This was also exactly what I was taught in school when I was 10 years old. We also saw examples of other maps from other parts in the world that put their location front and center.
That this map is a derivative of "a decolonization map", should be clear to anyone that this is just political posturing and not anything of actual use.
No, the Mercator map has been the world map you'd see everywhere by default, and it is not that useful except for sailing, which most of us are not doing
Mercator used to be quite rare before Google Maps, at least in Finland. But it's an appropriate choice for online maps that can be zoomed in and out. Local and regional maps look as you would expect, and shapes don't change when you zoom out.
What are the practical uses of a world scale map beyond sailing? I mean they could be neat for visualizing some useful route calculated as vectors and further used as vectors, but it would still be of mostly an aesthetic value, appealing to the viewers emotions, which could be achieved just as well with some palm oil and sugar.
> What are the practical uses of a world scale map beyond sailing?
Wow, is this even a genuine question?
I can use a world scale map to illustrate or explain some geographic point I make in a presentation. I can use it as a quick reminder of the geography related to some current news, etc.
If the mariners want to continue using Mercator, who's stopping them?
I remain unconvinced. Even with regional maps people struggle with conceptualising that similar distances at places even relatively close can vary dramatically in time needed to traverse, or with regard to energy/fuel cost to cover, or population density, or a number of things that are important in the moment. It would be extremely hard to use a world scale map to convey actionable information that couldn't be delivered better in another way, the more likely outcome is that it would just be misleading the audience by making them rely on their (almost certainly wrong) intuition rather than the information actually needed in the situation.
As far as the news usecase goes I also don't really see how checking world maps would be applicable outside the news in question being consumed as entertainment, where my previous point on entertainment boiling down to personal pleasure and being fungible still stands.
> So because some people can't use some information well, we should deny that information to all?
The argument isn't that using information is bad, it's that world scale maps are so shit at conveying usable information that there is no point in picking one projection over another (or any really) outside niche settings like sailing. Better to just use other non-map representations of the relevant information at that point.
> I do not consume news purely for entertainment, neither do those in my circle
Here my point was not that all news is entertainment, but rather that news one needs to reference a world scale map to make sense of in all likelihood isn't impacting anywhere near where one is living, nor near anyone amongst family or friends living abroad (hopefully one would remember the closest relevant neighbours), so those pieces are basically entertainment for the masses. (The assumption being that local impact to where the media is would be what's highlighted if there is some, hence the non-need for checking world scale maps in the event that the piece of news is impactful to the individual. So the pieces one feels like checking where on the globe are actually happening, one is in all likelihood checking because one is personally amused by finding out, not because it is useful beyond emotional gratification. And again no projections one could choose from would change the non-impact on the actions/decisions of the consumer of that piece of news.)
I mean it also accurately depicts relative land mass sizes? For the purposes of the UN that seems fairly relevant compared to Mercator which is a good map if you're actually navigating a coast line but atrocious if you're trying to gauge how big the territory you're talking about actually is.
> I mean it also accurately depicts relative land mass sizes?
At the cost of distorting shapes and distances.
> compared to Mercator
The UN resolution compared Equal Earth to Mercator, a comparison Equal Earth easily wins in many circumstances. But the comparison should not be to Mercator, but to other widely used projections that do a better job of minimizing distortions generally, such as Winkel Tripel.
The UN resolution is explicit that Equal Earth was chosen specifically for “social justice”–type reasons.
For the purposes of an organization concerned with the demography of actual people, what is the value Winkel Tripel is bringing at the scales it would be used in general application?
Because if you have a specific application then you choose the correct projection for the application.
But if you're just showing a world map, then what's important?
For the UN I'd say relative land mass size is a pretty relevant measure since that's where people live, and where environmental policy takes effect at the level of nation states it deals with.
And it's also the change you can actually pass in a highly subjective area: a slightly different projection no one wants to vote for isn't a viable option in the first place.
Carry term life insurance and long term disability so you can support your dependents if killed or injured, which you should be doing regardless of the motorcycle if you have dependents.
