Gen Z takes selfies with the higher quality back-facing camera using 0.5x zoom. You can't see yourself while taking the photo, but that's part of the appeal.
A lot of older cameras (and early phones too) would have a small mirror next to the lens, specifically for taking photos like that. The word selfie is kind of recent. The concept of taking a photo of yourself is probably as old as the invention of the camera.
I remember watching a podcast at the time where they were making fun of the word selfie for being an absurd unnecessary word. I remember vehemently agreeing.
I'm from the generation where that was the only option (and I still wasn't a kid then). I kind of liked the mystery, but overall I still prefer the front camera for selfies nowadays.
Management roles have always involved outsourcing cognitive work to subordinates. Are we seeing a cognitive decline there too? Maybe delegation was the original misalignment problem.
Not sure how much unpacking most founders do beforehand. "We do these things not because they're easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy."
I'm picky about layouts - I type in Dvorak, learned Janko via Chromatone, currently playing harpejji.
Coming from a classical piano background, there was definitely a learning curve, but I feel like it was worth it. Every chord shape is identical across all keys (C major and D major would be played the same way), which makes it much easier to learn jazz voicings or modulate a song.
If anyone ever builds a quality grand piano with Janko layout, I'm buying! Hacks on hacks become unnecessary if you start with the right design.
"Submit deposit." They get the money back in all cases where the bug is determined not to be AI slop, including it not being a real bug, user error, etc. Otherwise, deposit gone.
Interesting literacy regression: this newly discovered Babylonian hymn was routinely copied by schoolchildren 3,000 years ago, while yesterday's article about why English doesn't use accents showed that by 1100 AD European literacy had contracted so much that monks were essentially writing only for other monks.
If I'm interpreting this correctly, ancient Babylon had institutionalized childhood education for complex literary works. Medieval Europe treated literacy as a specialized craft. So much for exponential growth.
You're skipping a lot of context here. Ancient Babylonian scribal schools were for a small elite—hardly universal childhood education. Medieval Europe's "regression" had a bit to do with the collapse of the Roman state, plagues, and centuries of instability, not just a lack of ambition. Comparing literacy rates across millennia without mentioning population size, language complexity, or what “schoolchildren” even means is a stretch.
"Progress" and "enlightenment" are neither uniform, linear, upwards, or continuous. All it takes is one absurdly corrupt regime to burn down the "Library of Alexandria", and with it, thousands of years of history and accomplishment.
It's known as the Dark Ages for a reason. Society regressed in most ways. Maybe because of the collapse of the Roman Empire? Europe only started finding their feet
during the Reneissance.
I wouldn't pay too much attention to answers from this respectable subreddit when they express more what is a historiographic opinion than a fact. And when at the same time they are fighting strawmen.
The European Dark Ages narrative was indeed overblown and needed correction. But this correction went too far. It seems to be now at the stage of explicit and vigorous denial of any downfall of fortune in the Western ex-Roman provinces. I'd posit that such a denial is even more overblown than the initial myth it aimed to correct.
I understand the point and personally regard "the dark ages" (500 - 1,000 CE) as a period lacking in scrolls, commentary, and stonework compared to the Roman Empire .. but largely life as it was for those that were never an integral part of the Roman Empire workings .. eg: those that delivered food to the Romans in the UK never wrote or built much in stone themselves and once the empire faded in half to the east they carried on without record.
Regardless, your link is an interesting argument that doesn't provide anything especially compelling to the contrary .. a void, here a void in the record, is easily filled with speculation.
I was being facetious. But the crusades and the inquisition are actually really dark stains on the history of spain and the church. As for the French i meant it in jest, but really their abysmal military record speaks for itself. Also the actions of Vichy France shouldn't be glossed over, even though the overwhelming majority of France were against the Nazis and the Free French fought with distinction and bravery.
As to your last point, i view myself largely as an unaffected observer, who likes to poke holes in certain liberal narratives.
Early cljs/react adopter here. Found "the next react" in Hyperfiddle's Electric Clojure — it eliminates the client/server boundary entirely. Write one function that spans both sites, compiler handles the network automatically. The amount of plumbing code that just disappears is staggering.
I agree. Reminds me of that story about chess grandmasters having incredible memory for valid chess positions but performing no better than average when remembering random piece arrangements. There's likely some efficient compression you can achieve by playing real-world music patterns rather than random notes. And it sounds better!
An interesting middle ground might be using LLMs to generate plausible melodies based on real-world music patterns and emphasizing the unfamiliar patterns, but if the goal is to play real music fluently, nothing beats practicing with actual pieces from the repertoire you want to play.
reply