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Regolith's comments
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Regolith  ·  3170 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A team of architects wants to crowd-fund Minas Tirith

Oh good; had no idea Indiegogo added that feature.

Regolith  ·  3170 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A team of architects wants to crowd-fund Minas Tirith

It just occurred to me, a lot of people might put some money towards it just for a laugh, expecting they'll get their money back at the end of the failed campaign like Kickstarter does. On Indiegogo, the campaign keeps the money whether it's successful or not.

These guys just got £66,055 (Minus 5%) from a joke... They claim they'll refund it at the end of the campaign, but there's no system in place to guarantee that; they could just take the money and run.

If it raised hundreds of thousands, millions even, could you repress the urge to just take the money?

Regolith  ·  3173 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Google is restructuring, going private and is now part of Alphabet Inc.

From what I've seen Twitter is great for powerful, dynamic people to read in tiny bursts and write in tiny bursts, then get on with what they were doing; the character limit makes Twitter the success it is.

It also makes it fail at being a meaningful communication platform, given that concepts must be expressed in a finite, tiny space. Much Twitter anger seems to stem from a fundamental failure of one party to fully explain thier position within the character limit.

But given celebrities' small attention spans and/or demands on thier time, I don't see them moving to another social network unless it makes the experience faster and easier to consume still. This makes Twitter-in my mind-less of a place for normal people to socialise, and more of a stream-of-consciousness of celebrities - a one-way social network, and occasional personal messaging client.

Regolith  ·  3173 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

While I agree with the sentiment of ol' 927, for a standard to be adopted it must first exist. 927 didn't stop the Hamburger (One of the weirder statements I've made)

Regolith  ·  3173 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Google is restructuring, going private and is now part of Alphabet Inc.

That's a fine point, I hadn't considered the effects on consumers brand associations; Glass would really benefit from a distancing of Googles' perceived invasions of privacy in particular. It's interesting how we associate traits and values to a name so integrally, that just changing the parent companies name changes how we can perceive the products function. I know I'd instinctively feel more comfortable using the Kinect were it made by Acme Inc. instead of Microsoft.

Regarding Google's "Don't Be Evil" slogan, I do wonder how much of Google's fundamental philosophies and business structure will be ported between subsidiaries. It would be amusing and disconcerting to have, say, a military contractor providing cryptographic devices to the NSA as a sister company to Google.

Regolith  ·  3173 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

That's a really fine argument; that people gloss over the 'Buger when sniffing for navigation cues was particularly compelling. Up until now I accepted the Hamburger Menu as a necessary design compromise to make a mobile experience work well, and thought people would just get use to it with sufficient adoption like people got used to the Start Menu. But it is an ugly, unintuitive abstraction, and one of the worst compromises to solve the mobile UI navigation problem; designers can and should do better.

It makes me wonder whether we should be looking at the more novel ways in which mobile users can interface–like gestures, or movement input–that can be a pretty intuitive and totally invisible solution, if only some well designed, codified and broadly adopted design language was used.

Regolith  ·  3173 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Google is restructuring, going private and is now part of Alphabet Inc.

This is a really interesting move. It provides some protection against anti-monopoly actions, as r6y9yd8lar5u1mugbz said, and the fascinating prospect of opening up additional funding avenues and risk-protection as kleinbl00 said. Another interesting dimension is PR – other Alphabet subsidiaries won't benefit from the inherent value attached to the Google brand nearly as much as if they were directly Google products, "Glass, from the company owned by the company who owns Google" just doesn't have the same ring to it. On the other hand if a risky Alphabet subsidiary fails as dramatically as Google+ did, that failure won't reflect on Google and damage its brand nearly as badly.

This seems like a win from so many perspectives: Ease of administration, risk avoidance, monopoly defence, additional funding, tax mitigation, brand management. I'm kind of surprised they didn't do this sooner, on reflection.

Regolith  ·  3173 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Google is restructuring, going private and is now part of Alphabet Inc.

They should have waited til April 1st, and upheld the Google tradition.

Regolith  ·  3174 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: No, the EMdrive is not a miracle of science or anything else for that matter.

Nothing new then, this was the conclusion several months ago; but it's good to see it accessibly written out on a popular news site.

It is almost certainly a methodological error in the experiment; but that fact that so many groups are experiencing the same error (Even NASA's JPL, of all groups) implies that there's some thing unknown to science causing the error, even if it's a failure in the testing apparatus. Some of the best minds in their fields can't yet work out what's causing the effect, and that means we may well learn something new – all be it something that agrees with our current understanding of momentum conservation and thermodynamics.

