One of the things I didn't realize until relatively recently was that a lot (or at least some) of the re-used Wagner opus came from Tannhauser rather than the Ring Cycle.
I'm not sure I disagree. I don't have numbers but, anecdotally, you sure hear a lot of "But flying is such a hassle" which is sorta true but not sure how much more than it's ever been especially if you're willing to pay a bit more. I'm not sure how many people translate that into "So I'll just drive 1,000 miles instead."
In Europe (and the US Northeast Corridor), I do favor trains to avoid going to and dealing with airports, but they're no panacea either. And I say this as someone with the various passes that make flying easier.
I can drive for 5 hours, or take the 1 hour flight. The one hour flight has a total time of over 5 hours when you include getting to the airport, clearing security and getting bags at the other end. Plus I will not have a vehicle. For one person the cost is probably a wash, for two or more driving will be cheaper. 1000 miles does tip towards flying. Under 300 miles driving is going to be way less hassle to drive.
It has very little to do with security though. I usually go through security in 5 minutes at my home airport. I do leave a lot more time than that partially because my car company sort of insists on it. (Of course, the car company is another cost.)
Honestly, it would be faster and possibly cheaper for me to drive to Manhattan than take the train--in which case security doesn't enter in at all. And certainly for two people. But I hate driving into Manhattan.
Netflix is definitely the service that's closest to my bubble. Sometimes I then see something I'm interested in but I don't watch a huge amount of video and Netflix has gotten really pricey.
A lot of (good) series are also just fresh and different when they land. They're not as fresh in Year 2 much less any subsequent years. Yes, sometimes they can build on a serial story but, personally, I lose interest in most TV series after a bit. I realize others have a different mindset where they hate not being able to live with their favorite characters for more or less forever.
While there is certainly some (very) expensive real estate outside of Boston, to a much greater degree than San Francisco, you can actually get a house within a drive for an evening event that's pretty reasonable to a much greater degree than the Bay Area.
I didn't go this year but my local town library has a book sale where books go for something like $10/bag. I donate some books to them throughout the year. There are still a lot of books available on the last or second to last day of the sale. I'm sure a huge number get pulped.
I still pay less than when I had a cable bundle with the caveat that, then, I didn't have premium channels and, now, don't have live TV. In my personal book, I'm still ahead in the game.
Yeah, exactly. I can appreciate that people don't like how these services are raising their prices. If you don't think you're getting your money's worth, then cancel. If you want to turn to piracy instead, then I know I don't care. But people comparing these streaming services to cable really don't seem to understand just how bad cable was (and still is). It was way more expensive, you got way less content, and the quality of the experience was way worse.
I swear, the people who compare these streaming services to cable are all too young to remember that the average cable experience was flicking through channels until something remotely reasonable was on (and it was likely an episode or movie you've already seen many times before), you'd hop in part way through the content (so hopefully it was something you've seen before so you knew what was going on), you wouldn't be able to pause anything obviously, and about a third of your viewing time was forced ads. And all of this could be costing you over a hundred bucks a month in 2000s money in a locked-in contract lmao
TiVo et al. helped somewhat. But at one point I realized I hadn't watched anything on my TiVo in months and the landline on my triple play Comcast plan wasn't worth the cost as a backup or because I had to train my dad to call my fricking cell phone.
I get way more video than I have time to watch and I do monitor things so if I'm really not using a service I can always drop it. I care very little about having access to EVERYTHING which I never had before streaming anyway. If I really miss anything, it's DVD by mail.
> You can have live TV with a cheap antenna with a better image quality than any streaming platform.
OTA video quality isn't that great anymore. ATSC is 20mbps per RF channel, but most broadcasters multiplex video streams into that and use mpeg-2. ATSC3 can do more (or less) bits on the same RF channel, and uses a better codec, but at least for me, tuning channels is even slower than ATSC, half of the broadcasters won't let me use their signals, and the audio codec is difficult to use.
Admitedly, my tvs don't have atsc3 tuners which would have helped, but I bought a network tuner from the same vendor as my atsc tuners and ended up wishing I hadn't.
When I can watch the same event over the air or via a streaming service, my expectation is quality would be better with streaming, but I'll use OTA cause it gives me slightly better feels. Between interference from low band LTE and 5G on refarmed spectrum, reception issues from foliage and airplanes, and technical issues at the broadcasters, I don't know that reliability is higher either... But it feels wasteful to use bandwidth for something that's already being beamed to my house.
While this might be true from the intended full stream for a single channel (Congress wasn't happy when they authorized without understanding the network's intentions of multicasting), but I did an A/B test for people during a Super Bowl comparing Comcast to OTA. Nevermind the delay in Comcast signal, the image was noticeably better.
> Congress wasn't happy when they authorized without understanding the network's intentions of multicasting
Well if they don't like multiplexing, they really shouldn't be refarming OTA RF channels to cell carriers and they might want to relax the requirements for migration. As I understand it, stations that want to broadcast ATSC3 are required to find an ATSC broadcast to multiplex all of their existing streams onto.
