It's simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking. I can feel their panic.

"Oh no, I did a bad. Go away bad. Oh no, oh no, they're going to find out I did a bad chew. Bad away! Bad away now! Why is this not working?"

I've never been put under, but I just assumed OP meant that they would say something right before they started counting, not after.

I'm color blind so I can't read it, but I can see enough of the big orange dots to connect them together like constellations and fuck you too.

Fine, I'll stop talking about 9gag. Sheesh.

This is not fair. She hardly even has sleeves.

Respectfully, I disagree. We've entered an AI boom, and right now, the star of the show is in a bit of a gangly awkward teenage phase. But already, these large data models are eating up mountains of energy. We'll certainly make the technology more energy efficient, but we're also going to rely on it more and more as it gets better. Any efficiency gains will be eaten up by AI models many times more complex and numerous than what we have now.

As climate change warms the globe, we're all going to be running our air conditioning more, and nowhere will that be more true than the server centers where we centralize AI. To combat climate change, we may figure out ways of stripping carbon from the air and this will require energy too.

Solar is good. It's meeting much of our need. Wind and hydroelectric fill gaps when solar isn't enough. We have some battery infrastructure for night time and we'll get better at that too. But there will come a point where we reach saturation of available land space.

If we can supplement our energy supply with a technology that requires a relatively small footprint (when it comes to powering a Metropolitan area), can theoretically produce a ton of power, requires resources that are plentiful on Earth like deuterium, and doesn't produce a toxic byproduct, I think we should do everything in our power to make this technology feasible. But I can certainly agree that we should try to get our needs completely met with other renewables in the meantime.

Is it possible to be very supportive and say you look great, and give my hopes that you get everything you want out of life, but at the same time inform you it's spelled "collage"?

I hate when people save their music in a lossy format.

If you want a vacation, don't insurrect the nation.

That's an oversimplification. The Biden campaign has around $240 million on hand. If Harris becomes the presidential nominee, her campaign inherits the entire $240 mil.

If another person becomes the nominee, the Biden campaign could refund contributions so they can be sent to the new campaign directly. Otherwise, they are permitted to transfer as much as they want to the DNC.

But the DNC can't spend the money however they like. They can spend an unlimited amount supporting the new candidate independently (running ads, oppo research, etc), but there is a limit to how much they can spend in coordination with the campaign. For example, if they rent a venue for the candidate, that must be coordinated with the campaign and therefore counts towards coordinated expenditures. The coordinated expenditure limit per presidential cycle is $32.3 million.

And if they want to give directly to the campaign, that is even more limited. A political committee can only give $5,000 dollars per campaign per election cycle. Anything more than that would have to go to some kind of Super PAC which also has limits in what it can do in direct coordination with a campaign (though it gets fuzzier because Super PACs are tantamount to political money laundering in my opinion).

So no, if the DNC gets the money, they can't just give it to whatever campaign they like. The limitations are not due to any contractual obligation when donating the funds, but rather US political rules on how presidential campaigns are allowed to receive money.

Source: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2024-07-19/what-happens-to-bidens-campaign-money-if-he-drops-out

Haha, somebody did the math wrong.

* does the math *

Oh no.

I used to work for a company that did various kinds of biometric recognition. I unfortunately was paraded past these cameras many times for testing purposes, so my face was compromised many moons ago.

We had two kinds of products we installed in airports. When looking at large crowds most airports wanted cameras that would monitor the flow of traffic, determining if there were any bottlenecks causing people to arrive at their gate (or baggage claim) after their luggage.

The other product was facial recognition for identification purposes. These are the machines you have to stand right next to. There are various legal reasons airports did not want to use any crowd-level cameras for identification. They hadn't obtained consent, but also, the low resolution per face would lead to many more false positives. It was also too costly.

But we did have high def cameras installed in strategic locations at large music halls. These private companies were less concerned with privacy and more concerned with keeping banned individuals out of their property. In those cases, we registered faces of people who were kicked out for various reasons and ignored all other faces.

My point I guess is twofold: first, you might not be facially tracked in as many places as you think you are. Second, eventually you will be and there's not a whole lot we can do to stop it. For many years, Target has identified people with their payment card, used facial recognition to detect when they return to the store, and used crowd tracking to see where in the store you go (and sometimes they have even changed ad displays based on the demographics of people standing nearby).

Mostly, you will be identified and tracked when there is financial incentive to do so.

