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Morally speaking, one of the issues of modern society is the idea that knowledge should be free which was partially started by the file sharing movement, which didn't really move society in the right direction imo.

Free means the same as worthless, which inherently isn't true - since information takes time to consume in some form, and your time isn't worthless. Therefore even if you could listen to all songs theoretically for free, you would need to spend an inordinate time doing that.

When I was a kid, getting a CD from your favourite band was a major expense, getting a video game even more so. But it formed a sort of emotional attachment (and not even just for me), my friends talked about how 'band X''s new album was amazing or a stinker. Since there were multiple bands making similar kinds of music, choosing to be a fan of one but not the other carried real monetary weight.

Nowadays you just fish out a song you think you would like out of the endless sea of Spotify, no different from prompting an LLM. No, Spotify didn't make me enjoy music more.

Same applies for Steam & videogames.

Therefore I think the ritualistic act of paying money to get access to something does have a purpose. It inherently establishes the value of information to you, makes it an investment that you need to recoup by using it. I'm sure most musicians would trade a million fans who might check them out if they're in town, to ones who think their music changed their perspective in life.

Also the process of creating a song that vaguely appeals to millions is different from making one that speaks to a thousand.

This is a fundamental issue of modern capitalistic society, similar to the Marxist idea of 'alienation' - once something is cheap to get, you don't appreciate the effort that went into making it. And if your customers don't care about the thing they get, producers won't make an effor to make it good either.

And once nobody cares, people even forget what a quality product is like.


Interesting argument. At first sight it looks like an argument for scarcity, but I think it's more an argument for relationship - the value of art isn't in the capitalist concept of 'a for-profit content object in a corporate inventory' but in the social relationships and shared experiences it creates.

Without that, everything gets atomised into lonely individualism. You sit there with your headphones on listening to [Interesting band]. Not only do you not really care because you don't feel personally connected to the music - it's one of literally more than a hundred million content items on Spotify - but you're not sharing the experience.

This seems like the loss of a valuable thing which capitalist economics can't put a price on because it has no concept of value-created-by-shared-experience.

Superficially it's the same as 'sell-content-consumption-item-to-the-mass-market' but it's fundamentally not the same kind of thing.

The value is relationally both fleeting and persistent in ways that content consumption experiences - including live and recorded media of all kinds - aren't.


> Therefore I think the ritualistic act of paying money to get access to something does have a purpose. It inherently establishes the value of information to you, makes it an investment that you need to recoup by using it.

The same can be said for time. You said yourself it was an investment. There's no need for money to be involved since how much time you spend on a thing will establish the value of that information to you. If you must have a ritualistic act to form a connection to music, let it be the act of listening instead of paying.

Music discovery also takes in investment in time. Having near instant access to so much music also makes discovering a new song or artist you love very rewarding. I can easily listen to hundreds of songs before even one makes it into rotation in my current playlist.


> Nowadays you just fish out a song ... Spotify didn't make me enjoy music more.

Maybe change your perspective? Treat Spotify like a valuable audio lexicon. You read about an artist, a song, a time and immediately you can hear what is it about. Incredible!

If Spotify is only treated as a lazy background feelgood provider (while reading Marx;)), no wonder you feel that way. But it's your power/choice to appreciate it (or not), regardless of money.


How often does an AZ go down while the other 2 still work?

Isn't that the textbook definition of buying votes?

That's a problem if you live in a country with politically illiterate voters. That's why education is so important in democracies so people don't fall for such crap

Apparently not.

>In Brown v. Hartlage (1982), a Supreme Court case where a Kentucky county commissioner promised to reduce his salary if elected, the Court unanimously drew a line between policy promises and vote buying. “A candidate’s promise to confer some ultimate benefit on the voter, qua taxpayer, citizen, or member of the general public, does not lie beyond the pale of First Amendment protection,” Justice William Brennan Jr. wrote. Given that precedent, Trump is almost certainly within the bounds of the law (you might remember Elon Musk wasn’t charged for handing out $1 million checks to people during a campaign rally in Wisconsin in exchange for “taking the time to vote.”).

https://www.readtangle.com/trump-dividend-midterm-promise/


This is an asinine decision that essentially makes vote buying totally legal. We see this trick with the recent Supreme Court decisions that essentially make racial gerrymandering legal again by just making the crime impossible to prove by accepting any other justification at face value.

