"Kids are hard. People are selfish." - More people than ever before want to live a life free of the responsibilities of having children, which is totally fine but never gets talked about in this discussion about birthrate. I have a lot of financially secure friends who never want kids.
"The dating market is torture." - Expectations of dating, especially online dating are very different from previous generations and kind of wack. I admit to falling into the trap of feeling like someone else out there is better and not giving the person I met online more of a chance past the first date. I'm sure others who I was with had the same reaction. Next thing you know, you're past the age of wanting or even being able to have a child. Either way, it's crazy when you see online discussions about how such and such city has a dearth of good matches which seems statistically improbable.
I thought the rule was to keep the title the same as the article? The title is: "Toxic Gaslighting: How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe"
Aggressive moderation can be very toxic. The /r/toronto and /r/askTO subreddits are modded by essentially the same people. They remove comments/posts without explanation as to what rules were broken, and then when you critique them in the comments surprise, surprise, they remove them too!
> As for Udacity, which was founded in 2011, it gave the usual kinds of statements a company makes when it gets acquired by a much larger organization like Accenture. That is, it believes that it can reach more people and help them acquire skills as part of the larger entity. That goes without saying, but there had been rumors earlier this year that the company was in talks with Indian edtech company Upgrad with an asking price of $80 million. Apparently that deal fell through and Accenture ended up buying them instead.
I wouldn't be shocked if it was low. I remember during the online learning boom of the mid-to-late 2010s I spent some time studying a variety of courses on Udacity but I felt the depth wasn't there.
And now there's a lot of different options for online learning specialized to particular industries that are superior to general platforms like Udacity. For example, when I was learning DL, I joined a local study group that went through fast.ai together.
There's a disruption coming. One of the clearest LLM use cases is in learning and development. Another one is in producing "first drafts" of documents based on past work and "best practices". Both areas are what Accenture (and Deloitte, etc) excel at.
It's also a major disruptor for their business model: if the effort spent on "first drafts" and simple analysis is made automatically by LLMs, then you dont need as many juniors; your employee base gets smaller. But then how do you get experts if you hire fewer (better even) juniors? big consulting Cos are pyramids and these pyramids need feeding, continuously.
I think this is a brilliant move: Accenture has tons of capability in L&D that they've built up for their own purposes --feeding the pyramid. It's a capacity that they can easily offer to enterprises as an additional service, and they will probably use a lot of LLMs to deliver it. OTOH, this also gives them optionality in upskilling people (pushing them up the pyramid) while maybe having a narrower pyramid base because of the LLM disruption.
Expect Deloitte and the others to follow. It's too good a play.
YT search results also show results that have literally nothing to do with the query. Stop showing me videos I watched previously when I'm literally in the midst of trying to find something specific.
For me it very frequently loads good results, then reloads the results again but with much worse/completely irrelevant results, and I see the original results only for a split second.
It also doesn't do that second load when I f5/enter the url directly.
It happens to me frequently that I want to find a video I watched previously but didn't bookmark. If they hid all the videos I've watched before I'd never find them.
That's not what they're referring to. It will show videos completely unrelated to your search query.
A few moments ago I searched for "Porter Robinson Ludwig" to continue watching a 2 hour stream where Porter Robinson guides Ludwig through making a beat. The 6th result in my search list is a video I've watched before, "Pro Players Play 50€ decks" from a Magic The Gathering channel. Nothing to do with Porter Robinson or Ludwig or music. It's just there's because I've watched it once before.
If I type in the search query of "games that think more gameplay mechanics equals more fun" after just a few videos, the videos in search switch to being completely unrelated and are labeled either "You might also like this", or "Previously Watched". Hilariously, "Porter Robinson (Teaches Ludwig How to Produce Music)" is video is #6. #7 is "Streamer Fakes Blindfold Speedrun for Clout". The video by ProZD with that exact title does not appear in the first 30 results, and that's when I quit counting.