One thing that they are confirmed to do is when someone you interact with a lot searches for something, that person may be interpreted as a family member and results from their searches may show up in your ads. Devious af.

So multitalented! I can see why they called him Alexander the Great.

A lot of people describe the first moment of the big bang as infinitely small, dense, and hot. These descriptions may approximate that first moment of existence, but they slightly miss the mark because in the very first moment of existence, size, density, and temperature didn't exist. There was nothing to compare anything else against.

Instead, let's visualize that moment as infinitely same. Erase all thoughts of violent explosions happening very quickly and instead just imagine a single point of light. Not big, because size requires multiple things. Not small because it encompasses everything. Just one infinite same.

Now, since it's hard for us to visualize change in an infinite void that is simultaneously nothing and everything, imagine that point of light as a magical tank engine at the front of a never-ending train. And our job as conductors of that train is to get to the caboose at the end.

The train cars could theoretically go in any order, but because we conductors are beings of time who need them to arrive on a schedule, we must visit each car in a precise order. And before we can access a car, we must make it unique by showing it something that has never been seen before.

For the first car, this is easy. We simply show it the tank engine at the front of the train. So, the inside of the first car transforms its interior into a copy of the tank engine it's attached to.

But when we arrive at the second car, things are more complicated. The cars have already seen the tank engine. So, instead, we show the second car the first car. And the second car transforms into a copy of the first car and the tank engine attached to that. And inside the copy of the first car is another copy of the tank engine.

As you can imagine, the further down we get on this train, the more this starts to get out of hand. Copies of copies of copies abound. The magic train is powerful, but as mortal conductors of time, we worry our own powers may have limits. So, to reduce the burden on ourselves, we take some shortcuts. Instead of trying to visualize increasingly long nested copies of trains inside each new car we visit, we start to conceptualize these copies as amounts, or amplitudes. When we open the door to a new car, all of the amplitudes inside resonate and interact, becoming maybe more abstract than they are in reality. They form spatial dimensions and physical properties, as mediated by fundamental forces.

These aren't set in stone, but determined by the lens through which we view them. And when we look through specific lenses, we see these forces causing certain repeated amplitudes to intermingle and stabilize to the point that even though all of the train copies are further nested when we step into the next car, we can recognize and identify some of the same structures, just shifted slightly in their spatial relationships since we last witnessed them in the previous car. We call these persistent formations matter. And as their shared spatial relationships cause them to cluster and coalesce, we refer to that as gravity.

While in the early cars, this continuum of space and matter is not impossible to conceptualize, the more cars we travel through, the more apparent it becomes that these increasingly complex objects are becoming more and more isolated from each other. At every scale of amplitude, each nested car is attached to its own tank engine. While these engines can interact with each other virtually, at the end of the day, they are all just virtual copies of the train we are on. It is entirely impossible for any one of these tank engines to travel so far that it reaches the edge of its bounding box. Because that bounding box is just a lens through which we imagine overlapping traits of increasingly many very similar objects. And the more of them we imagine, the more space is required to provide the virtual framework of this lens.

So, when we feel like we are experiencing random events in our small subsection of the universe, those events are not truly random, but instead the result of our precise position in the the universal train we've been virtually sliding through for over 13 billion years. The universe has become so large that it contains every possible event that could have happened in this span of time. The events are not random but calculated, and duplicated every moment so that every time we enter a new train car, two copies of our observable universe exist at a distance so far apart it's impossible to comprehend.

And when we observe celestial objects apparently propelled away from each other at increasing speed, they are not really being pushed or pulled anywhere. It is simply an artifact of trying to keep track of the "same" object in rapidly advancing train cars, while each car doubles in size to contain everything the previous car had, as well as everything new that might emerge from the duplication event. The celestial objects year by year, and indeed ourselves from moment to moment, are never the same thing twice. It's an illusion brought forth by our brains being born into a cosmic flipbook.

Even something as simple as seeing multicolored pixels on this screen is not real, but the result of virtual "tank engines" moving into the same spatial zones occupied by our retinas, which are themselves constructed of virtual trains of varying size. The reason photons move at a set maximum speed which makes them exempt from experiencing time is because they are all just virtual copies of the real locomotive which is driving the whole train. Every photon in our universe is just a make-believe copy of the very first moment of the big bang. A specter of infinite sameness.

