Like sometimes I'll make a post and I go back and I reread it and I'm like somebody way smarter than me wrote this, and sometimes I'll go back and reread it and wonder how the fuck was I so stupid as to write this?...
"I'm a million different people from one day to the next; I can't change my mould, no no." — Bittersweet Symphony
We all show rotating aspects of ourselves, but we remain fundamentally the same. Unless something drastic happens that changes how those aspects present or function anyway.
(Maybe that lyric doesn't mean what I'm reading into it, but it's what I've taken from it. That's a funny thing about art.)
So yeah, I've looked back through comments I've made and realised that I knew something at the time that I'd since forgotten, and seen how smart I'd been - or how utterly cringe-inducing, and known that at some point, that if the cringe is bound to return, so might the smart. Hopefully. Maybe. Please.
There's also the fact that we distil ourselves down for a comment. Present the best side, or the best of the aspect we're going for. Even trolls do this. Unfortunately. So when we look back, not at all in the same frame of mind that we were at the time, it's like looking at the highlights of someone else's life on some other social media, not seeing everything else that's going on besides.
I probably won't remember all the edits and corrections I've made to this comment before submitting the first time. Only time knows how future me will perceive it, should I ever look back.
Old guy checking in. When ad blockers first became a thing, my then-teenaged boys started using one and were trying to talk me into it. I was pretty dubious. I said my concern was that the model most of the web was built on was ad-supported. That is, people created content on the web to try and get visitors, and made money by selling ads on their site, or used monetized links. If everyone started using ad blockers, I said, that model would break down and either people would stop creating content or they’d go to a new model, like subscriptions. I figured few people would take time equivalent to a full time job to create content for free.
I think that largely came to pass. A lot of great online publications have closed their doors, and the are lots of paywalls now. The things is, the sites are just as much to blame. Most people wouldn’t have been driven to use ad blockers if the ads hadn’t gotten so untenable. A banner or a box here or there is one thing, but when there are a giant number of pop-up windows, autoplay videos, windows you can’t back out of, and all the other hellish stuff, people are going to be highly motivated to find a way to stop it.
That whole arms race was one of the things that ruined the internet, in my opinion.
This isn’t about immediately filtered content, like the disgusting DuffMan George Floyd meme, or Holocaust denial. That’s pretty well kept in check by mod tools. I’m also not talking about cogent or even pointed political discussion....
So my home office is in our basement while my wife’s is in a finished attic space. We have a mini split system, but it has to be all heat or all cooling, and many days it’s cold in my office, but hot in my wife’s office....
Depending on the size of the flue, it would be entirely possible to put a 4"-6" stainless corrugated liner in there with a “T-Body” and “snout” going through the side of the chimney in the attic and close off the damper with an opening for airflow. Then you would have in-line duct fans with a rheostat control at both ends pushing air one way or the other. The duct fans that are the same diameter as the duct don’t have much pressure, so you would probably want a centrifugal fan to spend once and get desired results. You can buy the fan with the speed controller or they do have ones you plug into. The fans are loud, so the Mrs would appreciate it if it were inside of a baffle box to keep the noise down while she works. How low speed the fans can go is limited, so don’t expect to have infinitely varial speeds without spending a lot more.
There also are temperature controllers so you can have the fans cycle to regulate temperature without manual control. You would probably want to put that on only the attic fan if you went that route.
You could use galvanized duct, but it will rot out over time in the flue and it is harder to install vs a stainless corrugated liner.
The fans are $200-400 depending on how much chooch you want. The liner runs $12-16 per foot. The T-Body and snout are about $150-200.
There are bi-directional varial speed duct fans but they carry a premium, typically require custom duct manifold/plenum fabrication, and are two fans put together to achieve the pressure required. Going with one fan at each end is easier, cheaper, and easier to repair should one fan fail.
If it were my project, I would try just having the fan in the attic pulling and control it with a speed control plus temperature controller. If that wasn’t enough is when I would add the fan in the basement and do manual control with variable speed and have both fans push. I don’t really see why you would want to pull air from the attic, but you seem to feel you would need to.
It can be tricky to get the snout on the T-Body, you will want some 1/4" extensions and impact, as well as someone who can help you.
