I'm (apparently) aphantasic, having learned about the concept on a couple of months ago. However unscientific the [VVIQ](https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq/) is, I couldn't answer a single question with anything other than "No image at all."
What I find interesting is that for the past few years I've also been getting regular IV ketamine infusions to treat major depression. The imagery I visualize during these infusions is hyperreal and unlike anything I've ever experienced. I see these full-motion, hyper-detailed, 3D environments that absolutely blow my mind. I also seem to have fairly vivid dreams but when I'm conscious, I can't visualize anything to save my life.
Podcasts, like live news, radio talk shows, and other scheduled throughput based media, have to fill time with content. If there's nothing intelligent to say, they say stuff anyways.
The huge advantage of podcasts over most other forms of media is that they don't have to cut things down into tiny bite sized pieces. Many podcasts will get down into the nitty gritty details of things that the news never will. I think it's much closer to long form journalism than television news. Although, obviously, podcasts can take any form and some are geared toward that latter rather than former. But the ones I am most drawn to are those where actual experts pour over the data in great detail.
This Week in Virology was my go to during the pandemic, hosted by a virologist, and immunologist, and an infectious disease doctor.
You'll notice that many if not most of the loudest "expert" voices during the pandemic were speaking outside their area of expertise. With the exception of Fauci, of course.
Nah.
Podcasts are one of the few mediums that don’t have set lengths. The one here goes to 6 parts because of the volume of material. And often I’ve heard podcasts do multiple episodes in one. There’s no time they’re trying to achieve as there’s no standard.
That's mostly true, except for the big ones that have signed deals, but even then a lot of filler sentences, filler talk, etc., happens regularly in the podcast episodes I've heard.
What makes me uncomfortable is the elitism running through many of his videos. Put 100 "poors" in a circle so they can fight it out for $500k [1]? It's just another rich person making poor people do demeaning things for his entertainment and profit. It's disgusting.
They explicitly call this out in the article, but, how is what he’s doing any different than what we always were told reality TV was doing or gameshows do?
This is worlds better than casinos, sports betting, or any other form of gambling, IMO.
People are entertained through watching or participating and some are making big dollars.
My kids watch his videos because the algorithm feeds it to them and from what I’ve seen, I’d rather they be watching MrB than ads for DraftKings where they might believe that some day in the future their free $500 will make them rich. Or worse yet: state lotteries selling a dream for $2 and making millions off the stupidity of those who don’t understand basic stats because the education the lottery is supposedly funding doesn’t do a very good job.
> how is what he’s doing any different than what we always were told reality TV was doing or gameshows do?
It's not. Those things are bad too.
> My kids watch his videos because the algorithm feeds it to them and from what I’ve seen, I’d rather they be watching MrB than ads for DraftKings
I'm curious what your goal is here. It seems like you're disagreeing with me by saying "look, Mr. Beast is equivalent to/better than these other bad things, right?" I don't find your particular applications of whataboutism and false dichotomies terribly convincing or at all relevant to the discussion.
Like, you understand that "these other things are bad too" and "it's this or draftkings ads" are not substantive or relevant arguments, right?
A good point. It's disgraceful how broadcast sports have changed in the last five years to be all about gambling. MrBeast is marginally better than that at least.
I'm not exactly a fan of Mr. Beast, but this comment reeks of more elitism than any Mr. Beast video I've ever watched. Are "poors" too stupid to make decisions for themselves? Everyone in that video received thousands of dollars. I'm nowhere near poor, but if I was given an opportunity, I'd probably participate.
> Are "poors" too stupid to make decisions for themselves? Everyone in that video received thousands of dollars. I'm nowhere near poor, but if I was given an opportunity, I'd probably participate.
No one's saying they're stupid for participating. If I was offered thousands of dollars for peeing in my pants in public for a video, I'd very probably take the offer and no one would think I was stupid for it; it would still be a demeaning and exploitative offer to make.
Why do you get to be the arbiter of what's demeaning? Are "poors" too stupid to determine their own limits? Playing silly games is hardly comparable to peeing your pants in public.
It's about power imbalance. Using your power (in this case, wealth) to encourage other people to do actions they otherwise would not want to.