Don't forget: you can accept bribes as long as you receive them after the fact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snyder_v._United_States I guess I will never pay another restaurant bill again, since any possible future "gratuity" I might award them would of course have no bearing on their past decision to bring me a plate of food.

I mean, if you really believe that, then no politician would ever be able say something like "I'll work to get you free health care".

Yeah. I'm not sure how a strict reading doesn't end up with obvious policies ending up making all of the policies below "vote buying":

    - Cancel student loans
    - Reduce federal tax rates
    - Increase unemployment/pension/etc payouts
There is always a state of "this policy upside is contingent on voting for me" - though in Trumps case he is making it contingent Not on his own electoral outcome in some sense. Just messy.

As is often the case with our commander in chief, things once expressed subtly are now expressed brazenly.

Yeah. And? :)

> That’s why these systems are built the way they are.

Built how? Because I can state with confidence that I have cleaned up a ton of failed upgrades/zombie terraform deploys of these serverless kubernetes wonders that followed every best practice under the sun, and these things are not really considered even moderately reliable (as designed by imperfect mortals under real world conditions), meanwhile professionally, people who stand to lose a lot of money should their systems go down generally operate systems whose architectures were designed decades ago, are generally horizontally scaled monoliths, and are extremely conservative in software choice.

Also downtime often is no biggie, as long as it's planned and or don't lose (too much) customer critical data.

Like nodobody cares if your test db cluster goes down for the weekend. We even shut down our db instances to save money.


Well ackchually.. I get that large scale systems pose their own challenges on their own, but it also matters what's the smallest isolable unit.

What I mean by this is a CDN consists of nodes that are horizontally replicable and don't really talk to each other, and thus are easy to run even at scale.

In contrast, something like a bank or social media isn't really reducible - every user needs to be able to interact with every other user in a consistent manner.

So running a midsize bank's backend which processes 10m transactions per day, might be as if not more complex (all consistent, repeatable, and must never fail), that having a product which is a 10-10k org's IT infra replicated a thousand times.

And yes, lots of people have worked at banks and other fintech companies of this scale, including me.

I am not an expert, as I never worked on the 'core' systems but I know folks who did, and everyone told me there's an arcane database monolith that sits at the heart of these, very expensive and exotic big box SW & HW (at least for us unwashed rubes used to EC2 instances)


> What I mean by this is a CDN consists of nodes that are horizontally replicable and don't really talk to each other, and thus are easy to run even at scale.

This is only true if you exclude problems like “finding a CDN node from the device,” “managing congestion,” etc. as part of the problem statement


> What I mean by this is a CDN consists of nodes that are horizontally replicable and don't really talk to each other, and thus are easy to run even at scale.

They do though! They mostly try to avoid it since hitting the network to serve any kind of latency would unacceptably increase latency, but you wildly underestimated the amount of complexity there is to running a CDN.


I probably underestimated the complexity and I didn't mean to knock on CDNs - I just wanted to say that not all distributed systems have equal complexity, and some require essentially almost serializable transactions, while others are fine with small channels of eventual consistency

the complexity is in different places. For these systems the sheer scale of throughput makes reasoning about them challenging.

the OP mentioned 1B requests/day, where there are systems handling 1B requests a second.


Yup I live in an area built around the time 'roundabout fever' has gripped urban planners, so there's quite a few around. To add a few of my personal complaints:

- When there's a low traffic lane merging with a high traffic one, it's either impossible to enter, and you have to wait forever, or there's a traffic light cleverly hidden a couple hundred meters away, as to not break the illusion

- They do work in the middle of nowhere merging two low traffic roads. However for every roundabout you have to slow down which breaks the flow of traffic, and consumes more gas. There's often a string of 5-6 of these things.

- Having to turn to even go straight makes me queasy. Not too bad if there's just 1, but can be super uncomfortable when there's a string of them (which is common)

- 2 lane roundabouts are crazy dangerous and confusing (which is the same). You might understand how they work, but the car behind you might not. Besides due to the geometry of the whole thing, you have to cut across diagonally to car traffic to get to the inner lane.

