> it's based on the media company providing a service...forever? People in this thread are saying customers should get refunds and I disagree - customers should get video files!
Very much agree. And while Steam could disappear tomorrow, all of the games that have been delisted are still downloadable if you bought them (I think The Movies was one of the early ones - delisted in 2007 maybe, but you can still download it if you bought it back then).
I've heard dozens of people say this (and I've even said it myself) but I don't think it actually holds water. People will pay for things if those things don't suck, and it's not even hard to find examples of that (even with Google products no less!).
For search, Kagi has had a growing fanbase for a couple years now, but let's take things that have been easy to get for free for decades: Movies.
People have been, with relatively impunity, able to torrent movies for free for a very long time. It's not hard, and the only way you're paying for it is ads for hot MILFs in your area. And yet, despite this having always been an option, somehow Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ and HBO Max have managed to make fairly successful businesses selling movies that could have been pirated.
I could get YouTube as ad-free with an ad blocker, but I pay for YouTube Premium. I could get all my music for free with Redacted, but I use YouTube music, or I buy CDs. I could torrent video games but I just buy them off Steam or GOG.
This isn't new either; there were thousands of free forums on the internet in the late 90's, but yet people still bought accounts on Something Awful for quite awhile (and indeed still buy accounts, but with much lower numbers).
We can certainly argue about how much value these companies are providing, and we can argue about how it's annoying how there's a million different streaming services now and how that's really irritating, but my point stands: people do pay for things on the internet.
We don't have to accept that companies need to sell all our data. We don't have to accept being bombarded with ads. We don't have to accept that people won't pay to use services.
The best civic thing a business can do is provide a valuable service and thereby make money. Just look at all the wonderful things we have as a result - airplanes, internet phones, air conditioning, cars, agriculture, movies, AI - the list is endless.
I disagree, I got to B2 in 2 years in Germany by simply making time to go to my local Volkshochschule to learn (i.e. evening classes). Why? Because it was fun and I enjoyed learning a langauge. If you want to learn, you will. If living in Germany for eight years doesn't really make you want to take learning German seriously, then what will? I know many people who've been in Germany 10+ years and can't speak German. Honestly, if I was them I'd have either left or killed myself by now, I cannot fathom sustaining that isolation for ten years. But they are built differently, they are somehow happy anyway. I would not be.
And Anki is a nicety but won't revolutionise your learning. In fact in the end I stopped using it and switched to just reading German books and watching German movies.
> The notion that markets can drive efficiency is a valuable insight. But people for whom Econ 101 acts as a religion have a really hard time noticing when that effect gets swamped.
US businesses, though, do not. The desired state is monopoly, or, failing that, oligopoly with three or less major players. The US is there in cellular communications, web search, banking, drugstores, social networks, movies...
I coded on one of them. It was ok for a short period. The blurriness and ghosting, especially on the corners and edges made it pretty tiring after a while.
They're great for watching videos, movies, TV, etc. though!
Which laptop with AMD CPU I can use to watch movies for 20 hours or browse the Internet for the same amount of time without recharging?
I am not an Apple or MacOs fan but I recently bought a MacBook Pro just for battery life. So I can watch movies and browse the Internet on the sofa without having to plug the laptop.
> Isn’t it sad that the first $500b+ company from Europe is a peddler of vanity and overpriced luxury items?
I used to think this way but no longer do. I mean, the point of being people is to do people things. The point of trying to fix the climate is so people can keep on doing stuff they want (the planet doesn’t care).
Now indeed, I think ppl should stop doing things that hurt others, but $1,500 scarves aren’t that harmful. And leather is an awful material for most applications these days so these people just hurt themselves :-).
If I were to make a list of useless activities that could safely vanish overnight without me missing them, I would indeed wave my wand at fashion, as well as vehicle racing; all forms of movies, video, YouTube, etc; the music “industry” (not musicians!); motorized watercraft; Internet advertising; fast-food restaurants; celebrities… But some people would (inexplicably to me) not agree.
> I believe royals are the biggest grifters on earth.
Bad as aristos are, there are even bigger grifters!
not the op, but the latter applies to me. Absolutely had to experiment a good amount to figure out what worked, and I definitely made errors which were obvious in hindsight well into my late 20s and even early 30s. And something no one ever tells you but is common sense when you hear it: it's impossible for everyone to "like" you (for however you choose to define the word) because no single mode of interaction will build or reinforce a healthy relationship with 100% of people.
Quick tip: movies, dramas, and sitcoms are a terrible reference. So is r/relationship_advice unless you're looking for what not to do.
Speed of light is a hard physical limit. Local storage will always have a major edge for this reason alone.
That said I'm now in this weird mid-life confusion about the fact that my new WAN (3gbps fiber connection) is now faster than any reasonable home LAN I can set up. Needed to move some movies from one machine to another the other day and it was way faster to just bittorrent them again from upstream than actually copy, since even USB removable media was slower than my WAN. So I think we might be at least temporarily in an awkward situation where cloud storage outcompetes LAN storage.
But truly local storage (nVME etc) has an extreme edge over anything networked, and always will.
One of the main problems is marketing. Adding more bells and whistles to something makes it more marketable. And so we invariably trend towards more complexity, even when it doesn't really provide any "real" return. This also drives constant changes just for the sake of change - to feel like what you have is genuinely new as opposed to a fundamentally identical rehashing of what you already had. Operating systems being the obvious culprit there.
And the most frustrating part of it all is that often the more marketable concepts are often just worse. Flat design is one obvious example. It looks sleek and sexy in marketing especially compared to the janky pseudo-3d effects of times past, but not being able to determine at a glance which parts of your UI are interactable is objectively less functional. But functionality < marketing.
The one other thing I'd add is that this is not limited to software/hardware. Movies face the exact same issue. Explosions, effects, and "loudness" are highly marketable, people standing around talking isn't. So we went from movies focusing on personal interactions to movies focusing on people running around in spandex in front of green screens screaming and battling other people in spandex, all while stuff explodes around them and special effects zip and zap about, while music with all the emotional subtlety of a hammer to the head blares. Progress!
To be fair to big tech/software, it was the thing that me work from home, for some people (like my mother) that probably saved their lives. Not to mention all the digital services I relied on to keep some semblance sanity. I was stuck in a 300sqft apartment with my girlfriend for months but was able to talk with friends, family, watch movies and play games. None of that would have been possible without tech. You’re right that pharma ended up saving us, but it’s a bit pithy to totally dismiss what tech gave us.
> that can be as simple as "carry your laptop and stay within reliable coverage"
And be sober, and somewhere quiet enough you'll reliably hear/feel the notification, and be somewhere you can get that laptop out and type away at it for a while.
I get _much_ less enjoyment from many social activities when I'm on call. I enjoy gigs way less. I enjoy parties way less. I pretty much wont go to movies. I hate being "on call" while out at dinner with friends. I will not go on a date while on call (at least not with somebody I don't know well enough for them to understand the on call obligations).
> most of our lives are spent in that regime already
But not all hours in my life are of equal "value" to me. A lot of the "most valuable and enjoyable times" get disproportionally affected by being on call. I care way less about potentially being paged at 2:30am on a Tuesday morning than I do about having to curtail social events on a Friday evening or a weekend. You _will_ need to pay me handsomely to do that, and guarantee it only rarely becomes my responsibility. Been there, done that, am perfectly happy to turn down job offers that don't understand that (or to walk away from companies who try and spring that on me later I've accepted).
For business related services I use root servers hosted by e.g. Hetzner. I don't want to deal with hardware maintenance nor the 24/7 power bill.
For private stuff (pictures, videos, movies) I have a cheap old desktop machine at home with lots of storage running Ubuntu. Easy to administer, and I can switch it off if not needed. Data is mirrored and snapshotted.
For long-term backup I encrypt my data and upload it to Amazon Glacier Deep Archive (around 1$/TB!)
That said the cloud in general is great and you can do some things today for cheap that weren't possible for most companies 10 years ago. For some use cases it's the best choice.
In general a lot of workloads can be served orders of magnitudes cheaper than 10 years ago.
Approach all my planning from resource (time and energy) allocation perspective. Previously I would just make a dump of all things that I want to achieve, which made any kind of planning unrealistic.
Stay afloat but do not try to actively climb anywhere, save energy for inner work and contemplation. Stay at my current job (ok pay, just got hired), do not actively learn anything technical unless required for work (not interested, tired from technology). Do no work more than is necessary to feel I'm not gonna be fired.
Approach very critically all learning endeavors that are related to programming, and only do things that I absolutely enjoy. Drop at first sign of dissatisfaction.
Spend time on high RoI things (critical thinking, stress management and overall well being techniques). Drop low RoI things (movies, TV series, guitar).
Try to fight news and politics addiction.
Contemplate on how and where I want to spend the rest of my life.