No, like, the search will sometimes deliberately insert a couple of videos from your watch history in a section labeled "Previously watched". It's not just that it's surfacing previously seen videos which match the search; it's surfacing videos from your viewing history instead of videos which match your search.
This 100%. It’s so infuriating trying to browse search results but not even halfway down the page it just assumes that I have the attention span of a goldfish and that I would rather look at their list of recommendations for videos to watch that have absolutely nothing to do with my search query.
Good grief the people in charge of YouTube and Google have put their products in complete free fall because that’s the only way they can see a non-zero velocity.
It's mind-boggling how much Benioff and Weiss dropped the ball on the final two seasons of GOT. It's hard for me to even re-watch clips of the early seasons on YouTube because of how much I know its going to take a turn for the worst. The sad part is the production value and actors were still on their A game.
In contrast, I can rewatch practically anything from BB or BCS.
100x this. I am used to reading the traditional “write it in full once with a definition” for further use, eg. Breaking Bad (“BB”), but find lots of people on Hacker News just assume that everyone knows the acronym and several times a week find I have to search for a definition. It impedes understanding for what?
I feel the same way about Game of Thrones. I really loved the first few seasons, but I can't bring myself to start rewatching them as I know where it inevitably goes.
It's even worse than How I Met Your Mother in my opinion, for two reasons - first , GoT is much more focused on a long running story, making the conclusion more important. But more importantly, HIMYM is a sharp decline; you can simply skip the last two episodes and have a perfectly fine ending. GOT just declines ever more, making it hard to set a point at which to end the show.
They took many of the elements that made the first seasons so good and completely reversed course on them. Two that stand out are 1) anyone can die at any time and 2) these characters are really far apart geographically and it takes time for them to get anywhere, and things will happen to them along the way.
The last two seasons suddenly all of the main cast had plot armor and could teleport anywhere they wanted.
> It's mind-boggling how much Benioff and Weiss dropped the ball
Watching it, at times, I remember getting the visceral feeling that those who were the driving force behind the greatness of what the show was, had just lost interest; had new projects in mind and were just phoning it in for GoT, in the end.
Maybe they just ran out of ideas? These two didn't even write the original stories; the author George RR Martin did, but he didn't finish the story before they got to season 7 or 8, so they made up all the last stuff themselves without him.
Even if they had written the screenplays themselves, that's no guarantee of future quality. I can think of two cases with movies where the same people made horrible sequels: the original "Highlander" was great, for example, but the same director (and story writer) did the sequel and it was horrible. Similarly, "The Matrix" was revolutionary, but the same two brothers who wrote the story and directed did the sequels, and they weren't that great (though arguably not the huge drop in quality between Highlander 1 and 2).
The quality of Game of Thrones directly maps to how much source material they had to adapt.
The show runners have taken all the heat, but the fact is GRRM knew he needed to wrap up the novels before the show caught up. He wrote many blog posts about it. Unfortunately, it’s clear now that he never will.
Expecting the show runners to finish a series that even the original author can’t is just unreasonable. To that point they had writing credits on The Wolverine and a couple other shows.
But according to popular internet sentiment, Benoif and Weiss are to blame, not HBO or GRRM for leaving them high and dry…
It highlights what a good screenwriter Martin is. He writes for the screen in his novels (and this is good) so much so that it doesn't engage with my imagination at all which is actually what you need for television!
Obviously he has a good imagination and it's this that the other writers couldn't replicate. Maybe the imaginary is harder to capture in a screenplay compared to literature. Fascinating topic.
I just finished watching it for the first time. Start to finish.
I didn’t hate the ending. Season 5 was the worst, and the whole, “I’m going west of Westeros because that’s where the maps stop” was some weird nonsense, but otherwise it fit the general theme of the show.
I never used Apps for that reason. I found more success increasing attraction face to face. When I started I "killed the sale" when I mentioned I owned a place , or they found out about my "high status" job. I went from "fun guy" to "serious guy" and it killed the vibe.
