MetaFilter

the thread is titled "The Unluckiest Generation" and TFA is explicitly about people under 40 waking to this reality.

The problem is affecting all of us. The unluckiest generation is the one who has lived their entire life under it, but those of us who lived for a while in a better life have also gotten to watch the sliding horror. However, that also gives us a better perspective on how we got there, *because* we watched it happen.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by corb at 7:51 AM on April 2, 2024

It is obscene that this entire article manages to completely ignore the fact that going forward, piracy is the only way to guarantee access to the media you have enjoyed.

After these companies started to expect me to buy the same movies two, sometimes three times I hoisted the black flag and never looked back.
posted to MetaFilter by hobo gitano de queretaro at 6:06 PM on March 30, 2024

The author's parents are right wing Hispanic Catholics, so you might have something there. They are both public figures. Her father runs a pro-life group and her mother was part of Ron deSantis' cabinet.
posted by vacapinta at 4:38 AM on March 29

The article makes so much more sense now.
posted to MetaFilter by bluesky43 at 8:54 AM on March 29, 2024

I walked most of the way across Santa Cruz in the evening after the Loma Prieta quake. There was no city electricity or gas but roughly once a block there was a group of neighbors holding a barbecue of what they expected to go bad in their respective freezers. Everyone had a radio on and we were hearing what happened in San Francisco and Oakland. We were all a bit on edge waiting for aftershocks, but people were fine in general.

Undoubtedly there were some hardcore... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 1:28 PM on March 27, 2024

I will never run out of food because I've bought so many sardines in the vain hope that one day I'll eat them. Nobody's going to steal my sardines and I am so unexcited about eating them I'd probably forget about them and eat the cat's food first, or the cat. Or dirt. I wish I liked sardines, I really do. They're so good for you.
posted to MetaFilter by Don Pepino at 12:48 PM on March 27, 2024

What I got from The Dawn of Everything was that it was an attempt to ignite a sense of political possibility.

The message was that people have always made conscious decisions that bring political systems into being. There's never been a "primitive man" who unconsciously drifted into inevitable, "natural" structures. Homo sapiens have always talked with each other about how their societies work, how other societies work, how they... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by clawsoon at 6:14 AM on March 27, 2024

It's interesting that an anarchist can be "disheartened" by the book, but Sartwell seems to have forgotten that Graeber was an anthropologist, not merely a political activist. What he seems to object to the most is precisely what Graeber (and Wengrow) learned from anthropology.

E.g. Sartwell complains that the book rejects "the classic Weberian definition of the state" and thus undermines the "anarchist critique of the state, from William Godwin... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by zompist at 2:37 AM on March 27, 2024

this website loves to whine about engineer’s disease, but when it comes to listening to actual engineers…lol.
posted to MetaFilter by hototogisu at 10:52 PM on March 26, 2024

Depending on how wide "that part of central Europe" you accept, Microcosm: portrait of a central European city by Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse might be of interest. It's a history of Wrotizla; Vretslav; Presslaw; Breßlau; Breslau; Wrocław which is a bit N and W of where you want but I'd guess the cultural, linguistic and political issues are similar? A essay How I rediscovered my family story by (son) Christian Davies, is shorter.... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by BobTheScientist at 1:14 PM on March 26, 2024

Austro-Hungarians were more of a federation than occupiers in the modern imperialist sense - the Hungarian side grew more nationalist as the 19th century progressed but languages and schooling and arts weren't directly suppressed in the Austrian side. You may be thinking of Prussia/Germany or Russia. The Empire-Kingdom was a mismanaged and degenerating parasite but benefitted from neighbours that were decidedly worse

And damn but Central and Eastern Europe ethnic... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by I claim sanctuary at 12:40 PM on March 26, 2024

A long time ago, in Versaille
Some time-travelers wandered by
They say that they met
Marie Antoinette
And stared at some ugly old guy.
posted to MetaFilter by MrVisible at 8:55 AM on March 25, 2024

The Public Domain Review

What really happened? Here’s one version: two women of uncommon intelligence spent decades asserting the validity of their particular shared experience. They fought tooth and nail to prove that they saw what they saw, that it mattered, that it was real, and that they were credible. It was an argument about ghosts, but it might not have been about ghosts at all.

posted to MetaFilter by pracowity at 4:10 AM on March 25, 2024

I'm somewhat naive in this area: is there a "competition" where models are published and evaluated on data that arrives afterwards? Or are we relying entirely on self-reported evaluations of model accuracy? In ML we worry about models overfitting the training data set and becoming worse at modeling out of sample data, so I assume there are similar evaluations performed.

Sorry this turned out so long.