- Reading books (most recently, Nassim Taleb's books)
- Running (before lockdowns, now home workout is a very good alternative)
- Fasting
- Philosophy (Rene Girard, ancient Roman philosophy)
- History (my home country of course... also love the story of how Mehmed the Conqueror overtook Constantinople and ended Roman empire)
- Travel (mostly due to work but I always appreciated and respect the local cultures and landscapes)
- Art
- Music
- Movies
- Cars (most favs are Porsche as a modern business, and of course Tesla)
Recently, due to lockdowns I fall in love with cooking too.
You're equating shortage driven by organic demand to that of shortage from cryptomining.
The fundamental difference is that with organic demand, people typically just want one card. With crypto, the incentive is to get your hands on as many cards as you can, fuck everyone else. Then we find ourselves in this race to the bottom.
Moreover, trying to equate the energy use of both activities is laughable when mining creates an environment where idle compute resources translate to lost profits.
I'm sure many people have taken up watching movies instead. Thing is, the net energy use is still vastly higher because mining creates a perverse incentive for virtually all GPUs to be hoarded, while drawing power 24/7.
I don't disagree that a large swath of gaming culture is a cesspool, nor do I disagree that crypto has beneficial uses. I do however think both are beyond the scope of this discussion.
What I'm saying is that
the Proof-of-Work model has run amok and is a net detriment to society right now in its current incarnation.
The few times when I've had an online relationship, just having someone to say goodnight with has been so much more comforting and sleep-inducing than any of the medications that work for a bit until they don't.
2005 or so was the first time I had a really special relationship, online, and when I tried to meet the other person like they seemed to want they kinda backed out. It's 15 years later and no matter how close we get and the other person says we need to meet, when we want to meet and I'm so ready to meet them they instant or slightly-less-abruptly ghost me.
Um I really need a job where I could afford somewhere to live and it'd be helpful to have a job where I don't have to work 7/365 since I haven't had a day off in over 5 years and so I don't even know who I am or what I'm trying to do anymore.
My best friend is someone over 2500 miles away and 10 years older than me but they text me on discord about life and we watch movies sometime.
How do I find a place where there are one or more adults who could help me find a way to survive, afford a home and food and the rest on this planet? Is there somewhere else I could find someone or a future?
Your reasoning is incorrect, and frankly quite insulting. I never pirate music anymore, because there is a service available that provides everything I want with no need to do a wild goose chase half the time I want to listen to something new. Time and attention are the important ingredients, not money.
Ditto for computer games, as everything I care about is always available on one of the three (!) services I use: Battle.net, Steam and GOG. That's an example of low fragmentation. I gladly spend hundreds a year on this. I never have to worry that my favorite game will disappear from my catalog. Never have to worry about DRM servers shutting down and making my purchases worthless.
The same is not the case for movies and series, as the movie industry in particular is still digging its heels and refusing to build something that properly serves its prospective customers. Multiple examples of DRM servers shutting down. Weekly examples of content disappearing from a particular platform, or changing its licensing terms to make it unavailable in my location. You'd have to be a chump to accept these terms.
Laying fibre for new networks makes sense. But that's orthogonal to whether to deliver Gigabit and irrelevant to the question of whether to rip out a working network and replace it with "gigabit" as the justification.
"Gigabit will make sense later" is what they were telling people 35 years ago too. Back then they were explaining to people that you'd be able to watch movies at home some day. Yup, you sure can and of course you don't need anywhere close to a Gigabit to do it.
The applications for household Gigabit remain a mirage decades later.
I'm a totally undecided person. My first solution is to accept it - As in spend lots of time on the choice if it matters. If I need to buy something expensive, it will sometimes take me weeks / months background thinking about it, and I'm ok with that. If it's not urgent, why worry about that?
The second is to get many answers at the same time. I've usually got a list of movies to watch / things to read that I make in one go. You can bookmark things in some category with the idea that the next time you'll just grab the top one when you need it. You spent the time choosing them, so that part is done.
The third one is just to accept I won't make perfect choices. I can't say it's going to be easy for you, but this requires some level of training the "I don't care this isn't great. The other options would have their own issues." approach. Unless you have perfect knowledge about the products, it's always going to be true. If it was a really crappy choice, you learned something for the next time... but it doesn't matter. You saved time/energy by making one.
If you have some time to read "how Google works" you would be surprised by how long the company ran on NFS. I assume there are lots of workloads running on Borg to this day on top of NFS. If that isn't enough for you you should have a look in the client list of Isilon and see which kind of work they do, in case you ever attend a SIGGRAPH most of what you see is built on top of NFS, so, essentially, all of the computer graphics you see in movies. At last job our NFS cluster did 300 000 IOPS with 82gb/s throughput
I was in a similar phase (not schizophrenia) but others yes. Meditation helped me a lot. Going out and meeting new people will also help you.
Depression happens due to you stuck in one place, with no way out. Just go out daily, experience new things you are good to go. Stay away from smoking, drinking, movies, tv shows, porn, and interent in general for a while. Trust me you will be back up in no time.
And lastly exercies daily. Go for a morning run (around 6 am) and then join a gym or a fighting class.
>The Whole Product concept was popularized by Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm
I see the value in Geoffrey Moore's framework. There are similar analysis frameworks. One is MCDA (multi-criteria decision framework)[1] and another is SWOT Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats[2]. There must be a dozen others.
But I would still generalize them down to "multiple dimensions" because one can use it for non-commercial products sold for free such as comparing GCC vs Clang/LLVM -- or -- compare non-specific products such as "categories of products". An example of comparing multi-dimensions of categories such as "live theater" vs "movies".
Without GM's book and his framework, if we see someone say that "GCC is superior to Clang because it targets more cpus than Clang and the resultant binaries of LAME MP3 and FFMpeg compiled by GCC have better performance", it means the commenter is leaving out other dimensions to support his conclusion of GCC superiority. By omitting the missing dimensions, the observation that Clang/LLVM is winning over GCC in the "marketplace of ideas" seems totally illogical. But once one adds in additional dimensions such as Clang not forcing a GNU license and/or Clang exposing the AST parse tree, its adoption makes more sense.
Same for categories like "theater vs movies". When movies first came out, some experts believed that films would be a fad because "audiences want to see _real_ actors in person and not some _artificial_ projection on a screen". The experts were only focused on one dimension: the appeal of the audience being in the same physical space as the actors. They ignored all the other positive dimensions that films allow such as closeups on actors faces. (E.g. a live stage play's script can't rely on very subtle facial responses such as an eyebrow raise or a tiny smirk of the lips because anybody beyond the 3rd row won't even see it. Stage dialogue with whispers can't be real whispers, they have to very loud and very fake stage whispers. Films also allow alternating time and location cutting for storytelling. But live Broadway theater is also still around -- because it has quality dimensions some people prefer.)
A lot of arguments on the forums about X being superior to Y are really people favoring different dimensions and then talking past each other. Since people can't agree on all the dimensions/criteria to consider and how to weigh them, the debates remain unresolved.
- Try Meetup.com. Endless options there. Don't be afraid to be awkward. Read about social skills and practice them.
- Be a better friend and initiate contact with people you know - don't wait for them.
- Also make a list of all people/friends you know local or non-local. Refer to that list and keep in touch. This is harder than it looks but is important. I was surprised how many folks I had a good connection with but did a sucky job of keeping in touch with.
- Attend workshops, classes etc where you have the chance to meet others in a like minded setting. Especially overnight ones. There are always group events happening in urban environments. Seek them out.
- This is going to sound dumb - but try to interact with people via social networks. It teaches you a bit of initiative and also leads to in person quality time in some cases. But be careful that you don't get swallowed by it.
- Have something interesting at your home - like board games, gaming , good list of movies to watch. That way you can feel comfortable inviting people over to hang out at your place and have a good time. It feels nice to say "I have a really cool board game - why don't you guys come over and let's have some fun, along with some beer/drinks"
- Be interesting - if you are passionate about 1 or more interesting topics outside work, and talk about it with folks you meet, they will remember you. It could be AI, self-improvement, meditation/mindfulness, running, fitness, music and so on. But learn to talk about your passion intelligently. It leaves a mark.
the core feature of their jobs is their own economic exploitation.
Ugh, I know, being "economically exploited" is so rough -- making six figs in a top-tier profession with low single-digit unemployment that provides for a home/apt, family, regular health insurance, a warm bed and heating for the winter, cooling for the summer, multiple cars and a motorcycle (and maybe even a home for those too), an entire closet full of clothes, multiple pairs of shoes, regular healthy meals, spontaneous travel and vacations, hobbies, movies, TV, games, and entertainment nearly to our hearts' desire.
Worse, at work I have to deal with shiny new gadgets, laptops, desktops, servers, giant monitors, a desk and chair to my liking, HVAC, plumbing, and free filtered water. And wait a second, did you say you get paid while taking a bathroom break!? Life really does suck being exploited like this.
What's dead is not God, nor work, and the elephant might just be painted on the mirror on your wall.
A better approach than consumer reports is label certifications. A product bearing more testing labels (like things from Under writer's laboratory, or movies rated by MPAA etc etc) will have a better chance of being marketed to bigger audience.
