ggtdbz

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.

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.