This was one of the most depressing articles I’ve read online in a long time. As a middle-aged man who has never used Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tik Tok or any other social media, I was shocked to find out this is what young women have to deal with. Reading this article upset me more than the Epstein revelations or any other bad news stories that have been in the press this year.
Other than the one year I worked on a building site, I’ve been lucky that I only encountered mild sexism among male colleagues but never outright misogyny as described in this article. Same goes for my experience in an all-boys secondary school and my college experience in a mostly male engineering course during the 90s.
Until recently, I really thought things were getting better for women and that they would be valued and respected more for their accomplishments than their looks. I remember being a teenager in rural Ireland in the 80s with very little money (and very little exposure to the outside world) was difficult enough but now I think I was lucky to have been born at that time. My heart goes out to anyone who is trying to learn about and navigate the world when they are being constantly bombarded with such negative and hateful messaging. Also, to all parents out there who have to try and prepare their children to deal with this.
As an advocate of free speech, I’m now less certain of my opposition to laws that restrict such hateful speech and I would support a ban on social media usage for under-16s. I’d actually like to see such a ban extended to smart-phone devices. Fuck all those ad-tech companies that “hack” human psychology to make their money.
The Western half of the Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth century but the Eastern half continued for another thousand years until the Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople in 1453.
A sibling commentator points out that the Catholic church still uses the term “Pontifex Maximus” to refer to their pope. However, this was a title used by the dominant high priest of pre-Christian Rome and the Catholic church only started doing this after Constantine XI (last Roman emperor) died when Constantinople fell to the Turks.
The Catholic church was just one of many entities that appropriated the titles and symbols of classical Rome as a way to confer themselves with the prestige and historical legacy of the Roman Empire. For example, the words “Tsar” (Slavic), “Kaiser” (German) and “Keizer” (Dutch) are all derivations of Caesar (as a synonym for emperor). Western European rulers adopted the Roman eagle for their royal and national coat of arms; Eastern Europeans tend to prefer the double-headed variant. The most egregious example is the Holy Roman Empire which famously was neither holy nor Roman. Arguably, in its latter days, it was more a federation than an empire.
> The most egregious example is the Holy Roman Empire
I think unfortunately the most egregious example is this still-extant bit of russian imperial propaganda now repurposed as russian nationalist propaganda.
On my side of the Atlantic using en-dashes with spaces on either side of the dash is acceptable writing style so that’s what I use (instead of em-dashes). However, many people can’t tell the difference between the two so some might confuse my writing from that of an LLM. But I’m not going to let that dictate my writing style.
For the past 15 years, I’ve used the Unicycle Vim plugin¹ which makes it very easy to add proper typographic quotes and dashes in Insert mode. As something of a typography nerd, I’ve extended it to include other Unicode characters, e.g., prime and double-prime characters to represent minutes and seconds.
At the same time, I’ve always used a Firefox extension that launches GVim when editing a text box; currently, I’m using Tridactyl for this purpose.
I hadn’t heard of Grokipedia so based on the positive comments in this thread, I thought I’d try it out – only to discover that its search feature sucks.
I’ve just finished watching a HBO TV show on Blu-Ray called “The Night of” so I tried searching for it on Grokipedia. It failed to find an article about the TV series in the first 60 search results (regardless of whether I used double quotes or appended the words “TV” or “series”). After multiple attempts, I gave up.
On the other hand, when I typed the three words into Wikipedia’s search, the TV show was the second search result.
Logitech are my go-to example of a company that does the right thing and deserves recognition for it. They kept their squeezebox.com servers going for a decade after they discontinued their Squeezebox hardware audio players. At the same time, they funded a maintainer to keep improving the open source server software that users can self-host on multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, macOS, Raspberry Pi). Two years ago, they finally shut down the squeezebox.com servers that they were running but the server software is still being actively maintained: https://lyrion.org/
That's nice of them! Too bad they don't offer repair for other speaker systems that are out of warranty, nor do they sell components for other repair shops to fix speakers that are out of warranty.