When I kvetch about this kind of thing, my wife likes to remind me: it's everything.
It's hard to find a can opener that will last a long time. Food is made as cheaply as possible. Movies are carefully crafted to maximize profit, not to tell stories. Advertisements lie.
If you deconstruct it all down as far as you can go, you land on money. Well, I do. She says its "human nature". Whatever that is.
As China increases their creative capability they are increasingly capable of matching US products at higher and higher levels. They started with dollar store stuff, made cheap, sold cheap - but now it is made better and the range of products that attack US products is moving upmarket from the dollar stores to all level of technology - bar none. IP protected items, movies, designs, trademarked, patented etc are gaining fewer premium dollars every year.
Costs of city and state unions ratchet up inexorably, same with the manufacturing unions. How soon before China has a well designed car that will kick the snot out of what Detroit makes? (as if the unions have not already nearly killed US cars and Detroit)
> most high-end sensors have better dynamic range than film (~14-15 stops vs ~13 stops)
Film is the one with 14-15 stops. Plus its automatic S-shaped gamma curve, with gentle roll-off of the highlights, makes it easier to produce pleasing images. Movies, TV shows, and commercials that were shot on 35mm film in the 80s and 90s usually look better than the digitally shot ones today.
It's relatively easy to get the "hey look over there!" viral bump, but beyond that it turns into a game of retention with ugly words like "drip campaign."
People are always interested in "new," but they need a reason to keep returning. That's what makes a business run.
(kinda like how, for movies, the opening weekend gets all the news, but not so much the 22nd weekend.)
If more marketing results in more sales, that's what they're going to do. Living a life paranoid about marketing seems like a severe overreaction -- why not just be a more discerning customer? It's pretty clear the vast, vast majority of sales are driven by marketing and not quality - to the point that quality in a lot of industries is considered a niche. Living a life afraid of marketing and feeling like a victim seems a lot worse than buying some crappy stuff. The more positive use of your energy in my opinion is just being a more discerning customer.
> One can already see this happening with the blockbuster movies. Big studios start hyping up big releases as early as 2 years and continue to maintain the hype by releasing trailer and trailers of trailers, articles about how the director is a master of the craft and how the movie is going to be insane. But when you see the movie, it will be often mediocre. But the movie will be a hit regardless.
This is the movie industry reacting to a changing market more than anything else in my opinion. Movies are just moving towards the new LCD of people who will actually pay for movies. People are watching less movies, and lets face it a lot of the people who enjoy the types of movies I assume you enjoy (I am just assuming we have similar taste) are people who are likely to pirate -- the movie industry isn't going to cater towards a demographic that is relatively unlikely to pay for their content.
People obviously enjoy the behind the scenes stuff, so its a pretty obvious move to give more access to the public "faces" for your movie (namely director and major stars).
Releasing trailers early and gauging interest lets them know how much money to sink into the movie -- they need a higher hit rate than they've had in the past to make money on their "portfolio". So obviously they are going to change the process and move towards safer movies (reboots are becoming more frequent for example).
> The major share of it is manipulative and geared towards creating a need or preferences towards a particular product.
Okay? Isn't that basically the definition of marketing? The entire formula is the more people that know your product and feel like they need it, the more people buy it.
I use my iPad all the time, but primarily for reading and watching movies and TV shows. My three-year-old iPad does these things great and there's simply no reason to upgrade.
1. Schedule most times spent with spouse. For everything. I really mean everything. Dinner date? Schedule it in advance. Going house-hunting? Schedule the visits. Movies? Schedule the evening way in advance. Visiting folks? Agree on a set date.
2. Stick to the schedules like a mofo. Integrity integrity integrity. Promises broken because schedules could not be kept are more likely the reason for an unhappy spouse (or kids!) rather than the amount of time spent with them. No one likes getting their hopes up only to be let down last minute.
3. Never accept an impromptu activity with spouse without agreeing to set off existing agreed upon schedules. This reinforces your commitment to the discipline of schedules. They know you are serious about your time and doing so shows that you acknowledge and respect theirs.
4. Try to keep one day of the week as a wild card where you don't work and simply say yes to anything they (spouse/kids) ask. Schedule this day secretly without telling them. This is the day you can "disrupt" them by saying "Let's go for ice cream" while they are busy. See what happens.
5. When complaints are raised against you for not spending enough time with them, open your schedules - demonstrate the obvious.
6. Never work on a Sunday. This should be your wild card day.
Just as one example, Ankidroid is pretty unpleasant on a phone, especially searching for new decks. There are quite a few other apps, too, that are "tablet optimized" for larger screens than phones have, and use internal detection to change the UI/UX you're presented with. Web usage on sites that are menu or image heavy can be problematic, too, as is working with tabular data any time. I don't enjoy watching movies/tv on my phone, either (and the battery life is horrendous).
I really enjoy /r/photography, the quality of discourse is high and there are very little nastiness. The mod team is also highly active and engages members - weekly discussions along directed topics, weekly writeups/discussions about famous works/photographers, etc.
IMO subreddits like it are evidence that the Reddit macro model has been, and will continue to be a failure. The community is at its best when tone is actively directed by a dedicated mod team, and abusive behavior actively policed, in distinct contrast to the relative free-for-all that are the default subreddits.
Reddit's admins make a lot of noise about believing in the hands-off approach ("every man is responsible for his own soul"), but ultimately the hands-on approach create higher-quality communities (even at scale: see /r/iama) and curbs the abuse that has made the default subreddits complete intellectual wastelands. Not only that, Reddit itself has not been consistent on being hands-off, what with the banning of subreddits and whatnot.
Side shoutout to /r/movies - always good discussions. Things get more animated and sometimes less civil than /r/photography but the mod team does a good job keeping things from exploding.
Its a perfectly rational feeling. The problem is we also like to perceive ourselves as individuals, but in fact are products of a system.
I spend huge amounts of my time watching movies, doing things absolutely not related to my personal career ambitions, and yes I do feel guilty. But as this thread mentions, we are human, and the feelings pass away in time.
I've learned that one hour of focused productivity is worth 10 hours of "doing stuff" which you think will make you a better programmer.
The effective evasion and bots "stupidity" actually come from the lack of cultural context: through school, TV, Internet, etc. humans get a lot of common information that computers don't have yet. For example, even if you never played ice hockey, the question "would you like to go play ice hockey on a beach?" will never produce "count me out" response from a human. Humans will either be surprised ("how can you play ice hockey on a beach?") or frustrated ("do you think I am an idiot and don't know you can't play hockey on the beach?"). Now imagine an even bigger context around movies, songs, sports, ...
Wired connectivity certainly isn't either. I find myself using my home internet connection almost exclusively for movies and games -- not exactly the great innovative services everyone talks about.
I use my phone for almost everything else: online shopping, communication, news consumption, even work since I tether my laptop to it when I'm on the go. It's a lot more convenient; and the only thing I really need high bandwidth for is media playback.
I think you'll struggle to find a solid suggestion since disposable income isn't something people directly budget for; it's what's left over after you've ensured everything else is budgeted for.
The thing is, what is your disposable income for? Going out to the movies every weekend? If you enjoy movies that much, why not roll it out of 'disposable income' and into your regular monthly budget?
Or did you have a more refined definition of disposable income?
Political campaigns at least have downtime though, right? You can have a month or two off between sprints. I think certain creative work (movies?) is like this too.
I just got the Seiki 39" as well. It works great for coding and browsing the web. Even watching movies. However the color fidelity is absolutely crap. Everything looks oversaturated and blown out. I have an apple cinema I switch to whenever I want to do any of my photography stuff. The 30fps is noticeable but it doesn't feel encumbering. But I'm not doing any arcade style gaming.
32" and definitely 24" would be too small for me to read the text. I'd have to hunch forward or blow the font up to read things. I already have that problem on my retina MBP.
I am working on http://hmpgr.com (checkout the pronunciation in the "what is hmpgr?" link)
edit: use Invite Code: HN
Click on each app to see more details about it.
Back story: As a hacker, when you build a small application, its either web-based, iOS or android. All alone you cannot build for all the platform. So the first idea which came to me that why not build only web-apps which are responsive and hence can run smoothly on all platforms. But the problem was having a great experience on a web app is difficult. But if you think about it, its not true for all cases, you can have great experience and utility if the app itself is extremely simple and minimal.
And this is true in many many apps. In fact its true for Hacker News itself. So I thought of building a store for apps which are extremely minimal yet useful. The four apps (Running, Pins, Movies and Notes) are all my creation. Some of them you might find useful on a daily basis and some are useful only on specific occasions. The technology used is Ruby on Rails and we will be releasing a developers kit for folks interested in building apps on hmpgr.
Why would you build apps on hmpgr? Because you are guaranteed atleast one user (that's me :). Just kidding. Hopefully its going to be much more than that.
The idea is to easily get attention of fellow users who are already on hmpgr platform. The system gives you the option to install/uninstall apps on your choice basis.
Obviously, the system has bugs and am still working on them so use them and give me feedback.