A former neighbor died from slipping on his icy front steps. Again, carry proper insurance if you have dependents. You can die unexpectedly from things far less dangerous than motorcycles.
> You can die unexpectedly from things far less dangerous than motorcycles.
Existantials are always trivially true. But statistically:
> The lifetime odds of dying as a motorcyclist are roughly 1 in 726. While data specifically tracking "slipping on ice while walking" is rarely isolated on its own, it falls under the broader National Safety Council category for deaths by falls, which has a lifetime odds of 1 in 89.
However, if we compare reduced life expectancy:
> General lifetime falls reduce life expectancy significantly more across the whole population than motorcycle riding, but a motorcycle crash reduces a single rider's life expectancy far more severely.
> Riding a motorcycle poses a vastly higher immediate threat to your lifespan than the everyday risk of falling. On a per-hour basis, riding a motorcycle costs roughly 5 microlives per hour of operation (shaving 2.5 hours off your life expectancy for every hour you ride) because of high speeds and a lack of external frame protection. In contrast, the risk of general falling—despite including hazards like ladders, stairs, and slippery surfaces—costs the average person less than a small fraction of a single microlife per hour of daily movement. While falls ultimately claim more total lives because everyone is exposed to gravity daily, an individual actively trading riding time for walking time dramatically improves their statistical life expectancy by drastically lowering their microlife expenditure.
> The lifetime odds of dying as a motorcyclist are roughly 1 in 726.
The relative danger of motorcycling was not my point.
My point was: Everyone's lifetime odds of dying are 1 in 1. You don't know what will get you but rest assured something certainly will. So, carry insurance if you have dependents.
This isn't morbid, BTW. It's incredibly freeing to know that your family will be financially okay in the unexpected event you are incapacitated or killed.
Dying as a motorcyclist is different from dying. Life insurance either pays off or it doesn’t, if you hold it from 20 to 90, it usually doesn’t pay off.
The point of buying term life insurance isn't because you want it to pay out.
If you buy term life insurance that lasts while your dependents are minors, either you live the term and provide for them or you die early and provide for them.
I think we're talking past each other. I am going to call it here.
What's even more worrying is that I've heared plenty of people defend it as, "Younger generations are just intelligent in different ways compared to older generations."
I'm halfway through my 30's and this downturn started with my generation, halfway through the 80's. I hope I'm missing something, because I still need to see a benefit for lower attention spans, lower comprehensive reading skills and lower critical thinking capabilities.
Halfway through 30's means you were born in the 90's though, but other than that you're right, the advent of the internet, google, and rapid fire short form content has messed with our attention spans; the following generation grew up on the internet and saw the advent of high intensity videos and then short-form mobile-only infinite-stream short-form dashed-words videos.
The anti-intellectualism is so weird to me, it feels like people get overly defensive and angry (a secondary emotional response to shame) when confronted with their own lack of knowledge / intelligence or when asked or challenged to use their own brain.
They're not banning code written and maintained with the use of LLM's. They're banning projects entirely created by LLM's and heavily (or solely) maintained by LLM's.
It's basically not allowing junkfood on their platform. Now that code is easier than ever to barf out, so will the amount of junk.
As for tossing out any and all crypto projects... how is anyone still willing to associate themselves with that pile of garbage?
1. Is not a gamer's dream. It's terrible and you'll find out quite fast you're not interested in everyone's background and scream to most NPC's to shut the fuck up and get to the point.
It's just as terrible as injecting 'realism' in games for the sake of 'realism'.
I agree and I think games are ruined by dialog and quests. I like procedurally generated worlds, not stories, but I want the worldgen algorithm to be written by a human, crudely and with idiosyncrasies. I do not want to wander around a world of blandly plausible filler material.
The real salient point, in my opinion, is whether we can get generative AI to create game content which is not this, but rather novel, engaging and interesting with a solid gameplay loop.
I'm genuinely curious and think it's a cool area to research.
On the contrary. I'd give procedurally generated worlds as an example that suffers from exactly the same problem. You realize pretty fast which parts of the game had thought put into them and which ones are just realizations of a random process.
