Sometimes I bulk out my shakshuka with another great pantry staple - lentils. And a little more involved for this thread but mujadara is another great dish that’s primarily pantry ingredients plus onions. But I almost always have onions on hand and they keep so I give them a pass

I watch a lot of educational explainer content and I’ve thought about trying nebula. Who do you watch on there that you think makes it worth it?

I did a lot of that work when I was starting out. Trust me, not a fan anymore than you are. But the developers that buy up all the land and do the construction are, which I hate but understand. What I didn’t understand is that, your average SFDH buyer loves that shit. There were times I was cranking out tweaked designs for 15-20 builds a week across 3-5 neighborhoods. People would come to our company specifically because of that “cookie cutter” design. They loved it and loved paying for it with just a couple tweaks. They knew that there were just tweaked versions of maybe 3 house styles in the entire neighborhood and they loved the suburb feel. Me personally? I’ve always hated the suburb vibe since I was a kid but that’s what paid the bills until I could go back to school and get something I cared about off the ground

I am an architect and I do a lot of ai work. My specialty is actually in generative parametric design and I’m just taking a break from writing some code for an AI project I am working on.

I’m seeing a lot of bad takes here, I’m assuming from a mixture of not reading the article and not knowing what actually goes on in the field. No, we don’t just make pretty pictures. No, a trend you don’t like of boring or shitty buildings you’ve seen doesn’t mean the profession is dying (and for a lot of those you can look at developers to share the brunt of your and my irritation).

People working as “architects” do a huge variety of work and no two you talk to are going to have the same workflow or process so I cant speak for everyone. For me, ai tools aren’t ever going to take my job, just remove more time consuming tasks and, in the long run, increase complexity and expectations. Same as when we moved from hand drafting to CAD, and again when we moved to 3D BIM design.

Each step drastically reduced busy work but over time increased the base level complexity in the design work. When architecture was all analogue, we weren’t doing statics modeling and parametric studies. And now with BIM, I have to consider and model equipment and MEC feasibility. Even compared to a couple years ago, now I’m doing solar and environmental modeling to track energy performance and inform the designs and suggest changes early on.

There was a doctorate researcher I spoke with recently that mentioned that the direction the profession is going is that we will no longer make individual choices for every design element. Instead, we will manipulate the data and direction that end up at the final choice. And I think he’s right. I think in the last year I’ve hand modeled maybe one project? Everything else has been purely data driven generative design.

I use AI image generators to do early design inspiration alongside sketching. I have a local Stable Diffusion AI instance trained on my wireframe modeling that I use to create scenes for presentations faster. I build small tools that help me recursively optimize structural elements. The last few months I’ve been working on my own big AI project that could really help a lot of my peers as it develops, too. I can’t talk about it just yet but I will after the funding period ends. The future is looking bright.

Tldr: the whole field of architecture isn’t responsible for those shitty city apartments you don’t like, AI tools are helping us because architecture is much more data driven and complex than you think it is, architecture isn’t a struggling or dying field like the article quotes- what’s killing the joy is greedy cheap developers.

Happy to chat or answer questions

I love the Sony line so much but I’ve never pulled the trigger on one because they have a terrible history of android updates. I’m so tired of dropping so much money on android phones just to sit around on old, outdated software. The android rom community isn’t like it used to be and the Sonys have always been too niche and expensive with proprietary camera tech to drive a vibrant custom scene. Maybe Project Treble will solely start changing things but I’m not holding my breath.

If Sony actually marketed their phones, dropped some of the features like a notch or two, and slashed prices for a few years to build a base I think they’d dominate the android scene.

I’d really love if state actors moved from Twitter to something like NOSTR. The server relays would be cheap for municipalities to run and manage and it wouldn’t be tied to a private corporation. Kinda like how some EU countries had schools and departments move away from Office to FOSS alternatives.

Copy/paste mostly from another reply I made:

I have a huge audiobook library, I was fully prepared to do all the processes to move and organize my mess of a library to get it working with Plex. I’m sure you’ve seen the GitHub guide floating around.

But when it came time to sit down and configure my server for audiobooks, ebooks, tv, movies, and music, I found that audiobookshelf just did a way better job with less of a headache. My current stack is Beet.io with audible support to move my already downloaded library into a better folder and naming structure. Once I get those all finished I won’t have to use this step. This gets stuff about ~80% of the way there except when the source is really messed up.

From there I have Readarr looking at the Beets destination folder and managing downloads. This is pretty good for getting most of the rest of the info with some clean up and is similar to setting up other Arrs. Then audiobookshelf for final tweaks and browsing/downloading.

It’s quite a pain to ingest an initial large library but for new downloads it’s been pretty seamless. Way easier and more consistent than having to do most of this anyway plus fight with Plex.

The audiobookshelf library is really great and can pull audiobook specific information from a lot of sources automatically. You can browse by series or narrator or genre too and if you listen through their app or through the browser it syncs your progress which is nice.

The audiobookshelf app is pretty good for browsing and downloading but I don’t like the player as much as my usual one. But you can just point the download at whatever folder your favorite player uses.

Since you’re already using Plex for audiobooks you can probably skip all these steps straight to audiobookshelf if your folder structure already matches

I have a huge audiobook library, I was fully prepared to do all the processes to move and organize my mess of a library to get it working with Plex. I’m sure you’ve seen the GitHub guide floating around.

But when it came time to sit down and configure my server for audiobooks, ebooks, tv, movies, and music, I found that audiobookshelf just did a way better job with less of a headache. My current stack is Beet.io with audible support to move my already downloaded library into a better folder and naming structure. Once I get those all finished I won’t have to use this step. This gets stuff about ~80% of the way there except when the source is really messed up.

From there I have Readarr looking at the Beets destination folder and managing downloads. This is pretty good for getting most of the rest of the info with some clean up and is similar to setting up other Arrs. Then audiobookshelf for final tweaks and browsing/downloading.

It’s quite a pain to ingest an initial large library but for new downloads it’s been pretty seamless. Way easier and more consistent than having to do most of this anyway plus fight with Plex. I do still want them to add support, though.

The audiobookshelf app is pretty good for browsing and downloading but I think the player is way worse than Smart Audiobook Player. But what I do is just use the audiobookshelf app to download the books to Smart’s library folder and then use the best player app for listening.