ryanmercer

>But lamentably my good fortune in the finding of cash has come to an end. Perhaps the rise of the credit card changed my fortunes.

I'm a moderator of /r/silverbugs and we see some fun ones sometimes, if you pop over there and search "coinstar" you'll find the occasional post where members check the coin return on coinstar machines (you dump coins into a hopper, it gives you a gift card/credit at the store) and find 90% silver coins as the machines tend to reject them. Sadly all I've ever found is a nasty penny or two and a 1 euro coin which I think I chucked in the trash given I'm in central Indiana.

Just before covid started a friend of mine found a $100 bill in a purse at Goodwill, all of our friends went nuts on Facbeook reporting back on all the random (never money) stuff they were finding in pockets of purses/garments at Goodwill over the next couple of weeks.

"we can't delete bad reviews, but you could always make a virtual kitchen" is how I take that 'feature'.

>You need to go shopping for food, you need to pick ingredients, manage "freshness" so that food doesn't go off and plan what meals you'll cook with the ingredients you bought. It would create situations where I had to choose between going out after work to a restaurant or letting food spoil.

This reminds me of Rob Rhinehart's (Soylent) old (now deleted) blog post about groceries:

>I have not set foot in a grocery store in years. Nevermore will I bumble through endless confusing aisles like a pack-donkey searching for feed while the smell of rotting flesh fills my nostrils and fluorescent lights sear my eyeballs and sappy love songs torture my ears.

Still quoted here: https://www.businessinsider.com/soylent-ceo-rob-rhinehart-qu...

Maybe not 300k but /r/overemployed has a private paid discord that I checked out for one month out of curiosity, there are some extremely legit appearing people in there showing their setups and I fully believe the $$$ figures they are throwing around on the discord, not so much the sub itself but definitely on the paid discord there are some people with multiple lower 6-figure salaries laughing all the way to the bank while more upstanding people are carrying the bulk of their work load.

I'd run it off of a LiFePO4 (bioenno or something), but that's the ham in me (also I'd probably give it powerpole connectors just to further justify how much I spent on my crimpers haha).

Really cool!

>Inevitable. Working 2 hours a day while getting paid 300K+ is unsustainable

Right? And some people are holding multiple full-time jobs doing that sort of "work" glares at /r/overemployed

>[Edit] Yeah, I get that your average stag deer doesn't have access to thermal imaging and neural networks. But this is military camo, not deerstalking camo.

The average grunt doesn't have access to thermal imaging or neural networks either, they might have a crappy Vietnam-era flashlight, their weapon system, and a reasonable compromise between number of rounds and weight as spare mags. Especially when that grunt is a "third world" fighter. Pixelated camo like ARPAT saw the bulk of its current use in Afghanistan and Iraq where the most sophisticated thing the enemy might have is a pair of binoculars and a cellphone.

The pixilation, to the human eye, is much more natural than large splotches of a few colors because terrain/vegetation/buildings in natural light have all sorts of depth and shadow variation, the pixilation is much harder to pick out than fairly large blotches of random color.

>Why did they try them in the first place?

With no knowledge what so ever my gut reaction is to simply point to nature. Leaves get eaten/bitten/broken/ripped, a branch might be in front of another adding depth with similar patterns, rocks and sand in a desert can vary sharply at different focal depths, urban environments can have dozens of materials in use along with random detritus and objects at various focal depths.

Pixilation was probably a logical step towards recreating these varied environments. Look at a ghillie suit that has leaves incorporated, they'll have a pixilated appearance - example: https://static5.gunfire.com/eng_pl_Ghillie-Suit-camouflage-s...

I've seen "Crazy European commercial" type videos and they were things like two people having fairly aggressive sex and in the very background a crumpled pair of jeans or socks or something was the product being advertised. IIRC it was French or Belgian commercial. Then there were several other commercials in that presentation from various European countries that were on either side of that level of "sell it with sex".

A quick Google query didn't find it but this comment came up that is similar

>, I remember being stuck for half an hour in a traffic jam in east Beirut with my husband and kids on the way to a mountain picnic. Right in front of us were two giant billboards (both the same) advertising jeans with a man and woman in a sexy pose, and the woman (of course) without a top. I guess by then I was not shocked but did feel it was gratuitous (to sell jeans? or to sell sex?).

NSFW WARNING FOR FOLLOWING LINK

NSFW WARNING FOR FOLLOWING LINK!

https://youlookfab.com/2010/04/09/nudity-and-sexuality-in-eu...

And the article that comment is for has comparable still image ads.

I for one like notifications. I want to know when I get a text message, I want to know when I get pinged on work Slack or discord, I want to know when I get a call, I want to know the second I get an email from a very specific person because they are incredibly busy and sometimes I'm waiting days for that reply.

