From an outsider’s perspective, I think a lot of people think you guys sailed past the point of no return back in the 80s.

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I think the only correct answer will be “there are lots of different reasons”.

My wife took my last name, even though it’s not a good one and I suggested that we pick a new one.

Here are a couple of her reasons:

1. She wanted us to have the same surname.

2. She was very close friends with my cousins growing up, so the name didn’t seem weird to her.

3. Tradition - she’d always assumed she would change her name to her husband’s name, so that seemed the most normal thing to do.

We could technically do it now, but you’d need a ton of quality control.

A basic workflow:

Use an image generator to generate start (and optionally end) frames of each scene.

Use a video generator like Runway to create the scene.

Use something to generate the speech, either a realistic text-to-speech engine or a record the dialog yourself and use AI voice changing software.

Use a lip synch AI to match the mouth flaps to the audio.

Generate music using something like Udio

Job done.

All these technologies exist and in some capacity are available to use. The only issue at the moment is consistent quality. This is coming on in leaps and bounds, however.

Ah, ok - that’s fair.

I thought you were implying that we had some kind of firewall like China or something!

I agree, US sites geolocking their content is sometimes a pain, but I get your meaning. We do tend to be more comfortable with our governments trying to protect us than the Americans seem to.

I’m really curious about what you think you’re not being allowed to visit on the internet.

I can’t think of a single thing that’s ‘blocked’.

Unless you’re under 13, of course, in which case I concede there are a lot of restrictions - but that’s a good thing.

Running as a moderate party just continously pushes America politics right.

100% this

In the UK the left-wing party, Labour, very drastically moved themselves to the centre, rebranding as New Labour.

Since then, the Conservatives have increasingly adopted far-right policies and everybody just accepts it as normal.

At our GP surgery, there are a couple of doctors who won’t consult on birth control matters for religious reasons.

There’s just a sign at the reception saying that if you need to discuss birth control, please let the receptionist know and they’ll be sure to assign a different doctor.

I love the optimism here, but unless there was a significant potential for profit, none of the people who have the resources to begin collecting ocean plastics could care less.

The sad truth is that the majority of the world’s resources are owned and controlled by a handful of psychopaths.

Only in the US and a select few other countries…

In other places, ‘Professor’ is a specific academic rank - there’ll only be a few professors in a university.

chefs kiss

Materials.

If you’d have seen the marble sculptures when they were new, you would have described them as anything but realistic. We now know that many, if not most, sculptures were painted in bright garish colours.

Why paint a delicately crafted sculpture with a dodgy paint job? Party taste, perhaps, but more definitely because that was what was available.

The paints that we have now are carefully designed, mixed and stored to deliver a wide range of colours of a consistent quality (and even modern companies like GW struggle with that!).

The further back you go, the fewer pigments there are and the less sophisticated the binders are. It’s no coincidence that the rapid explosion in science and trade of the Renaissance led to the rapid development of paints. Even in those days, an artist didn’t buy paint, they made it - access to new raw ingredients was all that was needed.

So, why the Renaissance? Because it’s the earliest point in time it could have been possible.

if they don’t have some already, 100% on the Brio train set - except not Brio. The generic wooden railway sets are just as good nowadays, and many many times cheaper.

You can buy a whole dinosaur themed wooden railway set on Amazon for £37. I’d want that, even as an adult!

FWIW, both of my kids played with their wooden railway for years - seriously good investment.

I read that book about 30 years ago! I didn’t remember the eye-scanning gargoyle, but for some reason I still remember the phrase “Ultima Ratio Regum” from the nuclear powered gun.

I assume you’re talking about the Unifying feature.

I’ve got no direct experience, but there are a few people who say that despite Firefox not being listed as supported, it works fine.

https://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=14961275

As for the spying, I can see how that could be a concern, but I don’t think it’s too likely.

For convenience, I’m guessing they’re using a web interface to the settings in the same way that your router does. They’ve made a Chrome plugin, so that’s probably the route they want you to take because they know it works.

Logitech is a global brand, an they’d get into a lot of trouble in a lot of countries if they were gathering keypress data etc.

I wish I had your confidence that capitalism can be tweaked into a fair system.

I honestly think the logical end point to capitalism is self-destructive extreme wealth disparity.

“Oof. Right in the blocks”

“What a load of absolute blocks”

“It’s the dog’s blocks”

Camera zoom into extreme closeup. “oh… blocks”.

Yep, that’s the one.

Where did you go?

Each time or cumulatively?

I think you’re a little off on the “we need to fix this world” guys.

Although zombie films / TV series lean heavily into the action side of things, that’s just because it’s more entertaining than watching people building things, developing tech, doing scientific research.

Remember with COVID 19? Huge numbers of people immediately set out to find a cure, inventing and deploying ways to prevent and monitor the spread, creating pop-in treatment centres, etc.