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It feels a little on the nose. I clicked "random article", and there's an article on the United States. Shockingly, the things in the headlines in the news over the past 2-5 years caused a massive decline.
Maybe I've just read too much history, but the random topics of the day and trends that people care about one decade are almost universally irrelevant or forgotten in five decades. Some things were, in fact, important, but become background issues as people accept and adapt. Others are overblown, wrong, or artifacts on the political or cultural environment, i.e. proxies for anxieties that are generational or for the interests of a major institutional power with a short- or medium-term agenda.
That is to say, if I were to create a wiki for the mid twenty-first century, I'd make it alienating, not comfortably extrapolative. The concerns of the populace should be head-scratchers for us. People should be arguing about shades in social strata that don't exist now, waxing moral on norms we haven't invented, and making jokes we don't have the context to get. Sociopolitically, we should expect a layering of cultural and political movements. In fifty years, that might include some kind of Reaganesque conservative reassertion, some kind of orthogonal or approximately novel social movement, and some kind of progressive or liberal progressive advance, and each reacting to one another and sticking around to greater or lesser extents.
I think we will also be suprised to see what looks like zero or minimal progress in some areas that are currently hyped. I'll leave considering those as an exercise for the reader.
Basically, the future is messy and alienating. We'll be old then, if we're alive, and the concerns of that day will not be the concerns of ours, or even extrapolations on those concerns.
Anybody remember / still play [Nomics]? I thought this was something like that, but I guess it's different.
Which got me thinking, what if it was like a Nomic?
Imagine cloning an exact copy of Wikipedia on another server. Then have 2 player teams: bad guys and good guys. The bad guys edit/write articles to cover their tracks. The good guys scour articles and article histories trying to uncover the truth. Maybe there needs to be a "game master" team that does some type of moderation? I don't know, just spit balling here. Too crazy?
This looks similar to a very entertaining game I played a while ago called Orwell. It’s mostly text based and simulates the experience of being an intelligence/signals analyst in a dystopian surveillance state.
> The in-universe text in Deus Ex had such a profound worldbuilding influence on Truyens that he included its lead writer, Sheldon Pacotti, in Omnipedia.
This just made me want to play this. Sheldon Pacotti is an absolute genius. I started reading his books after finding out he was the lead scriptwriter in Deus Ex, and they've been amazing.
Having said that, the quote above is ironic, since Pacotti wrote the script, not the in-game texts. Those were written by someone else, whose name escapes me now ...
On the bright side, I'll be remembering soon, since now that Deus Ex had been mentioned, I'll have to reinstall it again ...
This snagged my interest but after a while I found myself wishing there were a "next day" button.
Is there some secret to progressing through the plot or do you have to click through every link and read through every minutia and all the change history of each article?
Or is the "secret" to buy a pass? (I was hoping the free sample experience would have some sort of conclusion.)
Depends on what topic you're interested in really. If it's people, look up Michael Bazzell's stuff. Or there are all kinds of data science problems going unsolved.
Please wear a mask, and please stay home as much as possible. Very onerous. We’ve had lockdowns, but even those generally allow you to go outside for a walk.
If your response is "well, you can generally leave your house to go for a walk" then it isn't really appropriate to respond with sarcasm.
In Australia we've had the army on the streets to enforce the lockdowns. It is pretty undeniable that there have been massive curtailments of freedom, geography dependent.
> Please wear a mask
Again, not sure where you are - but in my experience there haven't been a lot of "please"s. And when there have been it isn't a please-please, it is a I'm-pretending-this-isn't-a-command please. I saw a woman get booted off a tram for not having a mask; the police were certainly not just asking.
Not to be alarmist ( then again when exactly does one sound the alarm !?! ), but the Australian army has been patrolling the streets, making home visits & serving "health-enforcement" notices quite publicly.[1]
Other alleged incidents where Australian law enforcement have used force to detain / arrest rule-violating public outdoors and/or at their homes for as simple a violation as not wearing a mask.[2][3][4][5]
[1]
Penrith, Burwood and Rockdale have been put on COVID alert by the NSW Chief Health Officer | 7NEWS
You don't consider "you're not allowed in any building other than your own house, the closest grocery store to you, or an emergency room" to be a massive curtailing of freedom? Because a lot of places basically said exactly that.
People that don't mind killing other people to improve their personal comfort usually end up restricted to their cell and the prison's yard, when the issue is correctly framed.
I don't know why people expect this particular case should be any different.
I mean, I don't know how you imagine a better society but in mine there's definitely no cars involved (and I say that as someone who really really enjoys driving)
The average car driver doesn't risk passing a deadly virus to every single other driver they pass that day. Crashes don't kill that many people compared to the number of kilometers driven each day.
Frankly, whether you agree or not with the rationales, in comparison to any previous vaccination campaign, this one is really, really mild.
I think that I would have preferred a more straightforward law that mandates vaccination, rather than the more flexible/mild/sneaky approach taken by many governments, but I know that I would have hated being the one who makes any kind of public health call during this entire covid pandemic.
[ ] Neurometric montages: If you are equipped with a neurometric colloid, such as those administered with a membership of G6, Omnipedia may use this function to authenticate your login automatically and continuously for up to eight hours.
[ ] Behavioural montages: Omnipedia's algorithms can keep track of your emotional state and, depending on your reactions, highlight content that piques a particular interest or restrict content that may be deemed upsetting or inappropriate.