So… your argument is that it’s not counterculture unless it’s mainstream culture? And that one should only credit derivative works once they become mainstream, rather than the original inspiring works because they were too obscure?
I don’t think anyone is trying to “gotcha” you. You’ve just got a bad take.
I think it is actually pretty difficult to look at countries and say which ones have successful countercultures. I mean to some extent if a counterculture is successful it becomes not a counterculture, just part of the mainstream culture. On the other hand, a maximally out-of-mainstream counterculture is a totally unknown thing that we’ve never heard of as outsiders.
Counterculture is a culture that is counter to the mainstream culture. If a culture is happy on its own, it is more of just a subculture. Cyberpunk itself features counterculture not just subculture, but is also inspired by the counterculture at the time.
Cyberpunk doesn't randomly contain megacorporations, harsh environments and loneliness but it reflects the worst-case scenario for the ideals at the time. The grey skies and rain is because of pollution having destroyed environment as was relevant in concerns over acid rain or the oil crisis at the time. It is literally in the name with "punk". Japan doesn't have that much counterculture so it could never be that influential in cyberpunk. Just like it could never be that influential in music.
Something can be obscure and influential, but there is a limit to how defining it can be. Akira and Ghost in the Shell (and some video games) have been influential and are frequently credited for that, but that is about it. Everything else including similar media before and at the same time as them comes from mixing in other things [0]. Just like in music.
Korea is currently success with K-pop. But that is nothing in terms of influence compared to TikTok.
tl;dr: Cyberpunk is counterculture. Japan doesn't really do counterculture. Therefor it isn't very influential in cyberpunk despite having had influence.
i dunno. some of the most influential d-beat/crust bands of all time are from japan (d-clone, disclose, gauze, gallhammer, gism, death side... that's barely scratching the surface of bands that are/were actively countercultural).
it may not always take the same form, but anywhere you find big cities, you'll find some form of countercultural punk movement because the economy is big enough to support people at the fringes (even if you just work as a bartender or whatever).
By the early 90s, “cyberpunk” had largely become self parody, meaning that the counter culture was already rejecting cyberpunk as too mainstream. Search around for the Usenet reactions to Billy Idol’s album of the same name.
Or take a look at the opening sequence of Snow Crash, where the deliverator is clearly making fun of ubiquitous cyberpunk tropes. At the time it was considered a tombstone for cyberpunk, rather than some sort of positive signal milestone.
These are only two data points to demonstrate that the “counterculture” era had already expired in the US by the early 90s, as members of that counterculture felt that it had already stopped being counter to any part of American culture.
The claim that there is “not much Japanese counterculture” is too bizarre for me to wrap my head around. The more traditional a society is, the more “counter” any underground culture is —- by definition.
American counterculture hasn’t really properly existed outside of capitalist smother and capture since the early 90s either by the way. Give No Logo a read for more on that.
If I understood correctly, the global lock is so that notify events are emitted in order. Would it make sense to have a variant that doesn't make this ordering guarantee if you don't care about it, so that you can "notify" within transactions without locking the whole thing?
possibly, but i think at that point it would make more sense to move the business logic outside of the database (you can wait for a successful commit before triggering an external process via the originating app, or monitor the WAL with an external pub/sub system, or something else more clever than i can think of).
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Yes, and I am one of "us" but I still think they are annoying. I wear contacts most of the time. Glasses are just awkward in many situations. In the heat when you get sweaty they slide down your nose or completely fall off, in the cold when you walk in to a warm house they fog over, in the rain they get water spots, the frames are always visible and interfere with peripheral vision. I just don't care much for them.
Then they'll have to find a way to separate the "smart" frame from the prescription lenses, so you can change the glasses when your sight changes without having to buy smart frame each time - or the other way around, upgrade your frames without having to buy prescriptions lenses again.
Maybe we'll work out how to stimulate the optic nerve directly and skip to bionic eyes for both corrective vision and AR.
We'll need to overhaul the concept of limited liability before we do that though, the thought of someone being left without their eyes because a company goes bankrupt and no-one is at fault is pretty horrifying.
Lensology, you tell them the frames, and upload your prescription, and they send you the lenses to pop in. It's called reglazing, and millions of people do it all the time.
