• 5 Posts
  • 141 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 4th, 2023

help-circle

  • Trees and their leaves smother life underneath them in forests. The leaves do eventually biodegrade and fertilize the soil and in the spring before the leaves grow back the forest floor is full of lots of fast moving, fast living greenery, but then the leaves grow back and usually whats left is stuff that gets sunbeams from breaks in the trees and some hardier species and saplings waiting for their moment to take over. Trees move in slow motion, but they are actually quite active and competitive creatures. Even once their grown their branches smack into each other as the wind blows and they grow competing for sunlight. Some small trees will just give you a little coverage and yeah you can ignore it and it will be broken up and blow away on it’s own, but if you have a big tree your hard will get blanketed.

    A yard and garden are not a natural forest theyre artifically curated. Letting a yard be smothered by leaves might be good for starting the cycle that slowly turns empty ground into forest in my parts, but most people keep that yard space for activities, or for kids to run around, or for putting a garden in or something.

    That said a few leaves wont kill you and you dont have to immediately run for a leaf blower or rake as soon as a single leaf falls on the yard to keep your grass perfect.


  • Internet culture is a weird thing. There are people who will point to civil golden ages of the internet when things were nicer before modern social media like facebook and twitter, but even the message board days were loaded with trolls.

    I think some of the problem is that trolling is ingrained in the culture of the internet. I think it comes down to a few things:

    1.A lot of trolls are edgelords who are just trying to get a rise out of people because they think its funny. Theyre pranking a community. Sometimes it’s harmless like getting a rise out of nintendo fanboys, sometimes admittedly it can be funny if its over something stupid, but a lot of trolls will get desperate and try anything to get a rise out of people and not care about what lines they cross.

    2.Theres a phenomenon caused by anonymity or even perceived anonymity that can cause people to be a little more unfiltered and nasty than they otherwise would be. Its a phenomenon noticed prominently in drivers. Normally reasonable nice people can turn into road raging foul mouthed idiots because theyre in a big metal box and despite the many windows it feels like a private space. Obviously anonymous message boards encourage behavior, but even when your name and face is plastered on something the person posting is likely replying from their bedroom or even the toilet so there is an air of privacy even when they are in fact airing something in a public forum.

    1. There is an encouragement from social media to engage even if you shouldnt. If you dont like or care for something and it’s harmless you can and should just scroll by. The world isnt waiting for you to come down from the heavens and give your opinion on how the thing they like sucks, and we sure as hell dont need you to be a jerk about it on top of that. A lot of social media encourages engagement though.

    4.Internet users are young. Less so these days than it was in the 90s and 00s, but even so who do you think has all this free time to be terminally online? I mean yeah plenty of adults do, but its largely a lot of teens and college students. People who are more likely to find the edgy bullshit funny and get into trouble. People who are likely to get really opinionated on stupid stuff that doesnt matter, and people who’s personalities arent yet fully formed(granted I dont think we ever finish growing and changing and maturing but its definitely more rapid 14-24 vs 30-40). Theyre also likely to be influenced by the nasty internet culture thats been a norm for decades.

    I think years of all this together have just encouraged a nasty place to be. Trolls feeding trolls, feeding outrage , feeding normal people who are empowered by being faceless, feeding people who could just not participate and save themselves and everyone else a big headache and it distills into something mean.


  • I have family members that have owned poorly trained dogs, and have been around places with aggressive dogs. Ive also met many people with “oh dont worry he’s friendly” dogs who then are not friendly.

    I love dogs, but I always have a respect and caution around dogs I dont know.

    As an aside there was one time I was walking around a walking path in a park when around the bend comes a fairly large dog trotting down off leash at a reasonable clip. I was initially agitated that the owner would let their dog off leash especially at the pace this dog was moving and kept waiting for the owner to also cross the bend. They never did and as my eyes focused I began to come to terms with the fact that this was a coyote and we got off the path to let it scoot by and it paid us no mind.


  • A few years ago this happened in a row to my roommate, myself, and my significant other. I bought one of those portable battery chargers, tested it to make sure it worked, and then kept it in my car for just in case.

    It came in handy once or twice but I was already home so it just was slightly more convenient than cables. I like to think it will be useful and save my bacon one day, but I also have a dread feeling that it will just be dead or no longer functional on the day I finally need it and am away from home.


  • It depends what you’re using it for. If you want to old school mid to late 00s twitter that was just random anonymous people microblogging random thoughts and sharing links and pics then you’ll be happy to be back home.

    If you followed twitter because it was a way to get direct contact and access to industry professionals, celebrities, reporters, breaking news, specific niche communities that just dont exist or barely do on mastodon, then you will be unhappy with it. Mastodon will get you uh, George Takei, Zach Weiner, and the technologyconnections guy.