- There's another kind of 2 lane roundabout, which is less dangerous, but only allows you to turn right from the outer lane. If you're unfamiliar with which kind you're facing, you might be in for a detour. Even if you know, there's often a fight to merge into the inner lane, which is not exactly pleasant or safe.

I guess roundabouts are a niche solution that can work sometimes, but there's a whole internet cult for them, composed mostly of people who don't really live in an area with roundabouts.


> there's a whole internet cult for them, composed mostly of people who don't really live in an area with roundabouts.

Alternatively: it's people who do live in areas which have a lot of them - and well-designed ones at that. Most of your issues boil down to "people aren't familiar with them", which automatically solves itself over time.

There is no such thing as a "roundabout fever", just like there isn't a "traffic light fever". To any halfway-competent engineer, they are just one tool among many.


I knew a manager that tried the exact same but in the GPT4 era :D He also got fired/left but as satisfying it would be to say that this was the cause of his demise I can't prove that.

I was thinking about something similar (maybe) - generally speaking, embeddings for LLMs tend to learn real world concepts - things like 'fruit' or 'France' or 'city' as directions in embeddings.

But in things like programming, most concepts are abstract - 'if hungry eat an apple' in programming terms would look like

'if hunger > 50 {apples--; hunger-=30;}'

and compilers work with 'concept erasure' - to them, tokens (which are like llm tokens) look like

'if var1 > 50 {var2--;var1-=30}'.

They don't care about how these things map to real concepts. So all the embedding directions used to encode real-world concepts are just noise to LLMs when programming. This greatly reduces dimensionality and training costs. So does a token representation tuned for programming constructs, rather than natural language would probably have a more efficient encoding.


Current models go beyond the simple embedding because you start to encode groups of concepts in the context-aware part of the model (attention heads or any other method). So it is never simply words/tokens in isolation anymore.

I don't think this computes. Modern 'efficient' industrial design can absolutely fail at efficiency. I have lived in spartan, utilitarian apartments that you could tell were built without any regards for efficient use of living space, and ended up wasting huge swaths of their floor area to interior corridors, winding tunnels between rooms, random walled off mystery areas and overall such poor planning that I'm sure despite their builder trying to save every buck, ended up costing more money relative to usable living space than seemingly more luxurious alternatives.

I have seen the opposite as well. Building an efficiently laid out, beautiful building doesn't take that much more raw material, it just requires more thought. Big US cities used to also have copypaste mass housing even a century ago, built with a strong eye towards cost efficiency, but designers also kept aesthetics and livability in mind.

And since they were basically identical to each other, they had to figure this out only once, and they could build the same t

The 'cheap and nasty' design school usually succeeds at the latter, not so much the former.

And this supposed efficiency of modern architecture often doesn't really show up. The Empire State Building was famously built in a year. Nowadays the most utilitarian housing project takes longer.


They didn’t say anything about efficiency. It’s all cost driven. Cheapest inputs possible. The PE backed builder isn’t dealing with the building in 2 years, what do they care how well it works?

I think most developers have a captive market. They don't really compete, they build whatever they want, and still sell, because somebody somewhere will still buy, since they know they can sell for more.

The units are basically commodities. Same floor plans same amenities same building about the same rent. True across the country for these sort of newer buildings, only real difference is the pool doesn't close for the season for those in milder climates.

It is designed to be this way for investors more than consumers. Investors want these units to be as fungible as possible so they can better compare local market dynamics. Commodity trading has a lot of advantages for the investor after all. The consumers have no choice really but to be in this market if they want to be sheltered at all. It isn't like you really can exercise free market selection for something necessary like shelter. You have to take what has been made available and you cannot do without.

There is therefore no incentive to make a smart building that is favoring the tenant since this doesn't grow the potential pool of tenants in the area, that pool remains the same size as it was. It is unlike a lot of other markets where having a better product might actually grow the customer base of the product segment overall.


> Investors want these units to be as fungible as possible so they can better compare local market dynamics. Commodity trading has a lot of advantages for the investor after all.

I think you hit the nail on the head. Lot of the finance machine works on standardization, like the are some building techniques, like spray-on insulation that work perfectly fine, but banks wont approve a loan on a building like that because its hard to inspect and repair.

This ironically makes these crappy buildings built to investor standards expensive, since banks will give cheap loans for it, on account of having low maintenance costs.

