Interesting Links for 28-10-2022

[andrewducker]

1. I have no idea how Meta spent this much money on VR nonsense

(tags:vr Facebook MarkZuckerberg wtf )

2. AI generated Warhammer figures of politicians is as glorious and horrifying as you'd hope!

(tags:viaMyBrotherMike Warhammer politics ai awesome )

3. What Do Blind People Dream About?

(tags:dreams blindness )

4. Coverage of the debate on the Scottish Gender Recognition Act (reforming how transgender people can get a gender recognition certificate)

(tags:Scotland transgender law politics )

5. You may have heard of Stanislav Petrov, but have you heard of the *other* Russian whose choices averted World War Three?

(tags:nuclearweapons history Russia USA epicwin viaPatrickHadfield )

Comments

[cmcmck]

4. I see at least one bigot on the SNP has resigned over this because 'real women'.

[andrewducker]

I loved Sturgeon's reply to her:
"I note that at no stage have you approached me to raise your concerns about the Gender Recognition Reform Bill or the vote this evening"

[cmcmck]

I saw that and it did make me smile! :o)

[original_aj]

I was (unsurprisingly really) unimpressed with the Grauniad's headline being that the SNP had had it's biggest ever rebellion, not that the vote passed nearly 3 to one. And the rebellion was actually only 7 people, so it wasn't much of a rebellion compared to what happens in Westminster, plus there was a Tory rebel who voted for it.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, sensationalising it in that way is such a nonsense. And a great example of why I don't like to The Guardian.

[cmcmck]

The Grauniad is now notoriously transphobic which saddens me as back when I was dealing with all of it in the late seventies it was about the only paper you knew wouldn't attack you for being trans.

The Grauniad online: share and enjoy.

[hairyears]

You've probably read this already - sure as hell you've worked it out already! - but there's no shortage of occasions to repeat it:

https://mobile.twitter.com/Hairyears/status/1553872322167246849

Re: The Grauniad online: share and enjoy.

[andrewducker]

Totally agreed.

[ninetydegrees]

"I have no idea how Meta spent this much money on VR nonsense"

By illegally selling user data, not paying enough taxes and paying ridiculous low amounts to settle some lawsuits? Seriously that's like 40% of their 2021 net income according to wikipedia. But when you see the videos about it (not about the VR headset itself), it seems Zuckerberg is definitely convinced that VR in all aspects of ours lives is our future, and that it'll happen during his lifetime. Or he's too proud to admit this was a bad idea and can the whole thing.

[andrewducker]

I know where they got the money from - I just don't know what they spent it on!

[ninetydegrees]

Well I wonder if the amount mentioned is for AI, VR and augmented reality or strictly VR (and which aspect of it then? The assets and apps?). And whether this includes the amount spent on acquiring tech companies as well.

[fub]

It's surprisingly easy to build up very, very large departments to do Strategic Stuff. And then nobody really knows what to do because of a lack of vision and direction, and before you know it, you piss all that money away without having anything to show for it.

[armiphlage]

If the total average cost to hire a person (office space, salary, benefits, HR overhead) is $150,000, that means they have 100,000 people sitting around making no useful product. That's more people than 3M has!

[fub]

Good point -- it is a mindblowing amount of money. Though I can't say I'm opposed to Facebook eating itself in this way and then quietly imploding.

[hilarita]

It allows them to write off some tax as well?

[simont]

#3: in my head, Philip K Dick is suggesting "invisible sheep".

[andrewducker]

I like that!

[simont]

Mind you, I never thought that title made much sense in the first place. The usual association of sheep with sleep is surely that you count them in order to get to sleep, not that you dream of them once you do fall asleep.

Marvin's hum in H2G2 "now I lay me down to sleep, try to count electric sheep" always struck me as making more sense than PKD's title. (Which is odd, because when Douglas Adams is the one making the most sense, you feel that surely someone's not doing their job!)

[andrewducker]

It's amazing how much sense Adams made, by trying to exaggerate things for effect :-)

[original_aj]

In the book, the pseudo religion they follow requires care for animals (mostly killed off by then) so everyone has to keep a pet to be seen to be doing this. Real animals are too expensive so the protagonist has a fake, electric, sheep but dreams of owning a real one. Hence the title. Given they removed the religious aspects for the film version they had to change the title too as it would no longer have made sense.

[andrewducker]

Thank you, I've long wondered!

Edit: Although clearly not hard enough to actually go and look it up!

[original_aj]

It 's worth a read, it's very different to (and much weirder than) the film. They essentially took some of the background and key concepts and wrote a different story with different characters.

[calimac]

About 15 years ago (things may be different now, with subsequently released movies) I was on a convention panel that concluded that there were movies that were more like adaptations of PKD books than anything that actually was an adaptation of a PKD book: I remember Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Man Facing Southeast cited in particular.

[alithea]

Yeah, I enjoyed the both but they are really nothing alike. I don't think I'd have guessed the film was an adaptation if I hadn't known (I saw the film years before I read the book, my High school Geography teacher used it as part of his urban geography curriculum)