Most of that discussion is less about any advantages inherent to either aspect ratio and more about just viewing the film as the director originally intended.
The cinematographer would have composed shots for the main 1.43:1 aspect ratio first while taking into consideration the other aspect ratios (the viewfinder will overlay the different framelines to help make those decisions). The DP then gets to go back in during post and recompose each shot for the different formats as needed, tweaking what was originally shot to do their best to maintain a cohesive feel and emphasis across each crop. With five different formats for The Odyssey[0], I'm sure that was a fun experience.
It's not that one format is inherently better. The frame is a storytelling tool, and you can use different aspect ratios to influence how audiences perceive the film.[1] It's when you start changing it afterwards with little regard for the director's original intentions that we see problems. The old pan-and-scan movie releases for VHS or cheap 16:9 conversions are frustrating examples.
I for one am quite happy that Mercedes is committed to a physical button for hazard lights, parking assist overrides, and the other controls that are used so very...rarely. Perhaps they'll do something about the less commonly used buttons like climate control for the next model redesigns in five to seven years.
I really struggle to understand what's so damned difficult about this. They've admitted touchscreens annoy the hell out of drivers and capacitive touch buttons are even worse. Is it really going to take yet another lifecycle before they actually do something about it?
And many stupid decisions have no direct impact on the driver, but instead on those around the car. Like red beltline lights that don’t function as brake lights, instead using red lamps near the road that are easy to be obscured/ignored because the giant red lights above them look like brake lights.
Or dashes that are fully lit at night even if the headlights aren’t on, so the driver doesn’t have an obvious visual indicator that their tail lights aren’t lit.
So many rules I’d enforce were I king of the automakers.
Even if modern renewables and batteries kill the need for future nuclear power plants, that doesn't excuse the consequences of decades of burning fossil fuels because environmental groups fought against nuclear power altogether.
We had better options back then, and we chose not to implement them while slowing down efforts to improve them: nuclear reactor designs could have been standardized to lower cost, even safer and more effective reactor designs could have been pursued years earlier, etc.
The costs--and opportunity costs--of inaction during that time were massive, and we're going to be paying them for generations. Renewables have a heavier lift ahead of them as a result, with less time to build out and upgrade the grid, transition to EVs, etc. The very least we can do is acknowledge the consequences.
Try for too much impact, and you end up browbeating the reader until they're little more than metaphorical pulp. A human writer might like using those types of sentences--or any of the obvious LLM writing tropes--in specific contexts, but they'll usually recognize the need to avoid overusing them.
LLMs don't, and so the tropes get repeated ad nauseam. It doesn't help that social media posts are a huge part of their training data, and there's a large body of research on how Twitter and social media in general have altered grammar and sentence construction towards patterns more commonly found in oral-based traditions as users sought out ways to make their voices heard.
It's easy to imagine a more polished version of a line like "It's not X. It's Y!" being tossed out during a speech precisely because it can be dramatic and punchy. When it's done in every other paragraph, however, it can become rather disconcerting.
Disregarding the fact that NHTSA findings apparently contradict it (though that may just be a more recent change than the 2022 report), Tesla claims to use five seconds before a collision event as the threshold for their data reporting on their FSD marketing page:
> If FSD (Supervised) was active at any point within five seconds leading up to a collision event, Tesla considers the collision to have occurred with FSD (Supervised) engaged for purposes of calculating collision rates for the Vehicle Safety Report. This approach accounts for the time required for drivers to recognize potential hazards and take manual control of the vehicle. This calculation ensures that our reported collision rates for FSD (Supervised) capture not only collisions that occur while the system is actively controlling the vehicle, but also scenarios where a driver may disengage the system or where the system aborts on its own shortly before impact.[0]
In theory, that should more than cover the common perception-response times of around ~1 to 1.5 seconds used as a rule of thumb for most car accidents. But I'm quite curious what research has been done on the disengagement process as driver assistance systems return control to the driver and its impact on driver response times and their overall alertness.
If drivers trust the car to handle braking and steering for you, are we really going to see perception–response times that low, or have we changed the behavior being measured? Instead of timing a direct response to a stimulus, we’re now including the time required to re-engage their attention (even if they're nominally "paying attention"), transition to full control of the vehicle, and then react to the stimulus that they're now barreling down on.
