11,930 karma · joined December 14, 2013
Yeah, Miranda is south of us, and pretty metropolitan compared to our particular corner - and here we encounter words and pronunciations we encounter nowhere else in Portugal - not even 30km down the road.
I love it here, but living in the backwater of backwaters has its pros and cons.
Also larger things like figs and grapes - only after you spend a few years here do you learn that dona olema has one particular fig tree that tastes like melon, and senor rodrigo has a grape vine that makes gigantic (billiard ball sized) ridiculously sweet grapes. This knowledge doesn’t travel to the next valley over, even. Oh, and then you find another vine, the same, climbing a tree in a forest that was a vineyard 70 years ago.
Kinda amazes me how much genetic diversity for crop cultivars there still is, smack under our noses, across Europe.
I even recently used AI to do the FEA for a 80m long pedestrian suspension bridge, and to model where to anchor along the span to avoid bounce.
Entirely my own risk, on my own land, and the bridge is sound.
I’ve been coding since I was 6. In my 40s now. Making stuff. Making stuff in meatspace, too.
I always told myself that I enjoyed coding, that I enjoyed making stuff.
I was wrong. I hate coding. I hate standing in a ditch with heavy cables slung over me. I hate neck and eye strain from hours bent over a soldering iron.
What I like, what drives me - the outcomes. The neat bit of software that I conceptualised and now have in my hands. The mad Heath Robinson contraption that somehow makes the machine that goes “ping!”, in fact, go ping.
I’ve always recognised that I am a lazy asshole - but there has always been a carve-out for creating - yet the giant heap of unfinished projects tells me my “eh, amanhã” attitude does in fact persist throughout many avenues of my life, even those I thought I enjoyed.
Me, I fucking love vibe coding. I get to go to bed at a sensible hour, and wake up in the morning like it’s bloody Christmas Day, as I know there’s going to be something cracking to play with. The ideas I have, realised, without me having to slog through the weeds. Nobody sucking their teeth at the scope. No “madaxe got distracted by another shiny object”.
I’ve executed on basically every digital must and should that I’ve come up with over the last decade, in the last nine months. I’m now onto the “could haves” and “would like to haves”.
And… I’ll be honest. Maintainability, understanding what it does under the hood - for the first time in my life I barely care about, as next year I can have a better model do it again, and better.
So, I like the outcome. I like having an idea and seeing it come to life. What happens between A and B isn’t terribly important, as it turns out that not all paths are the goal.
And I think the same may apply to a lot of creative people - I mean, artists had and have artisans for a reason - and now we can all have an ever-improving artisan.
And then you go look at where there were Denisovans and Neanderthals, and those cultures have mythologies with trolls and ogres.
The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - in fact, it is speculated that floriensis perhaps hung on much, much later than 50kya ago - and I see no reason the same shouldn’t apply to Neanderthals or denisovans.
On a similar note - cultural memory runs deep. Take hill forts in the U.K. for instance. Commonly accepted as defensive structures. Except… the populations of these places, the topography, all of it, made them pretty crap defences - and the top of a windy hill, far from water, isn’t such a great place to live. So why? My take: the doggerland flood, and cultural memory. When the sea is slowly encroaching, building on top of a hill, building a dyke, a berm, sensible.
5000 years later, still doing the same thing. Why? Nobody quite remembers, but it’s important.
FWIW I’m an astrophotographer, and I don’t really view 30 hours of stacked exposures as “a photo I took”, rather as the outcome of a lengthy signals processing chain.
I suppose the question is where the line is drawn. Ten years ago, I doubt “I made this picture in photoshop” would have qualified as photography. Now that we have AI, the window has moved.
Meanwhile, you amortise it over years.
For some reason, nobody argues that this isn’t a real sale of a real car.
If it’s all just circular financing, then tax day will be the reveal, as there will simply be no money to pay the corporation tax on the profits.
Slither slither
I wouldn't be surprised if there are marines and/or mercs on the eixo monumental in November. Trump will need another war/conflict/invasion/occupation, sorry, special military operation, to distract from the midterm losses, and nabbing Maduro played well in Peoria.