Of course all this exists only on paper.


Yes plus everyone is competing on cost so the lowest bid gets chosen.

If you just look at hard costs and ignore beauty and comfort, is it also the cost-over-what-timeframe question? If a building is expected to be actively used for 100 years vs 20, you get to different decisions.

My other question that I've never found a good answer to, is with mechanization, how is it that "cheap" modern buildings are so expensive. Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive? What is the cost of a unit of beauty per year, then and now...?


> My other question that I've never found a good answer to, is with mechanization, how is it that "cheap" modern buildings are so expensive. Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive?

Old buildings were often expensive to their inhabitants because people were very poor. The cheap ones were largely torn down, because they fell apart because... they were cheap. Also, people largely lived in comparative squalor to today. Only about 50% of homes in America had an indoor flush toilet in 1926, and most of those were the urban north east. In 1926, the average home was <1k sqft (avg >2k in 2026). The modern idea of insulating a home wasn't around 100 years ago - houses were small, and cold, and you had to shit in a hut in the yard or in a bucket you threw out the window after.

Like cars, we've upgraded our standards of comfort and safety a lot. HVAC, electricity + internet networking, running water and bathrooms and water heaters, insulation, double paned windows, more and bigger appliances, safer standards for things like like staircase dimensions, increased fire/earthquake/hurricane/etc resistance, etc - there are a lot of things that just didn't get included in old homes.

Old houses were literally boxes made of wood, and now they're complex and mechanically rich in many subtle dimensions. Houses also have gotten bigger, so even as the price-per-sqft grows, so does the total size of the home.


Unfortunately only custom homes can afford to care about beauty. Developers are building for cheapest possible and letting the long term owners deal with the consequences.

Homes still aren’t really mechanized. I’ve seen attempts but they haven’t worked well yet. Labor and materials are so expensive!

And most new homes are built by one of a few big groups. Oligopoly issues again.


>Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive?

I'd say yes. Reading fairy tales and historical records, we see just how huge were the prices. A pair of boots could be worth a year's income of a peasant.


>My other question that I've never found a good answer to, is with mechanization, how is it that "cheap" modern buildings are so expensive. Or were old, traditional buildings super expensive? What is the cost of a unit of beauty per year, then and now...?

The land is far more expensive now. Plus legal liability insurance costs. And costs of permitting/zoning/bureaucracy is much higher.


You mention the private equity backed builder, but the designs come from the corrupted ivory tower which just invents more and more ridiculous designs (modernism, brutalism, for example) to try to stay fresh. Same in the art world. (Banksy, Warhol, others)

We have not made any progress, and perhaps we don’t need to, when it comes to architecture since World War I. There have been a few projects like La Sagrada Família, but those are exceptionally rare.

Suburban homes. What a disaster and embarrassment to the human race.


What do you think is weird about Banksy? Looks like older pre-modern art to me.

If you like neoclassicism and hate brutalism, then I would say you are very strange too. To me, brutalism hits the same things neoclassicism does but much more organically and better.


Idk. I don't see any cultural or artistic resemblance with Balloon Girl versus say, Luncheon of the Boating Party.

Separately it's always peculiar to me that folks go on to defend some art, but I bet if I went around saying neoclassic art is terrible I'd not get much opposition. I wonder why.

> If you like neoclassicism and hate brutalism, then I would say you are very strange too.

What artworks would you compare here?


Architecture. In both neoclassicism and brutalism, regardless of intended aim, the effect seems to be one of silublime monumental scale that humbles a person.

Both paintings you cited are very much on the traditional and representative end of the spectrum. None of them seem to be on the more abstract 20th century styles.


> Architecture. In both neoclassicism and brutalism, regardless of intended aim, the effect seems to be one of silublime monumental scale that humbles a person.

Well why would you discard the intention? I think there is more to compare as well than just the ability of the architecture to humble someone. What does the architecture say? Who does it glorify (in these cases)? How difficult is it to make?

You can also say they're similar but one is good and done well (neoclassicism as you mentioned but there are others) and one is done very poorly (brutalism).

Part of how you could argue that is something like number of visitors. Nobody visits brutalist architecture. It's extremely unpopular outside of academic circles or art establishment points of view.