That's so true. I'm kinda boring, and happy as such, but dating when was in my early 20s was harder. Not impossible by any means, but it narrowed the group of women who were interested. But by the time I turned 30 it was a huge asset being boring, solidly employed, with a house, etc. I just had to wait for my time to come...
I'm not sure why roundabouts are so uncommon in North America.
Where I live, at a 4 way small street intersection, two of the entrances have stop signs with a roundabout in the middle. At that point, you might as well get rid of the roundabout.
I think I live in a typical US CA city and there are dozens if not hundreds of roundabouts in this suburb. And I don't understand why you would have stop signs AND a roundabout. I am hoping someone can explain this feature to me. It just seems like extra chance for confusion and extra source of danger because of that.
It's also a reaction to poorly placed roundabouts that are severely unbalanced and heavily used. Not every intersection is well suited to become a roundabout.
I've been driving in America for over 30 years and while I've seen them occasionally, they are very rare. And when I do see them, almost no one understands how they are supposed to work (go slowly until you know there is no one already there). They basically either don't slow down at all or stop like a stop sign.
It's not really covered when we learn how to drive. We get maybe a page on it in the handbook and one question on the driver's test. And then the road test almost never has one since they are so rare.
Your post as a sibling to mine cracks me up. It really underlines how different road design is in the Northeast to the rest of the country; I can hit four roundabouts to go three towns over if I picked my route to avoid the highway, and probably see another additional yield along the way. And it was one of the most important things drilled into us (Maine) during our driving lessons and exam, where we were taught “default to stop unless you know you’re clear”.
Not just northeast. GP is talking from their own narrow perspective. I've driven all over the country, and roundabouts (as well as yields) are common in some places and nonexistent in others. GP just seems to have a narrow experience.
Totally, they're elsewhere too! I was remarking more that in New England they're pretty universally How You Do Things, and it falls off pretty drastically once you get out of NY and PA.
That would explain why there are so many stop signs in the US suburbs on intersection with excellent visibility and little to moderate traffic (at least, that's what I see in US movies). Must be super annoying to drive through. Where I live (Poland), stop signs are an exception, used only in circumstances where a mere yield sign is deemed too unsafe.
Yield signs, IME, are way more common in the Northeast than the rest of the country. They’re taught specifically in driving schools, too, or at least were when I attended, complete with “if you aren’t sure, treat it as a stop sign” (which might annoy drivers behind you but is the safer play).
We also have a lot of rotaries/roundabouts here, too, so you get a lot more practice.
You can't generalize across 340 million people across an an entire continent. Some regions have lots of yield signs and lots of roundabouts, some have very little of either one. The feds provide guidelines, but there is plenty of regional variation in preferences.
The only situation where I could see stop signs making sense is an unbalanced roundabout. It can be hard to get an opening to enter a busy roundabout that is dominated by cross traffic flow.
I have it even worse near my house. A roundabout with a stop sign at every entrance. It actually causes more problems than a four way stop sign, because people enter without signaling and then get mad when you assume they're going straight.
There is literally no difference between someone going straight and someone turning until they are right in front of you (unlike with a regular intersection where they would at least angle the front of their car to indicate turning).
"Kids are hard. People are selfish." - More people than ever before want to live a life free of the responsibilities of having children, which is totally fine but never gets talked about in this discussion about birthrate. I have a lot of financially secure friends who never want kids.
"The dating market is torture." - Expectations of dating, especially online dating are very different from previous generations and kind of wack. I admit to falling into the trap of feeling like someone else out there is better and not giving the person I met online more of a chance past the first date. I'm sure others who I was with had the same reaction. Next thing you know, you're past the age of wanting or even being able to have a child. Either way, it's crazy when you see online discussions about how such and such city has a dearth of good matches which seems statistically improbable.