Agree with this strongly. It's nice to have thousands of photos, but if what you're trying to do is preserve memories, you do that best by interacting with the photos.
Choosing the photos to include, plus doing the scrapbooking bits to decorate the photos, and including all the bits and bobs you might have acquired from whatever even you're memorializing, this locks the memories in far better than a carefully architected storage system that, in the end, is just a giant wad of binary data.
This goes double (or triple) when you have young children.
By all means maintain some kind of digital storage, but make your primary physical.
His point of high church vs. Protestantism is a good one. We in the US practice a kind of competitive Protestantism designed--at least partly, if not mostly--to make the adherents feel good about themselves. There is a distinct difference between submission and proselytizing.
There is also something to the state of empire as well. The British empire had been in steady decline for a very long time before Adams or Fry started making people laugh, whereas the American empire has been ascending quickly since WWII. This sort of gestalt is hard to ignore and will certainly influence things. For example, would a 'Blackadder' sell as well in 1890? This is around the same time 'King Solomon's Mines' was selling briskly, and Haggard's story is instantly recognizable by any modern Hollywood writer.
On some level Americans are British people time-displaced by a couple of generations.
I think there is a lot of truth in that. It led to the death of patriotism (which is now considered embarrassing outside of sport), national purpose, institutions, empire, and coincided with the decline of heavy industry (which only happened much more recently in the US).
EDIT: Saying that, there is still a strong positive national identity. We're just too embarrassed to express it strongly (see patriotism), because of our fall from grace.
I also think there is a breaking point, and we're seeing the resurgence of right wing parties in the UK and across Europe as a backlash to anti-patriotism and praise for everyone except those with a long history in their own nation.
"Anti-patriotism" doesn't really sum up the sense that many among Europe's owning and intellectual classes would prefer to "dissolve the people and elect another" via immigration. The example that shocked me, as an American, was when a story came out that certain schools in the UK had stopped teaching about World War II and the Holocaust because (second-generation, in many cases) immigrant parents objected to their kids being preached-at about the history of someone else's country. This was presented by, IIRC, the Guardian or the BBC, as a fairly reasonable objection.
To my American mind, for everything wrong with our country, come on, if you're an immigrant to the USA, it's your country. Taking on American history as your history is what it means to be part of the common civic project, and insisting that "the Allies beat Hitler and built the liberal international order and then we saw off Stalinism too" is somehow insulting to your family because those Allied soldiers weren't your blood ancestors sounds outright treasonous.
The history curriculum is (like nearly everything else) nationally set. The content of the leaving exams is also not set by the school (but by the national boards). It's possible that one school has decided to do something daft, but honestly not likely.
The story reads like ragebait, TBH. Brits are absolutely as keen on extolling WW2 heroism as anyone else.
"In England, by law children are to be taught about the Holocaust as part of the Key Stage 3 History curriculum; in fact, the Holocaust is the only historical event whose study is compulsory on the National Curriculum. This usually occurs in Year 9 (age 13-14)."
So not Province of Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales.
Note that WW2 is not a statutory requirement in any of the key stages although it does feature in the examples (which are non-statutory). And a reminder that history is a required subject only to Key Stage 3, so many students won't take it after they are 14 and won't study for an exam.
Reporting on education in the UK does tend to be rage-baity and most situations are more complex when you look at them a bit closer.
(I have never taught history and never taught in the school sector)
I would really like to see the source of that because as mentioned elsewhere in the replies the Holocaust is a compulsory part of the National Curriculum and has been at least since I was in high school in the 1990s.
To the extent that the Holocaust is part of British and American history it is that we knew very well what was going on in 1930s Germany and strictly limited the number of Jewish refugees because of domestic concerns over the level of immigration.
WWI "coincided with the decline of heavy industry" ? I can't think of any UK-based heavy industry that didn't dramatically expand between the end of WWI and say, 1958.
To be clear - I'm in Scotland and the flags I see are the Scottish flag and the EU flag (often combined). I know there has been a spate of flag flying for other reasons but I haven't actually seen that myself.
