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What’s the worst date you’ve ever had, and why was it so awful?
  • Went out with this girl I really liked but brought a friend too just to make it less one on one and more casual. I really liked her and thought it went well. When I drove my friend home, in conversation, he told me I could do better. It was such a stupid destructive thought. All three of us were into the arts. He was into videography, she was photography, and I was painting airbrushed graphics on motorcycles. I dated her for a little while again later and more seriously, but my life was more of a mess then and it didn't work out. That was one of my biggest mistakes in life; not realizing my lack of emotional depth and letting other's opinions hold sway or weight. I partition my emotions now. I'm not sure how I feel in the moment. My first reaction is likely worthless, so "I'll have to get back to you later" - is my usual response. People who whine about how everyone is about to lose their job at work, or tell me how I should feel about others are like giant red flags telling me to avoid them as toxic. Really, in a way I do not lack emotional depth as much as that part of my inner voice speaks quietly and I need to take the time to listen to it carefully. That girl and life lesson are the same thing to me; an abstracted patch, forever holding that part of my personality. When that red flag flies in my head, she is the one waving it; holding me back; telling me to think it through.

  • NSFW
    Lexa's pretty package
  • Knotty girl

  • Why the Future of AI & Computers Will Be Analog
  • IIRC there was a blog post article in the last year-ish about a researcher at Intel that had been working on using FPGA's for AI. IIRC, they mentioned that the issue they could not overcome was power and scaling. I seem to recall them mentioning that analog had a similar issue with scaling and throughput, but that is the weakest aspect I recall in my abstractions when my main curiosity is why large FPGA's are not the present goto tech.

    I'm on the edge of my understanding here, but I think the issue with analog is the depth of tensor rank dimensions. Analog is great and super efficient for the first few dimensions, but AI can have many rank dimensions, and there is no telling what the future of algorithms will hold. Building for optimising the way models work presently is practically guaranteed to result in a useless product by the time it is fabricated and brought to market.

  • WATCH: Migrants tell undercover reporter they are registered to vote and prefer Kamala
  • This is insane logic. Like there are killers in prison so all humans are killers type of nonsense. I can go out on the street and give someone a hundred bucks to say absolutely anything on camera. At an individual level, submitting this as proof of anything is psychotic. As far as I'm concerned the criminal gerrymandering corruption is the noise floor. When some asshat can lose the popular vote and still win, you better sure as hell show me evidence of a disparity greater than that percentage of difference. That is the standard of conservative criminality. Your standard. It works both ways buddy. If you can't show multi sourced bipartisan evidence if this scale, you fail your own corrupt standards of voting requirements. You need proof of hundreds of thousands and not some tin foil hatted trailer trash speculative garbage or half baked conspiracy nonsense.

  • English Ivy
  • Kudzu was the last bioweapons unit of the Union army in the US civil war. It never surrendered, it is still fighting the American South, and winning the guerilla war.

  • Citations please
  • Now be honest, have any of you written a text parsing script with a dictionary?

    I have, with AI, but for other creative reasons. The idea has crossed my mind as an amusing exercise. PC-autoreplace

  • NSFW
    Oiled up army
  • Love a girl on top; take the top girl down.

  • I designed a cardboard cutter that turns boxes into free cat scratchers
  • This looks a lot like trolling. The community here certainly doesn't seem to care for it.

  • Vote manipulation rule (in more ways than one)
  • We have a damn good business model here folks. All we need to do is sandbox the idiots so that they pay to see what they want to see and only they see it.

  • Rule
  • I would like to phone a friend Regis; Jean-Christophe Bonaparte.

  • This image.
  • Born in Huntsville Hospital... From one rocket town to the other. I can see Vandenberg launches from my roof.

  • This image.
  • They are a contributing factor in the whole system of gratuity as pay. WH is an interesting niche in that, those that work there generally make decent money, like a good bit better than most fast food joints. It requires people skills, and a crisis management type of multitasking, but often there will only be the minimum required staff in the better run places. It is not too unusual to see a place with only 2-4 people working with a packed restaurant.

    The gratuity culture is that you always must tip, but not excessively. However staying past your welcome/meal is not considered acceptable behavior, nor is showing up and not ordering. There are slower WH's in smaller towns where it is more acceptable to hang out when the place is not busy, but these are more like the exception. This is also a place that typically is associated with the idealized single working mom stereotype. You'll often find places where the employee shifts are flexible for these types of circumstances. There is often also some tangible drama to a WH, both from the staff and the customers. There are usually WH's within many residential communities or right on the outskirts. You'll often find the same people present as part of a regular routine. It usually does not involve dangerous culture or violence, but WH is a funny place to go find out and watch the drama of the local community if one is close to where you live.