> Both paintings you cited are very much on the traditional and representative end of the spectrum. None of them seem to be on the more abstract 20th century styles.

I have a hard disagreement here but I'm not sure what there is to really talk about.


Intent is not very relevant to the effect it has on people. You can make a building for any reason you want. Modern neoclassicism doesn't glorify any particular person, it may glorify the State or some Institution. Brutalism also doesn't glorify anyone, it isn't usually made by the state for itself either, I do not understand what the point of 'glorifying someone' would be to a general building. If you want to know 'who' a building glorifies someone then answer who CN Tower glorifies, and the Space Needle, and the Empire State Building.

I am neither an academic nor a member of the art establishment. I find neoclassicism nakedly fake in an irritating manner. Brutalism is a more honest and organic execution of what people try to do with neoclassical buildings.

>I have a hard disagreement here but I'm not sure what there is to really talk about.

You were the one who put Bansky among "weird and ridiculous" art movements which is frankly absurd as Bansky does very traditional and representative art. Did you have any trouble recognizing what Girl with a balloon was? It is a very clear and representational style of painting that has absolutely nothing to do with the more abstract art movements of the 20th century. Do you know of Woman with a towel? Do you consider it normal or "weird"? Girl with a balloon is no more "abstract" roughly than girl with a balloon. If you think one is and the other isn't then you have a really absurd and incorrect view.


But you pointed out the intent in your comparison between neoclassicism and brutalism, I didn't.

But to your point about the effect that some building has on people, we have things we can measure about that effect. You can look at number of visitors, or perhaps price on the market.

> You were the one who put Bansky among "weird and ridiculous" art movements which is frankly absurd as Bansky does very traditional and representative art.

Well it's ridiculous (worthy of ridicule) in part because of the poor quality and craftsmanship. It's poor art because it fails to express meaning in a way that, for example, you can clearly see if you are to compare it to Woman with a Towel. There is much more depth. Individual brushstrokes, intent.

Popular and modern art today lacks the ability to evoke meaning and depth in the same way. This is measurable. There's a reason that IKEA sells Andy Warhol prints and not Women with a Towel prints - yet many more visit and covet visiting the great masters. Modern art requires an industry to convince you that it is art and worthy of praise while the others draw people in without needing marketing. One is a faucet of the degradation of modern culture post-World War I/II (which we can rebound from of course) and is easily made and easily reproduced. The other, isn't.

> If you think one is and the other isn't then you have a really absurd and incorrect view.

No, your view is incorrect and absurd.


Bansky is simply not modern art at all. This is not a personal opinion, it is simple objective fact. Banksy is not remotely modern or abstract art. You are absolutely absurd in thinking so. Pop art is representational and not remotely abstract. If he didn't brush it how on earth did you think he painted it? If it turns out it was not done with brushes but was painted with airbrushes it is still a painting. Unless you mean to say airbrushes are not art. There is no "intent" behind individual brushstrokes, its crap you made up, just like you accuse fans of newer art movements to make up meanings. If you disagree, list me each brushstroke, their coordinates and meanings.

Its also absurd to try to compare visitor count for Bansky against a museum piece. People go to a museum because that is the only place they can physically see the painting. Banksy's work is done in public spaces so footfall would be whatever millions traverse it over the years. Unless you can mind read and tell me exactly which of them are and aren't fans of the painting how can you compare numbers of people who like it? You tell me where is the 'poor craftsmanship' in Girl with a balloon. Its more detailed if anything, and you seem to judge art based on how detailed and representative it is. Its as good in execution as Woman with a towel, and roughly on the same level on the spectrum between representational and abstract. It has a clear subject that has been painted with a degree of realism, just like Woman with a towel. You can't explain me the exact reason, because you made up nonsense about certain paintings based just on their age in years.


So now we're arguing that there are objective facts in art? Interesting. You can't simultaneously say that there are no objective facts and then argue with my interpretation of the art which is subjective opinion, just like yours. You're just proving my point here.

Its as objective as it gets in art as eg saying the Space Needle building is not a Roman style building. Banksy clearly does not belong to any 20th century abstract or modern movement at all. Its objectively absurd and wrong to claim so. The only way such a mind bendingly absurd statement can be made is if someone is only looking at the date stamp not the pictures.

