Do CEOs really qualify as commuters if they barely do any actual work? It might be more accurate to call them very consistent daily tourists.

Commuters are people who travel into the city to get work done during the day and then commute home.

You are making a basic framing error here which has been deeply ingrained into us as a narrative justification for hyper individualism and late stage capitalism, prey aren’t at war with predators.

Ever watch a whitetail deer spook and dash away into the underbrush? They flip their tail up to expose a bright white target on their rump.

Why?

Because predators overwhelming target sick and vulnerable prey, predators stabilize prey population swings and keep them from catastrophically exploding. Prey in turn sustain predators.

Whitetail deer display the signal to demonstrate they are healthy. I wouldn’t call it symbiosis, but I also think it is a serious categorical error to conceptualize it as an existential war or arms race. If whitetail deer suddenly evolved to become so fast predators could never catch them even if they counter-evolved to be a bit faster it would either lead to extinction of deer or the extinction of deer and the ecosystems around them, those are the only to possible end states neither of which is good for deer.

The reason I am saying this is that unlike predators, cars have no consistent genetic forcing on deer, car deerkills are essentially random and thus only function to lower the signal-to-noise ratio on other genetic forcings that continously shape deer into well adapted positive contributors to the ecosystems around them. How can you expect a species to adapt to a process of violence that is so chaotic and disconnected from the surrounding ecosystem that it is evolutionarily invisible except as a force of degradation?

I think the reason that deer seem “retarded” in their response to cars is that for their entire evolutionary history there has never been an animal that would hurtle through both the day and night at improbable speeds almost completely silently. No land predator has previously evolved to blind its prey with large powerful sets of lights at night.

Counterintuitively, in my opinion deer seem to so often chaotically run out in front of cars (and growing up somewhere with lots of deer I know how incredibly infuriating and scary this can be) because it is actually the most sensible survival strategy for being ambushed by a fast moving predator with a lot of inertia that may or may not realize they have stumbled upon a meal.

Imagine you weren’t a pathetic, slow human being and could outrun most predators, now imagine chilling inside a bush when you see a a grizzly bear sprinting at 40mph almmmossst but not quite straight at you.

Your impulse is to freeze and then wait for the right moment to bolt, especially because the predator hasn’t seen you yet and likely just caught your scent or is running at something else. However, this predator is scentless, nearly silent and at night blinds you so that the distance they are away from you is very difficult to determine (the opposite of a grizzly bear really), so the right moment to bolt is hard to judge.

At the last second you realize the “grizzly bear” is almost upon you and you panic because it is happening so fast and fall back on your instincts. Your instincts, as a prey animal that can run faster and for longer than predators, are the same as any human who has ever played a sport where they need to rush past a defender… and you erratically cut across the bear’s path of motion after you think it has committed to rushing directly at you. The idea is to hopefully catch the bear with its weight shift committed in the wrong direction so you get just a tinnyyyy bit more of a head start in the chase. In otherwords the deer’s instinct is to try to “juke” the fast moving predator with fancy footwork.

Please see the scientific illustration I have provided, notice that the bear’s path (red) has to switch directions whereas if the deer had decided to just directly run away from their bear the bear wouldn’t have needed to switch directions/accelerate twice, just make a slight turn to reorient itself into an opportunistic chase with the deer.

This doesn’t work on cars, especially because if at first a deer doesn’t succeed at getting the timing right they are dead.

They won’t, indie gaming will pick up some of the slack but we are witnessing the end of a golden era in game development.

Also I could care less about the AAA studios themselves. What is tragic is that without AAA studios the stepstones for advancing in a career of game development has become an order of magnitude farther apart and less realistic (especially if you have a family or something and need some amount of consistency).

The version of someone you invite in the door determines the initial trajectory of how that person will act in the community. You can invite in the leading edge of someone’s developing kindness or invite in the ossifying mass of their nature that is threatening to turn hateful and uncaring. No one instance of invitation to a new person (however that may happen, formally or informally) pushes the needle far either way within any one particular person (though sometimes it can radically do so) but the overall integrated effect is a moderate shift of the an entire community towards the better or worse version of the community members. When this effect is used for good people often describe the resulting community space as a community that accepts them for who they are or more succintly is a genuinely safe space.

Of course, every interaction is in an invitation in some small way, it doesn’t just happen once.

Also the taller the building is the more potential passive air circulation on hot days.

The problem is that when the state of Israel tells you to stay home it is as likely it is so they can more assuredly wipe out your family in one go as it is they care about your safety.

The actual act of taking some moderate sum of crypto here is meaningless to me, you were able to attain a valuable thing and so you did. It is only an intimate knowledge of the context of that choice that can inform any kind of accurate judgement fraught with grey areas as it may be.

That isn 't what interests me about crypto, what I find interesting is that no matter what rock you check under in virtually the entire crypto sphere the attitude of the creatures involved always untangles into this same precise attitude. Maybe you fall under the category maybe you don’t, my point is about the mindset of this whole enterprise that permeates it at seemingly every level.

