I am not sure cryptocurrency even has a practical use outside of money laundering. I guess it’s a casino, too.

I am a professional designer with two decades of experience and I gotta admit, you’re smoking crack if you think GIMP (the project that is almost entirely held back by its stupid name) is superior to Photoshop.

It might be able to get the job done for small tasks, but it is not a serious tool for serious people. I’m sorry. I’m as pro-FLOSS as anyone can get, and even I recognize that right now there’s just no competition in the design department. Affinity is Mac-only, and comes with its own problematic aspects.

Driving is honestly very stimulating for me. I have AuDHD and it is one of the few times I feel calm because I can actively engage all of my senses. Something about keeping an awareness in your head of what’s around you and your car really keeps me occupied.

Makes sense when even adults use phones as a means to escape even a moment of boredom. How many adults use their phones while driving? That’s one of the most mentally stimulating things I can think of, and people get BORED.

Meshtastic, baby!!

All my IT and InfoSec friends have called me alarmist for suggesting even the possibility of a GFW of America, but every day that passes, it looks more and more likely to happen, doesn’t it?

Start practicing circumvention techniques now, y’all, while it’s still legal and cheap to do so. Learn amateur radio. Learn Meshtastic. Learn all the different censorship-resistant VPN technology out there. Host your own websites or services for friends, family, or your community. It doesn’t make it impossible, but it does make it hard, and fascism is nothing if not lazy.

AI photography is so stupid. That target’s got legs. Handsome ones, too.

Might not be what it was designed for, but OpenAI claims their newest model is “PHd-levels” of intelligent. I feel like if that were true, it would do that reliably. Instead, sometimes it ignores the tool it’s programmed to know how to use and just, y’know, wings it.

Which, fair, but that’s my job and it’s taken!

If it turns out anything like Reddit’s attempt, the false-positive rate is going to be astronomical.

I think it’s pretty obvious at this point that Russia is pouring the entire future of its nation-state into keeping Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, so, I think it’s probably inevitable at this point given how little international support Ukraine has by now.

Why wouldn’t you need troops to stand at that border and make sure that Russia can’t just regroup and invade again in 6 years? Wouldn’t you call that ‘Peacekeeping’?

i think that these tools will probably be foundational to discovering more about the human mind and how words or images are received, stored, and assembled in the brain, but people like sam altman and elon musk are convinced that there is nothing else to a ‘person’ beyond that.

‘humanity’ is an emergent phenomenon, and that is what makes it special. a few other animals have the beginning of it, but none have all of it like we do. you don’t need a god or any kind of religion to understand this. as far as we know, we might be one of the least likely things to ever happen in the universe, ever.

Congressperson: “Okay, so, let me get this straight. Your company has spent over 20 billion dollars in pursuit of a fully autonomous digital intelligence, and so far, your peak accuracy rate for basic addition and subtraction is… what was it, again?”

Sam Altman: leans into microphone “About 60%, sir.”

[Congress erupts in a sea of ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’, as Sam Altman is carried away on top of the cheering crowd of Congresspeople wearing a crown of roses and a sash reading, “BEST INVESTMENT”]

I was out at a state-level protest the other day, and a white lady with the curly blue hair sheepishly approached my wife and I and said, “I’ve been out here every weekend since January because I am so, so ashamed of what you all have to live with. This isn’t what we wanted.”

And, like, props to you individually based old lady, but for real, nobody talks about how Hippism was first and foremost a movement of hedonism and personal excess — it was a rebellion against the trauma that 40 years of austerity burned into both the Silent and Greatest generations.

That is why all of them (and really, look at the data, it’s virtually ALL OF THEM) voted for Reagan. He peddled the notion that “greed is good,” which appealed well into a budding voter base who just wrapped up a youth defined by plenty, and they wanted more.

And they’re GOING to want more, and more, and more, until there’s nothing left for us except our one thousandth “once-in-a-century” weather event.

Google Pixel 9 Pofessional. It’s the slightly cheaper version, on account that it got a little burned at the factory.

I will echo the other poster and say that all anyone has gotta do is CTRL+R in their minds, and replace gendered general addresses (“bro, guy, my man, me mate, girlfriend, mama, baby, girlie, gurl, woman, miss, ma’am, mister, etc, etc, etc”) with the word “friend.”

Easy, simple, quick, uses pathways in your brain that already exist, and it’s just something that makes people feel good and included. Sure, maybe it’s a generic greeting at first, but I think eventually people will actually start softening their hearts and making more random friends that way. 🤷 Nothing wrong with a little more sunshine in a world where fucking everybody feels like a puzzle piece that doesn’t fit.

Y’all are way overthinking it. Just say “thanks dawg” to everyone you meet. It even works on dogs!

I also will petition the masses to entertain my personal hill to die on: “dude” is a gender neutral term, and can be so again. As the 1900s-era philosopher Keluardo Joharæon Rice Mitchell, “I’m a dude, she’s a dude, he’s a dude, cus we’re all dudes, hey!”

I guess, but you will lead a lonely life if you can’t find common struggle with people in different scenarios than our own. We can easily lose our soul with these endless purity tests — for some reason, Leftists, progressives, and liberals seem to be constantly on the lookout for the next Jesus Christ, who will just simply energize voters by consequence of, I dunno, magic or some shit.

Neil Young is still a working musician who needs to get his face and music in front of as wide and as general of an audience as possible — why wouldn’t they be where people are? That’s what makes this stand so important. Homie needs Facebook and Insta and still said no.

Well, it’s not like Ted Nugent is writing any new music. He probably doesn’t have anything better to do anyway.

Fair enough. 👌

Fiber optic cable is just glass or nylon, sealed with a thermoplastic. It really is one of the cheapest kinds of cables to make, maybe ever. It’s really not worth anything when anyone who needs to run fiber can just buy a brand new spool for the same price as a spool from four guys in a shitty pickup truck who can’t describe why they even had it to begin with.