That's only true if the markup and JS are also good. If, for sake of argument, the HTML had been badly authored such that the links in that menu were DIVs with click event handlers, rather than real links, then removing CSS would likely make the experience worse rather than better.
I guess that a key point underpinning your comment is that progressive enhancement is still better than assuming all potential users are on the bleeding edge, despite the evergreen update pattern for the most popular 3 or 4 browsers.
In my opinion, here in the UK, the cinema/theatre business killed itself. Cinemas are horrible places to visit:
- they smell bad (stale junk food)
- they have oppressive lighting (mostly extremely dark but with garish turquoise and pink dazzle, accentuating the most confusing aspects of their architecture)
- the sound systems are thunderously loud (I'll be taking earplugs the next time I go to one)
- most of them are expensive
- most of them only programme big, loud, contemporary Hollywood offerings (which are simiarly horrible high contrast junk food only out to assault the audience); there's little appreciation for the art of cinema
They're like nightclubs, but without the dancing, social interaction, or resistance (a nebulous concept I'm not going into here).
You can say "this is what the market wants", but I wont't believe you. Such an argument is like saying social media (surveilled attention management) is what the market wants. The truth is much closer to "this is what the market can bear before it breaks".
There are lots of great theaters where I lived (Austin, TX) that are well maintained and have great food and drink.
My problem is other people. People can’t make it more than about 15 minutes before they check their phone and start scrolling. Or if they aren’t checking their phone they are still using the screen like a flashlight to see the menu or their food. Or they eat like a noisy animal. The worst is people with glasses of ice they chew on. Every time they raise their cup it’s basically an ice maraca followed by the sounds of them crushing ice cubes in their mouth.
Even in theaters where phones are banned (Alamo Drafthouse) they generally don’t do anything about it.
The one model I can maybe see working is one where you have a bunch of mini-theaters that seat maybe 10-20 people max. Each group gets their own theater showing what they want, timed perfectly to where they enter.
Basically renting a really kick ass home theater that happens to access to the latest releases.
Mostly agree, but I have a different complaint about the lighting... The movie theaters I go in the US don't FULLY turn the main lights off, which drives me crazy. It's 95% off, but not 100%. In addition, there's always a bit of light entering through the door, killing immersion. The only lights I accept inside a movie theater are the step lights on stairways (and certainly not cell phone screens!)
I’ve mostly had pleasant experiences at my local theatre, even some memorable encounters with strangers, and find the notion of a home theatre rather depressing.
There's certainly something to be said for the social aspect. I just wish theaters would catch up with the tech.
Only something like 20-40% of theaters are 4k, and less than 1% do HDR. 4k is really important when the image is that large, and the missing HDR changes the entire vibe of some films.
I've generally preferred these over the mainstream chains. The nearest Picturehouse to me closed down recently, which was a real loss as it was in a great building. I feel they didn't lean into their art house background hard enough: half the programme seemed to be the afforementioned addiction-cinema.
I feel that these spaces should be celebrating cinema: specials, all-nighters, film discussion groups/clubs in their cafes, some kind of access for local film-makers... like to actually be a part of film-as-art, rather than a part of film-for-business. Some of this goes on (I've been to a few such events), but I have a hunch that there's appetite for much more. It's just a hunch though.
I have a theory for this, but I don't know how I'd test for it (and I don't work in the field).
We have a time window within which audio stimulae are interpreted as being "the same sound". When you hear two impulses outside that window, they seem to be different sounds. You can play with this by looping two similar or copies of a sound and then varying their offset a few ms either way. They'll move in and out of seeming like the same and different sounds, and around the crossover point you get ringing effects (especially if there's more than two copies, such as with tight echoes).
To me, this seems like a fundamental part of music interpretation. Not the core, but very significant.
Also, different species have different time perceptions. (I mean, I'm kinda guessing, but they all have different heart rate ranges, attention spans, brain wave frequency ranges etc, all of which imply to me a varience in time perception). Our music makes sense against our time perception; we're quite sensitive to it... raise the bmp of a track by just 2 or 3 and it feels quite different. Change from 50% swing to 53% (or 52 if you're really sensitive) and your sense of the groove changes meaningfully. Pass all that through the "different perception of time" and it's easy to imagine our music means nothing to other species.