Totally agree, WW1 is really the root cause of all of Britains problems.
Victory wasn't worth the cost. It would've been better to give the entire empire to the Germans to maintain peace. It'd be lost anyway in a short amount of time. Even forcing King George and Kaiser Wilhelm to marry would've been better for them than German Republicanism and the British Royals becoming Kardashians with crowns.
A large portion of the UK hasn't really accepted or internalized the fact that the British Empire is no longer a thing, and they're not the most powerful nation in the world, nor anywhere close to it.
(...And yes, that does sound like what it looks like is coming for the US, though it's not quite there yet.)
I do know the type of person you are talking about and I don't think it's the Empire as such (which is long gone) but the lingering on of the kind of exceptionalism that was used to justify the Empire. Wonderful sayings like:
"Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life." Cecil Rhodes
Mind you - perhaps I'm just bitter because I'm a Scot ;-)
I visited London several years ago, and in the house we were staying was a relatively short book describing, for lack of a better term, "British exceptionalism", and it resonated with me as an American. I don't recall that much, but I do remember the idea, for example, that the European Union was seen to be a good thing in the eyes of the archetypal Brit "for the continent", and not for the British isles. Always exempting themselves from international cooperation/norms/laws, etc. I think America inherited a lot from the British (certainly not an original idea of mine).
"Minister, Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last 500 years: to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now, when it's worked so well?"
For a small island nation, Britain has had an outsized influence. Culturally, politically, technologically, etc. There are many reasons for it, some accidental (like geography) and some purposeful, but it remains that Britain has punched above its weight for a very long time.
America has followed a similar tack, and for many of the same reasons. High-minded ideas like "international cooperation" sound especially good to those nations who are not sitting at the top, but for those that are it does seem less than ideal. I.e., I'm sure that Montenegro is big on international cooperation, but China will justifiably ask "cui bono" (but in Chinese).
That's quite true. On a recent trip I got talking to a girl from somewhere in Europe. She spoke perfect English, of course. At some point she remarked, rather bluntly, "It must be strange for you guys because you used to rule the world." I made a joke but internally I was reeling: used to? I'm almost 40 and still hadn't realised this.
Later I was talking to another 20-something, British this time, who didn't know Dr Martens were British. I asked where he thought they were from, "I guess I assumed they were American". Sigh...
and that's a very good thing. I only recognise our nation from 1945 onwards, establishment of the welfare state, the idea the government cares for its people. The idea that victims matter. While it wasn't just overnight and was many years in the making, there was this element of cruelty, a survival of the fittest, seen in the victim blaming of street urchins with rickets in the early 20th century.
In 1966 there was an industrial disaster where a school was submerged in coal waste and 116 children died. The coal company offered £50 per child as compensation. There was a national outcry that marks the change in attitude and the compensation was increased tenfold to £500 (quite a lot back then). Did we see this in Flint with the polluted water, or in Ohio when that train derailed with all the chemicals?
There's something about having absolutely everything in the world and then pissing it all away in an enormous own goal of world wars that is extremely humbling and I'd like to think that plays a key part in the British psyche and I think its for the better.
My grandparents were the war generation I knew, having lived through the blitz, and all they wanted was to sit in the garden and have a nice cup of tea. They didn't want to be the best or were looking externally for validation. Just a nice sit down and a chin wag and I think that's a positive way to be, as opposed to what I imagine was the driving force of the Imperial era in always wanting more and trying to prove how "great" our nation should be. We proved how great we are in two of the most destructive wars in the world's history where the entirity of Europe lost. We suck.
Britain won, but it cost them pretty much everything. And while a lot of pride is connected to winning them, neither were wars Britain really had to fight.
WWI was caused by every European power thinking they could benefit from a war, leading to powder keg that blew up from a completely inconsequential event. For the British one of the motivations was getting Germany's African colonies that were in the way of building the Cape to Cairo Railway, which ended up never being completed anyways.
