I really like this website for exploring all the options. Not sure how up to date it is with this latest ffmpeg.

https://ffmpeg.lav.io/

In my experience people didn’t trust each other more, but it did feel like you had more autonomy. Cell phones are what really changed everything, for better and worse. I think the dumb phone era was the best because you were no longer in a position to need to walk miles in the countryside due to a breakdown, but also they weren’t ubiquitous enough that everyone demanded constant contact (old rules of phone etiquette were still in force). Also no algorithms. Brain rot was confined to TV, magazines, and radio.

At first I thought she meant ‘fantastic’ in its literal sense and I was optimistic. No, of course the former CFO of Morgan Stanley is a ghoul.

“Burgum, a Republican, used his speech to criticize Silicon Valley for having supported ‘the climate extremist agenda,’ which he defined as the idea that ‘a degree of temperature change in the year 2100 is the thing that we should drive every policy in America.’ Burgum added: ‘I’ve always been a little offended by that.’”

Well it’s like 3 or 4 degrees at this point, which is civilization-ending. Real, “we’re all going to die anyway” energy here. Glad we’re doing this to hallucinate the next Amazon show and not slow down the approaching catastophe or at least give poor people food or some shit. Is that a little offensive?

I think Stephenson is a genius but honestly I slog through large parts of his books. He always creates a dozen threads, over hundreds and hundreds of pages, and on the last three pages they tie together beautifully and you end the book with an ache in your heart because of how beautiful it was. Even when I know that’s coming I sometimes can’t make it. He’s like the anti-Stephen King: the middle drags but the ending is wonderful.

Anathem is the exception. I couldn’t put it down. It’s one of those books that infected the way I think and little things remind me of it all the time.

If jacking off constantly at age 14 doomed a person we would never have left the Miocene epoch.

It seems like a perpetual panic, sustained because it creates a lever of exploitation to control the gullible. Like you can read complaints about “oversexed youth” from time periods when pornography was totally banned and women were essentially chattel. And hey, Boomers didn’t have internet porn and they are fucked.

It would peel off a few for about a year but then they’d be back. The core would just joke that the child was a democrat.

This happened to a friend of mine in the 90s. He was checking his email with pine. The lady who ran the school computer lab called the terminal “the black program with the blinking thing.”

Python is actually pretty baller with string operations too since so much of the C has been heavily optimized.

This is just some library too, not their main application. I know “lines of code” is bullshit but just for reference I looked it up and apparently curl is ~180k lines of code. I can’t imagine how crufty this fucking code must be, assuming this is even real because it seems too ludicrous.

You paid for something and never got it. Initiate chargeback with your bank. Amazon may close your account for this, but fuck them.

The Naked Lunch. I was probably 10 years old? I didn’t understand any of the plot, I was weirded the fuck out and the giant bugs made me sick to my stomach.

Like this: https://forgejo.org/faq/#where-does-the-name-come-from

Their high falsetto voices are like salty broken glass in my eyes. I’ve never been able to watch more than 10 seconds of a “vtuber”.

The collection sounds like “The Dark Descent” but I’m not familiar with the waif story.

It’d be amazing if they all shared the same cell. Gates and Clinton slap the shit out of Trump because he snores too loud and won’t sleep on his stomach. Trump and Gates thump Clinton because he’s afraid of the shower block and won’t wash his ass. Trump yells at Gates so much about his eye-watering gas that he farts in the toilet out of fear. They deserve nothing less than each other.

Read a horrific story once about one of those falling on a lineman. Like a modern-day version of boiling oil during a medieval siege. It’s pretty fucking crazy we just suspend them overhead all over the place in the right-of-way where trucks and shit can hit them.

I think Americans can perceive how fucked up and corrupt their government is but they lack any theoretical analysis to determine the nature of it. So all they have is a general perception that the government doesn’t work for them and that creates an inherent distrust of any government program, no matter what it does.

So an American might believe that universal healthcare is a good policy, but they also believe that in practice if such a policy were enacted it would mean that money being siphoned off by the ultra rich, with nothing fundamentally changing. They would be paying the taxes of a universal healthcare state, but the actual system would continue as-is, and they would still need to pay ridiculous prices. Thus getting double-dicked for no benefit.

The thing is this is probable. Section 8 is a massive subsidy to landlords. The ACA is a massive subsidy to insurance companies. But if you asked Americans why this keeps happening they would just spout some nonsense about R’s and D’s, or some particular politician, or whatever.

This cynicism spans both “blue” and “red” America. I think it’s the heart of the rot in our society. It’s not really a society at all in the sense that people have lost the belief that we, collectively, can work together to achieve more than what’s possible working alone. When that breaks the only motive people still believe in is the extractive motive of corporations. They believe that only the rich can make things happen, and thus are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy by electing venal politicians who believe the same.

Obviously I’m generalizing here, but just an undercurrent I’ve observed. It’s not coherent, but it is consistent across the “spectrum” of American politics. This ultra wealthy magnify this narrative since it suits them.

I’ve been getting annoying amdgpu crashes every now an then. I’ve tried all the various BIOS and kernel params but so far nothing has worked. Next step is rolling back a kernel version, at least that’s what I’ve gathered from all the threads about it. It’s bothersome but not frequent enough to be a real pain.

(This is an amd framework 13 with fedora 42 / wayland)