That said, I'm not surprised Comcast is worse than OTA, they (and satellite) have been bitstarving video streams for a long time. When I've watched regular games on ESPN+ or Amazon, they usually have sufficient bitrate that I rarely notice video artifacts, which is better than I get with OTA. ESPN+ does like to start at a low frame rate and then transition a few seconds in, which isn't ideal, but I can deal.
I don't know the stream details, because effort, but I suspect with the streaming device I use that they're using h.265/AV1 and a decent amount of bitrate, and at a higher resolution than 720p or 1080i.
I can not pick up anything with an antenna, cheap or otherwise.
I'm at the foot of of a hill that's between me and where broadcast antennas are 40-50 miles away. I had no TV when I moved in until Comcast eventually put in cable. The seller had even tried putting an antenna up in the attic which did no good. So I would need to subscribe to a live TV streaming service which isn't worth it for me as I don't really watch sports much.
But I'm glad you're so confident of your knowledge of my situation.
Along with more channels; many cable adopters got perfectly good OTA signals. And I used it for many years. It just became not a good value for me at one point.
Well, it's not an unreasonable assumption that RHEL will continue to be maintained even if we don't go down the whole CentOS path which I won't on a public forum. But, yes, there are always dependencies. There's certainly no guarantees that any of the ~rebuilds will still be around in n years.
I just don't see the "LLM-speak" here at all, for example. And I'm very tired of people who throw around the LLM-power critique as an easy criticism when there's no clear basis for it. It's lazy and stupid.
There are certain styles for a post like this that some people may not like but things like subheads and what would be, by historical standards somewhat clipped writing are just how writing in this content is mostly encouraged theese days. I'd just add that when people do post long-form New Yorker pieces there's plenty of whining about getting to the point.
I think this mostly boils down to experience with writing styles. I am an avid reader, albeit mostly read in Ukrainian/Russian, but I can confidently tell whether some paragraph was written by Platonov or Nabokov or Zhadan or Sorokin; even when the guys are stylizing their texts (Sorokin does this all the time) there are still subtle things in how text is composed that tell you who wrote it. If my reading menu was mostly contemporary blogs, probably I would be less sensitive to distinct writing styles.
The first tech book I did with a publisher, I was pretty much told that I needed to break things down more with subheads and the like. And I was already doing some writing of whitepapers and blogs with my then-employer which had a somewhat similar structured style. Certainly very different from Dickens, Trollope, Collins, etc.
I'm not making a value judgement, but modern writing on technical topics has generally been steered toward digestible formats whether or not LLMs are involved.
Until I left, I was on social media and style committees at my former employer and there was a lot of data-based evidence around keeping things (in various multimedia formats) shorter and easier to consume. In fact, we mostly got away from writing white papers at all in favor of shorter pieces.
I don't disagree with you that contemporary technical writing, editing
and technical blogs were converging to what is known as llm style even before provisioning of llms. In the end, llm
were trained on these recent writing and recent blogs and this is why similarity exists. Still one can find some technical writing that stands aside and has very distinct style without compromising on clarity/digestability, i.e. Martin Fowler, Armin Ronacher, Michell Hashimoto write very differently from each other and Claude, but their content is always sharp and very much digestable. Take this paragraph by Claude
> Scientific Linux gave the scientific community its own implementation of a RHEL-compatible computing environment. More importantly, it kept alive the people, processes, infrastructure, and institutional knowledge needed to maintain one.
> That capability had option value. You might not need to exercise the option this year, or even this decade. It becomes valuable when the assumptions underneath your primary platform change. Those assumptions changed surprisingly quickly.
Can't imagine this lengthy style with paraphrases coming from Hashimoto or Fowler. Yes, it can appear not only in llm writing, but also in some heavily edited o'reilly book, sure, but I miss the times when tech blogs and o'reilly books were different.
The Art Institute of Chicago is not on the lakefront. There are a handful of buildings east of Lake Shore Drive, with the most notable being the Field Museum, The Shedd Aquarium, Adler Planetarium, McCormick Place, Lake Point Tower and Soldier Field. McCormick and Lake Point Tower are the newest of these, with the former built in 1967 (replacing an earlier structure built in 1960 but destroyed by fire) and the latter in 1968. The others were all built in the 1920s and 30s (the Art Institute building, which is in Grant Park, with roughly half of its structure east of the trench with the IC and South Shore electric railways and the rest fronting Michigan Avenue, had the older section built in the 1890s and notably was the only construction in Grant Park to not be opposed by Montgomery Ward¹). The proposed location for the museum in Chicago would have been in land owned by the Chicago Park District which is part of Grant Park and is meant to be free and open to the public and would have been a privatization of that land (it’s worth noting that the Shedd, Adler and Field properties, along with Soldier Field are all owned by the park district and not their primary tenants).
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1. The person, not the company named after him which he founded.
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