    For example of the difference and why many people just dont care for jumping into mastodon I’ll use My wrestling feed as an example. On mastodon it is mostly one guy who’s enthusiastic about womens wrestling(seriously if he stopped my feed would die), one news reposting site(which honestly isnt a bad thing cause wrestling news is awful), and a handful of other people. Twitter has lots of memes and clips from the fans after episodes air, lots of links to primary sources and news sites, and the actual wrestlers interacting cutting kayfabe online promos, promoting themselves, and interacting with fans.

    This applies to a number of niches, hobbies, and fan interests on twitter. Bigger isnt necessarily better but the size and adoption of twitter is a huge strength.






  • When compared to other professional level laptops the macbooks do put up a good fight. They have really high quality displays which accounts for some of the cost and of course compared to a commercial grade laptop like a thinkpad the prices get a lot closer(when they arent on sale like thinkpads frequently do).

    That said even then the m1 macbook is over a thousand dollars after tax and that gets you just 256GB of storage and 8GB of ram. Theyre annoyingly not as easy to find as intel offerings but you can find modern ryzen laptops that can still give you into the teens of screen on time for less with way more ram and storage space. The m1 is still the better chip in terms of power per watt and battery life overall, but then getting the ram and storage up to spec can make it $700 more than a consumer grade ryzen.


  • A demanding game on a macbook air m2 will still draw close to 30 watts and while that is actually still good for a laptop relative to what the output is, and you can probably do things to improve that by tweaking in game settings, it’s still going to suck power out of a 50Whr battery.

    Steamdecks also run an efficient ryzen apu that lets them play games for 2-8 hours depending on how things are tweaked. Likewise on my 39Whr ryzen thinkpad(intel got a 59whr battery dont get me started on that nonsense) I can get 8-12 hours depending on usage normal browsing as well.

    This isnt to take down the m1 & m2. They are definitively more powerful, theyre definitively more efficient, I’m not disputing that. But the gap isnt as huge as it was when the m1 launched.


  • They’re of course exaggerating a little and speaking confidently because theyre in the business of selling a product and not in the business of trash talking what they sell or reducing confidence in their product.

    That said the M1/M2 silicon battery life gains were a huge leap forward when they first launched but in terms of battery efficiency and power AMD has been nipping at their heels, and in due time intel will likely get it’s stuff together and join them. You can already get ryzen laptops efficient enough and cool running enough that the fan is off during most light usage, and they can get hours into the mid to high teens on some models.

    Likewise even macs will start to drain quite a bit when say watching an hd video 1.75x speed, or playing a video game, or encoding something using max CPU power. So while the Macs do have a power per watt advantage, you’ll still need to be plugged in.

    And thats BEST arm vs intel and amd as they catch up. Samsung, google, and qualcom dont really have anything like the m2 at play and while qualcom is rumored to be close the samsung fab’d chips definitely arent.

    So as things are the death Intel and AMD has been greatly exaggerated and in part due a combination of the usual apple hype combined with that hype being VERY VERY justified this go around.




  • Oh sorry, I meant the DVD mail era of netflix not dvds in general. But yeah its fascinating how fast it happened. We went from having no dvd players to having one, to our house being full of them. I remember I even wound up getting a dvd player that was divX compatible that let me watch my downloaded content on the big tube tv. That stupid dvd player caused me to learn the difference between container and codec. It’s also remarkable how much clearer those low quality downloads on a low res CRT.





  • This is good practice for anyone really. Using an app or notebook to become conscious of what you eat and some exercise are a fairly surefire way lose weight than just trying to find a food hack of some kind. The all X, or eat only Y, or do Z diets tend to all fail after a while when you start wanting to eat like normal food again. With calorie counting and exercise you can just eat normally while being conscious of your portions.

    This of course comes with caveats like try to have a general balanced diet and eat healthy. Its not advisable to like at nothing but junk food and make your numbers. That said you can still eat desserts, and munch on chips, and eat pizza and stuff. Counting just helps keep you from over indulging.

    Also as with any diets it’s a slow and steady process so it’s ok if you have a cheat day every week, or slip up every once in a while. You arent a failure and havent ruined all your progress just because you over indulge during a holiday or at a wedding. You just gotta be aware and get back on track as soon as you can.

    Also also with any diets where you restrict your eating its good to try to keep a healthy outlook on weight and nutrition as in some cases being overly conscious of consumption can lead to potentially gaining an eating disorder along the way. Calorie counting goes both ways. You dont just limit your intake but you make sure you eat enough every day!