Elections (and referenda) do indeed have consequences.
It is however perfectly reasonable to look further up the causal chain and say "propaganda influences elections".
Right now, I’m rolling with her hypothesis that it’s purely environmental, and finish our intercontinental move next week.
Honestly, I don’t hold out hope, but at least our destination country is one with a good cultural attitude to mental health, which I’m hoping may rub off on her. And me - I come from the “keep calm and carry on” school, often to my detriment.
My wife often goes to bed shortly before I get up in the morning, and doesn’t rise until mid afternoon - exhausted, pissed off, tearful, all of it.
There’s zero pressure on her to conform to any particular day/night cycle. By the time she gets up my day is half over, the housework is done, the meals prepared, the business for the day concluded, the kid at school, who I’ll pick up later.
I used to be a night owl, but as she has become more and more nocturnal over the years, I’ve adapted to live on 5 hours of sleep and became an early riser, so I actually get to spend some time with her in the evenings, and am up and ready to deal with the day so she doesn’t have to.
So. I don’t think it’s society. Sure, it’s a sample of precisely 1, but this phenomenon seems to be largely internally driven.
Thing is, we tried the alternative. Quite a few times. The outcomes were considerably worse for everyone than capitalist economies.
I literally said above that she has developed excellent self control and a take-it-or-leave it attitude.
Her surroundings right now? What do you know about them?
Anyway. I wasn’t even giving advice, I was just saying what worked for me and her.
You seem to have signed up to HN to pick fights and piss people off, looking at your comments.
Someone, flag this dweeb.
She’s allowed to watch YouTube kids or Netflix whenever she wants, or to play Minecraft or Mario or whatever on the switch.
The upshot is that there’s no desperation, no begging, and self-moderation of consumption. She’ll watch a video about planetary formation for 20 minutes, or a Minecraft tutorial, and then she’s bored of that, off to go make art, or play outside, or have a tea party, whatever.
One rule that’s cast iron is never at the table - we go out for dinner, she’s bored and shitkicking, she gets a pen and paper. She reads, she writes, does arithmetic, and she’s empathetic and inquisitive. Couldn’t ask for more.
Once in a while she’ll decide that today she wants to lounge on the sofa and binge on Bluey, and that’s fine - it’s never a permanent state of being.
Strip it back to just billionaires, or their equivalent over time, and thus it always was.
People talk about the “new world order” as though this is some novel concept - but you can saunter back in time past the east India company, the bourbons, the holy Roman emperors, Rome, Greece, Sumeria, and see the same pattern played out throughout history. True power sits with wealth - an impoverished ruler relies on others for his means, and has no power of his own.
The wealthy, those with power, have always decided for the rest, have always had outsized influence, as long as there have been societies with the concept of “mine” and “yours”.
It took me five minutes to realise that this was something of an nothingburger. As the author states, you basically have to have PHP running as root, and allow an attacker to upload and then execute malicious code on your server already - and if you’re there already the house is already on fire.
Although eventually the meat in the loop will be redundant.
Honestly the hard bit was rigging something up to hold the drill in place - in the end, went with carpentry. Automating the choke just uses a strong spring, a Lego motor from the 90s, and, uh, Lego. And string. Latches with a solenoid when fully closed, and when coil power goes it releases it.
Like I said, obscenities, but it saves me a walk, in the rain, and allows me to keep the power on when I’m not here for months in winter and the sun is insufficient.
The first month was spent laughing at whatever had broken now, but it’s been two years now, and the only snag I had this year was that the string broke.
Engineered for… at least one 9 of reliability.
The article mentions several relatively minor/local public figures, including a prosecutor, apparently caught on mic saying they’ve influenced policy in favour of the group. Political lobbying is one thing, but an undeclared interest, another entirely.
As best I can tell this was published, talked about for a few days, and sank under its own mass. Their most read piece of 25, apparently, and it went precisely nowhere.