Of course, a story has to be a story that somebody actually wanted to tell. If you just SHOVE mountains of extra characters and extra side quests into a game where they don't belong and have nothing to do with the main story line, of course it's gonna suck.
> It's terrible and you'll find out quite fast you're not interested in everyone's background and scream to most NPC's to shut the fuck up and get to the point.
Many of the interactions in RDR2 are quite mundane, and despite thousands of hours of (high quality) voice acting, it can become quite repetitive.
I could very much see those micro-interactions being LLM generated, but the TTS would need to be a step above where even the best models are now to come close to RDR2s production quality.
The repetitiveness in video game dialogues is a feature, not a bug. Amongst other things, it allows you to re-retrieve information and hone in faster on what’s story and what’s relevant progression. Having each character invent their own inconsistent sloppy backstory whenever you talk to them is not a positive, it’s not good immersion when every character is a chatbot that can inadvertently give you story beats you shouldn’t be aware of yet or you missed some crucial bit of information but no one talks about it anymore (or worse, never did). In that world, those games would be made popular by people breaking the LLMs in funny ways, not the gameplay itself.
I don't think it can give you story beats you shouldn't be aware of yet. Those beats wouldn't be fed into the prompt until the event happens. LLM can't spit out what it doesn't know.
It might indeed fail to reveal something it should but even that i think is unlikely if the harness steers it hard enough.
I think it could be fun. If you're always given 4 choices of what you can ask the NPC then your choices can be too obvious. If its open ended then you have to think a little what to say and ask.
What "context"? If it's coming from the player's input, then the LLM isn't spoiling anything.
e.g. let's say an important character dies in your game but that hasn't happened yet in this point in the story. You're talking to some NPC. That NPC can't possibly spoil that that character is going to die because the developer wouldn't feed that in as context. The NPC doesn't "know" the character is going to die. You, as the player, might be able to convince the NPC that that will happen and it might respond accordingly, but it won't just randomly divulge that by accident.
This one is a fair point... if all the characters have distinctive names then NPC can plausibly become aware that it is a character in that game and spoil things. I don't know how to stop that, short of training a clean model from scratch, but that seems a bit much for a game.
> it’s not good immersion when every character is a chatbot that can inadvertently give you story beats you shouldn’t be aware of yet or you missed some crucial bit of information but no one talks about it anymore
What you're describing isn't bad dialog, it's bad interaction design.
I think your mental model might be of a single session with zero state, and no bounds on topics of conversation outside of the character's backstory. That isn't close to how this would work. A little understanding of how the game currently operates and some imagination, and you'll see how it could be improved further without degrading gameplay.
> those games would be made popular by people breaking the LLMs in funny ways
Because making the game do funny things didn't happen with RDR2, or any other game, device, or indeed humans (there are whole genre built around making people do or say "funny" things).
Perhaps try to steel man the argument. Your entire response is just one large condescendingly wrong straw man.
> What you're describing isn't bad dialog, it's bad interaction design.
I didn’t say it was bad dialogue. It should be pretty obvious that’s not the argument since I talked in terms of feature VS bug.
> Because making the game do funny things didn't happen with RDR2, or any other game, device, or indeed humans
Again, not at all what was said. Of course those things happen, and of course I know that. The clue is in the fact that I brought it up, which can be ascertained by reading the comment and engaging with it in good faith. The point was that becoming the focus.
Not to downplay, but is it wrong to assume you're self sufficient in daily life? Work a job and pay your bills?
You list your site and have a seemingly lots of professional experience.
Some of these conditions do make life harder, but there's a big difference between high functioning Autism and disabilities that make someone 100% dependent on others.
It's so odd to me that we haven't come up with a term for high functioning autism to separate from low functioning. It's ridiculous to me that a commenter with this background can superficially claim to be suffering from the same disability as a family member I have who has required a caretaker to not die and would probably be totally uninterested or unable to even give an opinion on a complex subject like this.