So, objects in our universe aren't moving apart as much as the space between them is increasing to account for the overhead of a universe with constantly growing entropy and uniqueness. The extra space represents a boundary which limits how far light can travel and affect matter in its realm of influence. If you're still reading this, somewhere out there, in a part of our universe so far away that light from our known universe will never even remotely reach, there is an opposite you made of antimatter reading the exact same thing as written by an opposite me. But we are only made of matter because of a virtual compression of sameness, so that antiverse may be the exact place where the curvature of the entire universe loops back around and is overlaid upon itself. And the uncertainty of photons may arise from the fact that there are two identical universes overlapped and constantly exchanging probabilities. And this may be the compressive property which allows the fundamental forces to exist in the first place. So, say hi to yourself. You're the reason you're here.

Yeah, they crammed a lot of good jokes into that 24 minutes but it somehow didn't feel rushed (except the parts they played at 2x speed).

I've had it three times zero!

I... I haven't had it yet.

It's funny, I thought of the exact same metaphor to describe tech giants, just a few weeks ago. It was in the lead-up to reddit pulling the plug on their API, as I was thinking about the ideal alternative to the current model of social media. Sometime around March, I saw this video: https://www.tiktok.com/@endangeredecosystems/video/7226846526713171205?lang=en

I thought about how current platforms quash diversity similar to how huge sections of rainforest are replaced with endlessly mundane tree farms that produce only palm oil. Instead of different levels of canopy for big communities, medium communities, and small communities, the tree farm just has one level which uniformly blocks almost all the light from making it to the forest floor.

In old growth forests, the biggest and oldest trees naturally fall and leave gaps in the canopy for new life to emerge. Right now, we have some new trees reclaiming portions of the homogeneous zones. Where parts of Facebook are burning, we have Friendica moving in. Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube are slowly being encroached upon by Lemmy, Mastodon, and PeerTube.

I think that ActivityPub is a big step in the right direction, but it's also just the first step of many. In the future, I want to see a full ecosystem of applications that are not just replacements of existing platforms, but living, growing, and evolving platforms of their own. We have pieces of that now, but communication between different fediverse platforms is not fully integrated. It would be great to eventually have an online world where the barriers between platforms are largely symbolic and any idea can spread anywhere with minimal effort.

Meaning, we'll all be passing around snippets of code, digital assets, and textual ideas, allowing us to create new subplatforms on demand, which naturally intermingle and breed with everyone else's subplatforms to produce dynamic macroplatforms capable of delivering desired content and behaviors quickly, accurately, and securely. We can crowdsource efficiency into every action in our society and everyone can benefit from our collective successes, while still programmatically rewarding those who work to push the progress bar forward.

Ultimately, I think that is the way to beat both climate change and income inequality. Find ways to achieve rampant decentralized success, so that resource hoarders cannot game the system to the detriment of others, but they can use their resources to take part in building a better society if they so wish. And if they don't opt in, the rest of us will get it done behind their backs, and we'll just have to find out whether capitalism or technosocialism works better.

My favorite games on Android:

1. Shattered Pixel Dungeon

• [Endlessly replayable roguelike. Clear each floor, identify potions, drink the right one to level up so you can use better weapons and armor, keep your health high and see how deep you can get in the dungeon. Game time only advances when you move.]

2. Slay the Spire

• [Deck building game. Use attack, skill, and power cards to beat enemies and earn new cards, use your choice of cards, relics, potions, and card upgrades to create synergies in your deck and make it past all three acts to win the game. Deck resets when you lose (or win).]

3. Infinitode 2

• [Tower defense game. Stop enemy shapes from advancing to earn gold, use gold to buy new towers, upgrade your towers, and swap out various types of tower to maximize your efficiency. Keep an eye on how close enemies are getting to your base or it will be overrun before you notice.]

4. Super Auto Pets

• [Pocket monster-style battling game. Use a limited amount of resources each turn to buy new bitmoji animals and watch your team face off against a random opponent at the same stage of the game, keep hearts if you win, lose hearts if you lose, get better quality pets each round you progress. See if you can win ten rounds to claim victory.]

5. Tomb of the Mask

• [Classic-style 2D arcade game. Use the four directional controls to zip past moving obstacles, collect all the dots on your way to the exit if you can, enjoy the snappy movements and fun retro sound effects. Very reflex-driven.]

6. Antiyoy

• [Turn-based hexagon-tiled conquest game. Buy houses to get more income, buy soldiers and towers to protect your land, upgrade soldiers and towers to face off against enemy assets, careful you don't upgrade them more than your income supports, enjoy the many hundreds of user-submitted maps. Single player by default, or get Antiyoy Online to compete against other players.]

