NaraVara's recent activity

  1. Comment on 8BitDo FlipPad in ~games

    NaraVara
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    Wow I’ve never seen a unicorn before!

    Wow I’ve never seen a unicorn before!

  2. Comment on 8BitDo FlipPad in ~games

    NaraVara
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    I love how marketing ads for mobile gaming peripherals so often show pictures of multiple people playing side by side while sitting around a table in a bar or cafe or something. I reckon this has...

    I love how marketing ads for mobile gaming peripherals so often show pictures of multiple people playing side by side while sitting around a table in a bar or cafe or something. I reckon this has happened maybe 10 times ever.

    I remember even the first wave of Nintendo Switch ads had groups of cool 20-somethings playing with the Switch on trendy Brooklyn roof decks while they sip on drinks. I have never seen this happen. Not once.

    5 votes

  3. Comment on Linus Torvalds says Linux is not "anti-AI", tells haters to 'fork it' and 'just walk away' in ~tech

    NaraVara
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    Visual artists already have great tools that leverage the same technology, they’ve just been using it since before it got turned into chatbots. ML has been used to either create or improve the...

    Visual artists already have great tools that leverage the same technology, they’ve just been using it since before it got turned into chatbots. ML has been used to either create or improve the functioning of tons of things digital artists use. Even before Photoshop had “generative fill” they were using magic lassos and various tools to do color grading, denoising, etc.

    “AI” is just marketing bunkum used to wrap a specific implementation of machine learning models that are designed to facilitate research and “knowledge work” rather than visual art. And the way it’s structured is very well suited for supporting software development. I don’t actually think it’s that well suited for a lot of other types of work that doesn’t involve distilling down a large body of existing text to the context it’s been given. That’s very specifically a coding shaped problem to solve, with a few applications for lit reviews and other types of research and exploration tasks.

    13 votes

  4. Comment on Claude Code is the ceiling on vibe-coded software in ~tech

    NaraVara
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    I would not assume that because they make the AI models they would know best how to use them and make them useful. If anything, being too deep in AI qua AI probably makes you distinctly bad at...

    I would not assume that because they make the AI models they would know best how to use them and make them useful. If anything, being too deep in AI qua AI probably makes you distinctly bad at understanding how to use AI for anything useful. These guys aren’t coming with expertise in the kinds of legacy burdened, highly interconnected, production environments most complex enterprises are running.

    I think there’s still a lot of work to do on the UI and interface ends to make the most out of AI tools. And as those improve the models will need to adapt to function better with those new modalities for working with them.

    7 votes

  5. Comment on Linus Torvalds says Linux is not "anti-AI", tells haters to 'fork it' and 'just walk away' in ~tech

    NaraVara
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    I’m very down on AI as an industry and all the economics around it. AI output tends to give me the “the ick.” But AI haters have started to get real annoying. BlueSky seems to have this little...

    I’m very down on AI as an industry and all the economics around it. AI output tends to give me the “the ick.” But AI haters have started to get real annoying.

    BlueSky seems to have this little clade of users who show up in posts from game developer accounts and demand to know whether “Gen AI” is used in the game as if these are conflict minerals or something. It’s 100% posturing from purity trolls who have lost all sight of what it is they’re fighting over.

    28 votes

  6. Comment on A philosopher’s one-word theory to explain why the world feels so weird: uni-context in ~humanities

    NaraVara
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    Yeah the same thing is sort of happening in fashion. Dressing to blend in or signal affiliation with a style of scene is kind of dead because all people are interacting with is a river of...

    Yeah the same thing is sort of happening in fashion. Dressing to blend in or signal affiliation with a style of scene is kind of dead because all people are interacting with is a river of context-free clips and footage. So it’s more like a blended up paste of everything at once that people pick from across eras and cultural traditions. It’s not even really like an intentional cultural fusion because the interaction with it doesn’t really go any deeper than surface-level aesthetic.

    3 votes

  7. Comment on A philosopher’s one-word theory to explain why the world feels so weird: uni-context in ~humanities

    NaraVara
    (edited )
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    You’re abstracting terms to the point of meaninglessness here. The article itself gives you examples of subjective goods being context dependent and complaints being more universally relatable....

    If there are universal context free ways to make someone unhappy, then surely it must follow that alleviation of those evils is universally good.