WWII at least had a clear villain. But it was a villain that made every indication that he didn't actually want to fight Britain. Maybe that was a ruse and Hitler would have attacked Britain after securing the continent, maybe it wasn't and a British and German empire could have coexisted. We will never know. What we do know is that fighting WWII required Britain to bleed its colonies dry, followed by losing most of them in the years after the war
I'm not going so far as saying Britain shouldn't have fought the world wars. At least WWII had justification beyond what can be seen on map. However without participation in those two wars Britain would have had a shot at continuing to be a wealthy empire
I don't mind the rationale for WW2 so much, I think the idea that Britain "didn't have to", doesn't scan. What the Third Reich was doing meant it would always be an existential threat that would ultimately result in conflict. So it was better for Britain to fight the Nazis than stay neutral.
I would however suggest that the two wars are basically the same war with just a big ceasefire in the middle, that's why I would treat them as the same mistake.
Britain mostly bankrolled WW1 and was broke by 1916. If you consider the British position prior to the war and after the wars, its an extroadinary failure. Especially considering how all the monarchs of Europe were directly related and had ample opportunities to prevent the wars. They were conflicts of hubris, over-confidence based on mostly fighting the developing world and never having to appreciate the horrors of modern artilery against their own ranks. If you look at the opening battles of the first world war the quantities of casualties are absolutely staggering. They were not prepared and under-estimated what it would take to fight these wars.
All that wealth and power wasted on turning Europe into a wasteland and sacrificing generations of young men.
In Japanese culture the failed hero is also revered, but in a solemn rather than comedic way.
Minamoto no Yoshitsune, Kusunoki Masashige, The Standing Death of Benkei, Saigo Takamori (the last samurai), the Kamikaze pilots, even Yukio Mishima...
What's interesting is that unlike the British fatalism, Japanese failed heroes are driven by duty and honor and tradition above all (even at the cost of themselves). To an outsider they are foolishly stubborn and unwilling to accept an imperfect or changing world. But in Japan that is something to be admired.
Many of those are not failed heroes. They are heroes who found success by dying honorably. "Death before dishonor" is something now known only to the criminal classes in the West, but was the norm for any feudal society (ie, Japan before being conquered by the US).
I got one where the called script ended in ".pl" and I had a flashback to the 90s. My trousers grew into JNCOs, Limp Bizkit started playing out of nowhere and I got a massive urge to tell Slashdot that Alan Thicke had died.
I think there is a danger in the enthusiasm for AI inside of these excellent points, namely that the skills that make a good programmer are not inherent, they are learned.
The comparison would be a guy who is an excellent journeyman electrician. This guy has visual-spatial skills that makes bending and installing conduit a kind of art. He has a deep and intuitive understanding of how circuits are balanced in a panel, so he does not overload a phase. But he was not born with them. These are acquired over many years of labor and tutelage.
If AI removes these barriers--and I think it will, as AI-enhanced programmers will out-perform and out-compete those who are not in today's employment market--then the programmer will learn different skills that may or may not be in keeping with language skills, algorithms, problem decomposition, etc. They may in fact be orthogonal to these skills.
The effect of this may be an improvement, of course. It's hard to say for sure as I left my crystal ball in my other jacket. But it will certainly be different. And those who are predisposed for programming in the old-school way may not find the field as attractive because it is no longer the same sort of engineering, something like the difference between the person that designs a Lego set and the person that assembles a Lego set. It could, in fact, mean that the very best programmers become a kind of elite, able to solve most problems with just a handful of those elite programmers. I'm sure that's the dream of Google and Microsoft. However this will centralize the industry in a way not seen since perhaps IBM, only with a much smaller chance of outside disruption.
Maybe solving more trivial problems with AI will left novice programmer to do more depth problems and will make them better faster, because they will spend time solving problems that matter.
That is possible, for sure. But think of it like a person learning the piano. You could practice your arpeggios on a Steinway, or you can buy a Casio with an arpeggiator button.