    When I lived in the suburbs of Atlanta, I knew everyone that worked at my local WH and could find out what was going on in the neighborhood based on the collective conversations that happened there. In a WH there is no real privacy or formality. It is one of the few places where striking up a conversation with anyone is acceptable if not expected. You can sit there and be quiet and answer tersely to indicate you just want to be left alone, but that is the exception.

    This is part of the southern libertarian republicanism ideal of independent hard work to bootstrap success. This is an illusion that leads to decay and poverty, as time has shown, but is still a core part of southern culture. I'm not saying it is right or wrong. I live in California now. There are no Waffle Houses here because California does not participate in this poverty wage type of exception to ethical pay. Overall, there is no effective alternative to turn to for people on either side, customers or workers. Places like California do not have an equivalent establishment for ultra budget dining 24/7 either. I've lived in both areas long term. I don't know of a good solution.

  • This image.
  • Waffle House is a chain of restaurants mostly in the Southeast USA. They are almost always open 24/7. It is like a tiny sitting bar with stools and a dozen or so tables. The food is really cheap, the staff is nice, and everything is built around the griddle cook top where all the food is made on the spot. There is no alcohol. This is the goto place to eat if you are by yourself. There is also a strong (poverty) community culture of endearment towards those that work at a WH. Everyone knows the staff basically only get paid in tips. WH is often busiest in the middle of the night when nothing else is open, at least in places like Atlanta, Chattanooga, Huntsville, or Orlando.

  • ManCave decoration
  • I would go with hard science fiction futurism. You get to write your narrative future history of humanity and nothing about your choices are restricted to following the styles or decor consumerism.

    For example, humanity has moved into thousands of 35 km × 9.1 km O'Neill cylinders with centrifugal spin gravity, mostly in cislunar space. We renamed the planet Wild Earth, and only a small scattering of indigenous humans choose to remain planetary caretakers. The age of scientific discovery has long past. Science is primarily an engineering corpus. Our primary technology is entirely biological, and in complete elemental cycles balance. All phenomenon of biological nature are accessible to us with a few genetic # inclue libraries and a few lines of code. We grow a banyan frame of a building and dial in our colors and patterns on living chitin walls, while more regal structures of ginkgo trees last nearly forever. Biocompute is a thing with the synthetic brayn. All is accessible with a complete understanding of biology.

    Allowing your imagination to run freely in this space is therapeutic on a level that I find deeply satisfying, and dare I say hopeful. Getting others talking about this can create change. Futurism is anti dystopian. Many will try to call it utopianism, but I counter that they simply lack depth of imagination. The full spectrum and challenges of such a future creates a powerful lens for inspecting and critiquing the present. That is the best way I can imagine the experience of creating a space and the type of space that inspires positive conversations I want to share with others.

  • Hacking wizard gets Linux to run on a 1971 processor, though it takes almost 5 days to boot the kernel
  • The 4004 is that tiny dip-16 chip the the top left, second box marked CPU. A working 4004 is worth around $300+ https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=intel+4004

    They are quite the collectors item as the first microprocessor

  • Had a little cycling fan on the bike trail today, all smiles

    So happy to see me, she wet herself in the middle of the trail, and too paralyzed to leave too. I gently helped her off the pavement and got this pretty parting smile.

    1
    What's a trait you look for in potential partners that seems uniquely in your trait wishlist?
  • Multiple passionate independent hobby interests with curiosity and depth. Really, that is my indicator of a potential unconstrained abstracted mind; a potential coexplorer that can find interesting tidbits in almost anything in life—which is what I've always wanted. I choose to remain an unconstrained nomad otherwise. I successfully avoided a few reality-TV-evenings zombies from my younger years and avoiding those anchors was one of my best choices in life. I would have made them miserable.

  • A Puzzle For The Visually Impaired, Or Blindfolded
  • It would probably be more enjoyable if the design was made in 3d geometry where both the existing work in progress and the individual pieces have more tactile uniqueness and a more congruent memory process. I imagine the mostly similar keys and various values would be tedious and frustrating without the additional visual cues. I am limited to around 6 memory fronts of focus at once where I can maintain my fastest focus and cognitive fluidity, at least this is the case with games like the open source Gauguin. I would likely find satisfaction in solving puzzles that constrained my solutions to a similar key/value dictionary. It might be an interesting thing to create in Open SCAD and parameterize.