Still waiting for the coordinate by coordinate breakdown of brushstrokes.

You still didn't tell me who those buildings glorify by the way. Why didn't you answer that question?


> Why didn't you answer that question? ... Its as objective as it gets in art as eg saying the Space Needle building is not a Roman style building.

Idk I didn't find it important or interesting. Even in your case of the Space Needle one could simply argue it's a continuation of western civilization in which Rome and Athens were the founders and stewards of. Maybe the Space Needle is just a big Egyptian Obelisk that the Romans were so fond of. Who is to say it's not a Roman style building?

> Banksy clearly does not belong to any 20th century abstract or modern movement at all.

I think Banksy is very abstract, the specific nature of whether it's more close to some arbitrarily defined time period isn't all that relevant, plus there's some overlap as styles emerge.

But I would actually argue it's pretty close as an offshoot. Most of the 20th century art movement is the result of the post-war psychosis that many experienced. Girl with a Balloon is very similar, in my view, even if it's slightly different stylistically.

Regardless of what it is, it's very mediocre as far as artwork goes. It lacks attention to detail, and where one may want to ascribe importance and meaning it is done so through a lens of modernism (like brutalism) that is still reeling from bunkers and trenches in World War I/II.

You're focused on the style, but I'm focused on much bigger things. My point anyway was that pretty much everything after around 1950 or so is bad. Whether we call certain styles 20th century or modern or post-modern is important for catalog purposes but ultimately unimportant to me. Civilization in the west stopped trying, and you can see that reflected in this shit art.


You seem to have some memory issues I think. You were the one who brought up the question of who a building glorifies, not me. It was you. You should be able to justify what you yourself said. Why is it suddenly unimportant? If it was unimportant why did you, not me, bring up that question. You clearly must be able to answer those questions.

>I think Banksy is very abstract

Did you have any difficulty knowing what the painting was depicting? Its more detailed than a lot of impressionism that you seem to enjoy. Its clearly not remotely abstract at all. It has absolutely nothing to do with brutalism, brutalism is an architecture movement not a painting movement. This is in not even wrong territory of absurd nonsense. What is the attention to detail you find missing? If you will put any argument, give exact specifics and examples otherwise don't say it. Its more detailed and well executed than Impressionism, and in neither impressionism nor that painting the intent was anyways photographic representation. It is very absurd of you to say because Banksy's style has nothing post 20th century about it at all. The date stamp changes nothing. Civilization is fine. Its not civilization's fault you make up crap in your head about some art periods and refuse to play the game of making up crap about other art movements.


> You seem to have some mental issues I think.

You seem to have mental issues then.

> You were the one who brought up the question of who a building glorifies, not me.

It wasn't a question though, I was just stating a fact. And "who" doesn't have to be a specific person, though it can be. Who can refer to a people, or a culture, or a civilization. "Who did that? The Egyptians did that", for example. There you go, it's justified and still important.

> Did you have any difficulty knowing what the painting was depicting? Its more detailed than a lot of impressionism that you seem to enjoy. Its clearly not remotely abstract at all.

I disagree completely and that is my opinion. You can't argue with my opinion without inviting objective criteria about artwork.

> What is the attention to detail you find missing?

Well partially graffiti-style art is limited by the medium, and as societies degrade we use cheaper and cheaper materials/products and do so with less knowledge until they die out. Look at suburban homes versus surviving residences in the high-end markets in places like London or Paris (there's lots of other cities just those are two obvious ones).

But from just looking at the artwork I think it's lower quality and less thought and attention was put in to it versus other artwork, including your reference point of Woman in a Towel. Girl with a Balloon seems to try to invoke a message about something but that message seems kind of silly and cliche. And then there are just these two colors. Black and red. Boring.

> It is very absurd of you to say because Banksy's style has nothing post 20th century about it at all.

I'm not trying to litigate whether some folks got together and decided that some art should be grouped in some way. That's just their opinion on the grouping, mine is different. I lump the majority of art post-World War II into a single category with the defining feature being a psychotic relationship to humanity driven by post-war psychosis. It's like brutalism. It's built off of bunker designs and fear of humanity.


In that case you should be able to answer the questions for each of the three buildings. Or the house you live in.