AT LEAST READ THE FOREWARD. It very meticulously lays out their 4 goals:
Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.
Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty
In plain language they want to:
Effectively make LGBTQ+ persons illegal, unable to marry, adopt, or even exist openly, nationally ban abortion, ban education about black history and systemic racism;
hamstring or eliminate a bunch of government agencies like the Department of Education, the EPA, the DOJ, Department of Homeland Security, and to eliminate many positions within the federal government or install loyal puppets;
close our borders completely, pull out of NATO and the UN, invest heavily in oil, coal, and natural gas while divesting in renewable energy and removing environmental regulations, and exert extreme control over tech companies and universities;
create school voucher programs which very much are to allow parents to segregate their children and use tax dollars to fund conservative, religious, private schools at k-12 levels, and eliminate social welfare programs. Also includes the contradiction of “champion the dynamic genius of free enterprise” and “include antitrust enforcement against corporate monopolies.”
The whole thing is full of conservative buzz words, “anti-woke” rhetoric, and contradictions about free enterprise while wanting to exert control over people and “big tech.”
But it’s also dangerous because they’re going to attempt to consolidate power to the next Republican president. There are complicated and far-reaching consequences to the things they’re proposing that would take an academic paper to get into. For example, Ron DeSantis just signed a bill making lab-grown meat illegal because of the “global elite.” It doesn’t make any sense, but it’s part of the reactionary, anti-leftist, culture war bullshit the Republicans are on right now.
That summary should be enough to show why this is so dangerous.
Don’t assume the article has to make sense. Notice how all the blame is put on Biden’s administration or consumers. Why no mention of corporate price gouging? No mention of record profits?
It’s just another fluff piece trying to draw attention away from, perhaps, the real problem.
Earlier this year, Microsoft added a new key to Windows keyboards for the first time since 1994. Before the news dropped, your mind might’ve raced with the possibilities and potential usefulness of a new addition. However, the button ended up being a Copilot launcher button that doesn’t even work in an innovative way....
That’d actually probably be a not-unreasonable application for machine learning, if you could figure out some kind of way to measure short-term biological arousal to use as an input. I don’t know if blood pressure or pulse is fast enough. Breathing? Pupil dilation?
Like, you’ve got inputs and outputs that you don’t know the relationship between. You have a limited number of them, so the scale of learning is doable. Weighting of any input in determining an output probably varies somewhat from person to person. It’s probably hard to get weighting data in person. Those are in line with what one would want to try doing machine learning on.
IIRC, vibrators tend to have peak effect somewhere around 200 Hz, but I’d very much be willing to believe that that varies from person to person and situation to situation. If one has an electric motor driving an eccentric cam to produce vibration, as game controllers do for rumble effects, then as long as the motor’s controller supports it, you could probably train that pretty precisely, maybe use some other inputs like length of time running.
I don’t know if it’s possible to have a cam with variable eccentricity – sort of a sliding weight that moves towards or away the outer edge of the cam – but if so, one could decouple vibration frequency and magnitude.
So that’s an output that’d work with a variety of sex toys.
There’s an open-source layer at buttplug.io – not, despite the name, focusing specifically on butt plugs – that abstracts device control across a collection of sex toys, so learning software doesn’t need to be specific to a given toy, can just treat the specific toy involved as another input.
I’m sure that there’s a variety of auditory and visual stimuli that has different effect from person to person and isn’t generally-optimal today.
And, well, sex sells. So if one can produce something effective, monetizing it probably isn’t incredibly hard, if that’s what one would want to do.
EDIT: Actually, that variable-eccentricity cam is designed to be human- rather than machine-adjusted. That might not be the best design if the aim is to have machine control.
I found a few old phones from my family. II cleaned them, installed LineageOS and rooted most of them. On one I installed postmarketOS, one is still stock Android and one is lets say bricked (after installing lineagesos it stay on boot logo for ever, before that I installed lineageos and nethunter on it). One one disk encryption...
For anything internet related: Keep in mind that you likely are not getting any security updates anymore, even on a custom ROM.
Also keep in mind that each accu you have in your home rises the risk of fire slightly. Obviously it always depends on the type and age of each accu.
