It’s 9 am now and they’re still bombing. An entire section of the city has been turned into ashes and a lot of people were just sleeping on the sides of the road in safer areas this morning. I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like this in my lifetime.

I’ve been to some of these neighborhoods. They are very poor, the people there have been neglected by the authorities for generations, leading many of them to believe strongly in the alternative. I don’t see that as wrong.

I feel guilty for even having a fraction of opportunity more than these people, to just live in an area that people go to for safety. To be able to worry about infrastructure and the international response and not my life and the loss of loved ones and their lack of a proper burial.

At least I’m not one of the clowns defending this on Lemmy. I didn’t think our little network was worth the disinfo effort but here we are. I’m on this platform to get away from this shit.

I’ve seen versions of this for every other country, from Mexico and Brazil to the Balkans and right here in Lebanon and Syria.

I was getting ready to take one look at these and write them off as looking just a little too sharp, but honestly, with how bleak the visionless hyperrealism of today is, the original design shines straight through. I might use this.

I played Grim Fandango about halfway through last year and I really liked it, although something else grabbed my attention.

Thursday is like this.

I literally cannot for the life of me explain why.

But خميس? The name of Thursday in my native Arabic?

Ah but Jeudi, the French name. Sun high in the sky. Very round.

I cannot even begin to explain.

I’ve commented about this before, but I do actually miss those first few generations of image generators. The first DeepDream style stuff was interesting but didn’t go very far, but this image in particular is a milestone for what came directly after.

I would love to run VQGAN+CLIP locally, for example, in some efficient way. It was fun to play with and to see how the model interpreted the input. And it wasn’t as scary as the tools we have now (especially when those are paired with the deep fake face swap stuff, for example)

I genuinely think slop is the perfect word for the current iteration of these image generators, both the image outputs themselves and the role they’re playing in the already-bleak digital media landscape.

I thought it was another one of those meme languages at first.

My reading is that it’s not necessarily a problem with the platforms but society at large.

One example you mentioned: yes, html5 games (and just downloadable itch/steam games) exist and they fill the gap left by Flash games from a gameplay perspective maybe.

But the mainstream appeal of Flash games and animations was different to what we have now. The social phenomenon of people randomly hacking together terrible flash games isn’t the same as the current tiny indie game phenomenon. I feel like the old ones were a bigger piece of the average person’s internet usage than the new one (the average person’s internet usage being 5% LLM 5% web 5% email 25% gaming 30% video and 30% doomscrolling or something like that idk)

I’m struggling to put into words what I mean by this, my comment sounds really vague when I reread it. The specific creative outlet that Flash gave people is not equivalent to what we have now, and the specific entertainment experience of browsing and playing Flash games is different from the experience of scrolling through itch. Am I making more sense?

Like of course the different technologies are different, but it’s where it fits into our lives that it’s really different imo. Hell, we could say this about Flash itself for the last few years before it was discontinued. Just the two thoughts of Newgrounds in 2006 vs Newgrounds in 2016 and how they fit into the internet ecosystem and internet culture are enough to see the difference.

I wonder if there’s a more efficient way to have things sync in blocks or something. I honestly understand very little about server architecture, much less decentralized social network architecture. Maybe having a smaller number of “centralized” (community-run, redundant, independent) nodes distributing blocks of federated data to take load off the actual instance servers that would only need to upload bulk data to fewer places?

Maybe this isn’t very different from how it already operates. Fuck if I know.

Will Wright took one look at this thing in an encyclopedia in 2001 and immediately started planning Spore.

This graphic is a year old! It’s actually seventeen years since that blockade now.

I wonder why some people there might think violence is the only thing their enemy would understand. Really a mystery.

Seriously, I wish I could just set up some kind of regex filter in iOS Shortcuts or something that would let me specify what notifications to show or block.

Doesn’t help that corporate social media apps will give you controls over every single notification type except for the ones they ram down your throat daily.

I have a very specific notification in mind: I’ve opened Instagram organically maybe eight times in the past decade, but I’ll open my messages if someone send me a message there. I can’t open their shitty platform on a browser as they hate VPNs on desktop. With all due respect to the meme posters on Lemmy, the fresh brainrot my friends send me on there is much easier humor to digest than whatever mix of Everett True, Star Trek, and den Döner-Mann nicht fragen warum er nur Bargeld nimmt the Lemmy All page has for me on most days. So I keep that malware on my phone. I want a notification when they send me a message. I want a notification when someone I meet wants to follow me. I’m squarely in the lower quantile of ages on Lemmy and a lot of people I want in my life will use that platform as their primary messenger, and while it’s not ideal, I do want those notifications. You know what notification I don’t want?