It's also not a topic that is easy to define as "right" or "wrong". Some game shows will be more empowering or enjoyable than others. Some contestants on the same show might find the experience more emotionally rewarding than other contestants. There's a very subjective, fuzzy, grey area here rather than a clear line in the sand defining what is morally good or bad.
From the odd Mr Beast video I've watched, it's felt like the driving factor was that the contestant didn't want to be there if it wasn't for the money. And that Mr Beast and his friends go out of their way to make the contestant want to leave. Mr Beast has all the power and makes his contestants perform like dancing monkeys to earn their prize. Now as long as the contestants do still find the overall experience more rewarding than demeaning (and that's for them to decide), then I'm fine with it being made as "entertainment". But like many of the others, I personally don't find it entertaining to watch -- I find it uneasy to watch. And that's fine too, people don't have to enjoy the same things. But it's hard not to claim that there is a massive imbalance of power in his videos. In fact that seems to be the point of his videos.
The earlier comparison with 80s cyberpunk seems quite apt. If you take away the fancy post production editing, there is something rather dystopian about the concept of his videos. Sure the stakes are significantly lower than, for example, Running Man, but the power imbalance isn't that dissimilar.
> It's about power imbalance. Using your power (in this case, wealth) to encourage other people to do actions they otherwise would not want to.
Like working at a sprocket factory? I think that somewhat fairly fits here. You could be describing how most of the world looks at their work. My point is that there might be deeper to look for the more "honest" objection.
There are laws (in Europe at least) to protect employees from being exploited due to that power imbalance.
Whereas it's not so clear cut, in my opinion at least, that contestants of Mr Beasts videos aren't being exploited. But as I said, the only people who can honestly answer that are the contestants themselves.
I haven't watched Mr Beast's videos to have an opinion. He popped up on my kid's screen once, we banned him and some associated channels and forgot him. It was clearly garbage content for us in our brief experience and not worth our time to identify why.
Again, no one is claiming that people who participate are stupid for doing so. Why are you insisting on the idea that others see people in financial difficulty as stupid?
Nor did I say I'm the sole arbiter of what's demeaning. We both seem to agree at least that peeing oneself in public is demeaning, but some third person might not see it that way at all.
Sorry. I didn't realize you were a different person. My point is that the only opinion who matters is the contestants. If I were a poor Mr. Beast fan, I would be offended by the original comments denial of my agency.
It's not about being stupid, it's about dependency and power. The offer alone is morally corrupted.
If they'd all get their equal share of money and could compete out of their own volition and quit anytime they'd want then this would be morally ok. But then nobody would watch it. And that there's exactly why this whole thing is morally wrong.
Why do they need to get equal share? This doesn't sound much different than game shows to me. People make money off of other people competing against each other to earn less money than the people organizing it. The difference is we view the contestants on Wheel of Fortune as earning it by playing a few minutes worth of games instead of whatever Mr Beast does. I don't watch his videos, I'm just piecing what it sounds like from the comments. It sounds like it could be a crude version of Survivor, Fear Factor, or Tough as Nails. People do unpleasant things, voluntarily, in the hopes of earning money.
Let's reductio ad absurdum our way through this, shall we? If what you say is true, then during the run up of Bitcoin, any corporation that didn't lay off all its employees and use the money to buy as much Bitcoin as possible was violating their fiduciary duty to maximize return on investment, right? Or maybe every corporation should turn itself into a casino or pornography producer since those are quite profitable endeavors, right?
I think you might want to reflect for a minute on why you thought "but do you know how virulent some of those communities were to just about everyone?" was an appropriate response to a black person talking about their experience of racism. I recognize you believed yourself to be mitigating the effect of your statement by prefacing it with "Not disputing your bad experiences," but I think you'll find that the net effect of your comment is still one of dismissing a black person's lived experience, or at least pulling focus away from it in an unhelpful way.
Hmm... this sounds an awful lot like, "because you're responding to a comment made by a black person, the only acceptable response is one of total agreement". I think you might want to reflect for a minute on the importance of nuance in a discussion, and the net effect of trying to police comments on others' behalf.