Level of detail is very objective. Are you saying degas is more detailed than that bansky piece? How is graffiti limited by the medium? What do you think is not possible to paint on a concrete wall that is possible to do on a plywood or wood panel or cloth?

> Look at suburban homes versus surviving residences in the high-end markets in places like London or Paris (there's lots of other cities just those are two obvious ones).

Show me average houses from the same economic class in your preferred era and in modern times.

>I'm not trying to litigate whether some folks got together and decided that some art should be grouped in some way. That's just their opinion on the grouping, mine is different. I lump the majority of art post-World War II into a single category with the defining feature being a psychotic relationship to humanity driven by post-war psychosis. It's like brutalism. It's built off of bunker designs and fear of humanity.

You are entitled to having insane beliefs of course. And to continue to invent statements without even attempting to give any explanation or example. Such as how a girl and a balloon is "fear of humanity" but a nude of some woman in a shower is not. What was the less detail? Give me specifics. Until you give specifics, you are just making up crap.


> In that case you should be able to answer the questions for each of the three buildings. Or the house you live in.

I can answer any question you have. Just let me know.

> Level of detail is very objective. Are you saying degas is more detailed than that bansky piece? How is graffiti limited by the medium? What do you think is not possible to paint on a concrete wall that is possible to do on a plywood or wood panel or cloth?

You can't get the depth of brushstrokes or color for example.

> Show me average houses from the same economic class in your preferred era and in modern times.

Why would I do that? What would be the point?

> You are entitled to having insane beliefs of course.

Your belief is insane also.

> And to continue to invent statements without even attempting to give any explanation or example. Such as how a girl and a balloon is "fear of humanity" but a nude of some woman in a shower is not. What was the less detail? Give me specifics. Until you give specifics, you are just making up crap.

There's no detail or specifics to provide that you would entertain or accept. So there's no point. It doesn't matter anyway because not only are the technical details subpar, the point of the artwork itself is, in my opinion, stupid.


>I can answer any question you have. Just let me know.

Who or what does (a) the CN Tower, (b) the Space Needle, (c) the Empire State Building, (d) your house glorify?

>You can't get the depth of brushstrokes or color for example.

In what way do you think they can't? Do you know what priming or not was applied to the concrete in his graffitis? And likewise to the wood panels of the artists you admire?

> Why would I do that? What would be the point?

Why shouldn't we compare average houses of like economic classes if you claim one style is so much better?

>There's no detail or specifics to provide that you would entertain or accept. So there's no point. It doesn't matter anyway because not only are the technical details subpar, the point of the artwork itself is, in my opinion, stupid.

Because you can't. You never yet presented a single example, detail or argument in favor of anything you stated other than "Because I feel so!!!".


> Who or what does (a) the CN Tower, (b) the Space Needle, (c) the Empire State Building, (d) your house glorify?

A - CN Tower I'm not sure. It's just tall

B - Space Needle - I'm not sure it's just tall.

C - Empire State Building - meaning there, Empire (it's in the name) business, commerce, American ingenuity, prosperity, and wealth.

D - My house probably doesn't glorify much. Most suburban houses by design I'd say they just glorify the car that's parked in front of the driveway while the front door is hidden. This is a vestige of the psychosis of post-war architecture which hides away things like windows or doors less an intruder easily find the entrance.

> In what way do you think they can't? Do you know what priming or not was applied to the concrete in his graffitis? And likewise to the wood panels of the artists you admire?

Well I just look at it. Look at it up close, look at pictures of it. It's less technically sound and older artists were much more skilled.

> Why shouldn't we compare average houses of like economic classes if you claim one style is so much better?

Why are we comparing the average house instead of the best made houses where folks had the funds to take creative liberty?

> Because you can't. You never yet presented a single example, detail or argument in favor of anything you stated other than "Because I feel so!!!".

I think the colors are poorly done and muted, the outline of the girl is really boring and euro-centric, and the intended message falls short. The medium used (graffiti) is one of the least challenging and limits the ability of the artist to focus on details which require a lot of time and effort to perfect.

Ok so you can no longer make this argument that I haven't provided a single example. It doesn't matter anyway because art is subjective and all opinions on it are equally valid.


