To be fair, if you’re a character actor in Hollywood, can you really afford to be turning down parts merely because they’re typecasting you?

As long as people are making media with Nazis in it, someone’s gonna get cast to play the Nazi. Might as well cast someone who understands the role.

It doesn’t mean they believe in it, which is discussed in the very article you linked.

Seems pretty straightforward, actually:

“We need to cast someone to play a Nazi for this episode.”

“Remember that one guy we cast in Voyager? He was pretty good. Let’s just get him back.”

Both series had the same primary casting directors:

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0244365/fullcredits/casting_director?ref_=m_ttfc_8
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0112178/fullcredits/casting_director?ref_=m_ttfc_8

Yeah, it can be really helpful to understand the context and the problems they were trying to solve.

Like for example, I think a lot of pop-sci talk about Special/General Relativity is missing huge chunks of context, because in reality, Einstein didn’t come up with these theories out of thin air. His breakthrough was creating a coherent framework out of decades of theoretical and experimental work from the scientists that came before him.

And the Einstein Field Equations really didn’t answer much on their own, they just posed more questions. It wasn’t until people started to find concrete solutions for them that we really understood just how powerful they were.

Trying to teach yourself higher math without a textbook is nearly impossible.

You could try just Googling all the Greek letters and symbols but have fun sifting through the hundred-odd uses of σ for the one that’s relevant to your context. And good fucking luck if it’s baked into an image.

The quickest way I’ve gotten an intuition for a lot of higher math things was seeing it implemented in a programming language.

I understood about 45% of that, and I also hate them.

This is the whole idea behind Turing-completeness, isn’t it? Any Turing-complete architecture can simulate any other.

Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/505/

This is undeniably hilarious, but if you’ve ever seen actual dissection photos or videos of surgery, you kinda recognize that good anatomical drawings required a lot of mental effort to create.

Imagine making a completely accurate diagram of everything in a car’s engine bay, either while the engine is running and it’s doing 70mph down the highway, or after it’s had a head-on collision at the same speed.

We’ve seen plenty of evidence that the current inflation is almost entirely driven by companies price gouging consumers.

And actually, the fact that the price hasn’t increased is pretty obvious evidence of this.

Do you think, for one second, Apple would accept any appreciable hit to its profit margin if their costs had inflated 1:1 with consumer prices? Especially when they have a perfect excuse to blame a price increase on?

The phone may cost them a little more to make than last year, but I doubt it’s that much.

There’s tons of elasticity built into the pricing already so that carriers can offer discounts.

The point is kind of moot because the phone definitely comes with the cable: https://www.apple.com/iphone-16/specs/

The article is actually about the new AirPods. I was going entirely off the information in the comment I was replying to.

The thing is, the iPhone 14, 15 and 16 all have the same launch price: $799 US

Adjusted for inflation, the 14 and 15 may have cost more, but Apple is almost certainly making that money back somewhere else. Like, say, making people pay for accessories that used to be included?

And at the end of the day, the prices consumers pay for end products don’t follow the exact same curve as the prices megacorporations pay for materials and labor. We’ve seen plenty of evidence that the current inflation is almost entirely driven by companies price gouging consumers. So it’s not really reasonable to assume that Apple’s costs have gone up 1:1 with consumer prices anyway.

But here’s the question: does it cost Apple $20 to make a cable? I seriously doubt it. It probably costs them closer to 20 cents per cable. So in reality, they now make approximately $20 more from every sale than they did before.

Sure, not everyone is buying a cable with every phone. But cables get lost, they wear out, they get stolen by your kids to charge their iPhones because they broke theirs, they get chewed up by pets, etc.

And you can bet your ass that, just like any other high-margin item, the people in the Apple store are gonna be incentivized like hell to get every customer to buy a cable with their phone whether they really need it or not:

Do you have a charging cable?

Is it an Apple cable?

Are you sure you have one that’s USB-C and supports USB Power Delivery?

And it’s not worn out?

You say your dog chewed on it a little but it’s mostly intact and still works?

Well, I’d recommend getting a new one anyway.

Yeah you can get your own if you want but it’s best if you get an Apple cable.

OK great, that comes out to $820 total. And do you want to insure your phone for $5 a month?

It’s fine if they reduce the price accordingly.

If it’s still the same price after they take the cable out, it was never about reducing waste to begin with.

Knowing Apple, that wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest, which is why I never have and never will own any of their products.

I feel like you either fear and/or despise generative AI, or you think it’s the best thing since sliced bread.

There seems to be very little in-between.

It’s an ideal that’s only achievable when you’re able to set your own priorities.

Managers and executives generally don’t give two shits about yak shaving.

Tip #1: if you’re gonna post your programming blog to social media, make sure it can handle the traffic…?

I’m no lawyer but I think drilling into someone’s head without permission might still count as assault.

In all fairness, I think it was a joke.

Jfc, having the girl in the room at all is a liability, let alone letting her touch the patient.

I hope this guy’s malpractice lawyer has good heart meds.

Here it is, folks, case in fucking point.

Did I ask, at any point, for opinions on how I should be feeling about any of this? I don’t think so.

In all fairness, she was pretty patient with me for a bit, but as I alluded to, I attempted to apply small course corrections when I should have tried a different course entirely. In reality, this was the cumulative effect of multiple different occasions.

See, my dumb ass didn’t think it was an issue with what I was saying, but how I was saying it. So I figured it was just a matter of trying to be more tactful with my suggestions. Obviously, that wasn’t it.

Sure, she could have been more mature and introspective about it, but so could I. So it’s kind of a wash.

I can’t really blame her because of the shit she was going through. There’s a bit more context that I don’t really want to get into on a public forum, but in hindsight her reaction is understandable.

Kinda hard not to blame myself when it was ultimately my fuck up, however. I’m still dealing with that over 4 years later.

Well, kind of the exact opposite of that. I realize that’s meant to be satire, but that kind of attitude is what got me into trouble.

I left out the exact details for brevity and privacy, but it was a situation where there wasn’t a simple answer. I just didn’t have a good grasp of the concept of active listening.

I was trying to engage with what she was saying, because she had previously told me that it seemed like I didn’t care about her problems. But I just wasn’t saying the right things.

In reality, my previous approach had revolved around keeping my mouth shut because then there was no way I could say anything to fuck it up. But then, in large part thanks to my undiagnosed ADHD, I would tune out without realizing it.

So I engaged in the only way I knew how, by trying to rationalize her experiences when I should have been empathizing with them.