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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • You could certainly make the argument that reddit / Lemmy and anything similar is social media, but the anonymity means you aren’t seeing or competing with people you know.

    Idk, maybe I’m just coping, but I’ve never felt the need to do anything performative for the masses of internet strangers - unlike some friends of mine who studiously document anything fun we do for the ever important task of impressing people on Instagram.

    Whenever the negative effects of social media come up, it tends to be about people comparing their “boring” lives with the carefully crafted veneer of other people’s lives they see on social media. That doesn’t happen (as much) when you don’t use your identity and you don’t know anybody else on the platform.










  • When I get deja vu, it feels to me like I’ve dreamt of whatever is happening before, I’ve always pretty easily been able to say “oh it’s just deja vu” and move on.

    But once, I woke up and told my wife about a strange dream involving very specific details of a situation with me and my brother. Along the lines of my brother throwing a beer can, it bounced off the trash can, bounced off me, then back into the trash can.

    A few days later, my brother did exactly that. I was dumbstruck, even my wife was like “what the hell”


  • I’m pretty specifically trying to bring to mind the time it takes to hone the skill. Photography is similar in that it takes many many hours to get to the point where you can produce a good work of art.

    If an artist (or photographer) spends a couple hours on a peice, that’s not the actual amount of time needed. It takes years to reach the point where they can make art in a few hours. That’s what people are upset about, that’s why nobody cares about “it took me hours to generate a good peice!”, because it takes an artist 10,000 hours.

    What AI art is doing is distilling that 10,000 hours (per artist) into a training set of 99% stolen works to allow someone with zero skill to produce a work of art in a few hours.

    What’s most problematic isn’t who the copyright of the AI generated age belongs to, it’s that artists who own their own works are having it stolen to be used in a commercial product. Go to any AI image generator, and you’ll see “premium” options you can pay for. That product, that option to pay, only exists on the backs of artists who did not give licensing for their works, and did not get paid to provide the training data.





  • I’ve sat in more than a couple mortar pits in my time, and have pulled rear security for sniper teams.

    There’s always technical solutions, ballistic calculators, holds for known targets on mortars, etc, but absolutely no way you’ll catch charlie or a sniper not capable of the mental math to run their weapon system.

    Mortars; often they just drive around with truck mounted systems and get sent coords, pull out a map and start calculating, snipers range find and then adjust with the markings in their scopes via mental math. They don’t dial their scope to 648 meters or whatever you’re thinking. I’ll admit I’m less clear on sniper math, but they usually all have notepads with them on performance data, DOPE, of their weapons systems to make needed adjustments to their calculations.

    I do want to be clear that the math isn’t crazy, and there’s often tech solutions available, but it’s definitely trained and often practiced.





  • Windows user here, have used Linux here and there too:

    Gaming. It’s gaming. Yes, Linux has workarounds and options, and some people are super knowledgeable and willing to go through those hoops. I’m not, not anymore.

    I spent a little bit of time hunting down and eliminating W11’s annoying behaviors, and now I don’t mind it at all, and I get to just jump in games with very little hassle.

    I’m pretty excited about the future of Linux gaming now that steam OS exists and Linux is a super viable target for developers, though