It also seems likely to me that:
a) most species have different sized windows
b) they perceive blends of frequencies quite differently depending on the window length
So, what seems like coherent, organised sound with a "story" or "meaning" or "structure" to us, probably becomes mush to most other species.
Then note that the different frequency ranges in which animals hear, the different ways their ears focus sound... etc. Us humans are creating organised sound around the biology of our auditory system; the perception of organisation is likely very different for most other species.
Just the difference between boom and bap, boom ... bap... boom... bap... tells us "something". but it's gonna tell you something different if you hear it as ttppssssss daaaaapppp ttpppssssss ddaaappppp.
This seems like an admission that LLMs don’t bring the productivity gains claimed/projected. Advertising works entirely counter to (individual) productivity. Adertising requires attention, and attention distracts from productivity. So oAI’s new route to profitability cannibalises their earlier route.
If I play devil's advocate, I'd say the productivity gain is so significant that even with the distraction of ads, you still save time by using LLMs :)
Not sure how that makes sense. Using Google with ads is more productive for finding something than not using Google at all, as was the case beforehand.
To conclude that Google is a net productivity loss you’d have to also factor in the productivity of all the queries over time where you _did_ find what you were looking for.
Yes if these llms were so great, they would just be autonomous agents out there shilling brands on every forum, hacking every protocol to inject ads anywhere and everywhere you could imagine... not randomly shoved into the middle of a poor teens suicide note revision
Or that the vast majority of people don't actually value their own productivity and time that much. Which given the popularity of social media and people not paying a few dollars to avoid hours of streaming ads per month seems fairly clear to me.
I'm no longer at MSFT, but according to the people that are, the leadership is straight up saying that anyone who doesn't like AI coding has no place in the company now.
Unfortunely, they are making people like myself, that in general tend to have comments more pro-Windows, starting to consider the alternatives yet again.
Even .NET and C++ tooling getting spoiled with AI no matter what, see latest set of DevBlog announcements.
I already said why. But to go deeper: the US has, and has always had, a strong libertarian and anti-government streak among a very large proportion of its citizens. And it's not going away. That's why the US doesn't have a national ID, the way so many other countries do. That's why adults are not required to carry ID's with them, the way it is in many other countries.
These political values are a strong part of American culture. The distrust of central government and authority has been around since the founding of the country. They belong to the most durable of American values.
If the US still doesn't have a national ID, or require citizens to carry ID's, and there's literally no political movement towards that, what on earth makes you think this will change?
Being able to put a driver's license on your phone is state-level. It's a form of ID we're OK with. It can't be mandatory because not everyone can drive. There's zero slippery slope here. I just want to carry the card I already have to carry when driving or flying, on my phone instead of physically. There's zero downside here.
My only use of XSLT (2000-2003) was to make interactive e-learning applications. I'd have used it in 2014 too, for an interactive "e-brochure", if I could have worked out a cross-browser solution for runtime transformation of XML fragments. (I suspect it was possible then but I couldn't work it out in the time I had for the job...)
If you can use it to generate HTML, you can use it to generate an interactive experience.
> where wealth inequality has reached a point of a new feudal like caste system
This is a global problem, not limited to the US. It's also the end-state of capitalism because having (access to) more money makes it easier to have access to more money, and money drives everything else.
> where our institutions now function to primarily manage and preserve an unhealthy society that is primarily exploitative and does not have the needs of the populace first and foremost.
For me, it has always looked like the use was primarily exploitative and completely opposed to supporting the populace.
> Where economic indicators, economic lingo and policy just uses a vernacular to hide its direct purpose to provide safety for the haves at the expense of the have nots.
This is not new. Chomsky told us this in the 60s. The Catholic Church used a similar strategy for over a millennia.
I'm not disagreeing with you, only attempting to disperse your sense of surprise.
There's no such thing as capitalism without government. Depending on how the government regulates capitalism, you don't necessarily get wealth inequality.
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