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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • The internet made photos of trump and putin kissing shirtless.

    And is that OK?

    I’m going to jump in on this one and say yes - it’s mostly fine.

    I look at these things through the lens of the harm they do and the benefits they deliver - consequentialism and act utilitarianism.

    The benefits are artistic, comedic and political.

    The “harm” is that Putin and or Trump might feel bad, maaaaaaybe enough that they’d kill themselves. All that gets put back up under benefits as far as I’m concerned - they’re both extremely powerful monsters that have done and will continue to do incredible harm.

    The real harm is that such works risk normalising this treatment of regular folk, which is genuinely harmful. I think that’s unlikely, but it’s impossible to rule out.

    Similarly, the dissemination of the kinds of AI fakes under discussion is a negative because they do serious,measurable harm.








  • The whole tablet UI switching had huge potential - particularly for 2-in-ones and to a lesser extent, mobile devices, but Microsoft absolutely butchered it in its infancy with atrocious execution, and by having the hubris to hobble their primary use-case (desktop) for the sake of pushing their half-baked nonsense into the mobile market. Users didn’t do themselves any favours by not understanding that you could just hit start then type the first couple of letters of what you want to launch (what kind of website double-clicking weirdo clicks through the whole start menu without pinned links or search anyway?).

    To me, it all reeks of designers/PMs/devs putting forward a super-promising concept, which was ruined by a bunch of overpaid MBA dipshits that thought they knew better.