Now some ideas
Someone on Lemmy wrote about using a phone as Home Assistant box, but I don’t remember if it was usable enough (e.g. possible to access usb/sensors/etc)
You might use them as sensors for Home Assistant, however the accu might not last that long, and/or having them connected to power might not be great for the accu
Run a media center on it (e.g. Kodi) and cast it to your TV
Connect some speakers and use them as Spotify boxes in different parts of the house (as it is specifically easy switching devices with Spotify. Maybe there is software for general WiFi speakers)
Use one to create a smart mirror that displays current information like weather etc
Do you have an IT department? Go explain to them how you fucked up and used a Windows key from a pirate website on your work laptop and risked the company’s reputation and a possible lawsuit from a tech giant and how you wish to unfuck things before it’s too late or lose your job.
Fucking hell man. That was a dumb move. I hope you learn a lesson from this.
So a couple of weeks ago, I made this post asking for help from those who used Linux and Davinci Resolve, and their experience. To those who’s response was effectively “I use arch btw”, I hear you, but that wasn’t the question I wanted to ask....
Heck, sign me up. That’s basically time travel to a future where presumably humanity has gotten its shit together if they’re still around inventing better ships. I see no downsides.
For anyone wondering if Threads and Facebook at large will be a fine neighbor in the space and compatible with other apps/services in the fediverse: they’re already automatically hiding comments that mention Pixelfed mastodon.social/@dansup/112126250737482807
I think AI replacing artists is going to be a good thing in the long run.
Right now, if you want custom artwork made without the use of AI you have to either criminally underpay an artist on Fiverr or pay an artist hundreds of dollars to make one piece which you may not like.
I think the cat is out of the bag on AI generated art pieces and there's no way to put it back in, and so future artists will use a combination of their actual art skills and their ability to work with an AI system to create entirely new and currently nearly impossible art pieces, and there is an entire field of unexplored possibilities waiting to be tapped by Future artists.
AI can't make new art.
All it can do is repurpose pieces of art other people have made, just like Auto-Tune can make you sing on pitch but it can't make you a good singer.
Like with many technologies, it creates as much as it destroys. It is a tool, tools change how things are used, some are adapted, some fade to obscurity.
I think there are merits to LLM’s, like for games and obviously translation. I also think for games there will be a script director who would work with the games LLM to make it work in the games universe (rather than spewing random things the player said in a playthrough).
I also think there are merits to AI generative tools, however I think they will be used in ways that differ minimally from something like procreate. Given that things like infill and nodes have developed so far as they have, it’s really just a few steps behind the “polish” of an adobe product. And mostly open source (depending on what you use).
Finally, I think something people tend to forget is that commissions are for people able to pay. If someone is creating free art because cost is an inhibiting factor then were they really going to be paying an artist for a commission?
That said, there are still downsides, and a vast number in our current state. Chances are high that copyright laws will go to protect corporations that use AI but prevent people from using local models. A far better approach would be for independent artists to be able to create, license, and sell their own checkpoint models, but that will never happen for so many reasons, primarily artists having shunned AI very quickly.
Another downside is that it’s just so damn resources expensive. Running AI on local hardware had gotten more resource efficient relatively quickly, but it’s still so much higher than it needs to be still. We can get the exact same results, better and faster even, with far lower power consumption by just using an analog computer to sift through the model and translate that analog data to digital data. So even if someone is just running it on a laptop with stable diffusion low beam settings it’s still quite a bit more intensive than it needs to be. Frankly, tensor cores and CPU’s are a brute force method.
Still, at the end of the day AI is a tool with a relatively low skill needed to get adequate results, with a very high skill ceiling for making something truly good with it. There is nothing wrong with a 2 job 60+ hour work week Sally wanting to use midjourney because it’s the only art she can currently make. She deserves that.
At the same time, if it’s true that Disney used AI for the Secret Invasion intro - what the fuck? If that’s replacing an actual artist, or an actual artist was trying to use Deforum and had that as finalized work that is a much different situation. As with all things, set, setting, and moderation.
A couple of weeks ago I tried Outlook 365 when Windows Mail made me mad for the 1000th time because it has issues to actually send the E-Mails from one of my accounts…
Anyway, outlook started and of course just added my Microsoft Account ignoring all other accounts that could’ve been imported from Windows mail. There was a new mail so I clicked it. Although Firefox is my default browser, edge opened and there was a website. It took me multiple seconds to realize that Microsoft just baited me to click an ad and earn a couple of cents.