For that matter, this approach is making the implicit assumption that pressing the brake pedal or turning the steering while is a sign of now-active control and awareness. Is it? Or could it just be a sort of instinctual reaction? I've been in the passenger seat when a driver has slammed on the brakes, only to find myself moving my right foot as if to hit an imaginary brake pedal even knowing I obviously wasn't the one driving. Hell, I remember my mom doing that back when I was learning to drive during normal braking.
Shorts are treated as a privileged feature; they aren't going to simply hide them just because a few of us have the unmitigated gall not to watch them. That's not to their benefit. Youtube and the other platforms want to manipulate users into getting on that particular hamster wheel, and the app's UX reflects that. In that, it's not dissimilar to how streaming services routinely prioritize engagement maximization over user experience. If it takes you a few more clicks to find your continue watching list, that's your problem.
I'd be surprised if the algorithms have much say on when and where shorts show up in your feed versus just inserting them into specific spots in your feed that were determined by a whole lot of user testing to see what's most effective. There might be some logic to tweak it, but overall placement is probably fairly uniform across users.
I would expect (but cannot prove) that these hostile patterns decrease engagement on the individual level.
But maybe the effort to cater to people who avoid this stuff isn't worth it, or maybe they find it doesn't really discourage us from finding what we want, or the value of this stuff is so high that they find a sufficient number of converts over time.
If it's a strategic play, it's a terrible one that douses usability in gasoline and sacrifices it at the altar of visual novelty for no real gain. Apple has spent literal decades working on and refining their Human Interface Guidelines for different devices. Between Tahoe and Liquid Glass, they seem to have just tossed them on the bonfire for no justifiable reason.
VisionPro was meant to literally overlay its interface over your field of vision. That's a very different context and interaction paradigm. Trying to shoehorn the adaptations they made for it into their other, far more popular interfaces for the sake of consistency? It's absurd.
> Apple has spent literal decades working on and refining their Human Interface Guidelines for different devices
Things like “human interface guidelines” get written by nerds who dive deep into user studies to make graphs about how target size correlates to error rate when clicking an item on screen.
Things like Liquid Glass get designed by people who salivate over a button rendering a shader backed gradient while muttering to themselves “did I cook bro???”
They’re just two very orthogonal cultures. The latter is what passes for interface design in software these days.
It's like the KDE developer who reluctantly gave out the script to set "border offset" from a window back to 0 (i.e. how close you could snap/drag the window to the border of the screen). He had defaulted it to something like -5 (i.e. at minimum, 5 pixels between the edge of the screen and the window, no matter WHERE you tried to place it), because "otherwise, how would you use the negative space, bro?". I.e. left-clicking JUST outside the window brought up a context menu for the window. WTF? I've been doing GUIs since 1987. Don't make "clicking outside the window" a way to interact WITH the window. I very nearly threw KDE out before he gave the fix.
No, no, no! Stop that! The em dash is an wonderful little punctuation mark that's damned useful when used with purpose. You can't turn it into some scarlet glyph just because normal people finally noticed they exist. LLMs use them because we used them, damn it.
For god's sake, are we supposed to go back to the dark ages of the double hyphen like typographic barbarians in the hopes that a future update won't ruin that, too? After all the work to get text editors to automatically substitute them in the first place?
What's funny is that, when people first started noticing that LLMs tended to like the em dash, I'd mentioned to a friend that I hoped—rather naively—it might lead to a resurgence and people would think to themselves "huh, that looks pretty useful." Needless to say, I got that one wrong. Are we really going to sacrifice the poor em dash just because people can't come up with a better signifier for LLM text?
Oh, no thanks. The emdash is lazy writing, through and through, for the same reason a parenthetical expressed any other way might be. LLMs overuse them the same way humans do: to pack in context where it doesn't belong. I'd happily lay the emdash and all its terrible cousins upon the sacrificial altar to see a renaissance in editing and proper sentence construction.
Fair enough. I fully recognize just how easily it gets abused, and "used with purpose" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in my original comment. That said, if someone's going to engage in sentence sprawl, I'd much rather an em dash get abused in the process than some of the alternatives. Bad em dashes are at least less ambiguous than a chain of a commas mashing meaning into mush, and they provide an obvious visual break that jumps out at the reader.
Em dashes are strong; they can take the abuse. While I'm right there with you on dreaming of a renaissance in quality writing, that's likely more fantastical than my own hopes that we'd see a resurgence in quality em dash usage. At this point, I'd probably settle for outright stagnation in writing ability.
I’ve never seen an LLM use an em-dash the way a thoughtful human is most likely to use them, in a parentheses-like pair. It’s just too bad there’s way too many idiots who cannot notice such subtleties.
