The matte effect is a huge part of why these look bad. Marble does an amazing job of showing off the subtle variations in the carving and matte paint flattens everything out. A glossier finish and literally any variation of tones would vastly improve the effect.
Readit Newsdrewbeck commented on Classical statues were not painted horribly worksinprogress.co/issue/... · Posted by u/bensouthwood
The main thing that people snag on is scale and frequency.
If you are super into "ACAB" (all cops are bastards) you can easily "research" this all day for weeks and find so many insane cases of police being absolute bastards. You would be so solidified in your belief that police as an institution are fundamentally a force of evil.
But you would probably never come across the boring stat that less than 1 in 500,000 police encounters ever register on the "ACAB" radar.
This is almost always where people run aground. Stats are almost always obfuscated for things that people develop a moral conviction around. Imagine trying to acknowledge the stat there are effectively zero transgender people perving on others in public bathrooms.
If someone had this experience I’d encourage them to look into how police departments across the US consistently fight against any accountability for the cops who perpetuate those relatively few awful encounters. “Most interactions are harmless therefore the negativity is overblown and cops are trustworthy” is one takeaway if you stop your research at the right point. “if you have a bad experience with a cop the entire department will turn against you; they are not to be trusted” is a more accurate takeaway.
As you say, stats very often obfuscate.
One thing that irks me about these schemes is that they often ignore cities role as regional hubs -- i.e. many cities became cities because they serve as geographical gateways interlocking the surrounding region. They are happy to take the benefits of being at the hub, but (increasingly) adopt a nativistic dialogue with the rest of the spokes.
I get that no one likes highways running through their communities, but when you decommission historical arteries while aggressively adopting anti-car transportation policies throughout the rest of the hub, it's somewhat inevitable that the network get snarled.
Maybe congestion pricing is the way to go -- it can certainly work for major European cities built inland, and surrounded by ring roads. For NYC / SF (surrounded by water), I'm less convinced. Sure, I'll 'just take public transport' to go downtown, but the options significantly diminish if I want to travel from North Bay to South Bay to see my parents, or Jersey to South Brooklyn to visit my inlaws.
> it's somewhat inevitable that the network get snarled.
Is this happening in/around NYC?
> Sure, I'll 'just take public transport' to go downtown, but the options significantly diminish if I want to travel from North Bay to South Bay to see my parents, or Jersey to South Brooklyn to visit my inlaws.
The are the same, you just have to pay the fee.
Also, for like 90% of NJ you'd be going the southern route into Brooklyn anyway, no congestion pricing involved.
drewbeck commented on Iran faces unprecedented drought as water crisis hits Tehran bbc.com/news/articles/cy4... · Posted by u/FridayoLeary
How do you prevent a hurricane? The failures of responding to the disaster were all at the state/local level.
The failures were not all at the state/local level. The feds also had many issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_government_re...
drewbeck commented on Iran faces unprecedented drought as water crisis hits Tehran bbc.com/news/articles/cy4... · Posted by u/FridayoLeary
Perhaps if they had put more resources toward maintaining their water infrastructure instead of spending on their nuclear arms ambitions, funding Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, etc., they might not have had this problem.
Governments like all institutions are able to do many things at once. Connecting their water problems to the issues you list is essentially a non sequitur absent specific evidence of either/or policy choices.
> Ok but you don’t look at every night sky or every sunset and say “wow that’s beautiful
Exactly - because it's a semantic shorthand. Sunsets are fucking boring, ugly, transient phenomena. Watching a sunset while feeling safe and relaxed, maybe in a company of your love interest who's just as high on endorphins as you are right now - this is what feels beautiful. This is a sunset that's beautiful. But the sunset is just a pointer to the experience, something others can relate to, not actually the source of it.
I’ve seen incredible sunsets while stressed depressed and worse. Are you saying sunsets cannot be experienced as beautiful on their own?
drewbeck commented on Gemini 2.5 Computer Use model blog.google/technology/go... · Posted by u/mfiguiere
Yeah I think it would be better to just have the model write out playwright scripts than the way it's doing it right now (or at least first navigate manually and then based on that, write a playwright typescript script for future tests).
Cuz right now it's way too slow... perform an action, then read the results, then wait for the next tool call, etc.
> or at least first navigate manually and then based on that, write a playwright typescript script for future tests
This has always felt like a natural best use for LLMs - let them "figure something out" then write/configure a tool to do the same thing. Throwing the full might of an LLM every time you're trying to do something that could be scriptable is a massive waste of compute, not to mention the inconsistent LLM output.
drewbeck commented on What if I don't want videos of my hobby time available to the world? neilzone.co.uk/2025/09/wh... · Posted by u/speckx
> Basic human decency.
While I think we all agree that this is crucially important, for many of us the affront to decency is not the capture of photons that have previously bounced off someone's skin, but the very idea that that person has a claim to those photons in perpetuity.
I think it's indecent to suggest that someone needs to avert their gaze (or in this case, their CMOS sensor) because I happen to be in the area.
The post here makes it explicit that that the issue is with posting that video, not capturing it.
What kind of show sell $700 tickets? Does that include an escort?
So many big shows these days, unfortunately. Not every ticket will be that much, but many of the best seats will.
drewbeck commented on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah nbcnews.com/news/us-news/... · Posted by u/david927