think of the 1998 Lost in Space as a reboot/botched franchise launch, it’s lousy. But if you think of it as a Friends side project where Joey Tribbiani follows up his triumph as Dr. Drake Remoray on the soaps with a huge Hollywood film, it increases its appeal greatly.
posted to MetaFilter by ricochet biscuit at 4:43 AM on September 25, 2023

33
posted to MetaFilter by Sauce Trough at 4:58 PM on September 19, 2023

They went with City on the Edge of Forever instead of The Inner Light?
posted to MetaFilter by RonButNotStupid at 1:09 PM on September 19, 2023

As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly
posted to MetaFilter by scolbath at 12:11 PM on September 19, 2023

> … launch fire-drill surges that extruded all obstacles

What the absolute previous is Isaacson on about here? Is this a colonic irrigation thing?
posted to MetaFilter by scruss at 3:16 PM on September 11, 2023

> Ah, yes, the vaunted "move fast, break things" ethos. Except the "move fast" part is illusory.

mr. musk was least-unfamiliar with how computing works back in the late 1900s, and doesn't realize that the stuff he's dealing with now is vastly more complex, with the consequences for breaking things much more severe.

it's like if someone who used to take a yacht out on weekends became convinced he knows... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 1:21 PM on September 11, 2023

"In retrospect, the whole Sacramento shutdown was a mistake."

Oh, hey. At least you've recognized that you made a--

"I was told we had redundancy across our data centers. What I wasn't told was that we had 70,000 hard-coded references to Sacramento. And there's still shit that's broken because of it."

Oh, somebody else's fault. Right. It's not like people who... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brundlefly at 12:15 PM on September 11, 2023

Who was it that said a southern accent makes everyone else discount your IQ by 20 points, and the opposite with a British accent?
posted to MetaFilter by gottabefunky at 12:04 PM on September 11, 2023

1. the idea of giving up once started is not in the range of my abilities.
2. There was a certain amount of bragging in social media circles, and I had to back away from that too
3. At least twice a week there were perfectly acceptable words that they decided were not, in fact, acceptable and to me that was wildly, I'm-gonna-write-a-letter-to-someone! unacceptable.

So I quit. But it is fun, for someone not me.
posted to MetaFilter by From Bklyn at 8:34 AM on September 11, 2023

It s almost like every field needs a cadre of mathematical statisticians immersed in the priors and theories of that field, but they all became quants on wall street instead
posted to MetaFilter by eustatic at 7:38 PM on September 10, 2023

I'm still haunted by the observation that it isn't that psychology has a "replication crisis," it's that psychology is the first field to openly acknowledge and grapple with a crisis that affects every field of science
posted to MetaFilter by DoctorFedora at 6:22 PM on September 10, 2023

Some of his songs hit harder than Jim Croce at his most maudlin but without the try-hard and if that’s not a testament to songwriting skill I dunno what is. Buffett took the skills he was given and made the world a happier, better place for a lot of people.

I feel like he should have lived longer. 76 is a bit young.
posted to MetaFilter by seanmpuckett at 6:17 AM on September 2, 2023

One of the best definitions of power, in human sense not energy, is: the ability to command the labor of others.

There's all sorts of ways that people can command the labor of others, but money is one of the simplest in our modern world. You can get people to do more or less anything if you have the money they want in payment.

And that's why billionaires are a threat to democracy.

Because they've got enormous power, and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by sotonohito at 9:11 AM on August 21, 2023

I was in Moscone for that Apple ][ Forever presentation… On the show floor, I demoed the new mouse for the Apple // to Bill Gates. I was not impressed. Another time, Apple had rented the huge auditorium/concert hall at the Junior College down the street in Cupertino, for some sort of product announcement. They had a satellite uplink/downlink setup for an expansion hall across the street. On one of the balconies, there was a huge setup of stacked 35mm slide projectors, probably around 20 or so,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by njohnson23 at 4:06 PM on August 22, 2023

the map asserts that nowhere in the United States will be uninhabitable due to heat by 2100. That's preposterous.

Certainly a true criticism, as there are places in the US which are uninhabitable due to heat right now. But I think the visualization effects are normalized to population, and the overlap of "highly populous US locations" and "potentially dangerous heat locales" is actually fairly small: Houston,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jackbishop at 11:59 AM on August 20, 2023

Oh my goodness, that did just turn into "kids today are too sensitive and don't read correctly" didn't it? Something something Freudian repetition something.

To feel defeated you have to want to win. You have to see yourself as playing the game. The whole point of Gen X is that we opt out. We don't do sincerity or all of that rat race striving. Our whole zeitgeist is of a disaffected outsider.

That's at least what it... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner at 1:41 PM on August 19, 2023

In my view, the core of the Gen X experience is the era of the latchkey kid and the disaffected independence that this nurtured.

Ow, that's a crystallization of something for me. Thanks.
posted to MetaFilter by hippybear at 1:37 PM on August 19, 2023