I first learned about em dash reading the GNU Texinfo manual in the 1990s. Now I have to wear a red, slightly long horizontal line on my shirt, and passersby shun me.
These questions are almost always more complex and nuanced than simply left or right. I agree with you on the second part to a degree—insomuch as the modern media landscape pushes people to quickly label shooters and tends to disincentivize any sort of nuance—but might you be doing the same here?
The charging document[0] said that his mother claimed "that over the last year or so, Robinson had become more political and had started to lean more to the left – becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented." There's also a text message he sent, which said "since trump got into office [my dad] has been pretty diehard maga." That's it. Acquaintances said "he wasn't too fond of Trump or Charlie [Kirk]," but we still haven't seen much that explains the specifics of why beyond the gay and trans rights angle. A former high school classmate said "[w]hen I knew him and his family, they were like diehard Trump" and that he was politically conservative and supported Trump "ahead of the 2020 election."[1]
As for what changed and why, we don't know. Did he stop supporting Trump because of gay and trans rights? Did he still believe in other conservative ideas? Simply labeling him as a leftist implies a cohesive ideology, but ideology is rarely so simple or straightforward even for normal people who don't decide to commit political assassinations.
Beyond that, a lot of even ideologically-motivated shooters have some awfully peculiar and non-cohesive ideologies. If the suspect agrees with 80% of a particular tribe's most common views, but that last 20% consists of some truly batshit ideas that have very little if any support, are they still a member of that tribe? Would that tribe even want them? Would they themselves want to be part of that tribe? Plenty of conservatives who believed fully in the movement's ideas broke with Trump in 2016 solely on the basis of his personal character.
They can also grab onto ideas from other tribes, to the point where investigators wind up crawling through something that's less a cohesive political ideology and more a smorgasbord of ideas they pinned together. I mean, hell, you've got to have a screw or two loose to think a political assassination is going to somehow lessen--let alone stop--anti-gay and/or anti-trans sentiment. Run that idea past pretty much any left-leaning politician, activist, or political junkie, and they'll tell you you're a moron, likely right before giving the FBI a call.
If you dont believe even his mother, theres tons of other evidence. The anti fascism messaging on his bullets. The text messages to his partner saying a Kirk was full of hate.
> I mean, hell, you've got to have a screw or two loose to think a political assassination is going to somehow lessen--let alone stop--anti-gay and/or anti-trans sentiment. Run that idea past pretty much any left-leaning politician, activist, or political junkie, and they'll tell you you're a moron, likely right before giving the FBI a call.
Straight cope and Im pretty sure I dont need to say why.
> If you dont believe even his mother, theres tons of other evidence. The anti fascism messaging on his bullets. The text messages to his partner saying a Kirk was full of hate.
Sigh. That's not what I claimed. I can accept his mother's limited statement from the charging document at face value, and still point out that we still know very little about his ideological leanings. Why did she consider him moving left? Was it just because of gay rights? Did his other views shift as well? Was the shooter's motivation more about the political side of things, or some misplaced idea that they were somehow protecting or helping their partner?
I have no clue, but I want answers to these questions if only because they can contribute to the effort of better understanding radicalization pathways and the process by which some random kid decided to commit an act of political violence.
We know that shooters rarely have cohesive, logical ideologies. The fact that a shooter decides to become a shooter in the first place is evidence that their personal ideology has shifted in some truly extreme ways that puts them--or should put them--outside the normal political discourse. Put another way, radicalization can take people to some truly unexpected places and it's entirely reasonable to want a nuanced view before jumping to affix labels because while labels can help us understand some things, they can also obscure other aspects and create entirely separate problems. Especially when those labels then get for partisan purposes and to undermine the political discourse.
As for the casings? We've got memes and video game references.[0] The most overtly political parts are "hey fascist, CATCH" with a video game code thrown in for good measure and an 19th century folksong that later became an anti-Mussolini resistance anthem. The others are memes. Do they all have meaning for the shooter? Obviously, since he went through the effort to engrave the casings. At the same time, their immaturity and oddness should be pointed out as well, as they undermine the idea that this was some sort of rational consequence of a cohesive political ideology.
> Straight cope and Im pretty sure I dont need to say why.
