The other thing is a lot of people don't realize that the nature of the surveillance has changed. I'm not that concerned with random security cameras recording me most of the time because they're dumb and only record so I'm only really giving up information that anyone else there in the moment can already see. With flock and other newer systems though the data is collated and collected making it a complete dragnet for anyone in the area they operate in.
It's one of the places I hope the courts or legislature updates the 4th amendment to acknowledge that computer systems allow collection of individually innocuous data points to build into an effective panopticon. A lot of the limits on the 4th don't really include a realization that technology has made a lot of things so much easier to do that the government is able to do much more with the same information because they can cross compare it with so many other datapoints that they can cheaply do it for everyone instead of being restricted by the resources and having to choose who to investigate.
Because it went public. The secret finally reached someone who cared enough to slip it to reporters who took a few months to research and validate the claims. That person could either be someone who's hoping to benefit or someone who just thought it was wrong that it was allowed to go on so long.
The best books usually are quite difficult to adapt. It's a lot easier to give characters internality because you can just say what they're thinking in a book quickly in a way that's jarring in a show or movie. I can't remember the last time I heard an internal dialog on a show.
I watched the trailer, and it doesn't mesh with anything I remember from the book. As the GP says, the book is disorienting. Not because of internal monologue, but because of the language. It places new words in essential places, where you can't really parse the sentence, and have to form some sort of impression. The rest of the imagery has been done to death. Some bits from the trailer looked a lot like Blade Runner. But the neologisms, feeling out of depth, that's an essential part of the book, never done in movies AFAIK, and I don't see it in the trailer.
I'm reading The Peripheral (2014) by William Gibson, and it does exactly this. The lingo starts on page one, and then it's meaning is slowly revealed throughout the book. I don't know if this pattern has a name, but it's very pronounced.
There's a few different terms that get used for it. Argot is the name for that kind of secret or subgroup specific vocabulary. Then deep end world building is a more general term for just dumping the reader into the world with limited to no preamble to familiarize them with the world.
Neal Stephensons Anathem did that do me, took me quite a lot of pages to get behind some of the words. Loved that. Can you recommend other authors who do that?
I am watching right now Cyberpunk Edgerunners and it's doing the same, you're an outside watcher of a very different world, and it leaves the onus on you to figure out what the heck they're talking about.
Not sure if that's because it's not going to be there or if it's just the parts the trailer covers don't have Gibson's brand of techno-babble in it or if they were selected to not have it to not confuse people in the teaser.
Dexter had the best internal dialog I can remember; it's like the protagonist had two greatly contrasting personalities (his outward demeanor and then his internal dialog) which were constantly riffing off each other on screen, though it never got in the way. Just pitch perfect throughout.
For a show where the internal dialog eventually does become a bit annoying, look at You (in my mind, greatly inspired by Dexter).
Dexter might have been the last one I watched that featured it heavily for sure. At least among live action I guess I should caveat, anime still uses it quite a bit as a shortcut.
And if you want to jump from “annoying” to “cringe-inducing”, look no further than Lynch’s Dune. Yes, I too love the movie but the inner voices of the characters were not great.
Yes, it's a naive assumption that quality of the presented material doesn't impact consumer behavior, if they get flooded with loads of garbage books and people can't find good book they enjoy they'll stop shopping at Amazon and it doesn't matter if they make money off the slop. It's the same reason Youtube has quality filters for algorithmic feeds, if the stream gets too polluted with bad videos people will watch fewer videos.
It's exactly the same process that's causing people to avoid expensive purchases on Amazon due to the number of fake products that have infiltrated their supply. People move on if they're sold a lot of bunk goods from a place.
I don't know. For years Amazon has had a fraudulent item listing problem to the point where it's hard to trust them. They have made no effort that I have seen to solve it. I mean, why would they, their sales haven't declined.
So, I am skeptical books will be any different than all those knock-off drop-shipped items.
I think you're proving his point: You've identified that the fraudulent items make it hard to trust the marketplace, and (reading between the lines) that has affected your habits in relation to the marketplace.
Yes, but I am one person. Their overall sales numbers show that I am a rare breed. With how bad Amazon has gotten in this regard, I would have expected sales to decline if people cared about it as well. Until they feel it in their pocket book (and it doesn't look like they are) they won't do a whole lot about it.
I often trust AliEx more than Amazon these days. At least one of the two isn't pretending not to be what it is.
Plus Amazon has a long history of screwing over sellers. TL;DR if your product is actually successful, they'll make their own "Amazon Basics" version of your product, then deprioritize you (or even ban you over an excuse). They do this a lot. There's a lot more than just this, it's just an example.
I'd say that's hard to judge from the top line sales numbers, their broad sales could remain fine even when they lose larger rare purchases if they're bringing in enough new customers that are fine with only buying the slop.
Sales may not have declined, but returns have skyrocketed. I return at least as much stuff as I keep. Sometimes they tell me to just keep the crap because they know it's crap and it costs them more for me to return it than to just refund me and let me keep the crap thing.
And yet look at all the non-book products being sold on Amazon that are all garbage. Its the same slop problem and has been for a while, but they don't seem to be addressing that either. I have to assume it doesn't impact their bottom line as much as we think it should, consumers don't (or can't) care as much as we would hope.
There are two categories of (physical) products I buy on Amazon.
Regular “brand name” items sold in pretty much any big box retail store. I have more or less the same experience with Amazon as I do Walmart or Target or wherever for that category. Over thousands of orders I’ve never received a fake or had an issue outside of very rare packaging issues like damaged boxes.
The other category is “trash I need faster than aliexpress” and it’s basically exactly as-advertised for that junk. I usually get the item in two days or less where I am, and the quality level is more or less the same as ordering direct from China. Just trading expense for quicker latency. Useful for that last component for a project or whatnot.
I get that I might not be normal though. If I went to Amazon and searched for “grow lights” and got presented with what you get via that search I’d be quite frustrated. But I tend to research exactly what I want for those product categories and never had a problem getting what I expected.
Part of why Pluto was demoted is it's so small it doesn't effectively clear it's own orbit. Orbits can look close here but with how small Pluto is it's gravity would barely affect this dwarf planet. It's also possible they've only been at their closest approach a handful of times in their entire life.
Because it's a comically difficult problem. The largest, most power hungry thing we have ever built in space is the ISS and it's peak power production is 0.215 megawatts. That's barely enough for a single current generation server rack.
Heat is also a huge barrier, radiators have to be huge because they have to rely in black body radiation and to be more efficient requires power hungry heat pumps to increase their temperature so they can radiate more efficiently
Heat control is one of the main issues in space and a space datacenter will be creating orders of magnitude more than any other thing we've ever put out there. We have a lot of techniques for it but the space datacenter is asking them to scale to levels we've never tried before.
Ok so approximately 3 starlinks worth of power for a single rack not accounting for any draw for the cooling equipment. It's still a huge step up in the power density of the things we put in space and the datacenter would have to be many times larger than the ISS just for the power and cooling scaffolding around the racks units.
One of these individually I think he may have survived with some trouble but 3 dropping in as many weeks with one being tied to illegal diversions and two being with subordinates is too many holes to patch. Plus where there's 3 there's probably more.
That seems to be shown false directly by the stock price between the announcement of the first affair and the election. NVDA dropped 15% between the 29th and the 5th...
Two back to back including one with a subordinate and one involving a person violating export controls though are pretty tough to weather. And I doubt that's the end of the affairs too, I'm not a Huang is months away from having dated every woman on earth extrapolationist but I also doubt he's only had (or has) 2.
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