I got so angry that I installed thunderbird. If I compare it with older releases from a couple of years ago it did get a whole lot better. I’m very happy.
Windows gave me so many reasons in the last months that I also ditched it completely. Running Linux Mint now and just like thunderbird it is so much more refined if I compare it with the past…
Paying money for crappy subscription based software like office (need it for work) and still getting ads was definitely the no 1 reason to switch.
Users of Google Chrome on Windows 10 and 11 are reporting that they have suddenly found themselves using Microsoft Edge, with their Chrome browsing sessions appearing in Edge....
Thank you, our future 🌐 (sh.itjust.works)
cross-posted from: sh.itjust.works/post/19653721...
Pills (Take Two) (lemmy.zip)
Do you ever go back and reread your own posts and find yourself wondering how the hell you managed to say the words that you said?
Like sometimes I'll make a post and I go back and I reread it and I'm like somebody way smarter than me wrote this, and sometimes I'll go back and reread it and wonder how the fuck was I so stupid as to write this?...
Seriously, why aren't most people using adblock these days (lemmy.world)
Has anyone else noticed a large influx of Trolls lately?
This isn’t about immediately filtered content, like the disgusting DuffMan George Floyd meme, or Holocaust denial. That’s pretty well kept in check by mod tools. I’m also not talking about cogent or even pointed political discussion....
I’d like to build a ducting system to actively push air from one room to another. Is that a thing?
So my home office is in our basement while my wife’s is in a finished attic space. We have a mini split system, but it has to be all heat or all cooling, and many days it’s cold in my office, but hot in my wife’s office....
FCC explicitly prohibits fast lanes, closing possible net neutrality loophole (arstechnica.com)
[serious] If Project 2025 becomes a reality. Would you fight in a civil war?
All the data so far is showing inflation isn't going away, and is making things tough on the Fed (www.cnbc.com)
Tech brands are forcing AI into your gadgets—whether you asked for it or not (arstechnica.com)
Earlier this year, Microsoft added a new key to Windows keyboards for the first time since 1994. Before the news dropped, your mind might’ve raced with the possibilities and potential usefulness of a new addition. However, the button ended up being a Copilot launcher button that doesn’t even work in an innovative way....
Windows 11 will reportedly display a watermark if your PC does not support AI requirements. (www.tomshardware.com)
Thank you Raymond Hill (programming.dev)
Taylor Swift needs a glass of water at night too (files.catbox.moe)
What to do with old phones?
I found a few old phones from my family. II cleaned them, installed LineageOS and rooted most of them. On one I installed postmarketOS, one is still stock Android and one is lets say bricked (after installing lineagesos it stay on boot logo for ever, before that I installed lineageos and nethunter on it). One one disk encryption...
deleted_by_author
I've Installed multiple Linux Distros on my Editing Rig to see how well Davinci Resolve Studio works. Here are the results.
So a couple of weeks ago, I made this post asking for help from those who used Linux and Davinci Resolve, and their experience. To those who’s response was effectively “I use arch btw”, I hear you, but that wasn’t the question I wanted to ask....
Interstell(rule) (lemmy.world)
First post! Here’s a stolen meme!...
Threads is automatically hiding comments that mention Pixelfed (mastodon.social)
For anyone wondering if Threads and Facebook at large will be a fine neighbor in the space and compatible with other apps/services in the fediverse: they’re already automatically hiding comments that mention Pixelfed mastodon.social/@dansup/112126250737482807
Is it a good idea to let a 16 yrs old use an AI assistant .i.e. chatgpt?
What are pros and cons of doing this? What impact it will have on the personality / mind of the person down the line after say 10 yrs?
Microsoft sneaks ads into the new Outlook for Windows (www.ghacks.net)
Microsoft Edge is apparently usurping Chrome on people’s PCs (arstechnica.com)
Users of Google Chrome on Windows 10 and 11 are reporting that they have suddenly found themselves using Microsoft Edge, with their Chrome browsing sessions appearing in Edge....
Any users worship Christianity regularly like me?