Right now I'm primarily using Game pass to play games on my Android phone, and at that it's doing a very good job. As a very surprising bonus, I saw flight simulator was included. This is downright aggressive of Microsoft. They're bundling a $60 game with a $15 a month service. Meaning even if you don't particularly like streaming games, you get your money's worth as long as every three months or so Microsoft adds another $60 game.
Of course since we all forget things, eventually you'll let Game pass keep recurring while sparsely using the service. This Gym like model is what every subscription service strives for.
I'm not complaining, if anything I might buy a new Xbox since I'm already entitled to tons of Gamepass games as well as Xbox live.
Edit: Might also just play everything on my PC. Good job Microsoft. Took them 3 generations , but they've finally merged the PC and console. Nothing on the Series X isn't coming to pick
I have a nice full time job so I can support myself, I don't think I'd abandon the project if I get bad feedback at this stage. I'd probably just tweak it , if 6k in I still can't make it fun then I'll call it a learning experience
Great movie that I agree with 1000% .
I suggest Lost Connections and 10 Arguments for deleting your social media ( mentioned in the movie) as well.
I stopped using all social media as of last year and the results have been amazing.
I'm more at peace , I no longer getting into stupid Facebook arguments. Online you aren't interacting with whole people, so being absurdly mean is easy.
Most people online are just their for validation( or are bots , see the Ashley Madison hack and the FTC complaint against the Match Group). At this point in my life I'm no longer seeking that. Plus , as the movie points out constant validation seeking will wreck your mental health.
I was having an amazing time meeting folks pre Covid and I have a plan to become more active whenever this ends. I'm thinking I'll try improv. Being around people does something for you that internet interactions simply can't.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Mostly for this golden quote which I have saved:
>Cats have done the seemingly impossible: They’ve integrated themselves into the modern high-tech world without giving themselves up. They are still in charge. There is no worry that some stealthy meme crafted by algorithms and paid for by a creepy, hidden oligarch has taken over your cat. No one has taken over your cat; not you, not anyone.
No offence, but you are arguing on HN, Reddit, Chan boards, /. now. Where is the difference? I did similarly but keep getting sucked into these communities simply because I'm alone in my head a lot of the time.
I no longer getting into stupid Facebook arguments
That's the one thing I absolutely loathe about Facebook. There's no constructive dialogue going on. Everyone is so full of themselves that any kind of argument derails pretty fast. And then there is the fact that the platform doesn't provide the structure for long conversations. After a couple of replies all text has the same indentation so it's hard to see who's responding to what comment. I've been online for twenty years, and I've never seen a environment more hostile to conversation than Facebook.
I have a lot of great conversations on Facebook, typically better than the conversations my blog posts elsewhere. It's a matter of cultivating a good community.
In my experience, reddit and other online discussion forums have been just as bad as Facebook at times.
Online communities like reddit and, yes, HN, are echo chambers to varying degrees. They can also elicit a sort of inhumane treatment of others by depersonalizing them, sort of like what happens when people get behind the wheel of a vehicle.
Sometimes I have commented on facebook forgetting it was not HN or another niche community. If you start talking about how your country's weather bureau monitors itself for forecast accuracy then you will almost certainly be met with silence if you try to do that on facebook.
> I'm more at peace , I no longer getting into stupid Facebook arguments. Online you aren't interacting with whole people, so being absurdly mean is easy.
I don't think people here appreciate you pointing out their hypocrisy. HN is different in many ways(not tailoring content based on profiles, not trying to maximize engagement, etc), but it still has many problems (groupthink, suppression of contrarian ideas, karma whoring, inconsistent fact checking, etc).
I see what you're getting at, but eh, I'm not entirely convinced. What is a social network? I think there's some gray area there. The Wikipedia article you shared calls out Social Media as being "Web 2.0" (which itself is a nebulous term). One could argue that HN is just a forum, not unlike news groups that predated Web 2.0. Like I said: I see what you're getting at, and maybe HN is social media, but I would still assert that when considered as social media, HN is a far cry from a network like Facebook in terms of platform-functionality/feature-set/behavior/agenda.
Used to waste so much time arguing on FB comments -- and now that I'm off of it all of that energy has been reclaimed. It's been a remarkably positive change in every way.
I got off Facebook a couple of years ago. A couple of months later, I got rid of my smart phone and went back to a Nokia 3310 for a full year. Actually was a huge relief and felt really good. I'm like many people here on HN, I suspect: I work a desk/computer job. My attitude: If I want something online, I'm in front of my computer 12-14 hours a day. If I'm not in front of my computer, then I WANT to be offline. If I'm offline, but you need to reach my for something important, you can text or call me.
One of the most interesting observations about not having a smart phone was not how my behavior changed, but how others behavior changed. As my friends became painfully aware that I don't have a smart phone, I'm not checking my email 24/7, their texts don't get read-receipts, and they don't see the ellipses as I type text replies... they became less demanding/insistent of my time (except for the urgent things, of course). It was really freeing.
I only got a smartphone again when I lost my Nokia 6 hours before I had to catch a plane for a week long trip -- I pulled an old smartphone out of my junk drawer, threw a SIM card in it real fast, and headed to the airport. I have hardly any apps on it now, and it's great.
Or rather, the answer is "no" right now, but I will bet you $500 that it'll be "yes" within ... hm ... 2 years max. And if I lower my bet to $100, I'll do 1 year max.
Let's just say it's a very lucrative, very active area of research.
One observation: facial detection gives you landmarks, and those landmarks are essentially UVs for a texture. So if you do that process repeatedly, and rotate the face slightly using latent directions, then you can back-project the result onto a 2D texture.
Very very cool. I could see this being intergrated into something like fortnight in the very near future.
If I was a better coder I'd being trying to get an Epic Grant for this. I can't imagine getting a full blown model would take more than a few hundred thousand
Of course since we all forget things, eventually you'll let Game pass keep recurring while sparsely using the service. This Gym like model is what every subscription service strives for.
I'm not complaining, if anything I might buy a new Xbox since I'm already entitled to tons of Gamepass games as well as Xbox live.
Edit: Might also just play everything on my PC. Good job Microsoft. Took them 3 generations , but they've finally merged the PC and console. Nothing on the Series X isn't coming to pick