The Microcenter near me always seems busy. There's always a steady flow of kids(I see more girls than boys interestingly) with a cart full of PC parts and a fat grin.
I always check there first when I need some kit. I much rather drive over and get what I need same-day. Routers, adapters, deoxit, solder, PC parts, generic flash drives in bins at the checkout like they're candy.
Their electronics section leaves something to be desired, but where else can I just grab a Pi zero w to-go for 10 bucks or some random sensor I've been meaning to play with to add on to whatever I was already buying. I cant even be mad at the markup because it's so valuable to have same-day.
That and the old-school sticker from the salesmen for commission means they tend to actually be nerds looking to help and I'm always happy to slap the sticker on whatever I'm buying to give them a piece.
If you have a Microcenter in your neighborhood, give them some business. I can only describe the feeling like you're a kid walking into Toys R Us again.
I'd say at least 70% of reddit "hobby" spaces are people buying something with little research, then posting the picture of the thing they bought.
Any real discussion is drowned out so the average post now is "bought these, new to the hobby, what do I do with them?".
The meshtastic sub is a good example of that. People buying hobbyist hardware, without doing any research. They probably saw some youtube video, hit the amazon "buy", then when it arrived, they're stumped.
Yeah, it's just consumption consumption consumption.
Post a photo of your new gizmo: 300 upvotes. Video of you using your widget: 4 votes.
And in subreddits dedicated to actually making things, it's just hustling hustling hustling. With a small percentage of self-help posts like "how I spent 4 years in my boring-ass generic video game and nobody wanted it".
My "favourite" is on the r/vandwellers subreddit with countless people posting a basic photo of a van they just bought with zero information about themselves, their build plans, how they intend to use it. It might as well be the Craigslist vehicle sales section.
> I'd say at least 70% of reddit "hobby" spaces are people buying something with little research, then posting the picture of the thing they bought.
This is exactly what happened to all of the hobby reddits I enjoyed.
Any useful discussion was crowded out by 10 posts per week (or day) of people posting their newest purchase or asking a question that had been answered 1000 times already.
The useful Subreddits have mods who come down hard on these posts. They don’t proliferate as much if people don’t see them everywhere. It’s a lot of work for mods though.
>I'd say at least 70% of reddit "hobby" spaces are people buying something with little research, then posting the picture of the thing they bought.
A really great (awful) example of this that I saw was on the typewriters subreddit (which is already 90% people posting pictures of the same 5 or so overhyped machines):
In the 1950s, Royal used to give out gold typewriters as part of a writing contest.[0] I saw one of these come up on Goodwill’s auction site, saved screenshots for my records and followed it closely, since I knew bids would get really stupid really fast. Sure enough, winning bid was around $1500.
About two weeks after the auction ended (about the time Goodwill’s very slow shipping takes), I saw it pop up on the subreddit, exact machine, identical scratches, blemishes, and all to the one I had screenshots of. The post title? “Found this at my local thrift store for $50. How’d I do?”
That was enough to finally make my delete my account and seriously question anyone who thinks Reddit is actually good for niche hobbies.[1]
[1] Well, that and the fact that and the fact that I was probably going to lose my mind if I earnestly gave detailed advice on repairing a machine I had personally stripped and reassembled, only for someone to get upvoted to the top for posting a confident pseudo answer about some mechanism—that may or may not even exist in that machine—that they only faintly understood from a general YouTube video that they only half watched.
I assumed this would be a challenge intended to be solved in a few days, not a single afternoon. Nowadays, other kids at school would have and give access to their AI as the solution would just be a prompt away. These days, you can't even stop kids from having internet and thus AI access for extended periods of time.
About 30 years ago in a creative 2-week fit I wrote a mini-symphony. I’ve always envisioned expanding it into a full-length orchestral piece but don’t have the skills to do so.
I would love to use a music model that could help me do that.
I’m imagining feeding it my score and then iterating with it to create the final piece I’ve had stuck in my head all this time.
https://projectsam.com/libraries/the-free-orchestra play around with something like this, and you'll be surprised with what you can come up with. Modern DAW's have given me a ton of freedom to create all types of music.
Nobody needs this thing indeed. Nice to have, but out of 100 producers I know only 1 employing end-to-end AI in his process. People love to mold and generally touch what they creatively pursue. Even most of the elevator music (so called vapourwave) was and is being done by humans.
Odd how you refer to vaporwave as elevator music. The original artists of the genre very lovingly remixed classic city pop from the 80s and 90s, and overlayed their own music on top.