See some of today’s most watched reels!

Their stupid app sent me this notification, like clockwork, about once every 23 hours.

Check out some of today’s most watched reels!

I’ve never watched a reel in my fucking life. I still call them Stories and I haven’t watched them even when they were called that. They put the button for Reels right at the bottom where all the important stuff should be, so I’ll fat finger my way into the Reels section once every three years, and it’ll still be at the tutorial screen where it tells you to swipe and tap and whatever. You can’t seek through the videos of course - not interested.

They know I’ve left it on the tutorial screen for longer than 20% of their userbase has been alive. And yet —

Check out some of today’s most watched reels!

(This is mostly an exaggeration, it was like once a week, and I left notifications off until recently because I met a group of people who use it more than my usual crowd. I have not been bombarded by unfiltered notification sewage for a decade lol)

And they didn’t have a toggle for that notification either until pretty recently. Or maybe I didn’t look hard enough. Wish everyone would stop using these apps and try hacking together a terrible HTML website like the good old days. Computers are wasted on us all. Hosting video is expensive, it must be rapaciously profitable to be trying to get everyone hooked on it.

That’s without counting the extra money spent on replacing strings, I’m sure using this kind of thing regularly would seriously shorten their lifespan.

The TS80P is lower wattage, technically, but the heating element is right up at the very tip, instead of having a heating element inside the handle with a long metal piece transmitting the heat. It gets hot way faster than you’d expect, it doesn’t feel like 30W at all.

It punches way, way above its weight. Unless you’re soldering pipes, comparing the wattage to traditional irons is misleading. Love that tiny thing.

Only problem is that this design necessitates proprietary tips that are relatively expensive. Not a fan of that, coming from the no name Global South Especiale 2$ firestarter irons that are the norm where I am. Not the end of the world, but worth keeping in mind.

The one I bought came with a USB-C cable that couldn’t handle the current though. That was the only real red flag. Shame too, that cable seemed like it was silicone coated and would have been ideal.

I genuinely believed (some number of) people would homeschool because regular school is too expensive. Interesting. American schools being free by default is really unexpected, especially given how expensive tertiary education is over there, and especially with the volume of complaints I hear about American school education being low quality. The free drinking water at restaurants thing is also unexpected to me.

It’s just weird that police have that responsibility there. I don’t get it. Getting questioned over being outside? I get that. Getting stopped? Weird.

In my part of the world (Lebanon) homeschooling isn’t really a thing. Public schools are seen as the cheaper, worse alternative, with many students who were kicked out of private schools continuing their education there. Teachers there get paid dirt and the buildings are often crumbling. Very few have a noteworthy reputation.

Most schools are private, not all that expensive, and usually religiously affiliated. That’s the default option. Then you have a very small number of expensive private schools mostly full of more affluent people.

The curriculum was last updated in like 1992 though which isn’t good lol

I was once walking down the street in the middle of the day on a weekday, and I literally had a cop stop me, thinking I was a high school student playing hookie from school.

Wait what? Is it the police’s job to make sure kids go to school in the US? What if they’re from a family that can’t even afford public school tuition? That’s so foreign to me. Cutting class should be frowned upon but not to the point of being harassed by police.

I wrote a similar comment under a similar post here.

I don’t know if it’s considered better to link or to quote an old comment.

Good lord this makes my blood boil. I’m still in awe of the support being shown by ordinary people around the world these last few months but I don’t think I’ll ever grasp how much hatred is required to keep the machine running.

To think that if history went differently I could just get on a cab and visit the Holy Land like my grandmother did as a kid. Instead I get to watch it get bombed to bits in real time with the excuse that there wasn’t anyone there and if there were any they’re terrorists.

My understanding is that this is a deliberate choice, at least for Mercedes and BMW having their models be letters and numbers instead of memorable names. The idea is that all models seem closer together, kind of elevating them all.

Compared to when you look at an Accord and think this is the nice Honda, unlike the other not nice Honda. The implication is that all of the Mercedes ones should be nice.

But what do I fucking know. I like quirky weird cars, I like shitboxes, I’m one of those simultaneous fuckcars car guys (I hope I don’t need to explain how I can be in both camps at once?). I’m not the person any of these companies are marketing for.

Oh shit, I thought he died after it ended. Still the worst celebrity death for me, and one of the few that I could care about.

What a great guy.