PrismCrystal

8 ms·

31.
by PrismCrystal 2y ago
Traveling across the developing world, I have been astonished at how many women even in countries with limited English skills follow the Kardashians (and the young men follow Andrew Tate). Yes, on one hand celebrities are silly, but on the
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
"Hi Res audio is snake oil designed to sell the same thing multiple times, period." The "period" is unwarranted, because there are too important caveats. Firstly, it has been extremely common for albums to be sold with v
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
"if some ayatollah gets both religious fervor for the afterlife and thermonuclear weapons" Among that majority of the Iranian population who now dislikes the regime, it is a common belief that the regime is really only interested
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
"They profit less if people actually learn a language and so can't be too good at their job because they'll bleed users faster than they can gain them - similar to dating apps." This might be why some of the best languag
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
What is sad, is that there are already whole generations who think one must learn with an app, and are completely unaware of self-teaching textbooks from traditional publishers like Routledge, Assimil, Teach Yourself, etc. These books don’t
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
"There are people who don't interact as much as other people but feel content about it and aren't lonely." Yet the difficulty about self-reported degrees of loneliness, is that it doesn’t tell you how resilient a perso
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
That first sentence has been a totally standard way to open a research paper for at least twenty years now. (As I have seen from both publishing myself, and as a side gig, doing editing of myriad papers by non-native English speakers worki
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
There’s also being funny not quite for attracting others, but for avoiding alienating people one has already attracted. As someone surely autistic somehow, I find myself making frequent jokes because I know my interlocutors don’t want to he
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
Among the classes rich enough to employ servants, complaining about those same servants is a perennial thing. Even a valet or chauffeur who comes out of an elite training school and knows to stay at the margins of his or her employer’s cons
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
There are quite a few Muslim peoples who don’t recognize the hajj to Mecca as an obligation, such as Nizari Ismailis and Alevi-Bektashis. Even in the Balkans or West Africa among Muslims who ostensibly subscribe to a more “orthodox” Islam
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
While Europe has a long coastline, there are only a given number of ports capable of the high thoroughput needed to feed Europe’s population. Blockade those and the entrance to the Baltic and Mediterranean, and most of your work is done. Mo
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
"If I could actually buy movies and TV shows for download I would" I wouldn't for one simple reason: the canon of classic cinema that one needs to watch and rewatch in order to have a solid knowledge of the art form, consists
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
The artists who don't mind not making money from their work itself, have built a personal brand to obtain other sources of income. But the future that the OP describes, and which feels quite believable, is one where AI defeats humans e
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
A lot of the people I recall interacting with on Usenet in the mid 1990s were very much grown up, graduated, far away from “mom”, and employed as developers or uni staff somewhere. However, they still enjoyed hacking, either out of pure fun
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
Some of the most bullying behavior I have seen online is by nerds, sometimes nerds old enough to have come out of the 1990s internet. It’s not only that non-nerd bullies, too, got access to the internet, it is that modern society (both outs
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
I’m not sure that positivity died with 9/11, but I can look back and recall a large number of people struggling after the 2008 crisis, and whole economies never entirely recovering, and so optimism had taken some hard knocks well befor
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
I can see commuting being regarded as a total time waste requiring employer compensation in the US, where most people commuting are driving. But in countries where commuting is done via public transportation, the time spent commuting can be
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
There is no “European PhD system” in terms of funding, or the duties expected of a PhD student other than the production of the dissertation. Different countries around the world do it differently, and that is true even within Europe.
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
> It really is an option to publish something and not care about knowing exactly who read it, and what they're doing with it. In a world with UBI (or in a world where creators are aristocracy who don’t have to worry about money) I w
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
Academia can be criticized as unsustainable as the OP does because the number of graduate students exceeds the number of secure employment positions available after one defends one’s dissertation or does a postdoc. However, the American mod
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
> Probably because they colonized white people. Better to say that they colonized non-African or non-American indigenous people who could not be conveniently attached to vehement Trans-Atlantic chattel slavery or Catholic-conquistador na
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
> /eə/ or /ɪə/ Is this an Afrikaans regional dialect thing, like how the letter e gets pronounced before k ? If so, where is each variant associated with?
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
How early on is that? What I remember of furry culture from the early-mid 1990s internet was pretty straight, at least to judge from all the announcements of heterosexual marriages, all the porn going around, and prominent internet-furry vo
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
Toys I remember from the 1980s had already outsourced production to Taiwan. I assume that things soon moved to China, but it is astonishing to think that Chinese labor could have made already cheap Asian production so much cheaper. So, I as
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
Depends where at the end of the 1800s. Belle Époque France saw adultery on the part of men almost normalized among the middle and upper classes, and everyone made use of prostitutes.
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
> Funny this is cancel-worthy sometimes, and in other times it's treated as a quaint personality trait. You can see this same tension in Fela Kuti fandom and scholarship, where people almost have to choose between lionizing him as a
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
> Luckily, it seems like the common folk have more sense than this. Not sure about that, honestly. As reading of longform text has declined with the rise of the smartphone and other distractions, and the literary-fiction publishing marke
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
Avoiding the official bike trails in Europe has advantages. For example, when you plot your own routes away from the touristic ones, local people might be more willing to chat or offer you a place to stay for the night because they have nev
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
Obviously. But HN is American-dominated, and the Copyright Clause in the Constitution and the original length of 14 years, are what most people are likely to think of when it is mentioned that copyright used to be a short monopoly to spur t
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by PrismCrystal 2y ago
What does “waymarked routes” mean, exactly? And same question for the OP. Doing OSM editing from Mapillary imagery in various US states, I find that the roads that have roadside signage as “official bike routes”, predate modern safe(r) bike

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