It’s the same as learning anything, really. A big part of learning to draw is making thousands of bad drawings. A big part of learning DIY skills is not being afraid to cut a hole in the wall. Plan to screw up. Take your time, be patient with yourself, and read ahead so none of the potential screw-ups hurt you. Don’t be afraid to look foolish, reality is absurd, it’s fine.

We give children largess to fail because they have everything to learn. Then, as adults, we don’t give ourselves permission to fail. But why should we be any better than children at new things? Many adults have forgotten how fraught the process of learning new skills is and when they fail they get scared and frustrated and quit. That’s just how learning feels. Kids cry a lot. Puttering around on a spare computer is an extremely safe way to become reacquainted with that feeling and that will serve you well even if you decide you don’t like Linux and never touch it again. Worst case you fucked up an old laptop that was collecting dust. That is way better than cutting a hole in the wall and hitting a pipe.

Yeah it’s technically better (crisper, higher res, etc) but the visual language is totally different and IMO worse. That fire just doesn’t look as hot, for example.

Lighting as an art form is highly coupled with the given tech. Something as small as just changing the shadow method can require artists relighting a whole game. My guess is they aren’t doing this or maybe are pushing the stark lighting the same way depth of field, colored lights, lens flares etc got juiced in previous generations.

That’s always wrong. The tech should service the art, not the other way around.

I was surprised when I read the OG time machine story by Jules Verne and this was a main plot point, and only later stories hand-waived it. You’d think it was something from later analysis of the idea. Almost like that Verne dude was clever.

Maybe not dumb just dark and absurd, but called the cops.

Worked at a retail computer store with repair shop. Extremely assholish customer drops off his machine for an install of a “defective” piece of hardware he couldn’t manage to install on his own, arguing that install should be free because it’s our fault, somehow. Service manager cuts him a deal anyway just to make him happy.

He drops off his PC. Tech takes the machine, boots it up, bam… CSAM on his desktop. Cops came and got the PC, never saw the piece of shit again.

Actually this happened a few times but only once was the customer rude at first.

Retail is depressing.

Personally I haven’t had luck with diatomaceous earth and ants, they seemed willing to sacrifice a few ants to push a trail through the powder and then they were fine (I had to admire this strategy, something I would have never considered). I have had great luck with those ant baits that are a mix of sugar water and borax.

Yeah you should. Look into soil testing with your local city, county, or University Extension office. You send in a little sample of dry soil and they email you the results. It’s usually pretty cheap and will tell you if any soil is unsafe. My local library, for example, has sample boxes for free. Definitely a good idea for anyone in a place where lead paint could have been used, let alone other horrible stuff.

When I first started gardening I had this idealistic view of, “I will just grow a surplus, if the animals take some I will still have enough.” Nope. They eat everything, to the ground. They can do it in one night. There are different pests that specialize in eating the seeds, the roots, the stems, the leaves, and the fruit. Deer will “sample” entire plants just to confirm they don’t like them. Squirrels will take a single bite out of every tomato. Bears will push down an entire fruit tree just to get one fruit. Energy is scarce in nature and these organisms aren’t fucking around.

Took me awhile to finally admit that barriers aren’t just nice, they are required.

Basically, it’s complicated. It depends on your soil/rock type, the water table, and the amount of poop. You want outhouses to be at least six feet deep for parasite lifecycle reasons, but at that depth you could be shitting directly into the water table and if the water is moving through cracks in the rock it could go quite far. Pooping in the top few inches of organic soil is much better for groundwater, but worse for surface water and then also hookworm can spread. And with enough people any primitive system totally breaks down.

Also, there are a lot of uneducated people. The people who owned my parent’s property before them built their outhouse directly over the stream because “water make shit go away”, I guess. In countries without sanitation people shit directly into the river or ocean for the same reason.

After a bunch of water quality data came out in the late 2000s, states and counties tightened up requirements but now to build anything you need to spend at least 10-15k USD on an “advanced” septic system which is completely out of reach for many people. It also requires electricity which could be another 10k. So you either subsidize it or people shit in the creek again.

@SOB_Van_Owen@lemm.ee mentioned composting. Laws are way behind on this. I looked into this before building septic and essentially no states around allowed it for permanent dwellings. I think Alaska and West Texas were the only regions where they still didn’t care. If you truly couldn’t afford it your best bet would be to do composting for your own health and just be illegal because you probably won’t get caught. But that means no mailbox, no address, hiding your camper, essentially boondocking on your own land out of sight. One angry neighbor and its over.

In the USA this is illegal too but it is mostly a health thing, eg you can’t live somewhere with no place to shit because you’ll end up shitting in the river. Not that “health and safety” isn’t constantly abused to brutalize the indigent, but it does also kind of make sense to not let people live long term where they can’t shit, knowing what we know now about outhouses and groundwater.