Unless I'm actively texting someone, that might me a dozen notifications a day.

>a lot less prudish than the US.

>In France you get shampoo ads that just casually show a boob

If you have to show a breast to sell shampoo, there's something wrong with your culture.

Well, thank you! 14 of those look like they'll be fun deep reads over the next few days.

I have no clue about the process but if I had to guess I imagine it has something to do with the chemicals not being evenly distributed either by inexperience, some sort of mask used before chemical exposure to achieve the effect, or the process is just prone to doing that.

>they seem to be recent pictures which have been photoshoped to look like glass plates:

If you click Tomas's name and scroll down some you see on his profile "Photographer Tomas van Houtryve captured the 19th-century grotesques, or chimeras, with 19th-century equipment: under a dark cloak, on glass plates, with a wooden camera he picked up in a Paris antique shop."

https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/photographer/tomas-van-...

He's a modern Belgian documentary photographer using period equipment.

My wife is a high school teacher, the stuff those kids are doing now in class is beyond anything I did the first decade I worked in an office. I'm 37, high school education of today in no way resembles the high school experience I had - a subset of kids are even graduating high school and simultaneously completing an associates now.

Yes. The only stuff it really sees is what I write on HN/Reddit/RyanMercer.com and papers I'm writing for class. 95%+ of what it sees me write is already public domain.

Spreadsheets aren't just useful for jobs. Budgets, keep an inventory of digital purchases, making a directory of contact info/birth days/anniversaries, dietary tracking, fitness logs, etc, etc, so on and so forth. Not to mention if they go on to college/university they'll almost certainly have multiple classes where they have to create/manipulate spreadsheets and write a heck of a lot of papers in a word processor.

Excel is a far different beast than what Libre Calc offers, and then what Google Sheets offers. It has some formulas that are exclusive (mind you Liber likely has some that Excel no longer has), outside of startups it is effectively the industry standard as well and is used in all kinds of industries and roles.

Libre also has different features than Excel which has different features than Sheets, etc, but Excel is the "standard". You're going to see Excel far more than Sheets in the workplace and I've never seen a job listing mention Libre Calc.

I know Excel, I started at a startup 4 months ago using Sheets, the first few weeks I had to 'unlearn' half of what I knew and try and figure out how to do similar in Sheets. If I only knew sheets, I'd probably have been even more lost going to Excel because Microsoft doesn't hold your hand like Sheets does with every formula you start to type. I'm guessing something like Libre Calc is worse than Excel and Sheets in that regard.

>Teaching the concept of spreadsheets is totally possible

Sure, but teaching someone to drive a 4-cylinder automatic driver's ed car doesn't prepare them to say operate a manual tri-axle or a an excavator. Sure they understand steering, acceleration and stopping, but all of the unique mechanics of say Excel are different than random free software.

>At this point if you're wearing a mask you are quite a kook

Masks are still very much a thing for a LOT of people in the midwest. In the past 2 weeks we've had at last 7 family members (my 69 year old mother, some of my wife's siblings and their children) diagnosed with covid. One of my sisters-in-law works in a nursing home and they currently have 17 cases of covid between staff and residents.

>"my nation's telecommunications backbone has a malicious FPGA hidden somewhere so it can man-in-the-middle critical communications"

Not just that, for about a decade now I've had a thought that you could just have a chip "self-destruct" when a signal goes out and bam a chip re-writes itself to be bricked.

If you bake this into some common chip (or just include it in a firmware update), or something used in say backbone level network hardware, or something in millions of cellphones you could send out the instruction in some previously routine traffic to and from the mothership and then a clock starts counting down. You build in long enough of a delay to ensure you get most devices to receive the signal, say a week or even a month, and you suddenly cripple millions of devices and create mild to moderate chaos which gives gives you a leg up for an invasion or has a massive impact on the markets, or cripples internet access for a large area for weeks or months until hardware can be replaced.

"DALL-E being trained on artists content"

Well, I can't go ask Caravaggio or Gentileschi to paint my query since they've been dead hundreds of years. But being able to to feed a query containing much more modern concepts in and get a baroque style painting in that specific style is wonderful.

Plus what has already been said about a lot of art being an imitation/derivation of previous works.

> I haven’t seen it generate anything that feels artistically interesting.

I'd disagree.

- One of the first queries I did made some interesting chairs, I would genuinely buy the first if it was sanely priced: https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2022/6/17/dall-e-2-...

- One of the first H R Giger inspired works I did made some really interesting computers, I would (and may) hang some of these https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2022/6/19/dall-e-2-...

- The first wood carving query I did generated solid gold of Vikings eating pizza, this is the kind of thing I'd see in a hole in the wall restaurant and absolutely love https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2022/6/17/dall-e-2-...

