I have been watching, with some horror, the spiraling descent of facebook and instagram, etc. The whole situation reminds me of an historical event that bore some similarity.
I have been watching, with some horror, the spiraling descent of facebook and instagram, etc. The whole situation reminds me of an historical event that bore some similarity.
I started this thought-stream in 2016. Since then, it’s interesting to watch how my interests have changed focus. I think my interests have changed in ways that reflect the changes in the internet, politics, and how society decides who and what is important, when.
I have actually checked with GPT and they say that the take-over will be non-violent.
Krea’s chat mode adds an interesting new dimension to image creation. For example, you can tell it “create a portrait of ben franklin” then, when it doesn’t look Franklin enough, you provide an image and say “more like Franklin” then work on the setting. It’s interesting.
I didn’t really have an answer. My guess was “hi.”
The other day I was trying to find out, roughly, whether the Sackler family and Perdue Pharma were a bigger drug crisis than the “Fentanol” coming in over our borders.
But it’s not, I swear! As far as I recall, the number of products or services that I have actually gotten excited about is, maybe, a dozen. I suppose that’s a side-effect of living in the past, where if someone comes up and wants to show me a new Tactical(r) self-defense cane, I’m going to be comparing it to long-established products like the Henschel VK4501 (aka “King Tiger”) which is almost certainly superior unless you are going on a plane.
I can’t remember where and when I wrote about it; I think it was here – but since I forget, it does not count. The point, I recall (because I keep discovering a’fresh) is that there is a certain basic recipe for cake and once you understand it, everything is a matter of proportion of flour to milk and how you cook it. For example, a pan cake is a cake cooked in a pan. A waffle is a cake cooked in a waffle iron. A popover is a cake cooked in a cup. Now, we can argue whether lard or tallow or butter makes a popover a Yorkshire pudding, but the basics are: a quantity of flour, a quantity of eggs (for structure) some salt, some melted butter (or lard or tallow or even vegetable oil, and then something to make it foam a bit, maybe. If there is absolutely nothing to make it foam, I think maybe you have shortbread. If there’s baking powder, it’s a pancake or a waffle. If air is lofted into it with a whisk, it’s a popover or Yorkshire pudding. But once you understand how runny it should be, how fatty it should be, and how airy it should be, you can produce a tremendous amount of Europe’s greatest cuisine. Unless you get into millefeuille which is basically butter/bread damascus with no air in it… Anyhow.
After way too many years (4, 5 or so) the Hot Shed is officially “done.” That means that the list of changes I want to make is pretty close to zero. Obviously, there will always be a few things but when you’re down to figuring out the lighting arrangement, you’re done.
Actually, I used to hang out at Affinity [aff] because sometimes there was interesting far-ranging discussions and art, and creativity. I started here at Pharyngula, when it was still under ScienceBlogs (I still have the mug!) and came to enjoy the rough-and-tumble crotch-kicking and religion-bashing. I still track there, but I have found that, in the last year, my ability to stay awake is seriously compromised, and the wars of religion are just a waste of time. In fact, I often catch myself thinking that the right-thinking people of the world were too busy pounding on theists to deconstruct the burgeoning fascist dictatorship that was growing in the wings.