You didn’t need to tell me you own crypto, your post screams “crypto bro” at such screeching decibels that I think you just shattered a wine glass over there.

I do think that would be a superb opening monologue (set to a moody montage) for a skit taking the piss out of naive crypto bros though, well done!

The biggest impact of digital currencies so far has been the obscene, democracy destroying amounts of money crypto bros spent to help get trump and other corrupt lackeys into office.

https://www.citizen.org/article/big-crypto-big-spending-2024/-

This is what the rise of digital currencies is an indicator of, an accelerated process of societal decay.

Yeah but then we get Incel-In-Chief JD Vance as president which is honestly MUCH scarier.

Shaming people for having deep moral quandries about voting for a candidate who is actively and directly facilitating genocide is pathetic and pointless and makes you look like a parody of yourself.

omm… the Republicans have the supreme court and are in the process of lighting the constitution on fire as we speak?

I think you will find Palestinian citizens agree with you on that point.

What about a deck of cards for healthcare CEOs like we did in the Iraq with the most wanted high ranking officials?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most-wanted_Iraqi_playing_cards

I like this one because anyone arguing this is wrong has to admit the US imperial war machine is far worse.

“As of 2024, all but four of the 52 most wanted have either died or been captured, eleven of whom have been released.”

They had zero actual plan to replace it with anything last time they took it away, they didn’t even really pretend to even have one.

This is a direct consequence of “the war on terror” attempting to redefine the military strategy of asymmetrical warfare as terrorism and inherently immoral.

To sell the bullshit “war on terror” the easiest way to make the US seem righteous was to degrade the public’s sense of why people violently resist and reduce it to the act of violently resisting an organized traditional military is immoral unless the thing resisting is also a traditional organized military.

I am glad that narrative is breaking down though as the distortion of how and why violent conflicts occur is dangerously blinding to a basic understanding of the world.

"Recognize that attention is task-specific. One reason it’s so difficult to definitively say whether or not attention spans are decreasing is that it depends on the task with which someone is engaged. We may be able to sit through an entire 2-hour, action-packed movie, but start to squirm within 10 minutes of a nature documentary. Infusing things with storytelling and interactivity are two evidence-backed ways of increasing the likelihood we’ll be able to sustain focus. "

The entire narrative about attention span hinges upon this fundamental distortion, you cannot separate your ability to pay attention to something into an abstract universal quantity, your capacity for attention is always intimately interwoven with the environment around you and the specific task at hand. Attention span is a pop culture concept, not a scientifically rigorous one making any science done about attention span unable to actually illuminate the unknown since the concept being studied simply comes undone with a tug on one of the founding assumptions. In popular culture attention span is defined axiomatically as decreasing because of technology, and discussion works backwards from there.

The references cited also don’t really support the conclusions the article comes to (“Challenging the the six-minute myth of online videos”), or they are links to pop-science articles talking about the topic, not actual evidence on the topic. An amusing example of this is the repeatedly, endlessly cited “McSpadden, K. (2015, May 14). You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than a Goldfish. Time. https://time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish/”.

1. Goldfish are specifically studied because they can be trained to remember things and focus on them, they do not have “short attention spans” so the entire metaphor is broken from the start.

2. There actually isn’t any hard evidence even in the original paper that popularized the idea… it was a white paper from microsoft not a scientific publication by academics

See this article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/shanesnow/2023/01/16/science-shows-humans-have-massive-capacity-for-sustained-attention-and-storytelling-unlocks-it/

It is also pretty easy to poke holes in the narrative that our attention spans are decreasing, driving a car takes an insane amount of concentration, more than arguably almost any other human activity practiced by billions of people on earth. If our attention spans were decreasing, the very first place you would see it would be in a huge increase in traffic crashes and deaths. You also wouldn’t see a vibrant world of longform youtube videos on niche topics that are made by some of the most perennially popular and watched video content makers. People wouldn’t be listening and reading to books, listening to longform podcasts, or engaging in hobbies that take significant preparation.

Further, the industry of marketing, perhaps one of the entities with the most interest in how we actually pay attention to things vs. what the popular narratives are about our attention span isn’t convinced our attention spans are decreasing either.

More things are competing for our attention, so we are more selective and discard things quicker in a fashion that is totally rational. Daily life has also become exhausting for most, if you notice you are unable to focus like you used to it is probably because you are more tired, stressed and have less free time than you did in the past. If our “attention spans” were decreasing the way everybody seems to believe they are, the impacts would be catastrophic and look like entire populations undergoing early onset dementia, and as someone who has spent years around people with dementia… that is clearly not what is happening at all.

They aren’t exclusive entities when you consider the careers of game developers who may have otherwise been able to leverage the stability and opportunities that came from working for a large company to advance their career and eventually create successful indie game studios themselves. This is ultimately bad for indie game development though I understand the schadenfreude.

The hilarious thing is that if they did that the resulting LLM chatbot would shit on AI and large corporations constantly.