  • me_irl
  • local mealitia forces

  • Bench dogs are awesome. Front vise busy and I need to hand saw something? No problem!
  • What kind are these? I am not clear on their mechanism but would like to know. I might make a 3d printed spinoff.

    How deep are the dog holes, as in the thickness of your bench top?

  • When Autocorrect Sucks
  • The system in android has turned insidiously covert. I make more than my share of mistakes but Andy likes to toss in some randos

  • How do you view your role in public ethics as a developer?

    I figured out how to remove most of the safeguards from some AI models. I don't feel comfortable sharing that information with anyone. I have come across a few layers of obfuscation to make this type of alteration more difficult to find and sort out. This caused me to realize, a lot of you are likely faced with similar dilemmas of responsibility, gatekeeping, and manipulating others for ethical reasons. How do you feel about this?

    25
    How few visual humanoid characters does it take to depict more diversity than cis male/female?

    Edit: not bait. not loaded. I genuinely want to know how to better visually depict this. Redirect the narrative if you'd like. I am 100% ally, really really. If any toasters come along, we'll toss em in the bathtub. Asking this should be safe in a well adjusted world like here.

    I've been messing with advanced Flux generative AI and LLM integration. I came up with this image goofing around for 5 min before shutting down the comp yesterday evening:

    --

    !

    I thought, why not try to play with some masking and composition to create a Jessica Rabbit like Lemmenistasp? to pair with the Arlemm Lemmeneggersp?, but it seems a bit binary fedisketch these days.

    ---

    !

    What does our hello world golden placard to the stars look like?

    ----

    !

    TBC: I'm not claiming I can or want to make such a thing, or that there is relevance in such a creation. The passing thought of representative visual humanoids piqued my curiosity. I'm far more interested in the philosophical answers, engagement, behavior, and meta collective awareness that might come from this question, and much more than I care about any image or creation.

    1
    How do I question the engineering physics of magnetic fields in a guitar pickup?

    tl;dr don't bother. This is too abstracted and nuanced. That is okay to skip.

    I like to understand the abstract scope of engineering. This is way beyond the simple surface level, with pics below to illustrate my point.

    With electric guitar pickups, the complexity of field shaping and design control over the sensor seems like a place where optimising the profitable manufacturability of the final product remains the primary constraint with little deviation.

    I struggle to qualify and quantify my intuitive hunch that there is a whole lot more potential to engineer something new and better within the realm of modern manufacturing. I don't know the principal questions I should ask or what might disprove my ideas from the get go.

    • Most transformers shape the magnetic field far more than guitar pickups.
    • a guitar pickup appears to be more of a two dimensional sensor that picks up the motion of a ferromagnetic string in the two primary directions of motion
    • there are more complex harmonic motions present than a pickup can register in two dimensions
    • the coil and slugs of a pickup are surrounded by a single large winding, yet the strings each have very different frequencies
    • it is now possible to make a powdered ferrite core of nearly any shape and frequency
    • the traditional pickup has little effective shaping of the magnetic field path
    • guitar pickups are not optimised to a point where they are readily used elsewhere in other sensory applications and devices as economy of scale should dictate in an open and manipulation free market... I don't think they are anyways
    • what might be the result if a 270° toroidal powdered core were designed and shaped for each string while tailoring the copper winding and ferrite for each string's mean frequency and shielding each of these
    • would a chord segment gap in a toroidal core pick up more 3d motion from the string
    • what effect would a primary and secondary winding wound in the opposite dot notation direction have on the pickup of more complex harmonics and motion
    • why does none of this matter due to the filtering of LCR and the noise floor or other aspects

    Like here is the basic range of commercial products:

    !

    The typical schematic of operation:

    !

    !

    Basic construction:

    !

    This is a typically low noise toroidal transformer that has been around for ages:

    !

    Now I need you to abstract this concept with me a little bit. Imagine if a small toroidal core was below each string and offset towards the neck or bridge so that they will fit. Nothing would stick out or surround the string. The 270° is not a radius cut like a pie. Instead it is a chord and removed segment:

    !

    There are totally random pics from DDG that are somewhat illustrative in abstract:

    !