Perhaps you should re-read the sentence before trying to read something into it that wasn't present? My point was simple: even setting aside the ethical aspects of the question (simple answer: outside of baby Hitler hypotheticals, it's bad--and even with Baby Hitler, most people will acknowledge they're trying to leverage his future actions to make literal baby murder pencil out because they recognize that baby murder is a prima facie immoral act), political assassination is an insanely stupid means to shift public opinion and pretty much any politician, activist, or advisor--whether on the right or left--will tell you the same thing. Feel free to substitute right-leaning for left-leaning in my original comment if "left-leaning" made the sentence read as something I hadn't intended. I certainly didn't intend to suggest that somehow only left-leaning folks are capable of recognizing that political assassination is a very bad idea with tons of unintended consequences. Anyone with even a basic grasp on history is more than capable of knowing how dumb it is.
Hell, we've got literal case studies showing how political assassinations tend to blow up in everyone's face. The CIA has a list of coups and political assassinations that pretty much all resulted in serious blowback that undermined their intended outcomes--and often resulted in the very thing they wanted to prevent.
So, yeah, I think that if the shooter shopped the idea that murdering Charlie Kirk would somehow magically make things better for gay or trans people to gay and trans advocacy groups--or influential figures on the left more broadly--they'd almost unanimously tell him he's a moron and notify the FBI even if they thought Kirk was a pox on American political discourse. It's an insane proposition, and only in the mind of someone who has serious problems would it somehow make sense.
I also think that the reverse situation--where the shooter wanted to benefit some conservative constituency or ideology by murdering a liberal political activist and shopped the idea around conservative politicians and activists--would likely result in the same call to the FBI.
> Was the shooter's motivation more about the political side of things, or some misplaced idea that they were somehow protecting or helping their partner?
I respect the effort you are putting in, but you are answering a question that was not part of this thread: what was his motivation.
The question in this thread was somewhat simpler: was he on the left?
Because the context of this discussion was the twitter thread where people and bots were en masse assigning MAGA affiliation to killers, just like they did in the Charlie Kirk situation.
And the answer is unequivocal: Robinson was not MAGA or groyper, he was on the left.
The problem with using modern pressure treated wood for outdoor furniture is less any cancer risks like with the old CCA treatments, and more that it's just a bad choice for a bunch of different reasons.
Modern copper-based treatments--e.g. ACQ or CA--still cause skin and eye irritation. If you try to sand it so that people sitting in your new chair don't get a nasty splinter somewhere best avoided, you can compromise the effectiveness of the treatment (even when the treatment gets full penetration, it's still most effective on the outer layers you're now sanding away). Plus, while the dust you create when working with it might not include arsenic, it's still nasty to breathe in and can cause respiratory problems. Staining P/T wood can be a whole ordeal in itself, and because interact much more closely with furniture than say a deck, any imperfections will be more noticeable.
Even then, it's not like P/T furniture isn't going to require ongoing maintenance in the future. At which point, you're better off with something like cedar or white oak. Hell, with a decent outdoor grade finish and proper care, even untreated pine is going to last for years without rotting away underneath you.
With a product this simple to make and prices of wood and finishing chemicals what they are I don't know if I'd even bother with finishing, but just remake.
Basic weatherproofing treatments for basic lumber ? There's tar, which nobody does at home. There's wood oil. What else is there ? Do I have other options ?
- My outdoor furniture use a wood oil plus polyutherane.
- My indoor furniture use just wood oil.
But that’s only in general. There are other considerations like impact resistance and spills that can stain the wood so you have to decide what combination of wood type and treatments work for your goal.
"wood oil plus polyurethane" sounds interesting. NSo you've had no problems with the two reacting badly to each other ? I'll be drilling screws in, so maybe the wood oil adds extra protection where screws penetrate the polyurethane layer.
The cinematographer would have composed shots for the main 1.43:1 aspect ratio first while taking into consideration the other aspect ratios (the viewfinder will overlay the different framelines to help make those decisions). The DP then gets to go back in during post and recompose each shot for the different formats as needed, tweaking what was originally shot to do their best to maintain a cohesive feel and emphasis across each crop. With five different formats for The Odyssey[0], I'm sure that was a fun experience.
It's not that one format is inherently better. The frame is a storytelling tool, and you can use different aspect ratios to influence how audiences perceive the film.[1] It's when you start changing it afterwards with little regard for the director's original intentions that we see problems. The old pan-and-scan movie releases for VHS or cheap 16:9 conversions are frustrating examples.
0. https://www.odysseymovie.co.uk/explore-formats/
1. https://www.cined.com/aspect-ratio-as-a-storytelling-tool-a-...