Probably not a coincidence that most Golden Age superheroes were created around the beginning of WWII:
Superman 1938
Batman 1939
Captain Marvel/Shazam 1939
The Human Torch 1939
Namor the Sub-Mariner 1939
The Flash 1939
Captain America 1940
Green Lantern 1940
Wonder Woman 1941
When I was a kid in the 90s, the 70s were in vogue and if you wanted to be retro it meant the 70s. That 70s Show for example, plus N-Trance doing all those old disco remixes, plus Dazed and Confused, plus Almost Famous, plus the disco songs in The Full Monty, etc.
And in the 70s, retro chic meant the 50s, what with Grease and American Graffiti (which was actually set in 1962 but was still about the 50s aesthetic) and Happy Days etc. So it seemed like “retro” meant “20 years ago”.
How, in 25 years, have we only advanced to the 80s for retro chic? Shouldn’t we be on the 90s by now at least, if not the 00s?
PS: perhaps this is indicative of a reduction in cultural influence, today, for the 20-to-30-something demographic, compared to the cultural influence that demographic had in earlier decades. Quentin Tarantino was 29 when he made Reservoir Dogs so he made a movie steeped in 70s vibes. Because in the 90s that age range was where revolutionary thinkers were expected to come from, so naturally the decade of their childhoods, the 70s, was in vogue. Do today’s 29-year-olds have the same platform and opportunities?
Yeah someone who cares enough about security to switch to Signal in the first place will be willing to go into the settings to get everything just the way they like it, but everybody else will only keep the app if it doesn’t bug them.
Well, they’re DEVELOPING them. They’re not MAKING them yet.
Hypothetically, we could terraform Venus. At the very least, it shares a lot of the issues that we’re trying to fix on Earth, just dialled up to 11 - its main problems are that it’s way too hot, the atmosphere has way too much carbon in it (96.5% vs Earth’s 0.04%), and the atmosphere has way too much sulfur (0.015% vs Earth’s 0.00000002%, making the atmosphere highly acidic). So if for example scientists had an idea for causing a chain reaction in a planetary atmosphere that rapidly sequestered all atmospheric carbon but were worried about unknown strength or side effects, instead of testing it on Earth where it could kill us all, they could test it on Venus where any failures would have no serious consequences. And if it worked, not only would it mean that we fix climate change on Earth but we partially terraform Venus into the bargain.
Venus has roughly similar gravity to Earth and has a ferrous core which could hypothetically be turned molten (and therefore ferromagnetic) to provide the same kind of magnetosphere that Earth’s core does. Mars has neither of these things and would therefore never be able to sustain human life naturally - Venus potentially could. On Mars, the atmosphere is just one of many obstacles. On Venus it’s THE obstacle. Solve the atmosphere, you solve Venus.
The word “al” means “the” in Arabic - for example, “al jazeera” means “the island”. And a lower case L looks like a capital i, so “AI” is visually indistinguishable from “Al”. So the joke is that people who try to shoehorn Artificial Intelligence into everything look like they’re speaking in Arabic.
I might have tried it once when I was a kid but it’s not as effective as a fingernail so once was enough.
The money saved will pay for one dev, or two if you cheap out
In principle I agree. The problem is that there are countries which don’t care about respecting law and if you kill AI in the West, all that will happen is the West will get left behind.
You’ve basically just described “confession”. You go into a little box designed to make it as difficult as possible for the priest to identify you, you talk about all the ways you feel like you’re a bad person, and the priest talks to you for a while about it, then gives you some actionable items to make amends and once you’ve done them God officially forgives you. The whole concept of confession is designed to allow people to let go of their regrets and live in the now. It’s actually quite clever as a bit of societal design. If modern priests had psychotherapy degrees then everyone in the world would have access to free therapy - unfortunately they wouldn’t be very useful for LGBT+ people.