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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • when I think of other famous psychologists my mind goes to people like zimbardo or milgram, because of their attention grabbing studies. but they are not great examples because their work has big problems with ethics and replicability. after that, maybe pavlov or skinner? but their work is most famous for its less ethical uses. harlow? or a bunch of his contemporaries who got famous mostly for torturing monkeys? maybe piaget?

    I only did psychology to a college level but I think a lot of 20th century psychologists are famous for the wrong reasons. Freud was full of crap but at least he didn’t torture any monkeys



  • the biggest causes of bsods and other crashes on windows up to xp were drivers. after xp, Microsoft required drivers for windows to go through their signing and verification program, which was controversial but it did solve the problem

    modern windows rarely crashes outright but in my experience it does break in small ways over time, without the user doing anything

    in terms of disabling windows components, it’s true that this can break your system, but I would argue this is still Microsoft’s problem. there are many windows competents that are deeply coupled together when they have no reason to be


  • The fact that book-readers don’t like the TV show isn’t some failure to conceptualise on their part - it’s because Foundation is a below-average TV show and a terrible book adaptation. The Foundation series is an examination of the social and political forces that shape society on the scale of millions of people and hundreds of years. But none of the science and politics that underpins Foundation comes through in the TV adaption. In the books, Hari Seldon is just a scientist, but in the show he becomes more like magic wizard man\Jesus allegory, while Salvor Hardin (who is mostly a politician in the books) ends up as a low-rent space action hero.

    The fact that the series doesn’t directly follow the books isn’t the problem, because a 1:1 adaption of the book probably wouldn’t make for good TV, it would feel dated and dry. I generally like it when an adaption has a new, original spin on the material. The problem is, Foundation isn’t a good show on its own terms, it’s a shallow-but-flashy science fiction soap opera with thin characters and an overarching plot mostly driven by pointless mystery boxes and stupid coincidences. It never engages with the political and sociological ideas presented in the novels, but it also provides no new ideas to replace them. The whole experience feels empty and meaningless.

    In your post, you don’t just say that you like it, you’re actually implying that you think the people who prefer the books are wrong, and that they have a lesser understanding of the material than you. So I ask you: what is the foundation TV show actually about?