    !

    These are just some random powdered core ferrites that illustrate how these can be formed into any shape now:

    !

    I usually avoid anything audiophile related because it draws out pseudo science nonsense like crazy, but at the center of this question is really a desire for a deeper understanding of sensors and magnetics that have much broader applications in precise motion control and sensors for a range of equipment.

    In a higher level of abstraction, I'm also really asking when and where does this subject become the realm of the illusive bearded nude virgin demigods that get enslaved to corpo NDA masters from birth. .5/s

    26
    Upside down structural design with funicular curves

    The following is a 14 minute edutainment upload presenting the funicular hanging chain and other techniques of deriving optimal structural compression geometry using the opposite form in pure tension (sounds more complicated than it is), by Architecture and Design Professor Stewart Hicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRv_syz2DAc

    This is a must watch as it shortcuts math and modeling in useful ways for design with minimal materials. I'm sharing as a 3d printing FreeCAD parts designer that likes to integrate all elements without printed supports in every possible case. The funicular draping chain idea is very much adjacent to how I think about integrating elements into a print design. I have designed with shells that integrate my structural elements, but this upload was an aha moment that takes my empirical design process to a new conceptual level. Modeling structural elements and knowing the math to apply can be challenging, but this kind of principal is a very useful shortcut. More info in article form: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funicular_curve

    0
    What is the oldest (optional) element of your daily routine?

    So not bathroom related tasks, but more like some arbitrary thing you must and always do daily.

    For me, I watch Anton Petrov's daily white paper summary with dinner since some time in 2018. Even when New Pipe is down, I hit up Vimeo or Odyssey to watch Anton.

    43
    Is there a Ben Eater's Bread Board Computer/6502 type of content creator for home networks?

    I've been watching some One Marc Fifty stuff on YouTube. I can follow him well, and I'm decent at much of the hardware stuff. At least I can compile OpenWRT or do a basic Gentoo install with a custom kernel. I dread staring at NFTables, but can hack around some. I don't fully understand networking from the abstract fundamentals. Are there any good sources that break down the subject like Ben Eater did with the 8 bit bread board computer, showing all the basic logic, buses, and registers surrounding the Arithmetic Logic Unit? I'm largely looking for a more fundamental perspective on what are the core components of the stack and what elements are limited to niche applications.

    I just realized I want to use self signed client certificates between devices. It was one of those moments where I feel dumb for the limited scope of my knowledge about the scale of various problems and solutions.

    8
    What is the goto source for free-as-in-freedom information about growing plants and helpful diagnostics info?

    I'm looking for a place to find any special info on soil nutrients, and simple image comparison type diagnostics. Something like the Wikipedia of a farmer's almanac or something. I'm looking for the best public commons type sources with no ulterior motives or influences; farm nerds for farm nerds.

    I'm not looking for copy and paste articles, ads funded nonsense, or anyone that is influenced by sponsorships or product reviews of any kind.

    If I have holes in the leaves of my tomato plants, or want to know the ideal lighting conditions, or soil pH, or hydroponics versus potted watering regimes, etc., I want to know where to look for info with everything from basic to advanced academic level depth.

    6
    Do you often write scripts to parse a codebase and get familiar with it?

    Playing around with the FOSS game Cataclysm DDA, I felt compelled to parse and connect the CPP and JSON to see relationships and complexity. It's the first time I've really felt motivated to do so. I'm just trying to wrap my head around how some features are implemented like z-levels, mining tools and various actions; simple stuff really. I find it challenging to parse something quite this large, so I started scripting a way to track down objects across the code base to see what is defined in JSON and what is hard coded. Normal? Obvious? FOSS alternatives to do this? I'm basically chaining a bunch of grep commands to print pretty trees with bat.

    13
    Cone head

    I'll be up all night with this little minion. The other cat is wearing a tin foil hat look at this new fashionable attire.

    10
    Is all of life a game of showpersonship?

    I was asking myself what makes for good reading. Perhaps it is relatable acumen, technical prowess, or a philosophically well defined notion brought to sharp focus from beyond the edge of my conscious awareness.

    !

    What do you appreciate, about others? Is it ultimately their moments of showpersonship, albeit based on any realm of thought? From kindness to empathy, from technical knowledge to relentless dependability; are all spaces ultimately a platform of performance and success or appreciation correlated with the show one is willing and able to perform?