At a certain point, the professional piano player can make much better use of the arpeggiator button. But the novice piano player benefits greatly from all the slogging arpeggio practice. It's certainly possible that skipping all that grunt work will improve and/or advance music, but it's hardly a sure thing. That's the experiment we're running right now with AI programming. I suppose we'll see soon enough, and I hope I'm utterly wrong about the concerns I have.
It also impressed me, as I'm not sure I'd have that sort of dogged patience. Samba is one of those incredibly useful pieces of open source software that sometimes I feel I take for granted.
I won't take it for granted now.
As a side note, the documentation has been pretty darn good too. I set up an AD server in Samba just from the docs, with a bit of additional help from Stack Overflow. It was only after I had finished that I determined that I could do what I needed with just the basic Samba user/groups. (My needs were not complicated enough to justify the extra overhead of AD.)
Samba was arguably the way Linux snuck into corporations in the late 90s. Microsoft’s server offerings were truly terrible in that era, compared to getting a very functional Unix-a-like for free out of commodity hardware. Terrible and expensive. The issue was, you needed to be able to do group file sharing to windows desktops, full stop. IT teams wanted Linux, bad, for nerd and quality of life reasons. They also wanted Apache, not IIS. As Samba stabilized, Linux boxen quietly started appearing without notice or fanfare, and never left.
If you are interested in keeping backups, including the ability to go back in time to recover accidentally deleted/changed files, then ZFS with its reliable snapshot facility is fantastic. Other file systems offer some version of this, e.g. btrfs, but they don't have the same reliability as ZFS.
Snapshots on ZFS are extremely cheap, since it works on the block level, so snapshots every hour or even 15 minutes are now doable if you so wish. Combine with weekly or monthly snapshots that can be replicated off-site, and you have a pretty robust storage system.
This is all home sysadmin stuff to be sure, but even if you just use it as a plain filesystem, the checksum integrity guarantees are worth the price of admission IMO.
FWIW, software RAID like ZFS mirrors or mdm is often superior to hardware raid especially for home use. If your raid controller goes blooey, which does happen, unless you have the exact same controller to replace it, you run a chance of not being able to mount your drives. Even very basic computers are fast enough to saturate the drives in software these days.
It’s probably a mistake to read too much into it but I can’t help but notice the McDonald’s ad is kind of a mirror held up to all the things that American culture has been progressing into: cynical, mean, isolated, artificial... whatever the opposite of “wholesome” is. Totally off-key for what Christmas is supposed to stand for. Christmas (at least the secular holiday) is supposed to be about kindness, putting differences aside, enjoying people and family, and the commercial was pretty much the opposite of that.
PSA: if you have family meltdowns playing Monopoly, try following the rules and allowing auctions of un-bought property. At least the game may eventually end then. Or just don't play games intended to be teachable "well isn't this shit" moments.
There is no agreed on meaning of secular Christmas. It might converge on one some day, but secular culture is literally dying so it has only about 100 years to come up with one.
> It’s probably a mistake to read too much into it
I disagree; art both reflects and influences culture. If we don't discuss and explore the subtext of things, we're impacted without understanding, and that's never a good position to be in.
> “However, we notice – based on the social comments and international media coverage – that for many guests this period is ‘the most wonderful time of the year’.”
How to make your corporate response sound even more AI than the actual AI...
> "And here’s the part people don’t see: the hours that went into this job far exceeded a traditional shoot. Ten people, five weeks, full-time.”
If it didn't even save time, then what was the point?
Looking at it I see familiar elements, which are used by an artist going by the name Gossip Goblin to draw apocalyptic visions of a humanity far in the future that, for the N-th time, almost wiped itself out via increasingly invasive body modifications.
I liked the McDonald's ad quite a bit because it encapsulated how I feel about this time of year - although I've never in my life eaten in a McDonald's and don't intend to start.
I thought the McDonalds one was good and what does it matter it was AI ; mcdonalds makes artificial food and everything about the place is artificial so why not artificial ads?
I'm pro-AI but I thought the Coca-Cola and McDonald's ads were shit. The Coke one was especially egregious because if the creators hadn't been lazy they could have made it look half-decent. Instead it's janky and inconsistent and ugly.