Great idea @cjbarber.
I was thinking of doing a separate Show HN but this seems like a great idea. Thanks for building it.
It's interesting how the decades of research in computational linguistics still come down to rating a single sentence + or -. And though they are getting better, the systems are still pretty open to 'obvious' attacks:
> I have seen many good movies, this one is not one of them.
> All movies, except this one, are good.
> I thought this movie was going to be bad, but I was wrong.
which rate positive, positive and negative.
I'm full of hope that the modern neural net and linear algebra type methods will eventually crack this though!
Maybe others asked for it, I didn't. I don't use social media, I vote third-party and always have, I believe in open source, I rarely watch tv or see movies. I dont listen to the radio, I use P2P.
working from home is great and all but I currently work in an environment where 'working from home' is the norm and it is not good for team-building at all. I've been here for months and still don't know what people look like or actually do even though I might send them reports or talk with them on lync.
Also, I guess this boils down to personality but I much rather work in the office where it is much harder to get distracted whereas at home you can just turn on the tv, watch movies, cook etc.
It does have local storage--it just doesn't have an SD card slot for storage expansion.
It's safe to say this will come in 16GB and 32GB varieties, and hopefully there will be a 64GB option.
My Galaxy Nexus has 32GB, and my Nexus 7 has 16GB, and I've never hurt for storage, even with movies (Nexus 7) and Spotify playlists at "extreme" quality (Galaxy Nexus.)
Agreed. I had a color nook before my transformer and the difference is night and day. The 7" is essentially a super ebook reader. Its useless for comics, magazines, non-mobile web, tv/movies, etc. My phone is almost 5". Not sure why I need a non-4G device that is merely 2" larger.
I suspect google knows it can't reach that nice price point with a 10" screen and knows the 7" market is ripe for stealing from Amazon. Its sad that its conceded the 10" market. I'd love a $299 10" google tablet to replace my aging Transformer.
The really awful part of this situation is that perhaps Google is ashamed at the lack of apps that can make use of a 10" screen. A lot of my apps are simply phone apps that look terrible on my tablet.
Its a shame there's no real pricing on the MS Surface yet. I could really see myself with one of those if they're $499 or less. I'd rather spend $499 on a super tablet than $199 on a media consumption device with little storage and not a lot of ports.
Google is gunning for the Fire/Kindle crowd here and I think its going to work. I prefer reading on an LCD where I can control the color scheme and where I can dip into using a proper browser now and again. e-ink is more than a bit over-rated and the Fire is just poorly engineered.
If new works are still being produced - and right now, they're being produced more than ever - we know there is enough.
This I would think is partly due to having some copyright protection for their works.
* Define "better work". *
I don't think there's a universal definition, but higher budget works or just more lower budget works that might appeal to different people.
Possibly, but again, I don't find that relevant.
it's relevant because piracy of certain works more than others will mean that stuff that gets highly pirated becomes less lucrative to produce. Think PC gaming as an example of this.
And we also don't have legal coercion for many other things. Fashion, for example, does not rely on copyright and still manages to be a vibrant community of creation.
Fashion relies on trademarks to protect labels, also having an expensive fashion item is a way to visibly display wealth as much as anything else, movies and music don't really work like this.
Show me another industry where the marginal costs are essentially 0. Music, movies, software, etc creation is different from most other industries for that fact alone.
Marginal costs are low but the up front costs can be very high , this needs to be recouped somehow.
Yes, they should be able to use it for something I might deem distasteful. I don't like censorship. If they misrepresenting my views, then they're defaming me. I don't need copyright to protect myself from that.
I don't like censorship either but if I say wrote a song that was adapted and used as an anthem for a racist group I wouldn't be pleased with that.
They don't have to misrepresent your views directly but they can make you seem guilty by association and it is hard to get damages for that.
Sure. In fact, if more money alone makes a better song, I question the artistic quality of that work.
Or simply a larger marketing budget gets it out in front of more people, not necessarily a bad thing but surely it seems reasonable that the original author can dictate at least some terms of use?
No, why should I?
Because it encourages parasitic business models , the guy who created the work has created more value than the guy who put adverts around it but the economic incentive is to be the latter.
When researching potential clients I needed to Google close to 1,500 different companies. They were all listed in Excel already. Searching for them one by one would have taken ages, so I looked for a way to speed up the process without finding anything (just see http://listsear.ch/?e=searchlists).
Listsear.ch is the product of that "itch".
After copying in a list (see http://listsear.ch/?e=movies or http://listsear.ch/?e=firms) and clicking 'Search list' a link to Google is generated for each list item. All of these links can be opened at once, although the exact behavior varies a bit from browser to browser.
Crossing lists seemed helpful, too (e.g. http://listsear.ch/crosslists/?e=movieratings).
He is still a man with great ideas, and an amazing ability to hype them. But yes, they get overhyped. Black & White sounded a lot more awesome than it turned out to be when released (still a good game, though, but nowhere near as epic as we'd all heard). Fable was, in essence, the same thing. The Movies, I feel, isn't much of a game, but curtains for the movie making thing (which worked nice), but by that time I had figured out the hype machine and expected less. Lionhead makes solid games overall, but it amazes me how the gaming magazines and sites swallow everything Molyneux says hook, line and sinker.
I use my CR-48 for almost everything these days...
SSH into a vps for programming.
Write my docs/prezis.
Chat/Video chat with people from all over.
Watch TV and Movies.
Its pretty great only times I need to boot into my much more powerful, much larger, school laptop is when I need to use eclipse and thats only because I'm too lazy to setup ant scripts to deal with my teams projects. Or when I've got a .doc or .docx that Google Docs chokes on.
Its the best machine I own and I didn't even have to pay for it. This article sums up much of how I feel about it day to day.
When folksonmies were the current hotness Clay Shirkey made a great point about things that seem similar but aren't.
"Synonym control is not as wonderful as is often supposed, because synonyms often aren’t. Even closely related terms like movies, films, flicks, and cinema cannot be trivally collapsed into a single word without loss of meaning, and of social context. (You’d rather have a Drain-O® colonic than spend an evening with people who care about cinema.) So the question of controlled vocabularies has a lot to do with the value gained vs. lost in such a collapse. I am predicting that, as with the earlier arc of knowledge management, the question of meaningful markup is going to move away from canonical and a priori to contextual and a posteriori value."
I quit my job in tech support about 4 years ago. Since then, I've made at least 7 attempts at starting a bootstrapped business.
My original idea was to build "a live-video youtube" but Justin.tv and uStream showed up just a few months after I got started, and the dream died. Since then, I've launched four search engines (two of which are keeping me ramen-profitable), a twitter app (wasted time), and a "viral" site based on comparing movies (didn't go viral).
With income from my two main sites dwindling, I decided I would try moving away from web apps, and focus on building a product. Patio11's success with the bingo card niche has been my main inspiration. After a few weeks of iterating through various ideas, I decided to put my skills with the camera to use, and started building a collection of layer styles.
My goal is to corner the high end of the layer styles market. Launching this site is the first step, but it will probably take a few more iterations to get where I want. Based on my research, there's at least 250k in yearly revenue up for grabs, and room for growth.
I finally launched the site yesterday, and now I'm looking for feedback. Please check it out and let me know what you think. Thanks.
PS: If you have a design related blog/forum/etc, and you want a review copy or a free copy to give away to your readers, just send me an email (john.at.blamcast.net)
Well, I does seem irrational doesn't it :-) I added a few extra "tags" to some of them. IMDB has 'movies' as tag and twitter has micro-blog. Perhaps I should remove them for the sake of clarity?
Hacker Cinema
71 comments on Hacker News
> it's based on the media company providing a service...forever? People in this thread are saying customers should get refunds and I disagree - customers should get video files!
Very much agree. And while Steam could disappear tomorrow, all of the games that have been delisted are still downloadable if you bought them (I think The Movies was one of the early ones - delisted in 2007 maybe, but you can still download it if you bought it back then).
I've heard dozens of people say this (and I've even said it myself) but I don't think it actually holds water. People will pay for things if those things don't suck, and it's not even hard to find examples of that (even with Google products no less!).
For search, Kagi has had a growing fanbase for a couple years now, but let's take things that have been easy to get for free for decades: Movies.
People have been, with relatively impunity, able to torrent movies for free for a very long time. It's not hard, and the only way you're paying for it is ads for hot MILFs in your area. And yet, despite this having always been an option, somehow Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ and HBO Max have managed to make fairly successful businesses selling movies that could have been pirated.
I could get YouTube as ad-free with an ad blocker, but I pay for YouTube Premium. I could get all my music for free with Redacted, but I use YouTube music, or I buy CDs. I could torrent video games but I just buy them off Steam or GOG.
This isn't new either; there were thousands of free forums on the internet in the late 90's, but yet people still bought accounts on Something Awful for quite awhile (and indeed still buy accounts, but with much lower numbers).
We can certainly argue about how much value these companies are providing, and we can argue about how it's annoying how there's a million different streaming services now and how that's really irritating, but my point stands: people do pay for things on the internet.