I think you might be referring to "Muzak", a particular brand of background music that would sell to businesses to play in stores and elevators.
> And people that enjoy creating art will still do it regardless.
Some people will, but for me, I could never justify spending time and money to learn something an AI could do better than me. I'd constantly feel like I'm wasting my time.
That seems silly. I spend time and money to get better at guitar even though there are countless pro (and amateur) musicians who can do it better than me.
Yeah, but you don't have access to those people all the time. If I have a free tool on my laptop that can do everything better than me at my command, it feels silly to spend the time to master the instrument.
People still calligraph even though we have printer. People will actively spend money in a hobby they like. It's totally fair that you personally might not want to do it anymore if AI can, but I think parent was saying other people will continue to do it if they enjoy it. There are tons of people who create copy right free music anyways. Talking about those type of people. :)
I don't even care about profit. My success indicator is "making something I couldn't make before". Since AI can do it, I can't justify learning an instrument, even if I might enjoy the process a bit.
I think this sentiment is actually incredibly sad and more or less the crux of the matter.
AI is a tool intended on increasing efficiency. The way you describe the act of making art/crafting things seems to come through the lens of efficiency, where you're wasting your time in the struggle of improvement.
The time spent struggling is not time wasted. The struggle is the single most important aspect of learning and improving. Its how lessons learned reach the deep subconscious as if you're walking or writing with a pen. No good musician, painter, sculptor, systems engineer, etc became that way without that deep struggle. If someone says they never struggled, be wary of them.
If we round off every corner in the name of efficiency and the bottom line, all we're left with is toil. We don't benefit from that toil, the people who push for greater and greater efficiency do. No matter how efficient we get, the excesses produced by the efficiencies will be guarded. Food thrown away, excess milk dumped in the dirt, crops burned, profits stowed away.
The AI can only exist via previous struggle. The music produced by AI will only ever be a shadow of Human struggle. It will never truly exceed that struggle. A series of vectors in memory on a graphics card can't know the feeling of a beat as it resounds in ones chest, or the resolution of a chord as the bridge turns around. It can't know the sympathetic emotions of a story told in lyrics. It can't know the nostalgia evoked by a shadow in a painting, or the familiarity of an expression in a face.
Only we as humans can create this, and its sad and disgusting to see these tools used to degrade the human experience for an ounce of profit by people who refuse to allow themselves to understand the struggle of creating art.
I appreciate the in-depth response, and I agree for the most part; the issue is, I can choose to struggle on something more practical. I'd get less fulfillment, but in today's economy, it's a far safer option, and I'd still learn and grow.
I was sad when I bought a new 10th or 11th gen X1 carbon to replace my 4th gen. I configured them essentially the same, second-to-fastest processor, FHD display, no touch screen.
The 4th gen almost never kicked its fans on, especially in Linux. The new one gets far hotter, even at idle. Lenovo removed the traditional sleep mode in favor of modern sleep, which causes it to die with the lid closed in a couple days compared to over a week with the 4th gen.
I can't keep the gens straight because I bought a late-model right after a new gen was released. It's definitely not the 9th because lenovo basically said "don't buy this", and it's the model before they added the awful external camera bump for a webcam I'd use 2x a year.
Ironically, battery life while actively using it is decent, not as good as the 4th gen, but I could squeeze 8 hours out of it. I use whatever cpu throttling utility that lives under the default KDE power controls. I trust it works because compilation times are quartered when you go from power saving to high performance.
Most of my complaints revolve around the fact I can't enable legacy sleep modes that actually save power. I blame microsoft for pushing their new sleep modes that mostly benefits windows.
He is making a stink about Covid vaccine requirements during a period where hospitals were overflowing and bodies were being stacked in refrigerated trailers.
There are no stories about this outside the first month. The hospitals were initially ill equipped but were so well equipped after March/April that the giant boat they sent as a backup to New York was barely used.
Almost no healthy people died from COVID, most had co-morbidities and they should have been the only ones forced to vax and stay home.
Vaccines were a miracle. The state medical examiner converted one nearby university’s arena to a temporary morgue at one point in 2020. It’s mind boggling that people were and still are in denial about how bad it got before large parts of the population started getting vaccinated
For real. The sibling comment is flagged now but people seem to have memoryholed the impact of COVID on the healthcare system.
Hospitals were absolutely overwhelmed at many points during parts of the pandemic, outside of the first month. That was a major concern during the "surges" and spread of new variants.