Climate (and many... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by mark k at 12:26 PM on March 25, 2024

We at the DoD want a digital twin with attitude. You've heard the expression, "let's get busy"? Well, this is a digital twin who gets "biz-zay!" Consistently and thoroughly. We're talking about a totally outrageous paradigm.
posted to MetaFilter by credulous at 11:18 AM on March 25, 2024

at least in your matrix pod you're guaranteed food, housing and healthcare
posted to MetaFilter by Coeliac McCarthy at 5:43 PM on March 24, 2024

Does the frenzy for naming and “curating” on online platforms make in-person meet-ups seem less desirable? Do kids turn to posting and online sociality because of restrictive parenting and the failure of society to provide them with other territories where they can experiment with identity and community? Are algorithms making kids too addicted to phones to be present in reciprocal friendships? Does the phone as an interface habituate kids to solitary solipsism? Are online spaces... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by AlSweigart at 5:40 AM on March 24, 2024

The thing about "Hitler did... " "Putin did..." "Trump did..." is that they don't actually do these things, in reality the state evolves into an extension of their ego (or whatever) as the bad people replace the not-bad people.
posted to MetaFilter by torokunai at 11:27 AM on March 23, 2024

If humans were meant to fly, they would have been born with wings.

Convince me that the invention of heavier-than-air flight has been a net benefit to humanity as a whole. Go ahead.
posted to MetaFilter by Faint of Butt at 9:43 AM on March 22, 2024

A rat done bit my sister
posted to MetaFilter by torokunai at 5:47 PM on March 21, 2024

I watched this last night and I think he's broadly right, but there were a few points at which I wished he could have been right without screeching about it. In my view The World's End was the weakest of the Cornetto films in part because Pegg's character is a kind of annoying man-baby in ways his protagonist in the previous films wasn't, which Danskin goes to some length to emphasize. Although I think Wright is a brilliant director and Pegg a charismatic lead, I never really... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by axiom at 10:37 AM on March 21, 2024

Also? Also also? This is 100% absolutely a show for subtitles. I couldn't imagine this as an English language production, the amount of translation-based hijinks that are only available through subs _alone_. But the actors are 100% leaning into language as a character, too, so good.
posted to FanFare by Kyol at 8:07 PM on March 20, 2024

This kind of fractal detail is what makes life interesting, TBH. I am novelty seeking, and the best way to get novelty is to work on learning to be modestly competent at things you have no idea how to do. Because of the spiral of complexity.

It's also why rich people think poor people don't know anything. Because how hard can it be to do whatever it is that poor people do? They must be stupid, just look at how trivial it is to (clean a bathroom / walk a dog / flip a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by seanmpuckett at 2:02 PM on March 18, 2024

Add a friend's address as return. Someone who lives far from you. Done.

jfc, do not do this. Not without that friend's fully informed consent at a minimum, and not without thinking really hard about the risks you're trying to avoid. It is not difficult to imagine anonymous' abusive ex-husband beating their current address out of this friend.

Please do not give out security or safety advice to anyone, ever, if you can't manage... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by mhoye at 7:46 AM on March 18, 2024

Starmer, the next PM, wrote this in 2021:

“The referendum was five years ago now. We have left the EU. There is no case for rejoining. We want to make our exit a success."

Unfortunately, and I say this as the remainiest of remainers, he's right in this

especially that statement "there's no case for rejoining" - but not the way most read it . "no case" is not on the UK's... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by lalochezia at 7:14 AM on March 18, 2024

is it that the signal strength and direction are not known outside the mission team?

The frequency and other information is freely available. For example, from the website All About Circuits: “The uplink carrier frequency of Voyager 1 is 2114.676697 MHz and 2113.312500 MHz for Voyager 2. The uplink carrier can be modulated with command and/or ranging data. Commands are 16-bps, Manchester-encoded, biphase-modulated onto a 512 HZ square wave... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by azpenguin at 4:04 PM on March 17, 2024

What kinds of measures does NASA take to prevent us randos from communicating with Voyager or sending commands?

I had a friend who worked on low Earth orbit civilian government satellites in the 90s. He told me at the time that it was mostly security through obscurity, they assumed no one would have the radio equipment or knowledge to send correctly formatted commands to the satellite. He also said there was an FTP server connected to exactly the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Nelson at 4:05 PM on March 17, 2024

From Donald Miller's book:

It was the interrogators’ immense amount of information about American Air Force operations that was their most effective tool in extracting information. In intelligence briefings back in England, airmen had been warned about what to expect, but the “apparent omniscience” of their captors unnerved more than a few of them. “[My interrogator] actually inquired about my mother’s health in Terre Haute and asked how my kid sister was doing in high... [more]
posted to FanFare by elgilito at 5:38 PM on March 8, 2024

If your so-called physics doesn't allow time to go backwards by spinning the earth around counter-clockwise, maybe you need some better physics.
posted to MetaFilter by mittens at 9:51 AM on March 15, 2024

As with everything else these days, it seems, people are not prepared to invest in quality furniture that's going to last them half a lifetime - they'd rather buy something cheap and shitty, then sell it and get a shiny new one when it inevitably falls apart.

I need to buy a new sofa soon, and it isn't like Company A is honest that their sofas are made out of sawdust while Company B offers a 30 year guarantee. They all use similar photos and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Dip Flash at 7:12 AM on March 15, 2024

The Tripods?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by justkevin at 4:51 PM on March 12, 2024 marked best answer

Constant surveillance is horrifying, but your behavior behind the wheel has never been private.