Regolith  ·  3175 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Dear hubski, when do you feel the most powerful?

When I'm having a good conversation, especially with a beautiful woman. I suffered from social anxiety disorder for most of my life, only coming to terms with it in my mid-twenties. I can't even begin to count the number of bumbling, frightening, simply awful conversations I agonized over for days, weeks sometimes.

Now that I can deal with my anxiety, and I've learned to be somewhat charismatic in the face of it, bringing charm to a conversation feels like punching my demons square in their faces. A good conversation with a beautiful woman makes me feel ascended to that charming, easily pleasing archetype of a fellow I always envied in my teens; makes me feel invincible.

Regolith  ·  3177 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Who is Jeremy Corbyn? An international readers guide to the British politician

Those proposing he's unelectable generally believe that a leftist government is a thing of the past in Britain – the last leftist government ended in 1979 following the Winter of Discontent, a series of widespread strikes in many industries reacting to poor economic governance. Margaret Thatchers' Conservative government was elected directly as a response to the poor performance of the previous Labour government.

Labour remained in opposition for 18 years, until Tony Blair won the 1997 election with his New Labour campaign – a restructuring of the Labour party to appeal to the centrists, inspired by the Clinton campaign in the US.

Many in the UK–including Tony Blair and many of the elected Labour ministers–argue a Labour that doesn't appeal to the centre can't win. I would argue that since Labour lost its large Scottish base to the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the 2015 election, a centrist Labour government can't win.

A shift to the left will give the much ignored left-learning portions of the electorate something to vote for again, hopefully increasing youth turnout and winning back some of the Scottish voters who went with the more left-learning SNP; and may well allow Labour to ally with the SNP to form a coalition government.

Either way, I don't see Labour winning again in its current incarnation; unless the SNP royally screws up and fails to keep its current voters. Something has to change in Labour.

Regolith  ·  3184 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Windows 10? Here are privacy issues you should consider

Given the changes to their privacy policies, making Cortana a flagship feature, and giving 10 away for free to most of their potential audience, it seems like Microsoft is moving towards the Google style of a data driven business for this OS instead of a product sales driven business.

It'll be interesting to see how (And if) they can make that strategy work, given that the 10%~ ad-network market share doesn't give them an awful lot of scope to capitalise on targeted ads like Google does.

Assuming this is the case, it seems like a backwards way of going at the problem – get the advertisers on board, and surely the users will flock to view those ads.

Regolith  ·  3191 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: My wedding was perfect – and I was fat as hell the whole time

She might, but clearly she's weighed that decision (Pun intended) and–as a rational human being with agency–decided the value of losing 100lbs is not worth it.

That fine. We're all adults, we can make those choices; and it's wrong to shame somebody into making a different choice — the choice you might feel is right for her.

Reframing the argument: Clearly a multilingual speaking person is better than a monolingual speaker; they can participate better in the global economy & contribute to a broader society. But learning other languages takes effort, time, and work.

I might say that if you don't learn other languages, you are a bad, lazy, incompetent person; a lesser person than I. Clearly you should be shamed into making the right choice about languages, my choice about languages.

Surely you can see that in a free society this is unethical. You've weighed the choice of learning other languages, and decided against it. It's not my place to tell you my choice is right and yours is wrong; that's what you're there for — to make your own choices.

Regolith  ·  3209 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Verge: We're turning comments off for a bit

Do inline comments work as a meaningful communication system at all? Every site with inline comments below the content I can think of seems to generate down right stupid conversion at best, and venomous conversion at worst; I can't think of a single site where it works well.

I'm curious why precisely – there doesn't seem to be any inherent failing in this type of comments system; if anything presenting a forum for conversion right on the page, without any effective barriers, should stimulate immediate and specific conversation about the content of the article.

Regolith  ·  3209 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A Series Of Unfortunate Events teaser trailer!

My only experience with the series is the film. In the context of the books, what did the film do wrong?

Regolith  ·  3209 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A Series Of Unfortunate Events teaser trailer!

Do all Netflix original series come to Australia? I'd be surprised if they didn't, there're no licencing hoops to jump through with their original content.

Regolith  ·  3209 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Where can I find Google's deep dream software for making those trippy images?

The code is hosted on their Github page; where they also have a pretty detailed guide for using the code. There's no compiled Windows executable to use that I'm aware of, yet.

DeepDream is written in Python using IPython. Python's a really simple programming language, and IPython gives you the immediate results of your code; it shouldn't take you more than an afternoon to get the GitHub code up and running if you wish to, even if you're new to programming.

