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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 9th, 2023

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  • LogSeq notes: https://github.com/logseq/logseq A different approach to note taking & journal. Very nice looking, rich plugin ecosystem, could use some performance boost but I think they are working on it

    My true love is Org Mode and Emacs, but honestly LogSeq feels similar in a weird way with its extreme simplicity but also confusingly powerful and open ended design.

    I am EXTREMELY impressed with LogSeq, I showed it to someone recently and they straight up told me “this is the best software I have ever tried in my life!”… admittedly they didn’t know about PKMs, external brains, obscure powerful note taking, thinking and tasktracking software but also that is kind of the point… they could immediately see the power of these type of tools even though they didn’t know anything about them because Logseq is so straightforward and powerful.

    Logseq + Syncthing (my favorite software period) is an INCREDIBLY powerful combination and honestly shits on 99.99% of office/task tracking/productivity/filesharing software from boutique productivity companies and multi-billion dollar tech companies alike. Like yeah… Syncthing isn’t a file backup utility, and Logseq has no built in simultaneous editing capacity in its current version but when you are talking about syncing edits of tiny markdown plain text files you can just basically forget all of that crap and just pretend you and the person you are sharing Logseq notes with are magically the same user making edits on a single device… and so long as you are reasonable with your editing pace you can forget the nightmare of the cloud/corporate silos/subscription/surveillance-capitalism… COMPLETELY in the realm of notes and note sharing.

    Crank the simple file versioning up to like 40 on your Syncthing share folder for Logseq, deal with the extremely rare file sync whenever it pops up through Syncthing’s GUI, preferably have one of the devices in the share network be a phone or raspberry pi that is online most of the time and never look back!





  • TL;DR of course sci-fi couldn’t have imagined how cool juggalos are, scifi is mostly written (and MORE importantly gate-kept) by man-babies with incredibly narrow views of reality, fuck sci-fi let’s go hang out with the juggalos…

    Honestly other than just extrapolating out what technologies will facilitate the rise of dystopias (while being weirdly obsessed with the aesthetics of dystopias to the point of it being dysfunctional to the objectives of the narrative and fiction) what have sci-fi writers actually meaningfully imagined about the future in the western canon?

    For all the mountains and mountains of sci-fi books and tv shows written I am not sure there is actually much to show for it except endless descriptions of how colonization, war and authoritarian power will be facilitated by future technologies (in a way that superficially claims to be subversive but is really just technology porn, politics be damned).

    The only western/European sci-fi series of any significant popularity that I think grapples with anything meaningfully human about positive potentials of the future is Star Trek. Other scifis of course accomplish this in parts of their stories, or in peripheral stories and side series, but almost without fail they all circle back to the same 5 things a boomer dude can imagine a society of boring boomer dudes doing who worship technology and talk over women.

    Murderbot is dope tho, I don’t say this critique to attack the wave of sci-fi that is written by diverse new authors that subverts the genre, just to say that the old guard of the genre should be trashed and thrown out the window in favor of these new authors who actually treat envisioning the human condition realistically as important…. to writing books about humans in the future…….

    ….sigh sorry I really think the classic sci-fi genre gets wayyyyyyyy too much of a pass for being a serious genre of art when it is written by a bunch of clowns who mainly used representations of human beings like action figures and G.I. Joe figurines, bending them in brutal and inhuman ways so that they carry out cool action sequences on the living room floor and reference cool technologies that will make their dad notice them and give them a hug for being smart. None of which is wrong unless you are claiming to write literature that illuminates deep things about the human condition with respect to the breadth of future possibilities.




  • Unfortuantely, I think just about every fan base these days has to deal with its share of racist Trump supporters who steal scrap metal from construction sites for meth money…

    If you live in the US (or UK) you live in a collapsing society being suffocated and held in place by neoliberal austerity politics that purposefully shuts down the possibility of any genuine systematic reform that isn’t in the direction of fascism. The US is run by centrists who will spit in your face (while their Republican drinking buddies cheer them on) for daring to suggest populist leftism reforms that would actually improve the quality of life of the working class and poor of the US.

    In that environment people are going to resort to taking meth and stealing scrap to survive, as society is literally trying to kill them off and there is no rational hope to be found for things to change. Are these people druggies, are they sketchy? Are some of them maga heads who turn to pathetic and hateful views? Yes, but I think it is important to always recognize the conditions that lead desperate people to act in desperate ways when we discuss the repulsiveness of said desperate acts of non-violent crime.


  • Maybe the whole point of Monty Python was to sketch out ways that humans could behave that would confuse and hugely throw off machine learning algorithms.

    Talk about “poisoning the well” with AI training, all you have to do is 65% of the time make completely normal and rational intelligent choices and the other 35% be completely illogical and inscrutable. Any algorithm trained on you then, no matter how smart you are or how valuable your knowledge is, will inconsistently and abruptly resort to batshit crazy and unreliable choices and information. :)

    The thousands and thousands of years we have nurtured sarcasm and absurdism in the garden of human culture has all been for this one true purpose…

    I would say maybe John Cleese is an alien trying to save us, but Cleese is a dick no matter how funny the stuff he was involved in was and I would hope Aliens were much more open minded than he is.





  • This is actually something that is really important to do with your dog, especially if they are a young pup that is going to grow into a large, powerful dog.

    (This is obviously advice ONLY for a dog you trust or unlikely to be seriously hurt by)

    Lay down next to their food bowl while they eat, get your face near their food, pet them and make them feel rewarded for doing what they are doing as they are eating. Pick up some kibbles out of their dish with your hand (again, ONLY do this if you already trust your dog or feel safe doing this) and offer them to your dog to eat out of your hand as they are eating their meal. Don’t let your dog become territorial towards humans about eating their food, teach your dog that humans don’t steal their food, it makes your dog so much less dangerous around other people.

    Lol so yeah, I literally do that last panel with my dogs, but I do it so a human having a face near their food isn’t perceived to be a threatening thing to them, it’s just normal. I grew up with german shepherds and we trained them to be friendly family dogs, you can’t risk a kid running up behind your shepherd while it is eating, surprising them and then having their entire face bitten off. They need to be chill about humans being around their food or you are raising an animal that could seriously hurt somebody.





  • A challenge most people fail in video games for unfair reasons will generally be considered a badly designed element of that game by fans and critics.

    Meanwhile the challenge of making it ahead in modern life, which most people fail at out of no fault of their own even if they play the cards they were dealt as smartly as possible… is considered a perfectly good design element of adult life.

    🫤

    On a lighter note I really wish the pinging system in games like Alex legends could be combined with a simple face recognition overlay (that only pulls from your semiprivate private network of photos with friends under certain sharing conditions) that just reminded you of people’s names and maybe very succinctly their connection with you.


  • Decent masculine dress shoes come through thrift stores quite a bit at least around where I live and they usually don’t sell for much.

    Yeah, maybeeeee the sole will fall off if you get unlucky, but usually the dress shoes are so cheap even in that case you are still saving money by going back and getting another pair instead of buying new. Also you can get the sole replaced on a nice masculine dress shoe if you really like the shoe.

    Just don’t take the first pair that kinda looks ok, look through a decent amount and when you find a dress shoe where the sole is in good condition (the heel isn’t super worn down or anything) and appears to be from a good quality brand, nab it if it is comfortable.