We don't have to accept that companies need to sell all our data. We don't have to accept being bombarded with ads. We don't have to accept that people won't pay to use services.
The best civic thing a business can do is provide a valuable service and thereby make money. Just look at all the wonderful things we have as a result - airplanes, internet phones, air conditioning, cars, agriculture, movies, AI - the list is endless.
The movies are a lot of fun.
I’d say movies.
I disagree, I got to B2 in 2 years in Germany by simply making time to go to my local Volkshochschule to learn (i.e. evening classes). Why? Because it was fun and I enjoyed learning a langauge. If you want to learn, you will. If living in Germany for eight years doesn't really make you want to take learning German seriously, then what will? I know many people who've been in Germany 10+ years and can't speak German. Honestly, if I was them I'd have either left or killed myself by now, I cannot fathom sustaining that isolation for ten years. But they are built differently, they are somehow happy anyway. I would not be.
And Anki is a nicety but won't revolutionise your learning. In fact in the end I stopped using it and switched to just reading German books and watching German movies.
> The notion that markets can drive efficiency is a valuable insight. But people for whom Econ 101 acts as a religion have a really hard time noticing when that effect gets swamped.
US businesses, though, do not. The desired state is monopoly, or, failing that, oligopoly with three or less major players. The US is there in cellular communications, web search, banking, drugstores, social networks, movies...
"Competition is for losers" - Thiel.
I coded on one of them. It was ok for a short period. The blurriness and ghosting, especially on the corners and edges made it pretty tiring after a while.
They're great for watching videos, movies, TV, etc. though!
Which laptop with AMD CPU I can use to watch movies for 20 hours or browse the Internet for the same amount of time without recharging?
I am not an Apple or MacOs fan but I recently bought a MacBook Pro just for battery life. So I can watch movies and browse the Internet on the sofa without having to plug the laptop.
> Isn’t it sad that the first $500b+ company from Europe is a peddler of vanity and overpriced luxury items?
I used to think this way but no longer do. I mean, the point of being people is to do people things. The point of trying to fix the climate is so people can keep on doing stuff they want (the planet doesn’t care).
Now indeed, I think ppl should stop doing things that hurt others, but $1,500 scarves aren’t that harmful. And leather is an awful material for most applications these days so these people just hurt themselves :-).
If I were to make a list of useless activities that could safely vanish overnight without me missing them, I would indeed wave my wand at fashion, as well as vehicle racing; all forms of movies, video, YouTube, etc; the music “industry” (not musicians!); motorized watercraft; Internet advertising; fast-food restaurants; celebrities… But some people would (inexplicably to me) not agree.
> I believe royals are the biggest grifters on earth.
Bad as aristos are, there are even bigger grifters!
not the op, but the latter applies to me. Absolutely had to experiment a good amount to figure out what worked, and I definitely made errors which were obvious in hindsight well into my late 20s and even early 30s. And something no one ever tells you but is common sense when you hear it: it's impossible for everyone to "like" you (for however you choose to define the word) because no single mode of interaction will build or reinforce a healthy relationship with 100% of people.
Quick tip: movies, dramas, and sitcoms are a terrible reference. So is r/relationship_advice unless you're looking for what not to do.
Speed of light is a hard physical limit. Local storage will always have a major edge for this reason alone.
That said I'm now in this weird mid-life confusion about the fact that my new WAN (3gbps fiber connection) is now faster than any reasonable home LAN I can set up. Needed to move some movies from one machine to another the other day and it was way faster to just bittorrent them again from upstream than actually copy, since even USB removable media was slower than my WAN. So I think we might be at least temporarily in an awkward situation where cloud storage outcompetes LAN storage.
But truly local storage (nVME etc) has an extreme edge over anything networked, and always will.
One of the main problems is marketing. Adding more bells and whistles to something makes it more marketable. And so we invariably trend towards more complexity, even when it doesn't really provide any "real" return. This also drives constant changes just for the sake of change - to feel like what you have is genuinely new as opposed to a fundamentally identical rehashing of what you already had. Operating systems being the obvious culprit there.
And the most frustrating part of it all is that often the more marketable concepts are often just worse. Flat design is one obvious example. It looks sleek and sexy in marketing especially compared to the janky pseudo-3d effects of times past, but not being able to determine at a glance which parts of your UI are interactable is objectively less functional. But functionality < marketing.
The one other thing I'd add is that this is not limited to software/hardware. Movies face the exact same issue. Explosions, effects, and "loudness" are highly marketable, people standing around talking isn't. So we went from movies focusing on personal interactions to movies focusing on people running around in spandex in front of green screens screaming and battling other people in spandex, all while stuff explodes around them and special effects zip and zap about, while music with all the emotional subtlety of a hammer to the head blares. Progress!
Probably movies, series, and techcrunch
The screens and sound setups are fine. The movies are bad products here.
To be fair to big tech/software, it was the thing that me work from home, for some people (like my mother) that probably saved their lives. Not to mention all the digital services I relied on to keep some semblance sanity. I was stuck in a 300sqft apartment with my girlfriend for months but was able to talk with friends, family, watch movies and play games. None of that would have been possible without tech. You’re right that pharma ended up saving us, but it’s a bit pithy to totally dismiss what tech gave us.
We waste money on almost everything that isn’t good or shelter. Cars. Roads. Movies. Sports. Etc
> that can be as simple as "carry your laptop and stay within reliable coverage"
And be sober, and somewhere quiet enough you'll reliably hear/feel the notification, and be somewhere you can get that laptop out and type away at it for a while.
I get _much_ less enjoyment from many social activities when I'm on call. I enjoy gigs way less. I enjoy parties way less. I pretty much wont go to movies. I hate being "on call" while out at dinner with friends. I will not go on a date while on call (at least not with somebody I don't know well enough for them to understand the on call obligations).
> most of our lives are spent in that regime already
But not all hours in my life are of equal "value" to me. A lot of the "most valuable and enjoyable times" get disproportionally affected by being on call. I care way less about potentially being paged at 2:30am on a Tuesday morning than I do about having to curtail social events on a Friday evening or a weekend. You _will_ need to pay me handsomely to do that, and guarantee it only rarely becomes my responsibility. Been there, done that, am perfectly happy to turn down job offers that don't understand that (or to walk away from companies who try and spring that on me later I've accepted).
I used to hoard data too until I realised that most movies and TV shows are crap most of the time.
My setup:
For business related services I use root servers hosted by e.g. Hetzner. I don't want to deal with hardware maintenance nor the 24/7 power bill.
For private stuff (pictures, videos, movies) I have a cheap old desktop machine at home with lots of storage running Ubuntu. Easy to administer, and I can switch it off if not needed. Data is mirrored and snapshotted.
For long-term backup I encrypt my data and upload it to Amazon Glacier Deep Archive (around 1$/TB!)
That said the cloud in general is great and you can do some things today for cheap that weren't possible for most companies 10 years ago. For some use cases it's the best choice.
In general a lot of workloads can be served orders of magnitudes cheaper than 10 years ago.
Approach all my planning from resource (time and energy) allocation perspective. Previously I would just make a dump of all things that I want to achieve, which made any kind of planning unrealistic.
Stay afloat but do not try to actively climb anywhere, save energy for inner work and contemplation. Stay at my current job (ok pay, just got hired), do not actively learn anything technical unless required for work (not interested, tired from technology). Do no work more than is necessary to feel I'm not gonna be fired.
Approach very critically all learning endeavors that are related to programming, and only do things that I absolutely enjoy. Drop at first sign of dissatisfaction.
Spend time on high RoI things (critical thinking, stress management and overall well being techniques). Drop low RoI things (movies, TV series, guitar).
Try to fight news and politics addiction.
Contemplate on how and where I want to spend the rest of my life.
- Reading books (most recently, Nassim Taleb's books) - Running (before lockdowns, now home workout is a very good alternative) - Fasting - Philosophy (Rene Girard, ancient Roman philosophy) - History (my home country of course... also love the story of how Mehmed the Conqueror overtook Constantinople and ended Roman empire) - Travel (mostly due to work but I always appreciated and respect the local cultures and landscapes) - Art - Music - Movies - Cars (most favs are Porsche as a modern business, and of course Tesla) Recently, due to lockdowns I fall in love with cooking too.
You're equating shortage driven by organic demand to that of shortage from cryptomining.
The fundamental difference is that with organic demand, people typically just want one card. With crypto, the incentive is to get your hands on as many cards as you can, fuck everyone else. Then we find ourselves in this race to the bottom.
Moreover, trying to equate the energy use of both activities is laughable when mining creates an environment where idle compute resources translate to lost profits.
I'm sure many people have taken up watching movies instead. Thing is, the net energy use is still vastly higher because mining creates a perverse incentive for virtually all GPUs to be hoarded, while drawing power 24/7.
I don't disagree that a large swath of gaming culture is a cesspool, nor do I disagree that crypto has beneficial uses. I do however think both are beyond the scope of this discussion.
