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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: December 15th, 2021

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  • Part of that is also how in our car-centric society, our public transportation sucks. And biking is unsafe in many places— even spots that have bike lanes. Everything is too far way, so you can only get there by car. Everywhere you that is close is either unsafe or actually impossible to bike to, unless you’re lucky. And if you wanna take the metro or bus, it’s slow af, unreliable, and in many places has very few stops and runs infrequently.

    And then the lack of people using public transportation only leads to more cars on the road which makes the problem even worse! More lanes, more land used for parking lot deserts, etc.

    Nowhere to go, no way to get there, nothing to do.


  • Idk why communists defend China’s every move. Communism can be defended without excusing China’s authoritarian practices. I have Chinese friends living in China who tell me all kinds of horrific stories that they’ve had to deal with because of China’s mass surveillance (and more). That isn’t western propaganda, that’s people’s lived experiences. There is literally a “Great Firewall of China” lmao. China IS bad when it comes to their mass surveillance and suppression of speech. USA IS bad when it comes to their letting giant corporations have such free rein that it makes us all into serfs. Why compare to China? Because China is a great comparison.



  • Ironically, cars are stopping me. Roads used to be for walking, and now they’re for cars. They gave us sidewalks and now some places don’t have them, and are unwalkable. The bike lanes either don’t exist or are too dangerous to use. It’s all roads and stroads now, with speed limits dangerous to pedestrians, and large SUVs meaning that car crashes with a pedestrian are more likely to end in death.

    The amount of people in cars has also crippled public transportation. Buses aren’t quick, and there are so few of them in general. Not to mention the lack of high speed trains, and the inefficiency of our subways.

    Giant parking lots with no cars took our parks. Took our public spaces. Took our nature. And they’re everywhere. Everywhere I look is dull, grey asphalt.

    It’s depressing to be outside. And where would I walk to? Everything is too far away to walk to. It used to be a 5-15 minute walk away. Now it’s more like 40 minutes to hours…

    I’m tired of human interests and public transportation being overlooked so that people can drive a couple minutes faster to their destination. When people in Europe, Japan, and China can just… get on a train.

    Sorry for the rant but I hate this bs


  • Mentioning the obvious things: Remember that depending on your location, you will not get full sunlight everyday of the year. The orientation of your roof and whether it’s pointed toward the sun also matters. If you have any young trees around you, they might grow and cast a shadow on your roof. If you have neighbors, they might plant trees.

    You can use Project Sunroof to roughly estimate the average sunlight your location receives during a full year (accounting for weather conditions): https://sunroof.withgoogle.com/


  • Personally, YouTube isn’t other people’s inane rambling for me. It’s science education, it’s about how to identify and forage for food, it’s video essays about nuclear disasters… it’s constantly introducing me to new concepts— like why lawns are bad for the environment, how other countries tackle the problem of traffic and public transportation, why DIY air purifiers are more effective than nearly every commercial air purifier on the market, etc.

    It’s a platform where the medium is video form content. Everything is available there. Both garbage and gold. It’s the way that you use it that determines which one you get. For me, it’s like Wikipedia in video form. With the occasional bit of entertainment on the side, as a treat.



  • Ok doomer.

    I say the above not as an insult, but because I want to make a point.

    Look up doomism. It’s a tool of climate change deniers. We are not dead yet. Nothing going on now is truly impossible to fix. It’s certainly not easy. It’s hard af. But just because it’s hard, doesn’t mean we should let ourselves give up. We shouldn’t let ourselves fall into a doomer mindset. Because the very moment we do, the moment we accept the doom, then the doom becomes our fate.

    Don’t give up. Don’t encourage other people to give up. Don’t say it’s over when we’re still fighting. It’s only over when it’s over.

    I bet World War II must have been psychologically devastating to witness. It must have felt like the whole world was falling apart. Like it would never bring itself back together. Can you imagine? Watching Hitler take over country after country. Watching the bombs fall in London. And the Cold War. Where people were so sure it was the end of humanity, because we were going to kill ourselves dropping nukes on each other.

    There are so many moments it was horrible. So horrible that we couldn’t even imagine there would be a way out. A good future.

    But there was. Things got better. Countries rebuilt. The Cold War ended. No one dropped any nukes.

    See, climate change, and companies taking our data, and AI, and the rich getting richer… all that? That’s our WWII. That’s our thing causing hopelessness and devastation and fear in everyone.

    The doomism is a plague we’ve been dealing with since probably the dawn of humanity.

    We can get through this. Maybe we won’t. But the chance we will isn’t even that small. As long as there’s a chance: fight for it.



  • I got a 17/20, which is awesome!

    I’m angry because I could’ve gotten an 18/20 if I’d paid attention to the thispersondoesnotexists’ glasses, which in hindsight, are clearly all messed up.

    I did guess that one human-created image was made by AI, “The End of the Journey”. I guessed that way because the horses had unspecific legs and no tails. And also, the back door of the cart they were pulling also looked funky. The sky looked weirdly detailed near the top of the image, and suddenly less detailed near the middle. And it had birds at the very corner of the image, which was weird. I did notice the cart has a step-up stool thing attached to the door, which is something an AI likely wouldn’t include. But I was unsure of that. In the end, I chose wrong.

    It seems the best strategy really is to look at the image and ask two questions:

    • what intricate details of this image are weird or strange?
    • does this image have ideas indicate thought was put into them?

    About the second bullet point, it was immediately clear to me the strawberry cat thing was human-made, because the waffle cone it was sitting in was shaped like a fish. That’s not really something an AI would understand is clever.

    One the tomato and avocado one, the avocado was missing an eyebrow. And one of the leaves of the stem of the tomato didn’t connect correctly to the rest. Plus their shadows were identical and did not match the shadows they would’ve made had a human drawn them. If a human did the shadows, it would either be 2 perfect simplified circles, or include the avocado’s arm. The AI included the feet but not the arm. It was odd.

    The anime sword guy’s armor suddenly diverged in style when compared to the left and right of the sword. It’s especially apparent in his skirt and the shoulder pads.

    The sketch of the girl sitting on the bench also had a mistake: one of the back legs of the bench didn’t make sense. Her shoes were also very indistinct.

    I’ve not had a lot of practice staring at AI images, so this result is cool!


  • You are indeed expected to come up with all those answers. Usually someone who already knows the answer asks the questions to you in person, and you guess until you get it right. Slowly, you realize the answers all have to do with the previous questions, and it makes it easier to think creatively hahaha. I wish I knew more than just this series of questions, but these are harder to come up with than it seems like lol.