Neither being colorful nor precise photographic representation were the point of Impressionism either. Charcoals peaked in the 19th century. Do you think charcoals are not art? If you go by level of detail and realism as your metrics then that Bansky piece is technically superior to the Degas. I would need you to explain in what sense you think it is euro centric as I have no idea how that is applicable here. What do you think was the message in a bunch of picnicers at a table or a naked woman in a bathroom?

> The medium used (graffiti) is one of the least challenging and limits the ability of the artist to focus on details which require a lot of time and effort to perfect.

Again how do you feel concrete admits of less detail than plywood or wood or cloth, which is what most older painters used?

>It doesn't matter anyway because art is subjective and all opinions on it are equally valid.

I am glad we could get down to tacks and admit neither of us are artists or art scholars and both our opinions are equally irrelevant on this topic.


> Neither being colorful nor precise photographic representation were the point of Impressionism either.

I didn't claim that photographic representation was the point. Colorful for the sake of colorful wasn't the point either, but impressionists artists (since that's what we're talking about) utilized color to a far more expert extent and then you can see that in the artwork. This is in part due to the poor medium, and in part due to the inability for the artist to do anything technically worthwhile with light and color.

There's nothing realistic about Balloon Girl for example when compared to Renoir's painting of Two Sisters. It's kind of like a silhouette or something. There really isn't anything there that would separate it from everyday graffiti or something like that.

Take a look: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/14655/two-sisters-on-the-terr...

Here you can see the masterful use of color and very precise paint strokes to illustrate different forms of lightning and how the colors interplay with each other.

The Banksy piece is kind of like, idk how to describe it in comparison without being too offensive. Even the girl's face in the Banksy work looks a little like a girl ogre or like he is a try hard trying to make some political point or something. It's really jarring and weird to look at. When folks are like "omg this is art, it speaks to me" I'm like, did you have an aneurysm?

> I would need you to explain in what sense you think it is euro centric as I have no idea how that is applicable here.

Happy to, the outline of the girl is western. It's not an asian girl, for example. You can clearly see that. The use of a heart balloon is arguably a European interpretation. Not that I think that's necessarily a bad thing I guess, I do think European art prior to the wars was the best that has been created but others may think differently.

> Again how do you feel concrete admits of less detail than plywood or wood or cloth, which is what most older painters used?

It absorbs paint differently. Can you identify an example where concrete is used paint something such as the Mona Lisa or perhaps something that Renoir created as I mentioned above?

> I am glad we could get down to tacks and admit neither of us are artists or art scholars and both our opinions are equally irrelevant on this topic.

I'm still confused as to why you are asking me to justify my thoughts here. It's just my opinion and if you believe art is subjective you simply have to accept my opinion and that it's just as valid as yours might be. There isn't any possible substance to debate unless you want to also argue there is objective criteria in which we can evaluate art. Is that your position?


> The Empire State Building was famously built in a year. Nowadays the most utilitarian housing project takes longer.

This is true, but usually fewer people die in the construction of those utilitarian housing projects


You're not counting the people who die of homelessness, or of depression because they seem stuck in a situation where they'll never have reliable housing, or in a car accident on their too-long commute, or of a heart attack because of years of stress related to rising rents, or...

Justice delayed is justice denied, and housing that takes years to build because of stupid NIMBY bullsh*t is just an indirect way for the haves to tell the rest of us to kys.


Speed of construction is also not the same as efficiency.

>The Empire State Building was famously built in a year. Nowadays the most utilitarian housing project takes longer.

In China buildings are built faster.


The global construction industry learned a lot in the last 100 years.

Yes, these proclamations of Rust devs that 'the future belongs to us', aren't getting any new fans for the language. Here's my rebuttal:

YOU have proclaimed the language to be as fast as C while being safe. YOU need to prove it. Think of this as an OPPORTUNITY to PROVE that Rust can walk the walk, and you can make Rust coreutils as fast as the C one. Think hard about how you can model low level Linux constructs safely. Fix your libs. Fix the compiler. This is the yardstick you need to meet. You are making free software, and the thing about it is users are free to choose otherwise. YOU need to prove that Rust is just as fast and lightweight as C, and once you do, we'll be happy to adopt.

Right now, dear Rust devs, what you are doing is the same as AI companies are doing - you're trying to usurp power based on extremely nebulous conjured threats. Nobody likes being threatened.


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