7. Mindustry

• [Realtime strategy. Research new technologies, build mining drills, create weapons, face off against enemy forces to control the map. Steep learning curve.]

8. Dungeon Cards

• [Tile-based strategy game. Pick a card, help your card survive on a 3x3 grid by using the four directional controls to swap places with any adjacent card, while being careful not to pick fights you can't win, be strategic about when you pick up weapons and potions. Don't get caught surrounded by poisons, explosives, or enemies at the wrong moment.]

9. Atomas

• [Science-themed matching game. Distribute atoms around a ring, watch atoms merge and transform into larger atoms when they match, set up chain reactions of many atoms each finding their mates at the same time, careful not to fill the ring beyond its capacity. Learn the periodic table in the process.]

10. I Love Hue

• [Relaxing color matching game. Get a mess of jumbled tiles on a grid and swap tiles around until they form pleasing gradients along both the y and x axes. Breathe in. Hold... Breathe out.]

Honorable classic game mentions:

• Chess [It's chess.]
• Rummikub ["Rummy-cube", compete against other players, using tiles from your hand to form "runs" (red3, red4, red5) and "sets" (red3, blue3, black3) in the playing area until a player wins by using all their tiles. At least 3 tiles per set/run, must play 30 points from your own hand on the same turn before manipulating tiles played by others.]
• Rommy's Gauntlet [Level-for-level remake of the Windows 95 "Best of Windows Entertainment Pack" classic, Chip's Challenge. Tile-based puzzle game.]

Oh great, you're here.

Thank you! Am 100% stoked for it.

Team of bodybuilders

Ah, so it would result in more Kevin Costner.

You don't know how many times that fox jumped.

I've used an adblocker for ages as well, though I do wish content creators on YouTube could get some passive non-membership revenue from me without me having to disable my adblock and look directly into the Ark of the Covenant. I could get Premium, but at that point, I feel like I've negotiated with a terrorist.

"Hey, you want to play some YYWTGRSHYGNLSYCT tonight?"

"Yeah, I'd love to play some YYWTGRSHYGNLSYCT, bro."

"Cool, let's get our YYWTGRSHYGNLSYC on."

"Wait, what game?"

I know everyone's been asking (or was it no one?), so I made a list of the companies that show up in the graphic multiple times.

Two appearances:

• Alphabet

• Alstom

• Deloitte

• Grammarly

Three appearances:

• Amway

• Upwork

And there is one company that shows up in this graphic four times. First person to guess it will get four randomly selected emojis sent free to their inbox.

I wish for people to learn the difference between its and it's.

LOL 😆

I grew up playing the 3D version of Centipede on the Sega Dreamcast. The game was a fundamental part of my childhood.

For whatever reason, I've never spoken to even a single other person who has ever played it (aside from my brother).

The level design was crazy. Tons of replayability, a low barrier to entry, but so difficult in the later worlds I never got close to finishing it. Soundtrack and sound effects I never got tired of hearing. Yet, no one seems to have heard of it.

Thanks for the kind words! It'll be an adjustment for sure, but I feel super lucky to have found a place where everyone seems kind and knowledgeable and I'm being compensated (more than) fairly. Feels like a dream, and it's motivating me to make the best impression and do the best work I possibly can. Funny how fair wages can do that. 😅

You are not ready for the credenza rules.

I'm planning on getting the iPhone 15, now that they're switching to USB C. My last iPhone was an iPhone 4.

To be honest, some of the cultish gimmicks have swayed me. The "in group" mentality of having the right color of text messages. The ability to send videos that aren't garbage quality. The ease of having shared photo albums with people in my family who also have iPhones. I know these are mostly underhanded tactics from Apple to make their product a status symbol, but I've grown tired of being on the outside. Still, I'm keeping my Android as a second line for various reasons.

There are a few hardware components that made me consider spending the money on an iPhone. The biggest one is the Lidar sensor. I don't know of any other phone that gives you the ability to combine Lidar and camera technology to create full color 3D models of your surroundings. I can't wait to 3D print my cat.

I'm a DevSecOps Engineer. I worked at my old job for about 10 years, but I was being drastically underpaid by the end. So, I'm about to start making nearly triple what I used to make. As you can imagine, I'm completely full of good jitters at the moment.

"I want my last words to be funny, so try not to laugh."

The first video of his I watched was about the history of turn indicator design. Unironically fascinating stuff.