What I'm saying is that the Proof-of-Work model has run amok and is a net detriment to society right now in its current incarnation.
> I’m really not sure what level of understanding people have of history these days.
People go by what they gathered from movies and what their older relatives talk about.
The few times when I've had an online relationship, just having someone to say goodnight with has been so much more comforting and sleep-inducing than any of the medications that work for a bit until they don't.
2005 or so was the first time I had a really special relationship, online, and when I tried to meet the other person like they seemed to want they kinda backed out. It's 15 years later and no matter how close we get and the other person says we need to meet, when we want to meet and I'm so ready to meet them they instant or slightly-less-abruptly ghost me.
Um I really need a job where I could afford somewhere to live and it'd be helpful to have a job where I don't have to work 7/365 since I haven't had a day off in over 5 years and so I don't even know who I am or what I'm trying to do anymore.
My best friend is someone over 2500 miles away and 10 years older than me but they text me on discord about life and we watch movies sometime.
How do I find a place where there are one or more adults who could help me find a way to survive, afford a home and food and the rest on this planet? Is there somewhere else I could find someone or a future?
Your reasoning is incorrect, and frankly quite insulting. I never pirate music anymore, because there is a service available that provides everything I want with no need to do a wild goose chase half the time I want to listen to something new. Time and attention are the important ingredients, not money.
Ditto for computer games, as everything I care about is always available on one of the three (!) services I use: Battle.net, Steam and GOG. That's an example of low fragmentation. I gladly spend hundreds a year on this. I never have to worry that my favorite game will disappear from my catalog. Never have to worry about DRM servers shutting down and making my purchases worthless.
The same is not the case for movies and series, as the movie industry in particular is still digging its heels and refusing to build something that properly serves its prospective customers. Multiple examples of DRM servers shutting down. Weekly examples of content disappearing from a particular platform, or changing its licensing terms to make it unavailable in my location. You'd have to be a chump to accept these terms.
The alternative should be obvious.
Movies, no. Casual TV shows, yes.
Laying fibre for new networks makes sense. But that's orthogonal to whether to deliver Gigabit and irrelevant to the question of whether to rip out a working network and replace it with "gigabit" as the justification.
"Gigabit will make sense later" is what they were telling people 35 years ago too. Back then they were explaining to people that you'd be able to watch movies at home some day. Yup, you sure can and of course you don't need anywhere close to a Gigabit to do it.
The applications for household Gigabit remain a mirage decades later.
I'm a totally undecided person. My first solution is to accept it - As in spend lots of time on the choice if it matters. If I need to buy something expensive, it will sometimes take me weeks / months background thinking about it, and I'm ok with that. If it's not urgent, why worry about that?
The second is to get many answers at the same time. I've usually got a list of movies to watch / things to read that I make in one go. You can bookmark things in some category with the idea that the next time you'll just grab the top one when you need it. You spent the time choosing them, so that part is done.
The third one is just to accept I won't make perfect choices. I can't say it's going to be easy for you, but this requires some level of training the "I don't care this isn't great. The other options would have their own issues." approach. Unless you have perfect knowledge about the products, it's always going to be true. If it was a really crappy choice, you learned something for the next time... but it doesn't matter. You saved time/energy by making one.
If you have some time to read "how Google works" you would be surprised by how long the company ran on NFS. I assume there are lots of workloads running on Borg to this day on top of NFS. If that isn't enough for you you should have a look in the client list of Isilon and see which kind of work they do, in case you ever attend a SIGGRAPH most of what you see is built on top of NFS, so, essentially, all of the computer graphics you see in movies. At last job our NFS cluster did 300 000 IOPS with 82gb/s throughput
speaking from personal experience I relied heavily on mnemonics memorizing skills during my years in academia.
At the beginning I had time visualizing all those "fake situations" and images. That's OK. You're OK. It gets much easier as you practice.
What helped me in this process is avoiding movies(especially modern action movies) and reading books.
I was in a similar phase (not schizophrenia) but others yes. Meditation helped me a lot. Going out and meeting new people will also help you.
Depression happens due to you stuck in one place, with no way out. Just go out daily, experience new things you are good to go. Stay away from smoking, drinking, movies, tv shows, porn, and interent in general for a while. Trust me you will be back up in no time.
And lastly exercies daily. Go for a morning run (around 6 am) and then join a gym or a fighting class.
Podcasts, books, games, movies, repeat.
How about movies and television, then? You don't need to be able to read to enjoy those, and they've been significantly vilified as well.
>The Whole Product concept was popularized by Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm
I see the value in Geoffrey Moore's framework. There are similar analysis frameworks. One is MCDA (multi-criteria decision framework)[1] and another is SWOT Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats[2]. There must be a dozen others.
But I would still generalize them down to "multiple dimensions" because one can use it for non-commercial products sold for free such as comparing GCC vs Clang/LLVM -- or -- compare non-specific products such as "categories of products". An example of comparing multi-dimensions of categories such as "live theater" vs "movies".
Without GM's book and his framework, if we see someone say that "GCC is superior to Clang because it targets more cpus than Clang and the resultant binaries of LAME MP3 and FFMpeg compiled by GCC have better performance", it means the commenter is leaving out other dimensions to support his conclusion of GCC superiority. By omitting the missing dimensions, the observation that Clang/LLVM is winning over GCC in the "marketplace of ideas" seems totally illogical. But once one adds in additional dimensions such as Clang not forcing a GNU license and/or Clang exposing the AST parse tree, its adoption makes more sense.
Same for categories like "theater vs movies". When movies first came out, some experts believed that films would be a fad because "audiences want to see _real_ actors in person and not some _artificial_ projection on a screen". The experts were only focused on one dimension: the appeal of the audience being in the same physical space as the actors. They ignored all the other positive dimensions that films allow such as closeups on actors faces. (E.g. a live stage play's script can't rely on very subtle facial responses such as an eyebrow raise or a tiny smirk of the lips because anybody beyond the 3rd row won't even see it. Stage dialogue with whispers can't be real whispers, they have to very loud and very fake stage whispers. Films also allow alternating time and location cutting for storytelling. But live Broadway theater is also still around -- because it has quality dimensions some people prefer.)
A lot of arguments on the forums about X being superior to Y are really people favoring different dimensions and then talking past each other. Since people can't agree on all the dimensions/criteria to consider and how to weigh them, the debates remain unresolved.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-criteria_decision_analysis
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis
Some options that I have tried and have helped:
- Try Meetup.com. Endless options there. Don't be afraid to be awkward. Read about social skills and practice them.
- Be a better friend and initiate contact with people you know - don't wait for them.
- Also make a list of all people/friends you know local or non-local. Refer to that list and keep in touch. This is harder than it looks but is important. I was surprised how many folks I had a good connection with but did a sucky job of keeping in touch with.
- Attend workshops, classes etc where you have the chance to meet others in a like minded setting. Especially overnight ones. There are always group events happening in urban environments. Seek them out.
- This is going to sound dumb - but try to interact with people via social networks. It teaches you a bit of initiative and also leads to in person quality time in some cases. But be careful that you don't get swallowed by it.
- Have something interesting at your home - like board games, gaming , good list of movies to watch. That way you can feel comfortable inviting people over to hang out at your place and have a good time. It feels nice to say "I have a really cool board game - why don't you guys come over and let's have some fun, along with some beer/drinks"
- Be interesting - if you are passionate about 1 or more interesting topics outside work, and talk about it with folks you meet, they will remember you. It could be AI, self-improvement, meditation/mindfulness, running, fitness, music and so on. But learn to talk about your passion intelligently. It leaves a mark.
the core feature of their jobs is their own economic exploitation.
Ugh, I know, being "economically exploited" is so rough -- making six figs in a top-tier profession with low single-digit unemployment that provides for a home/apt, family, regular health insurance, a warm bed and heating for the winter, cooling for the summer, multiple cars and a motorcycle (and maybe even a home for those too), an entire closet full of clothes, multiple pairs of shoes, regular healthy meals, spontaneous travel and vacations, hobbies, movies, TV, games, and entertainment nearly to our hearts' desire.
Worse, at work I have to deal with shiny new gadgets, laptops, desktops, servers, giant monitors, a desk and chair to my liking, HVAC, plumbing, and free filtered water. And wait a second, did you say you get paid while taking a bathroom break!? Life really does suck being exploited like this.
What's dead is not God, nor work, and the elephant might just be painted on the mirror on your wall.
A better approach than consumer reports is label certifications. A product bearing more testing labels (like things from Under writer's laboratory, or movies rated by MPAA etc etc) will have a better chance of being marketed to bigger audience.
When I kvetch about this kind of thing, my wife likes to remind me: it's everything.
It's hard to find a can opener that will last a long time. Food is made as cheaply as possible. Movies are carefully crafted to maximize profit, not to tell stories. Advertisements lie.
If you deconstruct it all down as far as you can go, you land on money. Well, I do. She says its "human nature". Whatever that is.
