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Density saves nature
  • Check out Habitat 67 in Montreal - an architectural student solved this in the 60s. Apartments where everybody gets their own rooftop terrace. Given the funding, the original plan was for a 30-story terraced hill of mixed-use and apartments in an A-frame with public green space underneath that mixed the density of apartments with the benefits of single family homes.

    Since everybody thought he was crazy, he only got a fraction of the funding for what he ended up building for the 1967 World's Fair, but those apartments have the longest occupancy time of any building in Canada (some seeing 2 or 3 generations living in them) and a 5-year waiting list on units.

    Last year, a 3d model of the original concept was released for Unreal Engine: www.unrealengine.com/en-US/hillside

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    me_irl
  • My dad had a friend whose apartment would frequently be broken into. So he started leaving the TV on 24/7, and he never had a break-in again while he lived there.

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    Vincent Van Who?
  • It probably has to do with strict character limits and the habit spreading. Twitter is only, what, 156 characters? I know text messages used to be something similar, and early on, they cost around 3 cents a letter and you had to hit the numbers multiple times to cycle through to the letter or punctuation that you wanted. It's where stuff like l33t speak came from, at least.

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    63% of Gen Z Would Rather Play Video Games Than Watch a Movie
  • I think the first stat in the graph is the most important one and really speaks to the reason for the last one. I said this is another post about this article, but video games have become their own kind of third space. Going out with friends has become so expensive, whether you're going to a movie or something else, and in a lot of places you can't go to hang out without having to spend money anyways, so video games have become a replacement way to hang out with friends. And that's before you start talking about stuff like friends who moved across the country for work or something.

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    63% of Gen Z Would Rather Play Video Games Than Watch a Movie — GamerBlurb
  • Also, there's the cost and community aspect of games. For the price of a movie ticket and popcorn, I can buy a game that I can play with friends for easily dozens of hours instead of us silently sitting next to each other for an hour or two.

    With the increasing death of third places and the increasing cost of existing outside, video games have become their own sort of third place for people to get together and just hang out.

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    Picture this
  • Again, that's literally what airlines and some hotels do. Based on how often you frequent the site and how often you search for flights for a specific date and location, they will change their prices for you specifically. The more interest you show and the closer it gets to that date, the higher the prices go. And your local pizza shop does this on a broad scale. They base their prices on demand - the more people willing to come in, the more they can raise their prices until they hit the threshold of what people are willing to pay.

    This is literally just taking targeted ads and applying it to pricing. A cross section of different values can identify you as an individual based on things like browsing habits and web searches, and companies can use that digital fingerprint to tailor online prices for you the same way that the airlines do. Even at a broad scale, they can tailor prices based on your income level, hobbies, and predicted price tolerance. Hell, with this concept they could even run fake sales at an individual level instead of site-wide like Amazon does during their Prime Day "sales."

    This is one of the more irrational fears/predictions about the dynamic pricing infrastructure grocery stores want to implement - that they'll start tailoring prices on things that you buy frequently or try to get you to buy extra with prices that look like a good deal. But it's a lot more practical to do online than in a physical store.

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    Picture this
  • Airline companies and hotels have been doing this for years. They track the location, time of year, and how frequently you're looking to adjust their prices for you. You can sometimes get a different price for the exact same flight or hotel by using a private browser. You know those freezer doors with the display in them instead of a glass panel? Those have a camera in them as well to track which ads you spend the most time looking at so they can roll the most viewed ads more frequently. Some grocery stores are attempting to roll out digital pricing systems in their stores so that they can "dynamically change prices on items due to demand."

    It's only a small step from using an algorithm to create a profile on you to serve ads tailored to things that you're interested in to companies using that same profile to "dynamically adjust prices due to demand."

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    Google results insist a Bugsnax sequel is coming out next month, but there's one small problem: Its devs aren't making one
  • On the one hand, yes, and Fandom is a blight on the internet.

    On the other hand, AI like ChatGPT are wrong some 53% of the time. The fact that this is another "use nontoxic glue to keep your cheese from falling off of pizza" situation doesn't mean that Google isn't equally culpable for doing nothing to prevent these sorts of occurrences even when the sources are right (AI is as likely to make things up that aren't even in its cited sources as it is to actually give you info from them).

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    Garlic showdown
  • But according to the story, he was buying at full price. No bulk discount. Jim was demanding more than his regular price. And, depending on when in the day he showed up, the price that Jim demanded fluctuated.

    There's gotta be more to this.

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    me_irl
  • There are two kinds of bi people:

    I'm not gay, but...

    And:

    Look how tall she is! And look how small he is!

    Everything else is a variation of The Exception or Bisexual Panic.

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    Big Penny!
  • There's a train bridge like that in my hometown, but it's directly over the base of a fairly steep hill. Pretty much anything bigger than a work van is likely to hit it, and I've seen a couple of box trucks with the top 6 inches or so of their roof peeled back like a half-open can of sardines.

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    Lots of negativity towards AI lately, but consider:
  • But these are the things people are complaining about - not AI itself, but the people making it, the reasons that they're making it, and the consequences that that is having on the human condition.

    For your example, people don't complain about it making Google obsolete or something, but about the fact that LLMs like ChatGPT are wrong about 53% of the time and often completely make stuff up, and that the companies making and pushing them as a replacement for search engines have collectively shrugged their shoulders and literally said "there's nothing we can do to prevent it" when asked about these "hallucinations" as they call them.

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    Lots of negativity towards AI lately, but consider:
  • "When I was young, they told me that AI would do the menial labor so that we could spend more time doing the things we love, like making music, painting, and writing poetry. Today, the AI makes music, paints pictures, and writes poetry so that I can work longer hours at my menial labor job."

    AI bros are like pro-lifers, straw-manning an argument nobody is making.

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    TIL: males have 25% more neurons in the visual cortex than females
  • There's definitely studies on it. I don't know how they measure them, but it's all about the number and type of cones in your eyes because there are a few different types that see different colors. This is why tigers are orange - because their prey lack the cones that see red, so the tigers look like the rest of the background foliage.

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    Halloween costume idea
  • Don't mute him, he can't stick his foot in his mouth if you do that! But by the gods, fact-check the shit out of him to make the hole he's digging even bigger.

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