I know this because my state routinely publishes hospital census levels and at many points during the pandemic elective and even non-elective procedures had to be cancelled due to lack of bed and staff capacity. The facility I work at was regularly impacted.
Search hospital related COVID stories during 2021 and 2022 and you'll find plenty.
The people who voluntarily glued themselves to propaganda TV never paid attention to it in the first place. They'll believe whatever they need to because they're mad about lockdowns.
Are we living in the same world? I had a child born about that time which was one of the few ways to actually get into a hospital. When I went in the fucking place was barren. A bunch of medical professionals shaking in their shoes waiting for something that never came. I knew then and there I knew i was being sold a lie and the news was carefully orchestrating snippets of misrepresented footage. And then went about my business as normal.
They were not putting COVID patients anywhere near the maternity ward and you certainly were not allowed to leave the maternity ward so I'm not sure what you were expecting. A busier than usual maternity ward?
Those protocols were apparently not in place yet, or security wasn't aware of them, or no one wanted to stop me. I walked around damn near every hallway of the hospital, which was smallish.
I did a Google search because a wife not being allowed to have her husband present during childbirth sounded too egregious to be true. I found a single Today article about one specific hospital in New York enacting that policiy (NewYork-Presbyterian). That's not nearly widespread enough to apply to any story of a COVID-era childbirth you hear about, FYI.
It varies widely by state/county, etc, but in most of the US, hospitalizations were pretty low still in April. The first peak was around August which was my experience, and the second peak was around January 2021.
So as far as "A bunch of medical professionals shaking in their shoes waiting for something that never came", they were waiting for what was actually coming.
> I knew then and there I knew i was being sold a lie and the news was carefully orchestrating snippets of misrepresented footage. And then went about my business as normal.
It’s extremely poor reasoning to rely on your individual anecdotal experience of your hospital visit to conclude that there is a global conspiracy on a massive scale. Was all the footage of overflowing hospitals and makeshift morgues fabricated?
Fwiw, I went to a Boston hospital in April or May of 2020 to get tested for a Covid exposure and they kept non-covid patients quite separate. They relocated entire offices to different buildings to avoid cross-exposure. They don’t want to put Covid patients near people giving birth or their infants for obvious reasons. Also our emergency department had a million signs up telling people who had certain respiratory symptoms to go to a different location (which I went to and was indeed much busier).
…But I didn’t base my belief on the things I was hearing from literally every source on that experience. I did it because that many people simply can’t coordinate a lie on that scale that convincingly. Skepticism is good, but respectfully and in my opinion, believing it was all a hoax requires a great deal of arrogance and gullibility.
For inexplicable reasons I was about the only one there with free reign of the hospital. They seemed so starved of guests and happy someone was there for good reasons that the hospital didn't stop me from walking around most the hallways, so I did. Small town hospital with few enough security that they all knew who I was.
There was so much bad data and propoganda coming in at the beginning thar ultimately the only thing I could depend on was what I personally investigated. I'm not using it to sign off on a research paper.
And you generalized this to the world as a whole? I admit I don’t have a citation for this, but I’d be shocked if small towns didn’t have markedly slower spread rates than cities. I feel like this was brought up frequently during the pandemic.
> There was so much bad data and propoganda coming in at the beginning thar ultimately the only thing I could depend on was what I personally investigated.
How and which things did you decide were propaganda and bad data?
Perhaps so but I ultimately use data I collected to make my own choices in my own environment, not to force choices upon you. If you had different data I would not judge you for acting differently.
No one exists alone in a society. People who ignored the overwhelming evidence of the pandemic’s severity were more likely to spread the disease to other people because of their poor judgement.
The evidence being peddled by our state health director at the time to justify lock downs was largely computerized projections that were not based on overwhelming evidence and were ultimately wildly wrong even without vaccines.
Sorry, I’m not an expert in the field, but are computerized projections not the norm in disease spread modeling?
I don’t really feel like continuing this argument, so the last thing I’ll say is that I don’t know how else experts are supposed to have made decisions at the time. Makeshift morgues were opening to handle the overflow of bodies. They acted on the evidence they had at the time, and readjusted recommendations as new evidence came to light. This is part of why social distancing protocols changed so much during the first year of the pandemic.
My contention was never so much experts making recommendations based on projections built on weak evidence, but rather experts issuing orders on these wildly false projections that imprisoned and fined people for something as simple as dancing on a sidewalk in protest.