I completely believe the commenter's experience, but I also witnessed the opposite a lot (and was deeply encouraged by it), and it's not wrong for me to chime in and point it out. And guess what? Experiencing vitriol on the internet directly contributed to me being more sensitive to things like racism. Although I've been on the receiving end of racist remarks offline, it wasn't until the internet that I caught a glimpse at how hurtful people could truly be. Again, not wrong for me to pipe up about it.
But it is unclear what you are disagreeing with. They never said that there was nothing positive in those communities. So what is the point of your comment? To make sure no one leaves this thread thinking that those communities were a net negative or something? I understand the desire to defend something you were a part of and got something positive out of, but the original commenter isn't criticizing people for enjoying or benefiting from those communities, they are pointing out that they had a clear negative impact on people who were targeted by those types of awful comments.
It’s unclear because you’ve concocted it. You’re asserting that there’s disagreement when there never was. I don’t strictly blame you for perpetuating ill rhetoric, but at least be aware that you’re responding to a stance that the comment in question never took in a fever to defend a black OP that never asked for any help and frankly IMO doesn't need it based on the high quality of their comment.
This is a discussion site, so not every comment needs to fit neatly in a 'agree' or 'disagree' bucket. That said, I'm in agreement with the comment I was replying to, and not actually defending anything at all - I meant for my comment to be taken at face value, nothing more.
> this sounds an awful lot like, "because you're responding to a comment made by a black person, the only acceptable response is one of total agreement"
This is clearly a strawman. I wrote nothing remotely like what you're describing. I asked you to think about what prompted you to redirect the conversation away from a black person's experience of racism and towards whatever your idea of an injustice was. My hope was that upon such reflection, you might realize that black people experience these sorts of microagressions and dismissals routinely, and that such things add salt to the wounds caused by racism.
Instead, you went the fragility route. There couldn't possibly be something for you to learn here. No, instead, you have to create a strawman to protect your fragile ego from the idea that maybe you did something hurtful to someone, inadvertently or otherwise.
> Hmm... this sounds an awful lot like, "because you're responding to a comment made by a black person, the only acceptable response is one of total agreement".
Not true. There is another acceptable response - not posting, taking some time to read and reflect, and moving along with your day.
You no doubt have any number of other things you could be doing, but you’re in here. Might be worth thinking about why that is.
> You no doubt have any number of other things you could be doing, but you’re in here. Might be worth thinking about why that is.
Obviously this applies to you as well. Maybe you've taken what I wrote as some sort of disagreement or getting defensive or... something? And then from there concluding that I shouldn't be allowed to participate? I'm not sure, but this is a discussion site and I'm participating in the discussion, and please don't take this the wrong way, but it's really not your place to tell me that I shouldn't participate. My original comment was in agreement with the poster I was replying to, and I was adding nuance and finding common ground in a semi-shared experience. None of that is wrong for me to do. Have a great day!
> My original comment was in agreement with the poster I was replying to, and I was adding nuance and finding common ground in a semi-shared experience.
Do you genuinely not see how "adding nuance" to a "semi-shared experience" is taking the focus away from the parent commenter's experience? When someone is recounting racism they suffered, how is adding "other people experienced other kinds of hate" adding any nuance? Do you genuinely believe that there's valuable common ground between, for example, a black person being called the n-word and another person who isn't black being called the n-word or some other slur?
> Obviously this applies to you as well. Maybe you've taken what I wrote as some sort of disagreement or getting defensive or... something? And then from there concluding that I shouldn't be allowed to participate?
You're allowed to participate, but I trust you can understand that in many situations there is a difference between what discourse is permitted in a space, and what discourse others might see as appropriate or a value add to the discussion.
> I'm not sure, but this is a discussion site and I'm participating in the discussion, and please don't take this the wrong way, but it's really not your place to tell me that I shouldn't participate.
Hmm, it is your place to be able to post whatever you like as long as it's permitted by the rules, but it's not the place of others to suggest doing so might not be appropriate, even if that is also permitted. Kind of a narcissistic, authoritarian mindset, it seems to me. Note that I didn't post "mods???" or report you.
