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Category: Post
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Liquid Glass, especially as expressed on MacOS, is a lightweight poorly considered design system as a whole, and its conceptual thinness is not sufficient to properly allow the Mac to carry the weight it needs to bear. — Read on daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
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In a world of information overload, we have not become more skeptical. We have become more confident that what we know is right and what we do not see does not exist. Institutions designed to limit exposure, protect fairness, or filter noise now appear suspicious simply because they fail to provide visibility on demand. —…
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The modern entertainment business is largely (and increasingly) populated by people who possess social, cultural and financial capital and who enjoy a certain degree of privilege. Ozzy was the opposite of that kind of person. Excellent obituary of the late Ozzy Osbourne here, by a writer who takes a class-based angle. Even after a (massive)…
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What NPCs need isn’t more lore. It’s shape. This is a tool I’m going to use to create NPCs who survive contact with play. It fits on an index card. It works for merchants, villains, allies, and authority figures. And it’s resilient under improvisation. — Read on neillwhyborne.substack.com/p/the-7-sentence-npc Info on writing durable, memorable basic characters.
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Our claim is that in a world of full automation, inequality will skyrocket (in favor of capital holders)…. The relative wealth differences in a thousand years—or a million—will be downstream of who owns the first dyson swarms and space ships. And space colonization isn’t bottlenecked by people’s preference for human nannies and waiters. — Read…
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Vienna is the height of world sophistication at the beginning of the century: Certain cities, during certain periods, exert disproportionate influence on world culture: Paris in the 1920s; New York in the 1970s…Vienna around the turn of the century might just outdo them all. But despite this power, citizens had the sense of “dancing on…
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Since 2000, the story of TVs falling in price is largely the story of liquid crystal display (LCD) TVs going from a niche, expensive technology to a mass-produced and inexpensive one. — Read on www.construction-physics.com/p/how-did-tvs-get-so-cheap
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Deep congruence requires accepting all of the stuff of your life, every particle of feeling. If you are highly congruent, you disown none of your experience. None of it. You agree with what you’re doing with your time. You accept the stubborn approach of death, the arbitrariness of your fortune, your unimportance on the cosmic…
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Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders. More here. I maintain…
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..,despite our problems, life is as good as it has ever been. Especially if you play the game of “imagine you’re randomly born anywhere in the world.” At almost every point in the past that would mean an above-average chance you would be birthed into poverty, hardship, pain, want, and violence, and your adult life…
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1. An anti-drone swarm laser system; claims to destroy 20 drones a minute 2. Our brain’s master editor, constructing our reality (X) 3. Billy Corgan is pretty sure he saw a shapeshifter once 4. Last gasp against nihilism. And then…(X)
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In the 1970s, the big question was why was Chicago so fiscally well run….Why did New York go bankrupt when Chicago didn’t?…in New York, the political machine died, and the result was…they gave money to everybody. Whereas in Chicago, people were either for or against the Daley machine. That machine had an incentive not to…
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Though Taylor Kitsch ultimately wound up landing the role, former Lost alum Josh Holloway has revealed that he was originally cast as Gambit in X-Men Origins I’m rewatching Lost, and it’s abundantly clear that Josh Holloway as Gambit could have anchored an entire franchise. Whoever decided to eliminate him missed big time. More here.
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For its part, eternalism is, in principle, hospitable to the idea of time travel. If the entire universe exists unconditionally, all spacetime with its varying regions simply be. We could travel to different times because all times exist. Traveling to different spatial locations is made possible by the existence of all spatial locations and the…
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Costco negotiates as a strong buyer with tremendous leverage, giving Americans the opportunity to live comfortably for low cost. What could this look like for medicine and health care?
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We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms – up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested – probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure…
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For decades, marketing leaders guided buyers through a neat sequence from awareness to purchase. Today, that linear funnel model is breaking down. Buyers now chart their own course — jumping between channels, self-educating via digital content and often engaging sales late, if at all. As buyers became harder to corral into a predictable path, marketers…
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whenever i hear a young person confidently assert that humanity is cooked, my first instinct is to ask for their screen time report. because, yes, if you spend more time scrolling than you do participating in real life, it’s actually quite reasonable to conclude that we’re hanging on by a thread — Read on stephstiner.substack.com/p/a-gen-z-guide-to-fixing-your-doom
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You could put higher consumption taxes on items the wealthy purchase to a disproportionate degree. Paintings and yachts, and so on. Tom Holden argues: “In a world in which capital is essentially the only input to production, taxing capital reduces the growth rate of the economy. Whereas at present capital taxes have only level effects.…
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those of us who do venture deeply into his work quickly discover something far more imposing. [Clark Ashton] Smith’s imagination is vast, luxuriant, and final, as though one had strayed into a world already immeasurably old, already in decline, and wholly indifferent to human ambition or consolation. — Read on grognardia.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-ensorcellment-of-january.html