    You’re abstracting terms to the point of meaninglessness here. The article itself gives you examples of subjective goods being context dependent and complaints being more universally relatable. And you undermine your own point at the end of your post. When you say: > Evils are what is contextual: death, pain, illness, violence. To die for a just and worthy cause; to endure pain for truth; to forebare illness in order to live on for some ideal; to responsibly permit or even enact violence in protection of others, these are contextual.

    This is literally adding the contextualization to contextless evils to infuse nuance into how they should be interpreted. This cannot be done if the specific thing itself is presented without any specific context around what it is or why it exists.

    when someone enjoys watching baby animals slaughtered, we don't say that that is just a preference oh well, we say that that person has something broken about them.

    Do we? Because people enjoy foie gras and veal but if all you know of it is the conditions under which they’re produced all you’d have is the bad part to complain about. Understanding that a slaughterhouse exists to feed people is context. Something which gets stripped out when all you ever see if video footage of a slaughterhouse.

    In any form of art we know there are some universal cues that give the audience a sense of calm or good feeling, and some other techniques that make us uneasy or put us in fear.

    The vast majority of these are culturally determined so I don’t really buy this premise either. In general you seem to be talking about norms and mores rather than context.

    4 votes

  8. Comment on A philosopher’s one-word theory to explain why the world feels so weird: uni-context in ~humanities

    NaraVara
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    Here are some questions that I consider self-evidently compelling about the modern world:

    • Why is the news media so interested in telling you how much the world sucks all the time?
    • Why are so many of us obsessed with distraction and managing our attention?
    • Why is it so hard to stop comparing ourselves to others?
    • And why does everything in art and design seem the same these days?

    A week ago, I didn’t think these questions were related. I’m not sure I would have told you I had a good answer to most of them. And I certainly wouldn’t have made the audacious and borderline bonkers claim that one single theory could begin to explain all of them, at once.

    But then I had the pleasure of speaking to Agnes Callard, the University of Chicago professor, about her new theory called “the uni-context.” It’s easily one of them most interesting conversations I’ve had all year. And once you’ve heard or read it, I think you might find it hard to think about anything else.

    3 votes

  10. Comment on Marvel’s ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ reportedly a “mess” in the edit after shooting without a finished script and packing in over sixty roles in ~movies

    NaraVara
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    You gotta be more creative! “Loki went back in time and kicked the original Kang’s father in the balls. All Kangs since now look like John David Washington for some reason.” EASY

    You gotta be more creative! “Loki went back in time and kicked the original Kang’s father in the balls. All Kangs since now look like John David Washington for some reason.” EASY

  11. Comment on Marvel’s ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ reportedly a “mess” in the edit after shooting without a finished script and packing in over sixty roles in ~movies

    NaraVara
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    They sell last year’s model every year. It’s pitched as the budget phone. Even if they can’t think of new ideas they still have space for a spec bump and battery upgrade.

    They sell last year’s model every year. It’s pitched as the budget phone.

    Even if they can’t think of new ideas they still have space for a spec bump and battery upgrade.

    7 votes

  12. Comment on Marvel’s ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ reportedly a “mess” in the edit after shooting without a finished script and packing in over sixty roles in ~movies

    NaraVara
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    Aside from the various Shapeshifters, Kang is probably the character that is easiest to recast with a very easy lore explanation. Not that you really need it. They managed to do it with War Machine.

    Aside from the various Shapeshifters, Kang is probably the character that is easiest to recast with a very easy lore explanation.

    Not that you really need it. They managed to do it with War Machine.

    12 votes

  13. Comment on The end of reading is here in ~books

    NaraVara
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    No buffs please. His energy level is already too overpowered for anyone else to keep up with.

    No buffs please. His energy level is already too overpowered for anyone else to keep up with.

    9 votes

  14. Comment on The end of reading is here in ~books

    NaraVara
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    One of the reasons every social media app has a messaging function now is a way to bait you to wade back in. Once you have one or two friends who mainly message you on a specific app then you’ll...

    One of the reasons every social media app has a messaging function now is a way to bait you to wade back in. Once you have one or two friends who mainly message you on a specific app then you’ll check into that app to talk to them, and once in that’s when they have dark patterns to get you on the infinite scroll treadmill.

    Same with groups. If you’re part of a PTO, a gym, a book club, or many other sorts of community organizations many of them do their primary outreach and bulletin board stuff on Facebook or Instagram. It’s another case where if you want the month’s calendar of activities you’re clicking into an Instagram page and then that’s how they get you.