Experts should be free to advise the public. Thankfully the health director issuing the order that jailed and charged this man with a felony had to resign in disgrace.
Look at the timeline of literally any plague, as they all follow a very similar pattern. For instance here [1] is the one for the Spanish Flu. There are a number of peaks and valleys that gradually recess to noise as viruses tend to evolve to less virulent forms while people also simultaneously develop broader immunity. This makes observational data highly unreliable for determining the efficacy of a vaccine during a plague.
The same is true of mortality/severity rates by vaccination status in hospitals. People who opt in to a vaccine are generally going to be more inclined to seek hospital treatment than those who opt out of such. So if somebody unvaccinated went to the hospital for COVID it would naturally be, on average, a much more severe case than a vaccinated person going to the hospital, with worse overall outcomes. And so you skew the results when looking at hospital data.
These biases and trends are facts most people may not be aware of, but big pharma certainly is.
> These biases and trends are facts most people may not be aware of, but big pharma certainly is.
I have a hard time believing that “most people” also means “most epidemiologists” or “most medical organizations” would be unaware of such an obvious problem. It seems like it would be day one of school stuff.
It seems trivially obvious to me, someone whose closest qualification to being able to debate the actual science here is having a bachelor’s in physics and very technically being involved in some academic research. I’m not going to second guess the overwhelming majority of scientists and medical professionals I’ve heard comment on this because of something like that.
I mean laymen. All epidemiologists and the like are certainly aware of such problems. You'll see these biases and many others buried in the discussion/limitations or other such section in any study. Here's [1] a random one from the CDC:
- "confounding might exist because the study did not measure or adjust for behavioral differences between the comparison groups"
- "these results might not be generalizable to nonhospitalized patients who have ... different health care–seeking behaviors"
Along with many more. The problem is that there was no meaningful public debate whatsoever. You were on board with absolutely anything and everything, or you must be an "anti-vaxer" and just wanted everybody's grandmother to die, and probably also thought COVID was caused by 5G.
I think there sadly exists an overlay in a lot of politics, basically tribalism, but I think the better phrasing is "teams" as in "team sports".
You don't like a team for an ideological reason, usually physical closeness or some other arbitrary connection.
For many, the team is the extent at which they analyze politics. You see this when conservatives will reference historical events in terms of the name of the political party. For example, it's relatively common to see someone say "Oh the Democrats are bad because during the Civil war they were on the side of slavery". Their analysis doesn't include the actual policy or ideology at hand, it's simply the team "Democrats". It doesn't matter to them if the flavor of policies that the early 20th century dems supported are similar or even the same as the policies modern Republicans support. Only the team.
I think there exists multiple layers of "tribalism" or "team sports" in politics that effects people differently. The bottom layer is sadly "<Name of party> good, <name of other party> bad". I think at some point we must acknowledge that some people are simply stupid. If they think making an argument based on the politics of a party 100 years ago is convincing, they might just not have the facilities for critical thinking.
A lot of those people are now @-ing grok on twitter to explain even the simplest of jokes.
Isn't this purposefully minimizing what essentially amounts to a poor-people-torture machine.
The purpose of the system is what the system does.
In the US we have deeply ingrained perverse financial incentives in criminal justice with wildly variable sentencing that depends on the mood of the judge that day.
Stray any amount from the fine line of legal, and if you're unlucky you could be plunged into a system where you'll be put into massive debt, while also losing your job, home, important documents, etc. We claim to want to reform criminals, yet we kick out their feet at every turn and expect them to say "thank you".
And then the people who face the smallest amount of risk to being victimized by this system like to say "Yeah, it's not perfect".
What textbook taught in the United States has anything with an ideological stance that isn't at the very least revisionist towards making the US look better?
Most history taught in the states already waters down the historical facts to make us look better.
I always check there first when I need some kit. I much rather drive over and get what I need same-day. Routers, adapters, deoxit, solder, PC parts, generic flash drives in bins at the checkout like they're candy.
Their electronics section leaves something to be desired, but where else can I just grab a Pi zero w to-go for 10 bucks or some random sensor I've been meaning to play with to add on to whatever I was already buying. I cant even be mad at the markup because it's so valuable to have same-day.
That and the old-school sticker from the salesmen for commission means they tend to actually be nerds looking to help and I'm always happy to slap the sticker on whatever I'm buying to give them a piece.
If you have a Microcenter in your neighborhood, give them some business. I can only describe the feeling like you're a kid walking into Toys R Us again.
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