Yeah public broadcasting is under attack because of advertising. Advertising fuels private broadcasting and it’s in their owner’s interest to push anti public broadcasting propaganda.

Any system humans design to serve us as a society will over time become “min maxed” by people or institutions seeking to maximize their profit or gain more power or maintain power in the face of changes. Advertising is a primary vector how those with the most economic power can influence society without people even realizing it. And everything is political.

For example take the ratings and something like yellow pages and announcements for new businesses like a plumber - needing to invest additional capital in advertising has an effect too. It makes it so new businesses are more indentures, more like wage slavery, than if no advertising existed at all. Obviously no advertising at all would favor seniority. But we have advanced in technology since we designed our government systems - there should be an independent “forth estate” or fifth or something for economics and regulation. They could be independently voted on to the executive or legislative. And their job would be to deal with regulation in the public’s interest, and sponsor things like an independent ratings portal that is moderated, and force shops like amazon to use the independent ratings for the products and the vendors. It will stay a struggle to stay ahead of people trying to abuse the system for gain, but right now we pretend the tools we have right now are somehow god given. We Europeans are far more conservative than we like to think.

If we want to have any resiliency against what is coming (because we destroyed our planet and let wealth inequality spiral and social media is nearly completely controlled by plutocrats) we need to push for better tools to govern democratically. And advertising is a major obstacle because it allows unmitigated influence of those who own the world.

TLDR: We don’t *have to * screw over new plumbers, but we should do it if we had to because stopping the brainwashing is more important.

Ok, it’s obviously a complicated task, and banning advertising will make things more complex. But that is what progress often is.

But before the internet we used to even have TV shows reviewing things, under the mandate they don’t get paid to do so. People do have an interest in learning about new cool things or improvements to old, and comparative reviews. There is no reason this wouldn’t serve the legitimate need for information better. Now we have ratings and that could be improved as well, through better technology to gather independent reviews.

And yeah, there are not free lunches from corporations, but there are from people or from the government. We pay collectively for things and distribute them for free all the time. Public broadcasting could be extended to youtube or even news papers, to make them more independent from profit driven behavior or owners. You can’t have democracy without free press, and currently we don’t have that. We have corporate press and every single youtube channel has to serve corporate news. And as you point out, in capitalism there is no free lunch. But we can make it free so we can stop the insanity of neoliberal and fascist propaganda currently destroying our civilization globally.

Another thing I forgot to mention, advertising is the main vector to increase consumerism. Which is killing our planet.

There are also market effects on what type of content is produced / profitable to advertise on.

And mostly unknown psychological effects of advertising on the human mind. Maybe advertising has altered your mind so much that you “don’t even mind” it any more. It is a brainwashing technique after all haha. Maybe all those youtube ads made about 5% of the people’s brain soft enough to vote for MAGA. Maybe the effect of advertising is as bad as lead in gasoline.

Yeah you’d want to legally verify that and organize en masse for this to have any impact.

I suspect it might even be easier (forward vs inverse kinematics).

If you could combine both (pressure sensors and pistons) you could do force feedback input devices that can be 3D printed. Which could be useful for serious applications, like controlling a vehicle and “feeling” the road, or feeling the air pressure on the wings of a plane. Or controlling an excavator and “feeling” the earth by measuring feedback in the pneumatic pressure. Currently things like that is really expensive.

They really went all out haha. They also have a linked website with a video and a tutorial. The tutorial has an easier to understand explanation of what they are doing.

It seems they use simple motion flow of the video to train the neural net, but they also use some kind of volume rendering to train the AI to predict and reconstruct the 3D scene with your robot. And they use cheap depth cameras but apparently it also works without depth. And this works for basically any robot you can imagine which is really brilliant.

Looking at all those pneumatic soft robots, now I wonder if you could invert this to use for an 3D input device. Like a kind of 3D printed pneumatic joystick that simply measures the resulting air pressure at the end of internal channels when you tilt or twist or move the joystick. No wiring or assembly, just 3D print a joystick and glue it to a board.

Woah this is awesome. I imagine this could be used to make “shitty robots” with imperfect joints, backlash or other things more precise. Which could help with 3D printers as well as 3D printed robots. Or using internal strings and pulleys to control a robot arms. Especially for larger robot arms stiffness becomes a problem.

Is there an open source, easy to use software framework so people can start to play and experiment with it?

It’s still irony. Like rain on your wedding day

Is there a reason to call it “male loneliness epidemic” instead of just “loneliness epidemic”?

Isn’t the male part actually a reaction to the “fascist youth indoctrination” mentioned above? The modern fascism pushed by the anti-woke “intellectual dark web” is fundamentally a belief in inequality based on identity like sex, gender or race. Which is incompatible with dating emancipated women if based on sex, and causes problem when dating materialistic women who seek beauty or wealth.

So part of the problem is fascism. And the other part is neoliberalism, making raising children so expensive that it forces people to strongly consider wealth of partners before other attributes. That and the other things you mentioned of course, or an identity fueled by social media self marketing.

There should be an “protest buy” action to any the products that do this bullshit. A large group of people buy the products and then return them to the store for a refund. Especially for perishable goods, this would make them worthless. Which would make stocking such products a loss and force the vendors and manufacturers to cut the shit out.

If this is how you see the Democratic Party, I don’t see how you have any right to call yourself a moderate and not a radical.

This is sort of hilarious, because I’d think you have a duty to call yourself a radical. If you’re not a radical by now, then you’re just a collaborator. It’s not about black and white, it’s about black and blacker.