I’m fairly certain that the “odd” behaviour is that of the extremists who hijacked the original concept to promote the idea that being fat is good.
I’d consider calling it “odd” to be an understatement. I always thought such extreme positions were a bizarre denial of the negative impacts that obesity can have on personal well-being and quality of life. Having said that, I only ever encountered such views on the Internet; never in real life.
As a life-long hater of ads (before the Internet, I would mute the TV during ad breaks), I must agree. Before AdSense, animated GIFs for advertising were obnoxious. When the “Don’t be evil” Google started doing advertising, I was so impressed with them. Even their advertising is tasteful - and relevant! They really seemed to have the Midas touch.
But I feel that their choice of advertising revenue as their predominant income stream set them on a trajectory that gradually and inexorably led them further away from their original principles.
A friend’s daughter (young adult) told me about five years ago that cassette tapes are “cool” again. I was surprised because I always considered them to be the worst physical medium for music. I still have the cassette deck that I bought in the 90s for my hi-fi separate system but I haven’t listened to it in years. In the mid-2000s, I gave away most of my cassettes to a friend who had bought an old car that only had a tape deck. I only held on to recordings that were only released on cassette: demo tapes, bootlegs of live concerts that I had attended and some DIY releases from 90s’ punk bands that didn’t have (nor want) a record label.
Good cassettes played with a good tape deck are actually really good for music. It naturally saturates and compresses the audio material which often leads to much more homogeneous musical experience. Also the frequency spectrum tends to soften too harsh recordings, which is also cool. It all depends on the genre of course. The typical high resolution classic concert is probably better to be listened from HQ flac or whatever.
Back in the days the only way poor bands could achieve some sort of release was on cassette, paired with car radios and kitchen players this for sure wasn't the best experience to listen to music. And unfortunately many professional tape productions weren't that great either. But this was a management and production problem.
Yeah, it’s wild to me too, but I then remember purposely obtaining an eight track player in the 90s. My daughter has taken to vinyl for a time and now has a discman and it seems like a push back against the Illusion of Choice that music streaming “provides”.
That and she’s clearly genetically predisposed to hipsterism.
> I was surprised because I always considered them to be the worst physical medium for music.
That's a big part of why they're cool.
Imperfection is beautiful. We feel this intuitively when it comes to loving someone, or when it comes to impressionistic art. It really is the same thing with music.
I believe the typical response is that you can simulate that imperfection on digital media... but cassette lovers would argue this is tantamount to putting a photograph through a 'Da Vinci' filter in Photoshop. It's missing the point. There's more to music than what it sounds like. Where it came from, what you did to play it, these are all part of the experience. The context of a piece of a media, the means by which you listen to it, where it came from -- these change how the music feels, even if there is no difference in how it sounds.
Back when vinyl or cassettes were the only option, sure, the response is "screw your romanticism". But now that we have perfect digital media always available, there is romance in getting to choose something fragile and imperfect and precious. People like that feeling.
Other than the one year I worked on a building site, I’ve been lucky that I only encountered mild sexism among male colleagues but never outright misogyny as described in this article. Same goes for my experience in an all-boys secondary school and my college experience in a mostly male engineering course during the 90s.
Until recently, I really thought things were getting better for women and that they would be valued and respected more for their accomplishments than their looks. I remember being a teenager in rural Ireland in the 80s with very little money (and very little exposure to the outside world) was difficult enough but now I think I was lucky to have been born at that time. My heart goes out to anyone who is trying to learn about and navigate the world when they are being constantly bombarded with such negative and hateful messaging. Also, to all parents out there who have to try and prepare their children to deal with this.
As an advocate of free speech, I’m now less certain of my opposition to laws that restrict such hateful speech and I would support a ban on social media usage for under-16s. I’d actually like to see such a ban extended to smart-phone devices. Fuck all those ad-tech companies that “hack” human psychology to make their money.
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