Codex

I’ve absolutely driven past a cop who was playing WoW on his laptop while sitting in traffic.

I don’t know who really got that trend going. I’ve enjoyed up to hour-ish long videos on more or less anything, but a few years back the first truly excessively long video I remember is Whitelight’s 7 hour long overview/miniseries on Death Stranding. And to be fair, I did find that faster and more enjoyable than playing Death Stranding.

(Also I get why folks make them: more ads plus having that much watch time heavily biases the algorithm towards you so it’s more money overall. And the kind of person that watches 7 hour long reviews in the background (or while sleeping), aka me, certainly help weigh the scales for super long videos.)

But also, I kind of like when shorts are like a minute long or less so I can watch one when I’m like, on the shitter and not accidentally end up with a video essay. I mean 10 minutes used to be the limit of every youtube video! Will they introduce a new, even shorter format? Bring vines or blips back?

Alright, I split the differance, I think that should make everyone happy.

Can’t wait for 10 hour long reviews of Elden Ring, BUT VERTICALE AND LOOPS NOW!?!

Wow, hadn’t thought about that one in a long time. I thought it was an old Scott Hanselman blog and I was correct! I’ll have to reread it, been years now.

I’m not sure there’s much why to it exactly. I feel like a small fraction of people I’ve met in life were truly passionate and excited about the work they did. Most had some passion for an art, or a hobby, or for their kids very commonly, but people who really want to grow and master their craft are somewhat rare generally. Most folks just want to do well enough to keep their jobs and then go home to whatever they actually care about.

Consider that to go on a site specifically for programming questions and then take a survey about it, you have to be the kind of person that cares about getting their code “right”. The majority of programmers I’ve met would only go there to copy-paste a quick answer, and those people have all moved to asking chat-gpt for code now.

In Alejandro Jodorowsky’s concept for a Dune film from the early 1970s, each house has their costumes and architecture designed by a contemporary artist. Giger was the designer for the Harkonnen, and several of his ideas persisted beyond the failed film.

The Harkonnen Castle

A Harkonnen chair

I assumed Villeneuve was calling back to those designs.

People in times of desperate oppression and violence rarely turn to the uncaring vastness of the chaotic universe for comfort.

Is it just me, or is it worrying how companies keep packing up and selling off the only parts of their businesses that actually, you know, make stuff, in favor of becoming full time bullshit peddlers?

I’ve been wanting to get a pipe Garfield tattoo since first seeing this. It changed me. Made me better.

I’m definitely getting my blog going regularly again… next year…

be you

wake up

cast spell

big bowl of lentils!

post lentils to lemmy

joy for all

The “tendies” thing (“nuggies” too) is so cringe to me, even more than Redditors and “le bacon”. It’s so easy to heat up frozen, pre-breaded chicken, and all these greentexts present it as though “being able to cook” (read: can put frozen food in an air fryer) is the pinnacle of love languages.

Can we make Lemmy lentils a thing or something? We’re already obcessed with beans I guess, feels like we need our own stupid food meme gimmicks to compete.

Not to be too much of an old man, but I do feel like the total digitalization of the world has sucked a lot of the scary mystery out of these things. Analog TV was spooky stuff! Local stations and public access led to some wild people getting on air. Depending on where you lived and how good your signals were, you could also pick up over the air pirate broadcasts or the ghostly partial images of the premium cable channels your parents couldn’t afford. Was that a nipple you just saw… or a ghost?!

It’s sad but i stopped writing answers or comments on SO years ago. I used to have all these optimistic ideas about people working together to collectively grow our shared knowledge. I guess Wikipedia and the Internet Archive keep barely hanging in there, but if anything those cases prove my point: without one extremely strong personality to hold the corruption in check, all these collaborative “digital commons” projects are a leadership change away from completely selling out all the work put into them. That can be feeding everything into AI but it’s also monetization schemes and EULA changes to claim ownership of user submitted content and locking the public out of your site without accounts and subscriptions.

And usually the public’s only recourse is to tear it all down and start again, waiting for the next con artist to come along and steal the village’s prosperity.

Interesting, I’d tend to demote the initialism, ie topSecretFbiFiles.tar.gz

Floaters, caused (I believe) by lensing of your aqueous humor (the liquid in your eyes) which is a viscous fluid. That’s why they show up more on bright solid color backgrounds (like the sky). As you get older, your eyeball fluid gets thicker and chunkier causing more of them.

To the tune of the Flipper theme:

They call him eggboy, eggboy!

Master of frying!

No one you see

Can cook them as he

And we know

Eggboy!

Lives by a greasy oven

Frying and lovin

Lovin his eggggggggs!

Oh you have no idea how deep my paranoia on this goes! We’ve been implementing Dynamics 365 at my office, MS made software that manages your entire business from the accounting ledgers on out. Copilot AI is everywhere in it, trying to encourage you to teach it how to do things.

MS wants to offer the next generation of knowledge worker. No more accountants, no more senior managers of inventories and all those many miscellaneous titles it takes to run a company. Certainly no more technical support. AI is going to do it all. MS wants to tell every business how to do business.

I went on a tear at one point trying to really understand, rigorously (I’m a computer and maths person by trade and training), what dialectics are and how, specifically, the material dialectic (the foundation of Marxist thought!) should work.

I was a bit dissapointed to understand that they can’t really be “rigorous” in that fashion and that they’re really more of a philosophical and rhetorical tool. I do still get a lot of use from them, and in discussions with other people the framework of the dialectic (“Ok, what if we took these two ideas and put them on opposite ends of a spectrum, how does that look?”) is very useful for explaining and expounding upon ideas.