I cannot recall why Asperger's as a term was dropped or deemed controversial, but this is the equivalent of stolen valor but for mental illness especially when used to justify an argument.
How is it any different than people with obsessive compulsive tendencies claiming they have OCD? There's a huge difference.
> "It's so odd to me that we haven't come up with a term for high functioning autism to separate from low functioning."
If you are interested to learn, autistic people are typically assigned a level of support needs on a scale of 1 to 3. Most people who would once have received a diagnosis of Aspergers now receive the "level 1" designation. Based on your description, your family member is likely "level 3", possibly with comorbidities? I was assigned "level 2".
> "I cannot recall why Asperger's as a term was dropped or deemed controversial"
It was dropped because a number of labels, now all considered to be ASD, were discovered to be different presentations of the same underlying disorder. The divisions break down under scrutiny and the apparent modal jumps disappear when you control for comorbidities and the ability to mask.
> "How is it any different than people with obsessive compulsive tendencies claiming they have OCD? There's a huge difference."
I'm not the other poster, but I'm a different autistic adult to whom your complaints might apply. To answer this question, the difference is that I call myself an autist because I have been diagnosed as autistic, due to meeting the diagnostic criteria of autism.
> "this is the equivalent of stolen valor"
Please go to the equivalent of hell.
Disabled people are allowed to call ourselves by the correct labels without apologising that our suffering is less severe or less obvious than someone else sharing the same label.
> Disabled people are allowed to call ourselves by the correct labels without apologising that our suffering is less severe or less obvious than someone else sharing the same label.
I think you guys are perhaps talking past each other.
The fact you acknowledge and recognise 'less severe' (a significant understatement when comparing ASD to Downs) suggests that you do understand parent's point.
Parent, I also note, was not seeking or implying an apology was sought from people with less severe genetic conditions. Rather, that the implications on QoL, lifespan, social / familial imposition etc of Downs, is nothing at all like so called high-functioning ASD.
The parent comment was specifically and exclusively talking about autism, not Down's syndrome. I'm addressing their claim that it is "ridiculous" for an autistic person to "claim" to be autistic when other autistic people have worse outcomes.
I'm not interested in litigating the fairly obvious point that Down's syndrome is a much worse prognosis than ASD, and the comment to which I responded says nothing about it either.
Dr. Asperger may or may not have been sorting autistic children into high- and low-functioning groups so that the higher group (with “Asperger’s”) could go on to become good Nazis and the lower group could be euthanized.
Perhaps including milder forms of autism under the term was a useful way to reduce funding for the intensive care and therapy required by those with more severe forms (e.g. the nonverbal), since we can now frame these things as “changing who they are” etc. and not, in fact, necessary.
Many children who primarily have intellectual disabilities will be categorized under the "Autism Spectrum" because funding has been applied for "Autism", and not "vague learning disability". If the doctor checks the Autism box, it opens a huge swath of support networks in certain states.
I don't blame anyone for lumping their kid in. I think it's more of a massive failure for social funding that hyper-categorizes due to means-testing.
But the moral conundrum here is that they can't choose untill well after they're born, meaning the parents are the ones that need to make the decision.
This is one of those situations where the child will likely never get the choice, for the same reasons we don’t require informed consent for being born or getting your diaper changed.
I would to add onto what others have said by mentioning that omission is still a decision. Even if the parents didn't explicitly choose, the inaction comes with dire consequences towards the child, whose parents are responsible (and held accountable) for taking care of.
I will always love Star Wars for the 15 minutes of Return of the Jedi that make the point that, with all of magic and technology at your disposal, love is still the strongest weapon in the universe. The rest of Star Wars (and all of Star Trek) is comparative fluff.
B5 spends most of the series saying that sort of thing.
I wonder what happened to the old addage of "only 10% of the time you actually spend coding, the rest of the time is figuring out what is needed".
At the same time I see people claiming 100x increases and how they produce 15k lines of code each day thanks to AI, but all I can wonder is how these people managed to find 100x work that needed to be done.
That this map is a derivative of "a decolonization map", should be clear to anyone that this is just political posturing and not anything of actual use.
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