Steve Parrington

Society really lost it's shit when we moved away from containing the internet to one room in the house.

I do think given this information (and much cleaner energy mix, particularly in summer) Europe should invest more in AC.

Correct, the US data pretty clearly shows fewer heat related deaths than Europe, with how widespread AC is over there I assume it is a major factor in these numbers. The problem as you alluded to is that their energy mix is still very carbon heavy.

Why is it always tearing up regulations? Why is it never improving them? Worst of all worlds, you lose the wisdom of the initial regulation AND you lose the benefit of solutions developed through iteration.

Imagine a world where the Labour Party leadership *aren't* cowards. Good job Ed.

Nobody should have to isolate themselves culturally to protect the most precious thing they have - their attention.

For another, people shouldn't have to pay for 3rd party services to protect themselves like this.

But also, the existing solutions feel insufficient. Where is the digital wellbeing solution that covers smart TVs? YouTube is booming on TVs.

Of course you can already do all of this with a variety of solutions, some of them paid-for, some of them OS level. So why bother with app level features?

For one thing, laptops are much more annoying to set-up good self-binding solutions on.

I think giving people choices is the way to go. App level support for self-binding mechanisms, scheduled times they can use the app, daily usage limits. There should also always be the option to completely disable algorithmic curation and have it persist between sessions.

It's not a massive leap to say that attention is a key input into productivity. There is a prize to be won from increased regulation.

You may even get a lot of buy-in from the average worker who is sick of the whole monstrous mess.

So how could it be regulated?

Sometimes it surprises me that there isn't more of a concerted lobbying effort from the non-attention parts of the economy to regulate the attention parts. If you aren't making money from targeted ads but something actually important you'd surely be a bit pissed off.

Not decarbonised enough of course, but still.

I assume you saw the FT piece with the deaths caused by overheating graphs? Even in countries that supposedly manage with superior building design like Spain and Italy they have more deaths than the US. Sometimes I think people don't realise how much our energy mix has become decarbonised.

The WWII US propaganda poster "When you ride ALONE... " which now has Elon Musk, with hugely dilated pupils, driving the car. He's also wearing his black MAGA hat. The ghost of Hitler is no longer in the passenger seat - he's been replaced by the ghostly form of MechaHitler from the Wolfenstein game. Grok, who until yesterday was calling itself MechaHitler, will soon be your Tesla AI driving buddy, whether you want it to or not. I'm sure it'll be fine. Just don't tell it where Great Gandma came from.

Started this yesterday and got distracted.

Great piece by @jburnmurdoch.ft.com on why Europe needs to get serious about air-con www.ft.com/content/50f6...

I quite enjoyed CDMX tacos recently, although I found I enjoyed the chicken more than the beef. One day I'll get to Mexico City and have a proper point of reference. 😁

AI might actually just be lowering the barrier to entry for those with low technical skill, allowing them to cobble together something low quality.

It might not be as useful for experienced veterans.

My best theory for what is happening here is that reading code is harder and more time consuming than writing it. AI increases the amount of code that developers need to read, because if we don't review the output properly we could well end up introducing bugs or vulnerabilities.

4 days into the 14 day theme park road trip

Ah, I've not ridden Voltron yet, how would you describe it? Somehow I have not ridden a single coaster in Germany yet, so many trips to plan...

Really they should adapt the books up to and including God Emperor of Dune to really drive the point home.

Is doom scrolling really rotting our brains? The evidence is getting harder to ignore | Siân Boyle ‘Brain rot’ is the Oxford word of the year – a fitting choice, given the startling impact the internet is having on our grey matter, says journalist Siân Boyle

Is doom scrolling really rotting our brains? The evidence is getting harder to ignore

www.theguardian.com/...

Many have asked for my take on this. So, is it another example of "I have concluded that my gut feelings are correct and I'm cherry picking 'evidence' to support it"?

Yes, yes it is
1/21

VC just didn't seem to have the level of forcefulness I was expecting, also it wasn't as well paced as I was expecting. GCE had bags of airtime and intensity with a nice varied layout. It's possible VC just wasn't running well when I rode it, but that's all I have to go on.

I rode VelociCoaster in September and GCE a few weeks ago and honestly I preferred GCE. Definitely get over there to ride it!

You are of course correct, but even crypto had a kernel of a good idea within it. The problem is the way the tech industry takes good (or even amazing) ideas and massively oversells them to drum
up investment.

If “moral purity” was a significant factor, why did so many on the left and centre stick with X for so long?

If people only ditched X for Bluesky because they don’t like Musk it would have happened ages ago. X became terrible under Musk’s leadership. Bluesky hit critical mass and became a viable alternative. Those 2 things are way more significant IMO.

If it was just because of not liking Elon it would have happened ages ago. What has really happened is X has become progressively more terrible, Bluesky has started to reach critical mass AND they don’t like Elon. The scales have tipped.

Me: coaster layouts that are just a succession of airtime hills are boring.

Also me: the best element on Gotham City Escape is a regular old airtime hill.