Of course one has to act and vote in a sane manner and play politics, but if your rhetoric and our demands aren’t seen as radical by the mainstream, that’s a problem. Like e.g. universal healthcare.

Modern Liberalism claims to be for individual equality but that’s kind of a lie. It has the same mechanisms to distribute economic and political power than Classic Liberalism, Libertarianism or Neoliberalism. Capital rules everything.

MAGAts understand that the Democrats believe in inequality just like the fascists do, just inequality based on class instead of on identity. So for them it’s perfectly logical to choose identity instead. They are not wrong about the hypocrisy of liberals, pretending to care about equality for some specific group but ignoring the inequality for all. It was fine until prosperity started to plummet.

That’d be blaming the one bad egg, not the the institutions. Neoliberals will ally themselves with fascists to fight socialists. But I guess it’s possible. Also good strategy, blame the rogue politician instead of their moral bankruptcy.

The real issue is that Cuomo isn’t a right-wing Nazi

He’s trying to split the vote as a spoiler candidate to allow the NAZI party win. Which makes him a NAZI collaborator.

Haha I wondered how they would try to stop Mamdani becoming mayor.

But why does the bird have a stone on it’s head?

I can’t believe the original isn’t AI lol.

It’s creative writing, about the same as what I’d expect a random artist to produce as an illustration for some genius math. I’d be much more worried about AI if it got everything right already lol.

And there are efforts, even simple methods to verify LLM output, like asking it to provide sources for claims or find examples of the formulas in the web or in textbooks.

Yeah the value of art is that it can express or show things about the world that are hard to express in words. And we desperately need a new way and clarity about the failure of the old ways, because that is what leads to the cynicism and hopelessness. So either keep politics out of it and produce harmless entertainment, or have a bloody brilliant take on politics that provides actual artistic value.

I quite like superhero movies as escapism, like a fantasy world where clear definitions of good vs evil exist. But I can’t stomach biopics or docudramas that mix this fantasy with real world propaganda, like some nostalgic fantasy about US politics or journalism any more. It feels like they all want to recreate the beautiful fantasy of Sorkin’s “The White House” or the classic thriller take of “a bad apple in a good system” but today that is a dangerous lie.

I only watched a cam-rip and stopped after Louis Lane “interviews” Superman which was painful to watch. The typical reporter tearing and deliberately misrepresenting or framing things in the dominant world order, every question a cut and propaganda criticizing people who disagree. It was kinda gaslighting, like “why did you attack our ally unprovoked?! Also some people are saying you’re an alien spy!”. Instead of asking questions to get the truth, they are loaded questions that can’t be answered without making yourself look bad.

What a total failures as a character introduction and makes her instantly an unlikeable removed. I mean holy shit is that bad storytelling. Or is that just me? If that is what you think a reporter should do, then don’t do it as a friend / girlfriend, and if that is how you see the world that you are not worthy of being the girlfriend of a hero like Superman. Because in my opinion you’re one of the villains in real life.

I do suspect this plays into why some people disliked superman. What people seek in these troubled times is strength. And they hate what tears strength down, seeking to control or subdue it or put it in it’s place in the proper order of things. They want someone to break things because deep down we all know the path we’re on right now leads downward (economic inequality, enshittification of products, appliances and services, climate change and environment, rising tensions, news and social media, post truth world). The people voting aren’t entirely wrong in just wanting to see the world burn.

There is a quote which I don’t know where it came from or remember well: “The samurai valued strength above anything else, because that is where all other values flow from”. Or differently: “The samurai believed that strength was the foundation of all values, as it enabled them to uphold honor, loyalty, and discipline.”

But our liberal world order sees strength as something that has to be separated, atomized, means tested and distributed into channels to control. Controlled by laws, bureaucracy or better yet, the dictates of capitalism, because it’s oh-so-efficient. I suspect right wingers like Homelander not because he’s a corporate product, but because he breaks out of that and goes rogue, and also rejects the “we must not kill anyone and obey the laws or we will be like the villains!” bullshit.

The cult of personality or hero worship represents a desire of people that someone comes and fixes all this shit and cuts through the red tape. Someone who has strength and the courage to use that strength, despite all the clever fucking shitty arguments and conventions to the contrary. Because we’ve heard it all before and it sounds so good but it’s clearly not working. Superhero movies are supposed to fulfill that wish and grand escapism into a world where our problems are magically solved. But recent movies (Marvel) failed to do that, instead pushing the failed real world fantasy of a liberal world order into the movies. Like the common trope of Washington and the government being fundamentally good and working well, except for a few bad apples, and as soon as you get the proof and give it to the good people or the newspapers, everything works out fine. Which is a painful reminder that it doesn’t in real life.

I suspect the “reactionary backlash” is not just about racism, it’s about the rejection of the distraction of identity politics - that if we only lean in more, if we accept different cultures, everything will be fine - because that is just distraction from the continued neoliberalism and disaster capitalism. But breaking things and bringing things to a head is also an opportunity - accelerationism.

These are just by jumbled thoughts on how this reflects on our culture war. Again, I haven’t watched the movie or read any of the right wing critiques, only seen the “liberal backlash to the backlash”. This controversy in itself is rather predictable and pisses me off. Like it’s a distraction in itself, a pair of two anger memes that complement each other perfectly are tossed into the ether to continue to keep us occupied.

Also after I stopped the movie I read some (serious) reviews and it’s also just a shitty movie.

Oh no, the secret plot of the tankies for world domination has been unmasked!