That said, local governments in rural areas can barely keep fire departments and schools open. Nobody is checking on your vacant land unless someone complains, and they’d have to drive past fifty other shanties to get to yours.

Most of the comments here appear that way. It’s kind of darkly humourous considering the essay.

Which is a shame because state law has a much bigger impact on the actual day-to-day lives of people than federal law. If there aren’t actual journalists then nobody is hanging out at the state house, let alone the local courthouse, to report on what’s going on. So the news is just outrage at federal politics and corporate/political press releases published verbatim.

For people not familiar, each US state has its own legislature. As bat-shit crazy as the federal legislators are, the state ones are even worse. They’re wild. Salaries across states range from low six figures to literally $100 a year. In many states its not even a full-time job. Each representative is the guy who owns the biggest car wash in his small town and thinks Bigfoot keeps breaking the gas pump. Most Americans probably couldn’t even name their state reps and probably aren’t even aware there’s government apparatus at all between the level of local school board and governor.

Speech and thought are bidirectional, meaning not only is there the obvious relationship of thought influencing language but there is a less obvious relationship where language actually changes how we think. Much like how the food you consume becomes your bones, muscles and nerves, you “are what you eat” when it comes to words, speech and thoughts. In that sense the language of a message gives us insight into the mind of the author beyond their literal intent.

Which is scary when you consider people actually think in a manner that produces this ultra processed corporate diarrhea. It’s no wonder these people believe LLMs can replace humanity when their thoughts look like this. Shit is like reverse poetry. The only coherent message I see is that companies delivering ultra processed foods have ultra processed minds. Slop. Guessing that wasn’t their literal intent.

I hope the people affected end up with something better.

At this point let’s just go back to manually using command line GPG/PGP.

I first heard about the fake mermaid “documentary” by someone who was fooled by it. Also a few years ago there were “alien bodies” in… Mexico maybe? They absolutely could not have looked more ridiculously fake, like junior high school art project fake, “found” and promoted by a known con artist, and people in UFO circles are still talking about them credulously.

I like to listen to old Art Bell episodes when I’m driving and it’s pretty astounding how these people can just grift and grift and grift for decades. Thirty books, speaking engagements, radio, newsletters, training courses. The hard evidence is always just a few months away. The whole thing is about to blow wide open by Summer, by next year, in two years. Then it just melts away into the next thing. I find it entertaining for some reason.

The fix is now published (see “Assets” section): https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube/releases/tag/v0.23.2-beta

KDEnlive is improving, however Resolve is still more powerful and mature. That said, DaVinci’s business model seems precarious. It feels like they could, at any moment, enshittify Resolve and force users into a subscription just to maintain access to old edits. I think for that reason KDEnlive is better for almost all users. If you are a professional filmmaker then the color and vfx workflows of Resolve are probably worth paying for, but in that case it’s probably a FinalCut vs Resolve question anyway.

I bet he can’t wait to Mengele this horrific techno garbage into some poor people at the concentration camp in Cuba.

This one is pretty obscure but I feel like it fits this question.

For people who don’t know deep meme lore, YTMND was/is a site where people uploaded extremely short audio clips and images/gifs that went together. This all sprouted from a short clip of Sean Connery saying “You’re the man now, dog!” in the movie Finding Forester. Here’s the Know Your Meme page. Sometimes these were funny, sometimes they were artful and surreal, sometimes they were meta, usually they were just stupid.

One day back in the stone ages I was browsing the site and I found this one:

(CW racism):

I have to say it struck me. I reverse image searched the painting and discovered it’s by an artist named Slowinski whose work is explicitly about fucked up shit in American society. In this case obesity, lotteries, a terrible food supply, etc. are literally murdering a black man but its presented like a carnival attraction. The music seems so fitting to me because it mimicked both how “Black is Beautiful” and Black American art fights against the narrative but is also co opted by capitalism to push the exact same poison. I even thought, “Wow, the name is a play on the N word but also its homophone which means someone who is miserly, perhaps additional commentary?” Fucking excellent, especially for YTMND.

So I clicked the little “source” icon in the corner to see if the author had some insight on this and it’s literally just some kid who slowed down the song, thought it sounded like a “fat black guy”, and googled that then posted the image. Well fuck.

I wouldn’t say it’s a masterpiece but I still remember it, especially the irony of it, and it was a fucking YTMND of all things, so I guess that counts for something.

It’s just a grift so I doubt that will happen unfortunately. They’re just going to be used for military parades, Elon will have one with humongous fascist flags on the front, and the rest will sit rusting in some field on an army base.