Anyway, you seem to have misunderstood by initial and subsequent comments, so other than rereading them in good faith until you believe me when I say that I was neither disagreeing with the comment, nor trying to undermine his experience, nor defending bad stuff online, I don't think we can make any progress, so I'm moving on to other things. Have a great day!
> the only acceptable response is one of total agreement
That's not exactly it. The only informed response about a black person's experience on these platforms is a black person's. When people talk about "lived experience," the implication is that empathy is practically impossible. The best you can offer is sympathy.
> I've been on the receiving end of racist remarks offline
I am a white person who has been on the receiving end of racially-motivated police brutality. Even though it was racially-motivated I would not consider it a racist act. The fucker was merely angry at white people, that's different to racism. While there are places on the planet where white people experience racism (typically at the hands of other white people), I can almost guarantee that you have not - especially if you are American.
Don't wash the black community's suffering with white experiences.
> The best you can offer is sympathy.
> I can almost guarantee that you have not [experienced racism] - especially if you are American.
My goodness! How can you honestly make such an assertion? I am American, I've visited every state and lived in a dozen of them. I am well-acquainted with many forms of racism and am fascinated that you could believe such a statement. All I can say is that you are unequivocally wrong.
> Don't wash the black community's suffering with white experiences.
This is absurd - finding common ground is the key to rooting out and overcoming things like racism. Always insisting that someone's experience is too different for others to understand only serves to perpetuate division.
I will never know what it's like to be a black person and all of the stupid things black people have to up with. But experiencing unkindness and bigotry helps me understand a little. And while having just a couple of experiences where someone judged me and was cruel to me simply for being white is nowhere near the same thing as dealing with it for years, it's something I can extrapolate from, and it taught me more about racism than any number of books or articles ever could.
> You, as a white person, have been a victim of racism?
Have I been told to leave somewhere because they don't want "whiteys" there? Yes. Have I been yelled at for being a "honky"? Yes. Have I been told things like, "all white people are ___"? Yes. Have I been in a group when someone said, "don't give any to the white kid" ? Yes. Have I been threatened with violence with the sole given reason being that I am white? Yes. Has a friend of mine been told not to be my friend because I'm white and we shouldn't mix? Yes.
(for reference, these occurred while living in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia)
Are these common experiences across the U.S.? I doubt it. Are they as bad as what black people have to deal with? No. Are they as widespread as racism towards black people? Almost certainly not.
> How is refuting the experiences of a black person finding common ground?
I haven't done that at all - maybe you read some other comment and thought it was mine? If so, no worries for the confusion, there's a lot of comments flying around.
Why do some black people hate white people? Because their great grandparent perished on a cotton plantation, because their friend was hunted by some white folks in a truck, because their friend was choked to death by a white policeman, because your race is targeted by disenfranchisement.
Why do some white people hate black people? Because they hate black people.
There is a substantial difference between those two, and the difference is central to the definition of racism vs. racially-charged. Someone being a vengeful asshole does not make them racist, someone being an asshole to a race in general does not (necessarily) make them racist. Racism is hating a race, it is not being angry with a race that participated in horrific acts against you and your (in some cases near) ancestors.
Is it fair that you are being held accountable for the acts of your ancestors, and other living white people? No, that isn't the claim. You find the retribution you face unfair/unkind/unjust, as you have the right to. Now imagine facing the same for merely existing. The claim is that you couldn't possibly understand the experiences of a black person. The claim is that you do kinda' have to accept the stories of black people at face value.
The claim is that the vast majority of their life is defined by racist experiences, where you have a handful of racially-charged experiences to point towards.
You're conflating racism with the reasons for racism.
It doesn't matter how good or bad your reasons are: once you are feeling or expressing prejudice simply because someone is a member of a particular ethnic group, that's racist.
I won't be paying any more attention to this thread. I have evidently engaged in a fool's errand. If you continue to disagree with me and my learned viewpoint (I once believed that my police brutality experience was racism) then it is likely my fault for not being able to adequately convey this viewpoint. I can't see a way for me to express it any other way, so this discussion is pointless.
I have gone from your current viewpoint to my current viewpoint, because I was wrong. I won't be changing my mind to what I used to believe, now that I understand just how wrong I was.