Your local police department probably keeps track of your movements with license plate scanners. I like privacy, too, but it's hard to feel that driver behavior monitoring is an outstanding offense under the circumstances.
posted to MetaFilter by Western Infidels at 6:52 AM on March 12, 2024

Get your skis shined up
Grab a stick of Juicy Fruit
The taste is gonna move ya
Take a stick
Pull it out
The taste is gonna move ya when you pop it in your
...
MAOOOOOUUUUUUUUUTHHH yeah!

[Ray Manzarek organ solo]
posted to MetaFilter by credulous at 11:28 AM on March 10, 2024

I'm not sure I knew Scarlett Johannson could act.

Definitely check out Under the Skin. It is an unusual film and Scarlett even improvises a bunch (some of the scenes are filmed with civilians that didn't realize there were cameras present.
posted to FanFare by mmascolino at 12:44 PM on March 10, 2024

She's not Jewish, Buddhist or Muslim. She is, however, from the same fundamentalist/evangelical background, and was writing from her experience of an affect she recognized from being trained in it herself.
posted to MetaFilter by fatbird at 12:46 PM on March 9, 2024

Why Can’t People Be Normal About Sydney Sweeney?

because "millions of people ambivalent about $topic" doesn't generate clicks?

i'm extremely normal about Sydney Sweeney but nobody cares about that
posted to MetaFilter by glonous keming at 4:48 PM on March 8, 2024

folks who sit to pee and thus don't get piss on the floor, seat, hands, clothing

That may seem self-evident, obvious, and correct, but I can assure you it is not.

It brings with it a different problem, that of the accursed final drop, which no matter what you do, will not fall until after you stand up and pull your pants back up.
posted to MetaFilter by ChrisR at 10:58 AM on March 8, 2024

this bit here:

> It seems like simple common sense to most people nowadays that assets will on average increase in value, investments will yield a return, and businesses will make a profit. Stop and think about that for a minute, though. Why does this happen? Because the economy grows every quarter. Why does the economy grow every quarter? There are many reasons, but they all ultimately boil down to the fact that the population increases.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 1:17 AM on March 7, 2024

Who?
posted to MetaFilter by mhoye at 7:50 PM on March 6, 2024

I could obviously just pay it off with cash on hand. but that cuts my runway for getting a new job by more than half.

At present you have a slab of high-interest credit card debt and a larger slab of cash.

If I were in your position and that cash were my runway, then given that I can't actually know whether I'll need the whole runway, I'd pay off the credit card debt straight away.... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by flabdablet at 7:33 AM on March 5, 2024

This episode does absolutely lean more into Anjin taking actions that benefit or even save Toranaga, but I'm willing to extend it the benefit of the doubt thus far. Blackthorne was obviously not going to be marginalized for the entire narrative -- his relationship with Toranaga *is* the story. I don't -- currently -- see Anjin's heroics as diminishing the other characters.

What gives me hope about this, other than the high quality of the writing thus far, is the *way*... [more]
posted to FanFare by absalom at 6:49 AM on March 6, 2024

> We're told that Toranaga is a savvy planner and manipulator, well-known for his trickery, but Blackthorne has to save him twice during during the escape attempt.

I think they're struggling with how to make it plausible that Toranaga would accept Anjin as an advisor and also a friend, given that it seems like the smartest thing would be to throw him to the Jesuits to forge an alliance and save his head, so they had to make our World's First English Weeaboo into a... [more]
posted to FanFare by dis_integration at 6:43 AM on March 6, 2024

I am as sectarian divisive lefty asshole as it comes and frankly I am pissed at Lee staying in that CA race despite the fact that her politics are more in line with mine and I would much rather have her in the Senate. It's not that she's "too old" - I don't think voters care about actual numerical "age" btw, they care whether someone is behaving like a deteriorating old mummy - but she doesn't seem to have any path to victory, and is only polling high enough to chip off a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by windbox at 9:35 AM on March 5, 2024

Sure it is, it's the size of these buttons
posted to MetaFilter by potrzebie at 9:30 AM on March 5, 2024

If the name of your movie is also the name of a character in said movie, it should be disqualified from this analysis. Barbie? Fucking It??? Come on.
posted to MetaFilter by rhymedirective at 8:17 AM on March 4, 2024

Ah boy, I'm just so tired of all these Star Wars.
posted to MetaFilter by gc at 7:55 AM on March 4, 2024

that's really the problem with casting Walken... he's one of many older actors and actresses who, at this point, only come across as their persona on screen rather than the character (for example, Pacino, DeNiro, Eastwood, Mirren)
posted to FanFare by kokaku at 9:43 AM on March 3, 2024

Chani was his love and to be the one to bear his children. I dont like that they've created extra drama here.

(a) The political issues are hugely important to her personally, and Paul has just blown up everything that matters most to her.

(b) We have a deep-provincial concubine suddenly being made aware (apparently without any preparation) that she's insufficiently valuable to marry. Instead, her boyfriend is taking up... [more]
posted to FanFare by praemunire at 11:43 PM on March 1, 2024