As China increases their creative capability they are increasingly capable of matching US products at higher and higher levels. They started with dollar store stuff, made cheap, sold cheap - but now it is made better and the range of products that attack US products is moving upmarket from the dollar stores to all level of technology - bar none. IP protected items, movies, designs, trademarked, patented etc are gaining fewer premium dollars every year. Costs of city and state unions ratchet up inexorably, same with the manufacturing unions. How soon before China has a well designed car that will kick the snot out of what Detroit makes? (as if the unions have not already nearly killed US cars and Detroit)
> most high-end sensors have better dynamic range than film (~14-15 stops vs ~13 stops)
Film is the one with 14-15 stops. Plus its automatic S-shaped gamma curve, with gentle roll-off of the highlights, makes it easier to produce pleasing images. Movies, TV shows, and commercials that were shot on 35mm film in the 80s and 90s usually look better than the digitally shot ones today.
Everything falls after launch. Everything.
It's relatively easy to get the "hey look over there!" viral bump, but beyond that it turns into a game of retention with ugly words like "drip campaign."
People are always interested in "new," but they need a reason to keep returning. That's what makes a business run.
(kinda like how, for movies, the opening weekend gets all the news, but not so much the 22nd weekend.)
If more marketing results in more sales, that's what they're going to do. Living a life paranoid about marketing seems like a severe overreaction -- why not just be a more discerning customer? It's pretty clear the vast, vast majority of sales are driven by marketing and not quality - to the point that quality in a lot of industries is considered a niche. Living a life afraid of marketing and feeling like a victim seems a lot worse than buying some crappy stuff. The more positive use of your energy in my opinion is just being a more discerning customer.
> One can already see this happening with the blockbuster movies. Big studios start hyping up big releases as early as 2 years and continue to maintain the hype by releasing trailer and trailers of trailers, articles about how the director is a master of the craft and how the movie is going to be insane. But when you see the movie, it will be often mediocre. But the movie will be a hit regardless.
This is the movie industry reacting to a changing market more than anything else in my opinion. Movies are just moving towards the new LCD of people who will actually pay for movies. People are watching less movies, and lets face it a lot of the people who enjoy the types of movies I assume you enjoy (I am just assuming we have similar taste) are people who are likely to pirate -- the movie industry isn't going to cater towards a demographic that is relatively unlikely to pay for their content.
People obviously enjoy the behind the scenes stuff, so its a pretty obvious move to give more access to the public "faces" for your movie (namely director and major stars).
Releasing trailers early and gauging interest lets them know how much money to sink into the movie -- they need a higher hit rate than they've had in the past to make money on their "portfolio". So obviously they are going to change the process and move towards safer movies (reboots are becoming more frequent for example).
> The major share of it is manipulative and geared towards creating a need or preferences towards a particular product.
Okay? Isn't that basically the definition of marketing? The entire formula is the more people that know your product and feel like they need it, the more people buy it.
Chiming in to agree with slower update cycles.
I use my iPad all the time, but primarily for reading and watching movies and TV shows. My three-year-old iPad does these things great and there's simply no reason to upgrade.
SCHEDULE.
1. Schedule most times spent with spouse. For everything. I really mean everything. Dinner date? Schedule it in advance. Going house-hunting? Schedule the visits. Movies? Schedule the evening way in advance. Visiting folks? Agree on a set date.
2. Stick to the schedules like a mofo. Integrity integrity integrity. Promises broken because schedules could not be kept are more likely the reason for an unhappy spouse (or kids!) rather than the amount of time spent with them. No one likes getting their hopes up only to be let down last minute.
3. Never accept an impromptu activity with spouse without agreeing to set off existing agreed upon schedules. This reinforces your commitment to the discipline of schedules. They know you are serious about your time and doing so shows that you acknowledge and respect theirs.
4. Try to keep one day of the week as a wild card where you don't work and simply say yes to anything they (spouse/kids) ask. Schedule this day secretly without telling them. This is the day you can "disrupt" them by saying "Let's go for ice cream" while they are busy. See what happens.
5. When complaints are raised against you for not spending enough time with them, open your schedules - demonstrate the obvious.
6. Never work on a Sunday. This should be your wild card day.
Just as one example, Ankidroid is pretty unpleasant on a phone, especially searching for new decks. There are quite a few other apps, too, that are "tablet optimized" for larger screens than phones have, and use internal detection to change the UI/UX you're presented with. Web usage on sites that are menu or image heavy can be problematic, too, as is working with tabular data any time. I don't enjoy watching movies/tv on my phone, either (and the battery life is horrendous).
I really enjoy /r/photography, the quality of discourse is high and there are very little nastiness. The mod team is also highly active and engages members - weekly discussions along directed topics, weekly writeups/discussions about famous works/photographers, etc.
IMO subreddits like it are evidence that the Reddit macro model has been, and will continue to be a failure. The community is at its best when tone is actively directed by a dedicated mod team, and abusive behavior actively policed, in distinct contrast to the relative free-for-all that are the default subreddits.
Reddit's admins make a lot of noise about believing in the hands-off approach ("every man is responsible for his own soul"), but ultimately the hands-on approach create higher-quality communities (even at scale: see /r/iama) and curbs the abuse that has made the default subreddits complete intellectual wastelands. Not only that, Reddit itself has not been consistent on being hands-off, what with the banning of subreddits and whatnot.
Side shoutout to /r/movies - always good discussions. Things get more animated and sometimes less civil than /r/photography but the mod team does a good job keeping things from exploding.
Its a perfectly rational feeling. The problem is we also like to perceive ourselves as individuals, but in fact are products of a system.
I spend huge amounts of my time watching movies, doing things absolutely not related to my personal career ambitions, and yes I do feel guilty. But as this thread mentions, we are human, and the feelings pass away in time.
I've learned that one hour of focused productivity is worth 10 hours of "doing stuff" which you think will make you a better programmer.
I thought visual arts are already popular. They're called movies!
The effective evasion and bots "stupidity" actually come from the lack of cultural context: through school, TV, Internet, etc. humans get a lot of common information that computers don't have yet. For example, even if you never played ice hockey, the question "would you like to go play ice hockey on a beach?" will never produce "count me out" response from a human. Humans will either be surprised ("how can you play ice hockey on a beach?") or frustrated ("do you think I am an idiot and don't know you can't play hockey on the beach?"). Now imagine an even bigger context around movies, songs, sports, ...
Wired connectivity certainly isn't either. I find myself using my home internet connection almost exclusively for movies and games -- not exactly the great innovative services everyone talks about.
I use my phone for almost everything else: online shopping, communication, news consumption, even work since I tether my laptop to it when I'm on the go. It's a lot more convenient; and the only thing I really need high bandwidth for is media playback.
I think you'll struggle to find a solid suggestion since disposable income isn't something people directly budget for; it's what's left over after you've ensured everything else is budgeted for.
The thing is, what is your disposable income for? Going out to the movies every weekend? If you enjoy movies that much, why not roll it out of 'disposable income' and into your regular monthly budget?
Or did you have a more refined definition of disposable income?
Political campaigns at least have downtime though, right? You can have a month or two off between sprints. I think certain creative work (movies?) is like this too.
I just got the Seiki 39" as well. It works great for coding and browsing the web. Even watching movies. However the color fidelity is absolutely crap. Everything looks oversaturated and blown out. I have an apple cinema I switch to whenever I want to do any of my photography stuff. The 30fps is noticeable but it doesn't feel encumbering. But I'm not doing any arcade style gaming.
32" and definitely 24" would be too small for me to read the text. I'd have to hunch forward or blow the font up to read things. I already have that problem on my retina MBP.
I am working on http://hmpgr.com (checkout the pronunciation in the "what is hmpgr?" link)
edit: use Invite Code: HN
Click on each app to see more details about it.
Back story: As a hacker, when you build a small application, its either web-based, iOS or android. All alone you cannot build for all the platform. So the first idea which came to me that why not build only web-apps which are responsive and hence can run smoothly on all platforms. But the problem was having a great experience on a web app is difficult. But if you think about it, its not true for all cases, you can have great experience and utility if the app itself is extremely simple and minimal.
And this is true in many many apps. In fact its true for Hacker News itself. So I thought of building a store for apps which are extremely minimal yet useful. The four apps (Running, Pins, Movies and Notes) are all my creation. Some of them you might find useful on a daily basis and some are useful only on specific occasions. The technology used is Ruby on Rails and we will be releasing a developers kit for folks interested in building apps on hmpgr.
Why would you build apps on hmpgr? Because you are guaranteed atleast one user (that's me :). Just kidding. Hopefully its going to be much more than that. The idea is to easily get attention of fellow users who are already on hmpgr platform. The system gives you the option to install/uninstall apps on your choice basis.
Obviously, the system has bugs and am still working on them so use them and give me feedback.
Great idea @cjbarber. I was thinking of doing a separate Show HN but this seems like a great idea. Thanks for building it.
It's interesting how the decades of research in computational linguistics still come down to rating a single sentence + or -. And though they are getting better, the systems are still pretty open to 'obvious' attacks:
> I have seen many good movies, this one is not one of them.
