No, “aesthetic” is generally just a noun, historically. As in “it has a modern/minimalist/cyberpunk aesthetic.” Its usage as an adjective just means “relating to the general idea of aesthetics as a field of study,” or “someone with a strong sense of and attunement to the design and beauty of things.” Using it to just mean “beautiful,” basically, is a new usage in just the last 5 years or less.
Using it as an adjective, to mean “has a pleasing aesthetic.”
can it? Sure, most any arrangement of bits can be converted into some kind of Unicode text. Can it be converted to something meaningful or readable? No, some formats are plain text (.txt, .ini, .json, .html for some random examples) that are meant to be read by humans, and others are binary formats that are only meaningful when decoded by a computer into specific data structures inside a piece of software.
Well, yeah. That’s not really in the same category or ever really disputed
No, that’s my evidence that it wasn’t ubiquitous and typical.
Maybe not just your social circle, but social-circle-specific.
No, this was just your social circle. I know literally zero people who ever bought into any of that crap
Yes, your aunt has (probably) signed up for what’s essentially a scam. This is their whole business model, they know timeshares sound better than they end up being, so they intentionally trick people into signing contracts that are very difficult to get out of, so they can’t just dump it the moment they realize they don’t want it anymore.
That’s… An extremely bizarre take on what happened, and on whether selling would be a good idea. The stock market almost never has anything to do with electoral politics, and electoral politics almost never have anything to do with what your market position should be.
Not that you’re going to get any kind of constructive discussion here regardless, but it’s worth noting that “liberal” in the US means something very different in the rest of the world (what we’d call “neoliberal” or globalist) and I don’t really know which one you mean
The corporate bureaucracy is as much a product of the overall system, and just as much a slave to its incentives, as you or I. Though granted, the level of self-awareness of their role in the system is on average pretty low. With few exceptions, there is nobody at the wheel of problems like these. Worrying about whose fault it is is usually a waste of time.
It’s wildly under-taught. It explains like half of all problems in the world. Education: “teaching to the test.” Economics: optimizing GDP at the expense of non-material well-being. Maximizing shareholder value by selling out employees and enshittifying your product. Software: “data-driven decision making” optimizing short -term gains over long-term because they are more measurable. That’s just off the top of my head.
This – I think this is probably starting to die out already, but there was a massive wave of startups whose “product” basically amounts to a prompt template that they fill in with your input and pass along to ChatGPT. Any early stage startup getting plugged on HN or whatever, you can assume there’s at least a 60% chance it’s pure smoke and mirrors, and that percentage only climbs the more buzzwords it includes.
Of course it is. People have really fixated on this “Google kills products” meme way, way beyond reality
Gmail is load-bearing software for, like, Western civilization at this point
? You’re saying exactly the same thing I am. I was giving a definition, not an example. Admittedly confusing since I used the (real) word in its own (slang) definition.