Best of luck! If you do care to revisit the topic, I urge you to start with focusing on what racism actually is and isn't. Specifically, a racist act or thought isn't non-racist just because there is a "good" argument for it.
If you can get past that idea, then a lot of how we can fight racism follows pretty naturally (and, by extension, it becomes more clear that at least some of what is happening today in the name of fighting racism actually engenders it).
And to counter your claim here - someone's "lived experience" is not a sufficient ballast for blindly accepting an anecdote.
People's memories suck. And more often than not subjective experiences don't map onto reality, especially when negative or stressful emotions are involved.
One negative experience on an IRC/forum can cloud a person's entire recollection simply on the basis of the Negativity Bias.
The point isn't to figure out whether these communities were a net positive or negative. I wasn't a target of any of the racism, sexism, homophobia, etc on these forums and chat rooms but I sure saw a lot of it everywhere I participated at a level that was kind of ridiculous in some cases. It clearly had impact on the people it was targeting, the degree to which it "clouds a persons recollection" is entirely irrelevant.
Is your point that their recollection should be dismissed? That they were too sensitive? It's unclear what this response's intent is.
I think you might want to reflect for a minute that you are playing the exact DEI game that the OP is complaining about. You are dismissing your parent post's argument without addressing content of the argument. Essentially, your post boils down to "Don't argue with Black people. "Lived Experience" trumps all rhetoric and discussion. In the future, please keep your thoughts and concerns to yourself."
You are fostering a culture without room for discussion. You are also presuming to speak for the Black person two posts up. Solidarity is important, but shutting people down based on racial context isn't it.
I was not engaging with the argument made by the post I replied to because the poster's argument is completely beside the point.
When someone says "I experienced racism because I'm black," the appropriate response is not "Well, actually, lots of people who aren't black experienced that terrible thing." So what if lots of non-black people experienced that terrible thing? That's not what we're talking about here. Your statement is re-centering the conversation away from the black person who's describing their experience. And you know what? It's the black people who are being routinely discriminated against, incarcerated, and killed because of racism, so maybe it's irrelevant to say "my feelings were hurt on IRC too."
> but I think you'll find that the net effect of your comment is still one of dismissing a black person's lived experience
Pointing out that those venues were full of anti-everything hate is not dismissing a black person's experience, it's validating it, while pointing out that he's not alone.
Hate directed at black people, who have been exploited, oppressed, enslaved, killed, and more for over 400 years has a more significant and problematic impact than hate directed at other, more privileged groups. Recentering the conversation away from the black person's experience is a form of dismissal, not validation.
An abuser on IRC calling a black person the n-word is objectively more harmful than an abuser on IRC calling pretty much anyone else pretty much any slur.
I reject the claim that such a response is recentering the conversation, and I also reject the implicit assumption that words can be objectively harmful.
For instance, a black person might be reasonably angry at hearing the n-word, until they find out the person suffers from Tourette's, at which point the "harm" vanishes. The harm clearly did not result from the word but from the framing of the situation, and the framing exists entirely within the mind and can be changed.
This pattern of harm resulting from framing is seen repeatedly throughout psychology. Of course we should still push for relegating incorrect and outdated framings, like the various -isms, to the dustbin of history, but there's considerably more latitude for how to do this than naive language policing like is commonly suggested.
> Pointing out that those venues were full of anti-everything hate is not dismissing a black person's experience, it's validating it, while pointing out that he's not alone.
But it implicitly implies the negative experiences were similar in scale unless otherwise noted.
It downplays the very large weight that racism adds to the negativity of that experience even if the intent is a noble one of making that person not feel alone.
Or, maybe you’re the one projecting negativity for assuming that the existence of another anecdote downplays the black one in play? I give it no such credence.
Being dismissive of the experiences of members of oppressed groups is objectively more harmful than being dismissive of someone not part of a similarly oppressed group.
> Even so, the apparent protection extended to all age groups. In all, men who averaged 4.6–7 ejaculations a week were 36% less likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer before the age of 70 than men who ejaculated less than 2.3 times a week on average.
Sure, they use "apparent" as a weasel-word but "protection" is clearly suggesting causation.
Unless you've discovered some secret research that you're not sharing, a 31% decrease in incidence is certainly enough of an excuse to speculate about a possible protective effect.