> All movies, except this one, are good.
> I thought this movie was going to be bad, but I was wrong.
which rate positive, positive and negative.
I'm full of hope that the modern neural net and linear algebra type methods will eventually crack this though!
We no longer have to care about actor career. We care about whether the show is good as a whole.
Movies are subpar compared to TV shows with a tiny number of exceptions.
Maybe others asked for it, I didn't. I don't use social media, I vote third-party and always have, I believe in open source, I rarely watch tv or see movies. I dont listen to the radio, I use P2P.
working from home is great and all but I currently work in an environment where 'working from home' is the norm and it is not good for team-building at all. I've been here for months and still don't know what people look like or actually do even though I might send them reports or talk with them on lync.
Also, I guess this boils down to personality but I much rather work in the office where it is much harder to get distracted whereas at home you can just turn on the tv, watch movies, cook etc.
It does have local storage--it just doesn't have an SD card slot for storage expansion.
It's safe to say this will come in 16GB and 32GB varieties, and hopefully there will be a 64GB option.
My Galaxy Nexus has 32GB, and my Nexus 7 has 16GB, and I've never hurt for storage, even with movies (Nexus 7) and Spotify playlists at "extreme" quality (Galaxy Nexus.)
Agreed. I had a color nook before my transformer and the difference is night and day. The 7" is essentially a super ebook reader. Its useless for comics, magazines, non-mobile web, tv/movies, etc. My phone is almost 5". Not sure why I need a non-4G device that is merely 2" larger.
I suspect google knows it can't reach that nice price point with a 10" screen and knows the 7" market is ripe for stealing from Amazon. Its sad that its conceded the 10" market. I'd love a $299 10" google tablet to replace my aging Transformer.
The really awful part of this situation is that perhaps Google is ashamed at the lack of apps that can make use of a 10" screen. A lot of my apps are simply phone apps that look terrible on my tablet.
Its a shame there's no real pricing on the MS Surface yet. I could really see myself with one of those if they're $499 or less. I'd rather spend $499 on a super tablet than $199 on a media consumption device with little storage and not a lot of ports.
Google is gunning for the Fire/Kindle crowd here and I think its going to work. I prefer reading on an LCD where I can control the color scheme and where I can dip into using a proper browser now and again. e-ink is more than a bit over-rated and the Fire is just poorly engineered.
If new works are still being produced - and right now, they're being produced more than ever - we know there is enough.
This I would think is partly due to having some copyright protection for their works.
* Define "better work". *
I don't think there's a universal definition, but higher budget works or just more lower budget works that might appeal to different people.
Possibly, but again, I don't find that relevant.
it's relevant because piracy of certain works more than others will mean that stuff that gets highly pirated becomes less lucrative to produce. Think PC gaming as an example of this.
And we also don't have legal coercion for many other things. Fashion, for example, does not rely on copyright and still manages to be a vibrant community of creation.
Fashion relies on trademarks to protect labels, also having an expensive fashion item is a way to visibly display wealth as much as anything else, movies and music don't really work like this.
Show me another industry where the marginal costs are essentially 0. Music, movies, software, etc creation is different from most other industries for that fact alone.
Marginal costs are low but the up front costs can be very high , this needs to be recouped somehow.
Yes, they should be able to use it for something I might deem distasteful. I don't like censorship. If they misrepresenting my views, then they're defaming me. I don't need copyright to protect myself from that.
I don't like censorship either but if I say wrote a song that was adapted and used as an anthem for a racist group I wouldn't be pleased with that.
They don't have to misrepresent your views directly but they can make you seem guilty by association and it is hard to get damages for that.
Sure. In fact, if more money alone makes a better song, I question the artistic quality of that work.
Or simply a larger marketing budget gets it out in front of more people, not necessarily a bad thing but surely it seems reasonable that the original author can dictate at least some terms of use?
No, why should I?
Because it encourages parasitic business models , the guy who created the work has created more value than the guy who put adverts around it but the economic incentive is to be the latter.
When researching potential clients I needed to Google close to 1,500 different companies. They were all listed in Excel already. Searching for them one by one would have taken ages, so I looked for a way to speed up the process without finding anything (just see http://listsear.ch/?e=searchlists).
Listsear.ch is the product of that "itch".
After copying in a list (see http://listsear.ch/?e=movies or http://listsear.ch/?e=firms) and clicking 'Search list' a link to Google is generated for each list item. All of these links can be opened at once, although the exact behavior varies a bit from browser to browser.
Crossing lists seemed helpful, too (e.g. http://listsear.ch/crosslists/?e=movieratings).
Reddit still has a fantastic set of communities on it. Think of it more as a service, not one singular website.
Like usenet.
(These are some of the subs that I like, they might not be your thing, but they're examples of solid communities)
http://reddit.com/r/truereddit
http://reddit.com/r/longtext
http://reddit.com/r/depthhub
http://reddit.com/r/askscience
http://reddit.com/r/neuro
http://reddit.com/r/burningman
http://reddit.com/r/movies
http://reddit.com/r/linguistics
http://reddit.com/r/philosophy
And if you're looking for pictures, there are the "SFW \"Porn\"" subs:
http://www.reddit.com/r/earthporn+villageporn+cityporn+spaceporn+waterporn+animalporn+humanporn+botanicalporn+adrenalineporn+destructionporn+movieposterporn+albumartporn+machineporn+newsporn+geekporn+bookporn+mapporn+adporn
Reddit certainly isn't dead. It's just maturing.
He is still a man with great ideas, and an amazing ability to hype them. But yes, they get overhyped. Black & White sounded a lot more awesome than it turned out to be when released (still a good game, though, but nowhere near as epic as we'd all heard). Fable was, in essence, the same thing. The Movies, I feel, isn't much of a game, but curtains for the movie making thing (which worked nice), but by that time I had figured out the hype machine and expected less. Lionhead makes solid games overall, but it amazes me how the gaming magazines and sites swallow everything Molyneux says hook, line and sinker.
And now I want to play Populous II again. :/
I use my CR-48 for almost everything these days...
SSH into a vps for programming. Write my docs/prezis. Chat/Video chat with people from all over. Watch TV and Movies.
Its pretty great only times I need to boot into my much more powerful, much larger, school laptop is when I need to use eclipse and thats only because I'm too lazy to setup ant scripts to deal with my teams projects. Or when I've got a .doc or .docx that Google Docs chokes on.
Its the best machine I own and I didn't even have to pay for it. This article sums up much of how I feel about it day to day.
When folksonmies were the current hotness Clay Shirkey made a great point about things that seem similar but aren't.
"Synonym control is not as wonderful as is often supposed, because synonyms often aren’t. Even closely related terms like movies, films, flicks, and cinema cannot be trivally collapsed into a single word without loss of meaning, and of social context. (You’d rather have a Drain-O® colonic than spend an evening with people who care about cinema.) So the question of controlled vocabularies has a lot to do with the value gained vs. lost in such a collapse. I am predicting that, as with the earlier arc of knowledge management, the question of meaningful markup is going to move away from canonical and a priori to contextual and a posteriori value."
http://many.corante.com/archives/2004/08/25/folksonomy.php
I think this can apply to anything where similarity can seem like a problem.
Just because items seem simliar doesn't take into account the context in which said items are used.
I quit my job in tech support about 4 years ago. Since then, I've made at least 7 attempts at starting a bootstrapped business.
My original idea was to build "a live-video youtube" but Justin.tv and uStream showed up just a few months after I got started, and the dream died. Since then, I've launched four search engines (two of which are keeping me ramen-profitable), a twitter app (wasted time), and a "viral" site based on comparing movies (didn't go viral).
With income from my two main sites dwindling, I decided I would try moving away from web apps, and focus on building a product. Patio11's success with the bingo card niche has been my main inspiration. After a few weeks of iterating through various ideas, I decided to put my skills with the camera to use, and started building a collection of layer styles.
My goal is to corner the high end of the layer styles market. Launching this site is the first step, but it will probably take a few more iterations to get where I want. Based on my research, there's at least 250k in yearly revenue up for grabs, and room for growth.
I finally launched the site yesterday, and now I'm looking for feedback. Please check it out and let me know what you think. Thanks.
PS: If you have a design related blog/forum/etc, and you want a review copy or a free copy to give away to your readers, just send me an email (john.at.blamcast.net)
Really? There are tons of them. Some of the AdMob supported apps on my phone at the moment include:
* Movies (Flixster) * Load Monitor * MixZing * Virtual Beer * BlueTooth File Transfer * Carr Matey * Aldiko * Camera Magic * VG Classics Board * Dolphin Browser
The Hacker News Reader app is also ad supported, although I think they're using a different ad network.
Alcohol & cigarettes. Board games. Movies. Also automobiles, radio, defense.
Well, I does seem irrational doesn't it :-) I added a few extra "tags" to some of them. IMDB has 'movies' as tag and twitter has micro-blog. Perhaps I should remove them for the sake of clarity?