The official Python tutorial is really accessible, it's how I first learned programming; there are also free courses available at Code Academy. Python can be used for a huge range of tasks, I think it's a tool that everybody can make valuable use of, whether you're into programming or not.

Also, here's some eyecandy from DeepDream from their GitHub page. I especially like the beagle-butted knight.

Regolith  ·  3210 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Can Wikipedia Survive? - The New York Times

It's doubtless a threat to Wikipedia, and a sustained one, but Wikipedia's well equipped to handle it.

I spent several years as an anti-vandal editor; even back then editors had a huge and powerful suite of tools to quickly, easily, and accurately contextualise edits and revert them; I regularly checked several hundred edits an hour. Every edit is reviewed by a small army of diligent people checking facts, rephrasing contributions, and warning/banning offenders; it's less a question of if a mal-intended edit would be reverted, and more when it would be reverted (Generally in the first half-minute, rarely more than a few minutes)

I stopped patrolling edits because I felt I was simply spending my time making an already very efficient machine only seconds more efficient; there were better things to do with my time.

Regolith  ·  3210 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What will you miss most from Reddit?

The Imaginary Network of fictional art, which I'll still visit from time to time.

As others have said, I don't think many of us will leave Reddit; it still serves its purpose of mass democratised information retrieval and indexing that no other website has the community size to match. The fact that we Reddit outcasts are here at all implies we are more versed and invested in Reddit-like theory than 95% of Reddit users, or we wouldn't have found Hubski to begin with; this in turn implies we already have pretty well curated and selective subReddit subscriptions, and there's really little wrong with our own Reddit feeds.

Reddit still serves that function of harvesting and parsing links of the niches we're interested in, the key problem I think we all have with Reddit–the reason I'm here–is that Reddit is no longer a good place for meaningful conversation. The mechanics of how Reddit sorts posts and comments, combined with its size and demographic, have killed Reddits capability to systemically host good conversation. This is a function Reddit can no longer serve — and a function Hubski seems to serve quite well.

Regolith  ·  3210 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A Simple Post: Discuss your favorite TV shows here!

Attack on Titan is a simply masterful series; an extraordinary visual composition, a soundtrack that still sends chills down my spine just thinking about it, and a relentless, beautifully written story. I put it up there as one of the best television series of all time without reservation, along with the modern Battlestar Galactica & Firefly.

Another recent anime I deeply enjoyed was Psycho-Pass. It explores a dystopian world where every persons psychological state can be scanned by sensors; the series follows a group of police officers tasked with hunting and dispatching the seriously unbalanced and psychopathic before they can cause further psychological harm to society. It's a really fleshed out and deep examination of the consequences of such a technology, and doesn't pull any punches.

Regolith  ·  3210 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A Simple Post: Discuss your favorite TV shows here!

I too adored pretty much all of Star Trek, but despite two attempts I can't finish Enterprise.

It started attractively enough, looking at the some of first steps the Federation makes into deep space and even introduced the Klingons as a newly encountered race in the first episode; it felt exciting, as you say, to see humanity's early rise above its bullshit of nation states, capitalism, and war to unite in the participation and exploration of interstellar space, a chapter of Star Trek history we only ever previous heard about second-hand. That first season was broadly compelling, generally well made & well written.

And then the Xindi turned up with their "Temporal Cold War". It seemed as if the executives watching over Enterprise were worried that without a constricted, monomyth story structure Enterprise would fall down dead right out of the gate, so we have to have a distinct and consistent antagonist, a Sauron and his army of malformed Orcs, they need to have a pathological hatred of humans & our protagonists in particular, and they need to ineffectively sabotage Enterprise like Gargamel ineffectively sabotaged the Smurfs.

Because clearly, in 21st century television, you can't just have a spaceship aimlessly travelling through space, encountering weird and wonderful alien cultures, technologies, and problems. You might end up with seven legendary seasons and four feature films like The Next Generation!

Season three totally gave up on the idea that this was a Star Trek, and it became a Star Wars. A silly, poorly written and seemingly pointless battle with the Empire Xindi, where the Millennium Falcon Enterprise overcame impossible odds to destroy the Death Star Xindi superweapon.

At that point I gave up. Did I miss anything in season four?

Regolith  ·  3211 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: PSA: Welcome to Hubski, Redditors.

From how I understand it: You shouldn't think of voting as sharing with your followers – like Twitter. Voting simply means "I found this interesting", by definition anything you find interesting will also likely be interesting to those who follow you; and if it isn't interesting to them, they won't be following you.

So don't worry about what your followers might think of what you're sharing; if the system works they'll find a post as interesting as you did.