That's not a weasel-word, that word is there precisely to point out that the protection isn't verified. Combined with their conclusion that I already pointed out, there really is no suggestion of causation here.
There is no ambiguity in the statement "The studies...do little to answer these critical questions," it means the studies are inconclusive and shouldn't be treated otherwise.
Caveats: 1) this may not be what grandparent was trying to do and 2) I have limited experience debugging "regular" Docker, let alone firecracker or whatever Fly.io does.
With that said, I succesfully deployed a simple Rust/Actix/Sqlite app with a Dockerfile to Fly.io. I then thought I'd try out litestream. For reasons I'm still not sure about, having `ENTRYPOINT ["litestream replicate … -exec myapp"]` resulted in immediate kernel panics.[1]
As I was debugging, my instinct was to want to `fly ssh console` into a running container to see if running the same command from the shell produced any clues for further debugging. Though I understand this is the wrong mental model, the thought was something like "well, I know everything else works, I just need Fly to ignore this failing command so I can have a minute to poke around." To do this, I ended up just removing litestream from the ENTRYPOINT so the deploy would succeed, then I could SSH in and play around at the shell to see what was going on.
Again, I have no idea whether this is the same sort of problem the other person was having, but for my case, what would be helpful is probably not changing how `fly ssh console` behaves, but perhaps some documentation of suggested debugging techniques in case your app is failing to start.
[1] Putting the exact same command into a "start.sh" and making that the ENTRYPOINT worked fine so that's what I ended up doing.
One of my biggest UX nits with Fly (I have no excuses, I have all the access I need to go fix this myself) is that we "kernel panic" when your entrypoint command fails. Of course, our kernel is not really panicking --- we've just run out of things for our `init` to manage, so it exits, and when pid 1 exits, so does the kernel. But you get the terrifying stack dump.
We can clean this up, so that you get a clearer, simpler error ("your entrypoint exited, here's the exit code, there's nothing else for this VM to do so it's exiting, have a nice day"), and it's been on the docket for months. We'll get it done!
We could conceivably add a flag for our `init` to hang around waiting for you to SSH in after your entrypoint exits. But that's clunky and complicated. Usually, you want your kernel to exit when your entrypoint fails, so that your service restarts! What you should do instead is push a container that has enough process supervision to hang around itself. Here's a doc:
That all makes sense. I think context matters. Yes, when I have a service that's been up and running for some time, if that service fails, I want my service to restart.
But when I'm trying to get a service running for the first time and I'm not sure that I have the right command in the entrypoint, the right arguments to that command, or the right supporting files in place, or the right libraries installed, or the right file permissions, …, well, then I don't want things to just blindly restart, I want a handle and some information so I can figure out why it isn't working.
ETA: I recognize that your link to docs about running a supervisor addresses this problem. For me this raises some interesting questions. Like, I understand why Ben would implement `litestream exec` but maybe it would be better to steer users to a proper supervisor? Separately, what if it's the supervisor that's failing? Now I'm back to seeing kernel panics and not having error messages or a shell.
Usually, when I'm debugging a container, I start with a `tail -f /dev/null` entrypoint, or something like that, and then just shell into it to run the real entrypoint to see if it's working.
> We could conceivably add a flag for our `init` to hang around waiting for you to SSH in after your entrypoint exits. But that's clunky and complicated
This is a common thing in CI platforms, and the way they usually expose this is "run tests with SSH enabled", and they keep it open for 30 minutes/2 hours/whatever until a session closes.
So if I have some app failing, being able to run `fly restart --ssh-debug`, having that first just sit around waiting for the app to boot, and then dropping into ssh would be a very helpful piece of UX. The main thing is cleanup, but y'all charge for compute! You can be pretty loosy-goosy on that one honestly.
What I find interesting is that for the past few years I've also been getting regular IV ketamine infusions to treat major depression. The imagery I visualize during these infusions is hyperreal and unlike anything I've ever experienced. I see these full-motion, hyper-detailed, 3D environments that absolutely blow my mind. I also seem to have fairly vivid dreams but when I'm conscious, I can't visualize anything to save my life.
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