- The first "painting" in this series I may very well print and hang in my office https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2022/6/27/dall-e-2-...

- These H.R. Giger chairs 100% look like something I'd expect to see in a modern art museum https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2022/6/24/dall-e-2-...

- If you want to create new characters for something, and are lacking inspiration, I think it could be extremely useful to artists. For example these variations of Don't Hug Me I'm Scared https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2022/6/21/dall-e-2-...

I've got thousands of queries, and a LOT of them have generated things I genuinely see as having artistic value, I've probably got 200~ images that I would 100% hang/display in my home ('woodcarving' and 'stone carving' queries rarely disappointed me)

is it some unique form of art, no, but can it produce works I want to see in a medium or style that already exists to a level that it is believable as authentic human art, absolutely.

People like me, with zero artistic ability, are able to take part in creating visually pleasing works. I imagine artists would also find great value in it, being able to feed a few queries in with what they are thinking of creating to draw inspiration, or even putting their own work in and generating variations that may lead to inspiration for new works.

Same. I generated several thousand images and found it a chore, outside of the daily theme on the discord server, to try and even think of anything to query. It was also discouraging when sometimes you'd hit pure gold for 4-5 of the 6 images, then you'd be lucky to get 1 out of the 6 that was worth saving for several more queries. Now it's down to 4 images and... yeah...

I'm not going to try and profit from the images, I don't need them for any business uses or anything, so to me it was a fun for a while and now just something I'll largely put out of mind.

This is the most wonderful thing ever.

Mine goes back to the very early 2000s when it was still a LiveJournal, it is worth the cost to me because it is a repository of my thoughts and memories that I felt like sharing with the world.

It is 100% for me, not for trying to get a job or anything.

Self defense isn't "misbehavior", I assume you mean the punching one. An armed felon, that had threatened police, was actively resisting 3 police officers trying to put him in cuffs... are you saying you wouldn't have punched someone with a gun actively trying to fight you and several other armed officers?

We bought our house about 20 months ago, the guy bought it at auction for about 50k and sold it to us for 179k (and now it's worth 230-245k because of the past 2 years) after having flipped the one across the street soooo, I mean...

>Then, as a cop, you arrest them

Sure, 1-2 officers responding to an incident are just going to arrest an angry crowd of 10, 20, 50 people while fearing for both their own safety and the safety of the public.

Go watch police cam breakdown/footage on YouTube. Crowds surround officer and start shouting, and even throwing things.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvDwWSl-sVE here officers try to restrain a felon, in felony possession of a firearm, that had tried to assault officers while a felon unlawfully possessing a firearm, as people surrounded them to hold their phones as close to them as possible to take footage, then as 3 of them try to subdue the suspect that continued, while armed, to try and resist then has to escalate to non-lethal violence of gasp punching the guy to try to get him to submit. At 3:42 an onlooker throws a full trash can at the officers that are actively trying to handcuff an ARMED FELON that is fighting tooth and nail to escape.

Yes. Go watch a dozen or two of these videos, it's quite common for bystanders to interfere with police, endangering police, endangering themselves, and endangering other civilians in the area.

WARNING videos on this channel frequently include violence either in aggression or in self defense, some resulting in the loss of life.

https://www.youtube.com/c/DonutOperatorOfficial/videos

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw3F91w6D78 here is a video of onlookers recording agitating one another, several of which are standing in the street and blocking police vehicles.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71wdrhKzuys here a man that had been harassing local businesses and patrons all day charges a guardsman (who's an off-duty police officer) and the crowd starts surrounding him, recording, shouting things, agitating, when another bystander jumps to the guardsman's defense and now you've got multiple hostile people getting more and more agitated while the guardsman waits for uniformed police to come take the guy that tried to assault him, tried to damage his car, was harassing others, etc.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H40vEOOs5z0 here are protestors, standing around filming each other, assaulting a motorcycle officer on his motorcycle as he tries to drive away from them

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvDwWSl-sVE here officers try to restrain a felon, in felony possession of a firearm, that had tried to assault officers while a felon unlawfully possessing a firearm, as people surrounded them to hold their phones as close to them as possible to take footage, then as 3 of them try to subdue the suspect that continued, while armed, to try and resist then has to escalate to non-lethal violence of gasp punching the guy to try to get him to submit. At 3:42 an onlooker throws a full trash can at the officers that are actively trying to handcuff an ARMED FELON that is fighting tooth and nail to escape.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdFsumyHLXo guy on a roof of a business hops down, then retrieves a handgun and aims it at officers, the officers start issuing commands while a bystander walks into the officer's line of fire filming and occasionally shouting things (go to 4:20 and you can see them just right of 12 o'clock.)

Etc.