ITT: Apple customers think everyone is as bad at purchasing decisions as they are.

I think it’s just jabbing at our early assumptions about dinosaurs seemingly lacking much in the way of bulk. We used to interpret them as these ultra-skinny weirdly mummified looking things rather than the plumper creatures many of them probably were.

The idea is that aliens find skeletons of animals we’re more familiar with and come to the same kind of wildly mistaken conclusions about them that we might have if we’d found rabbit skeletons without having first hand experience of modern rabbits.

GIMP is honestly fantastic. My workflow goes draw in GIMP, import to Inkscape to convert pieces to vector, then bring them into Godot where shaders get applied. I would rather draw in GIMP than any other program. I find drawing in Inkscape super awkward in comparison. GIMP is pretty no-frills, but it does the job. I prefer it over Photoshop. With Darktsble I’ve found it useful for importing high res raw images for textures too.

I don’t know why people hate on it so much. It’s all about using the tools you’re comfortable with.

Once I sat in a field listening to Victor Wooten and whistling along with him. On a fence nearby was I think a brushed shouldered blackbird? Brushed shouldered something. It started singing with me and doing a little dance. Eventually it even started syncopating its part. Like, you could see it waiting for the timing to be just right for each note. On key and everything. Went on for about half an hour.

Birds are cool.

Tompato!!!

Potamto!!!

If humans went extinct… um…

Um.

UUMMMM…!!!

Massachusetts has much more dude than this.

I’ve honestly had the same thought, but then I look at the attitudes of the people involved and their implementation of what they’re doing and it’s hard to assume anything other than stupidity and malice. I don’t think Trump or Elon are capable of that sort of strategy, and if they are they’re two of the best actors on the planet. I really don’t think they’re nearly that intelligent or talented at actual deception. They’re certainly reckless enough, but I don’t buy that they’re anything other than dangerously stupid.

I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if that’s been the motivation for some of their supporters, though. There may well be people in the world who feel that pulling the pendulum as far into a shitstorm as it will go will create enough of a counter-swing to be worth the immediate results, and that may well have affected their voting. It seems like a pretty foolish gambit for anyone who has to live through it, though, and pretty heartless to boot.

If, on the other hand, the acceleration and counterbalancing is just a natural occurrence? A way to get from point A to point B with the least possible action? That doesn’t sound totally crazy to me at all.

But, like, there doesn’t need to be someone sneakily manipulating politics and capitalism for that to happen. Hopefully we do learn from what’s happening and what’s already happened enough to make some of the same sort of societal improvements much of Western Europe and the United States saw after WWII, preferably sooner than they did with a lot less damage in the mean time.

We do seem to be in a similar situation and have a similar opportunity to change things as a result once people actually get the ball moving. Assuming we do actually get the ball moving.

Depending on what it is you’re trying to make, it can actually be helpful as one of many components to help get your feet wet. The same way modding games can be a path to learning a lot by fiddling with something that’s complete, getting suggestions from an LLM that’s been trained on a bunch of relevant tutorials can give you enough context to get started. It will definitely hallucinate, and figuring out when it’s full of shit is part of the exercise.

It’s like mid-way between rote following tutorials, modding, and asking for help in support channels. It isn’t as rigid as the available tutorials, and though it’s prone to hallucination and not as knowledgeable as support channel regulars, it’s also a lot more patient in many cases and doesn’t have its own life that it needs to go live.

Decent learning tool if you’re ready to check what it’s doing step by step, look for inefficiencies and mistakes, and not blindly believe everything it says. Just copying and pasting while learning nothing and assuming it’ll work, though? That’s not going to go well at all.

I remember hearing that but I’d forgotten the specifics! Thanks!

Just be glad they didn’t turn into crabs or cats.

Europeans used to think tomatoes were poisonous. They referred to them as poison apples.

You can wash your clothes, yes, but I’d still expect Mr Catalyst to have more than one outfit. Though to be fair maybe his closet is just full of the same plaid shirts.

Only the reactants ever change their clothes, and reactant 1 only changes after leaving the catalyst.

That man stinky.

Also there’s a bridesmaid in the back covering some guy’s face out of crab in a bucket distress at not being in the picture.

It’s pretty neat that we can see something like that from the distant past of our universe. Like, I’m aware that everything we see out in space is pretty delayed, but hearing this referred to as being in the ‘early universe’ really drives home that we’re looking into the past on such incredibly long time scales. It makes the hundred thousand years or so from one end of the Milky Way to the other sound pretty recent in comparison.

Walk barefoot in the woods and take up guitar.

Do you think it’s realistic to take back any branch of government from like, actual whole ass conservatives by dividing the only coalition we have?

This framing isn’t particularly helpful for solidarity.

The left relies on coalitions. Criticizing the stewards of those coalitions because they fail to address the needs of the people they rely on for votes is helpful and constructive. Just reducing all left-wing voters to a pair of stereotypes and trying to push one of those stereotypes away from the other? Not helpful.

We need nuanced dialogue and mutual aid. It’s a matter of survival. This isn’t that.

Why is this thread full of Nazi propaganda? Yikes. 😬

Well, not really. Sort of.

2025/“04-28-2025.xls”

You still want the year in the title format so you have it if it ends up on its own somewhere.