Ray Ban does it for their Meta glasses, but Lensology can handle stronger prescription lenses.
> Then they'll have to find a way to separate the "smart" frame from the prescription lenses, so you can change the glasses when your sight changes without having to buy smart frame each time - or the other way around, upgrade your frames without having to buy prescriptions lenses again.
Ehh, there is nothing special about the lens, all the magic is in the frame, and the rayban and oakley frames look very similar to their standard versions. Getting new lenses for sunglasses is very common.
Anecdotally, I haven't found it possible to buy lenses for a particular frame other than when you buy both new at the same time. Good luck getting the same lenses next time the prescription changes.
The frame will probably change slightly over time to make them incompatible.
> The frame will probably change slightly over time to make them incompatible.
This is probably true.
The rest of your comment is probably not true for most people.
It just depends on how strong your prescription is and how willing the shop/website is to do special orders.
If you are almost blind, then your choice of lenses/frames will be much lower than if you are only slightly blind(most people). Any reputable eyeglass/optician shop should be able to make custom lenses for pretty much any frame. They can't always do the super sleek shades that some people like to wear.
And contact lenses and lasik are popular because many don’t want to wear glasses. I see head mounted displays useful in constrained scenarios (e.g construction site and tasks where you already wear safety glasses and need free hands). I have a harder time seeing a world where people ditch phones and start voluntarily wearing glasses which is often uncomfortable and inconvenient. Just finished 5 miles run on treadmill, went to sauna and did bouldering. There’s no room for glasses but can occasionally check my phone.
To be able to see and remove them as soon as they can. And even in those scenarios not everybody wear them. Run my own little study at beaches, concerts and other outdoor activities and noticed less people wear glasses than I was expecting in ideal conditions to do so (<50%)
Another thing that's endemic in Rationalism is a kind of specialized variety of the Gish gallop.
It goes like this:
(1) Assert a set of priors (with emphasis on the word assert).
(2) Reason from those priors to some conclusion.
(3) Seamlessly, without skipping a beat, take that solution as valid because the reasoning appears consistent and make that part of a new set of priors.
(4) Repeat, or rather recurse since the new set of priors is built on previous iterations.
The entire concept of science is founded on the idea that you can't do that. You have to stop and touch grass, which in science means making observations or doing experiments if possible. You have to see if the conclusion you reached actually matches reality in any meaningful way. That's because reason alone is fragile. As any programmer knows, a single error or a single mistaken prior propagates and renders the entire tree invalid. Do this recursively and one error anywhere in this crystalline structure means you've built a gigantic tower of bullshit.
I compare it to the Gish gallop because of how enthusiastically they do it, and how by doing it so fast it becomes hard to try to argue against. You end up having to try to counter a firehose of Oh So Very Smart complicated exquisitely reasoned nonsense.
Or you can just, you know, conclude that this entire method of determining truth is invalid and throw the entire thing in the trash.
A good "razor" for this kind of thing is to judge it by its fruit. So far the fruit is AI hysteria, cults like the Zizians, neoreactionary political ideology, Sam Bankman Fried, etc. Has anything good or useful come from any of this?
It’s not unreasonable to suspect they are doing the same. The article starts with a description of a lawsuit NY Times brought against OpenAI for similar reasons. The big difference is that research presented here is only possible with open weight models. OAI and Anthropic don’t make the base models available, so it’s easier to hide the fact that you’ve used copyrighted material by instruction post-training. And I’m not sure you can get the logprobs for specific tokens from their APIs either (which is what the researchers did to make the figures and come up with a concrete number like 42%)
I think in Chinese this is literal for hand made (手工) - the gong 2nd character can also mean work or job I think - but the sex term of art I guess is different there. Haha
There's a board-game version of Tetris that I've been playing with my toddler, and is pretty much the same low-stress approach. It's also multiplayer (the next piece everyone must use is decided by drawing cards from a deck). The only shortcoming is that you can't do the maneuver where you slide a piece sideways just as it hits the bottom to slot it into place under another piece. Highly recommend!
I don’t think anyone is trying to “gotcha” you. You’ve just got a bad take.