    2
    Harry T. Hearsey's bicycle shop in Downtown Indianapolis in 1896, where Major Taylor worked as a bicycle instructor

    Major Taylor was Black and one of, if not the first, true international sports celebrities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_Taylor

    Just to contrast: >From 1893 to 1900 Benz sold the four wheel, two seat Victoria,[19] a two-passenger automobile with a 2.2 kW (3.0 hp) engine, which could reach the top speed of 18 km/h (11 mph) and had a pivotal front axle operated by a roller-chained tiller for steering. The model was successful with 85 units sold in 1893, and was produced in a four-seated version with face-to-face seat benches called the "Vis-à-Vis". > >From 1894 to 1902, Benz produced over 1,200 of what some consider the first mass-produced car, the Velocipede, later known as the Benz Velo.[20] The early Velo had a 1L 1.5-metric-horsepower (1.5 hp; 1.1 kW) engine, and later a 3-metric-horsepower (3 hp; 2 kW) engine. giving a top speed of 19 km/h (12 mph). > >The Velo participated in the world's first automobile race, the 1894 Paris to Rouen, where Émile Roger finished 14th, after covering the 126 km (78 mi) in 10 hours 01-minute at an average speed of 12.7 km/h (7.9 mph). > >In 1895, Benz designed the first truck with an internal combustion engine in history. Benz also built the first motor buses in history in 1895, for the Netphener bus company.[21][22][23] > >In 1896, Benz was granted a patent for his design of the first flat engine. It had horizontally opposed pistons, a design in which the corresponding pistons reach top dead centre simultaneously, thus balancing each other with respect to momentum. Many flat engines, particularly those with four or fewer cylinders, are arranged as "boxer engines", boxermotor in German, and also are known as "horizontally opposed engines".

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Benz

    2
    Say hi if you're not a bot. Place seems to be dry.

    I've been modding a game for a few days and not on here as much. What's your excuse friend?

    118
    Are you self aware of different types of hungry?

    As one of the most hardcore types of roadies, I've experienced many of the extremes of human endurance. Like the need for sodium, magnesium, and potassium from massive leg cramps, or calorie crashes when it feels like your tank runs so empty you hit a massive wall where your body all but quits.

    One of the things I'm only just becoming self aware of is the need for iron/protein as a direct craving, not some common indirect theoretical knowledge.

    I've been on the same basic daily diet for a year with very little variation. I've noticed times when I crave eating extra stuff. I used to be massively overweight, so I'm super aware of avoiding binge eating and most junk food. However, I've found a pattern where sometimes I need a fresh fruit, and others–I need something with protein and iron. If I go straight to those resources at the right time, the cravings stop. If I get it wrong, I feel hungry again and crave something more in a short amount of time.

    I get the impression I was overweight when I was younger because I lacked the awareness to connect these dots... along with a nutrient poor base diet.

    It is just a thought I've been mulling over in the back of my mind for a few days. I wonder if others are either more subconsciously able to crave a better available food that meets their needs, or if I just failed to RTFM when I was born and most people are aware of this kind of connection. So... are you self aware of different types of hungry where eating a small amount of the right thing can make the issue go away when you would otherwise eat too much?

    28
    The LibreWolf website needs a feature that shows the current version plainly

    If I want to know if my version is up to date without issues, I should be able to find that information very quickly and plainly on the website as an external verification source. It could be on a page or on something like the menu or landing page footer. I just checked all of these. Finding this information is not obvious to me. I want to know this directly and without in-browser, distro, or other influences.

    1
    How do you secure your bootloader without secure boot or why doesn't it matter?

    I've made the effort to secure mine and am aware of how the trusted protection module works with keys, Fedora's Anaconda system, the shim, etc. I've seen where some here have mentioned they do not care or enable secure boot. Out of open minded curiosity for questioning my biases, I would like to know if there is anything I've overlooked or never heard of. Are you hashing and reflashing with a CH341/Rπ/etc, or is there some other strategy like super serious network isolation?

    33
    Do any of you have M$ Word running in present form?

    My old man has a bunch of .dox stuff saved. He has complicated large files saved that are not supported by any of the FOSS conversion tools. I've tried Libre office, Abi Word, and every command line tool and converter I can find. These are entire book sized files.

    I have a W10 machine with Word. Is extracting the .exe and running it with wine feasible without making an epic mess or massive project of this?

    54
    j4k3 j4k3 @lemmy.world
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