The worst part about the Coke ad is the fake "making of" video they released to show how much manual work went into their ads. The "pencil sketches" ostensibly made by humans in the making of were also AI-generated.
You probably do, but you don't count the calories, and instead of everything being in the salad, you have a few ingredients outside (bread, nuts, cheese, whatever).
Salads being a healthy, low-calorie thing is an idiocy; it's only possible if you don't use any dressing, and at this point you are only eating crunchy water.
Otherwise, the oil in the dressing is over 800 kcal per 100g. Most people will put the equivalent of 50-70g of bread just as dressing in their salad. It's mostly fat and not filing.
In other words, it's extremely dumb to think salads are healthy; only fat women believe that shit and this is exactly why they end up like this.
I'm not American; I'm French.
We invented the vinaigrette, and I have worked at quite premium restaurants.
You are just clueless, and it's not even worth explaining.
Salad is a stupid meal for rich people to feel superior. It's wasteful and plain stupid. And if you are actually a worker (or someone who needs to be physical), you are ingesting the wrong type of calories.
But that's the whole point. It's not sustainable for a worker; thus it is a class signifier.
I have premium French dressing in my fridge. It's 483 kcal/100g.
The recommended serving size is 2 tablespoons, but most people actually put in at least 3.
That's about 20-30 g of vinaigrette.
In other words, it's about 150 kcal just for the vinaigrette, or about 50g of bread.
You are an idiot, I'm not your buddy, go fuck yourself.
Homeschoolers form co-ops. A local one here does ballroom dance, tennis, basketball. There is often a youth symphony option in mid- to large-sized cities.
For STEM-type stuff, see if there's a nearby Civil Air Patrol squadron. That alone has tons of extracurricular stuff: search and rescue, help with earning a pilot license, robotics, drill and ceremony.
Homeschooling is not for everybody, but if you go down that route there's a lot of support.
I've been a paying Affinity customer for a while. I did not like the Adobe subscription model, even though pricewise it more or less the same as what I paid for software upgrades to Adobe products, ~$600/yr. So I looked for alternatives and Affinity was "good enough", and over time got significantly better.
This new model, as of now, I don't have a problem with. Free is good, and Affinity (now Canva) already has my email address. I will be interested to see if this means that offline work is difficult or impossible. If Canva can just manage to not go insane, this should work out well for them. A $200/yr Pro license is extremely reasonable. Even though I steadfastly refuse to use generative AI in doing design, I would consider the Pro if it turns out to have some tooling that would be advantageous.
It’s free for now. The log in and activation means they can change that any time. I’d rather pay for v3, v4, etc. than being held hostage with a login requirement.
If it’s going to be free for everyone forever, why can’t they give us a truly free binary that will work locally forever? That would give people peace of mind they can always access their data locally, the revenue doesn’t change, and the AI subscription features can still be locked behind a login.
My understanding is that you need an account and Internet for the download and license activation, but then works offline (they specifically say “for extended periods”) in the FAQ. That is pretty much the same as v2 right?
They ought to follow the intellij/jetbrain model, where you pay for the subscription to access the latest version, but when you stop paying, you can keep using the last version you've paid a subscription for.
But of course, this does not hold your data hostage, and thus less "profitable" in the long run.
Quite a lot of the low-hanging fruit from pharma has already been picked. The modern business model for pharma involves coming up with a patentable new drug that does the same thing as an older drug that's now out of patent and available for manufacture as a generic.
Making pharmaceuticals subservient to the whimsy of the stock market is a bad idea. It introduces incentive distortions where none should be.
Choosing the photos to include, plus doing the scrapbooking bits to decorate the photos, and including all the bits and bobs you might have acquired from whatever even you're memorializing, this locks the memories in far better than a carefully architected storage system that, in the end, is just a giant wad of binary data.
This goes double (or triple) when you have young children.
By all means maintain some kind of digital storage, but make your primary physical.
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