P.O.S.S.E.
“My guess is that so many of the letter-writers are effective altruists and vegans themselves that they see it as an impeccable testament to his character, and don’t realize others don’t necessarily assign it the same moral value. That, or they realize that “vegan” is a convenient way to signal “white, wealthy, and well-connected” without having to say it. Probably both”
“Surely a world where sensible, small companies produce enough revenue to keep their fellow travelers consistently employed is possible. Seize the means of production, not by guillotine, but by building better systems than the empty suits and learning how to do sales.
I’ve had it up to fucking here watching people live in fear of inexorable death machines deciding that they need to juice their profits because they spent all the money on Deloitte”
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/on-authenticity-and-whats-worth-doing/
“Andrew Fray, a lead programmer at UK studio Roll7, makers of OlliOlli World and Rollerdrome, shared what they called the PS2 manifesto on social media earlier this month: “7-13 hours of content. Combine a few old ideas in a new way, or have one big new idea. No complicated character upgrade trees. Limited online, little post-launch support. 2 ish years, 30 game devs. Thanks for your money, on to the next one.” This attitude gave us so many weird classics 20 years ago, games that are difficult to imagine existing now, from Ico to Gitaroo Man. None of them were multimillion sellers but, crucially, they didn’t have to be”
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/feb/28/pushing-buttons-playstation-job-losses
“the Alabama Supreme Court decided in a wrongful death suit resulting from the accidental destruction of embryos that were part of an in vitro fertilization (IVF) process, in which doctors artificially fertilize eggs outside the womb and then transfer them into a person, that fertilized human eggs have the same status as children. Chief Justice Tom Parker declared in a concurring opinion that the people of Alabama have adopted the “theologically based view” that “life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-21-2024
“If you count hybrids, BYD has been outselling Tesla for quite some time, nearly doubling Tesla’s total in the first half of 2023. But it’s not quite right to position BYD and Tesla as rivals in the model of Ford and General Motors. If anything, they’re more like Microsoft and Apple — opposing futures for electric vehicles that are likely to keep bouncing up against each other for decades”
“To court the large demographic of customers moulded by the internet, more cafes adopted the aesthetics that already dominated on the platforms. Adapting to the norm wasn’t just following trends but making a business decision, one that the consumers rewarded. When a cafe was visually pleasing enough, customers felt encouraged to post it on their own Instagram in turn as a lifestyle brag, which provided free social media advertising and attracted new customers. Thus the cycle of aesthetic optimisation and homogenisation continued”
“For some in the party, denying the Tories victory would force them to become “true” conservatives again, perhaps under the leadership of Suella Braverman. But for others, including Habib, the goal is to permanently destroy the Conservative parliamentary party as an electoral force. “It does not deserve to survive,” he told me. “You can’t reward failure with incumbency, the party needs to be obliterated.”
Here, though, lies the question at the heart of Reform: what is its ultimate purpose? This question is neatly encapsulated in the figure of Farage himself: the founder and majority shareholder who is not planning to stand for the party at the election but is flirting with the idea of joining the Tories afterwards”
“But hacks and data leaks happen all the time. Also, companies sell, rebrand, and change business models, and when they do, privacy policies have been known to become more porous. Latch may not be selling my data today, but what about in a couple years? How much trust do I owe a company whose product I am only inadvertently a user of, and which has only caused me headaches?”
https://www.curbed.com/2024/01/latch-smart-lock-nyc-apartments-aggravating-feature.html
“I rewrote my prose over and over, but it didn’t seem to satisfy my robot grader. I finally chose one thought per sentence, broke up paragraphs, and replaced words with suggested keywords to get rid of the red dots signaling problems.
The result feels like an AI summary of my story — at any moment, a paragraph could start with “In conclusion…” or “The next thing to consider is…” The nuance, voice, and unexpected twists and turns have been snuffed out. I’m sure some people would prefer this uncomplicated, beat-by-beat version of the story, but it’s gone from being a story written by a real person to a clinical, stiff series of sentences.
Now imagine thousands of website operators all using this same plug-in to rewrite content. No wonder people feel like the answers are increasingly robotic and say nothing”
https://www.theverge.com/c/23998379/google-search-seo-algorithm-webpage-optimization
“With more parents working from home, nannies are spending more time out of the apartment, where their behavior can be more readily judged and photographed by spectators. Lidia*, a former nanny who spent 17 years working for families in New York and New Jersey and now consults in the child-care industry, recalls an incident last year when her friend was in the park nannying for two kids and was reported on Facebook for ignoring the children while she was “busy having a dramatic phone call.” The person on the other line was in fact her boss, the children’s mom, who’d called with the upsetting news that she’d had to take her third child to the emergency room”