    The only way to avoid it if you’re an active and engaged member of a normie community group is through constant application of willpower, which is another way of saying it’s simply not gonna happen at any scale that will be meaningful.

    6 votes

  15. Comment on The end of reading is here in ~books

    NaraVara
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    I’ve noticed this as my son has grown up. There is SO much stuff in his life as a 4 year old that is gated by the fact that he can’t read yet. He has the reasoning and problem solving skills to...

    I’ve noticed this as my son has grown up. There is SO much stuff in his life as a 4 year old that is gated by the fact that he can’t read yet. He has the reasoning and problem solving skills to navigate all sorts of things, but the fact that he can’t read instructional text nerfs him.

    6 votes

  16. Comment on The end of reading is here in ~books

    NaraVara
    (edited )
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    The most surprising thing I’ve learned about banning phones in schools is that it seems like (at least at high school age) the kids themselves seem to lean slightly supportive and it’s the parents...

    The most surprising thing I’ve learned about banning phones in schools is that it seems like (at least at high school age) the kids themselves seem to lean slightly supportive and it’s the parents who push back harder.

    Apparently kids view the smartphones as something of a leash that enables helicopter parenting. The context of a high school is that you’re in a fixed area with pretty much your whole social universe for most of the day anyway, so it’s not really as critical to them for being able to hang out with their friends.

    A lot of writing about this sort of thing sort of treats kids as passive consumers of cultural forces, but I think at least by the time they become teens, they are pretty well aware of what’s happening to them. And they DO want to be set up to learn and grow and be capable and self-possessed. They WANT the adults in their lives to set them up to succeed and, at least the driven and ambitious ones, do recognize conceptually that they need their guardians and parental figures to help them maintain healthy boundaries for themselves.

    21 votes

  17. Comment on Sports entertainment makes me angry in ~talk

    NaraVara
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    It definitely reads as hostile, but that’s partly because the original post it’s paralleling in structure is hostile. The main difference is the original post was hostile to a medium and people...

    It definitely reads as hostile, but that’s partly because the original post it’s paralleling in structure is hostile. The main difference is the original post was hostile to a medium and people into it generically while this directs that tone at a recognizable someone specifically. Is it more mean-spirited if I point directly at you and say you’re ugly but a-okay as long as I only say “God I hate anyone whose name reminds me of a mall department store combined with a mythological bird! What!? Why are you mad? I didn’t single anyone out!”

    So I don’t know if it’s “needlessly” hostile, since the intent of the post is to demonstrate to anyone inclined to agree with the original post how that sort of take sounds. So wow, yeah, that is pretty hostile. OP ends up sounding like kind of a jerk. What could the implications of this be!?

    17 votes

  18. Comment on Modern, abstract art makes me angry in ~arts

    NaraVara
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    Yeah I just meant like, any specific sentence in something like “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” is a pretty straightforwardly understood sentence. It doesn’t seem “abstract” in the way a Jackson...

    Yeah I just meant like, any specific sentence in something like “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” is a pretty straightforwardly understood sentence. It doesn’t seem “abstract” in the way a Jackson Pollack does at a glance. The abstract aspects of it become clearer once you start taking it together as a whole. It’s almost like the inverse of an impressionist painting.

    2 votes

  19. Comment on Modern, abstract art makes me angry in ~arts

    NaraVara
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    The Godzilla theme is, interestingly, in a major key despite being intended as kind of ominous and threatening it also sort of makes you want to root for the monster.

    The Godzilla theme is, interestingly, in a major key despite being intended as kind of ominous and threatening it also sort of makes you want to root for the monster.

    1 vote

  20. Comment on Modern, abstract art makes me angry in ~arts

    NaraVara
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    Everything done with skill and proficiency appears low effort if you don’t know what goes into it and don’t care to learn. Thats why such dismissals are snobby. The basic question one could ask...

    The criticism of modern art seems obvious to me: it, at minimum, appears extremely low effort.

    Everything done with skill and proficiency appears low effort if you don’t know what goes into it and don’t care to learn. Thats why such dismissals are snobby. The basic question one could ask is, if scamming in this way is so easy, why aren’t more people doing it?

    Why are a bunch of mostly very young schmoozers with dubious business sense able to pull it off and how would you execute the “scam” if it’s actually as easy as all that?

    12 votes