Zink

I have two optimism-filled counterpoints to this.

1. Happy childhood memories are often much nicer than actually existing as a child. Much more concentrated. You already have the good stuff.

2. The only person stopping you from walking through the woods and finding cool rocks is you!

(insert caveats here about how adult life sucks for so many people right now and they don't have free time to wander in the woods. I know. It sucks. I can only encourage you to consider it a metaphor and find something realistic and rewarding that fits your life)

This is where the information economy starts to eat itself. If every message arrives pre-saturated with irony, critique, and self-awareness, then no signal can rise above the din. Warnings, reassurances, satire, and sales pitches collapse into the same register. The audience isn’t persuaded or misled so much as numbed.

It sounds like you are describing an unfolding future where all communication us ultra-processed.

I have posted about this a couple times, but ever since I saw Jon Stewart a while back describe modern propaganda as ultra-processed speech. It's engineered for reaction and engagement. It's like you said, everything collapses into the same register when there's a BOMBSHELL headline every day.

But the ultra-processed thing has been reaching much further into our media and culture than political speech for a while now. Like I dunno, everything that has half the people's faces buried in their phone in public.

People genuinely admire the rich. I think some cultural norms/lessons with good intentions may have backfired and made it even worse. I remember being taught not to be jealous of others, not to compare myself to them, not to keep up with the Joneses, and that a person can do whatever they want if they put their mind to it and work hard.

Those might individually be good things for one to practice, and I am going to keep doing so.

But at the same time... those lessons are not supposed to be taken as bidirectional rules of nature! A good person doing those things does not imply that a billionaire is the rare individual that is 1000x visionary and hard working, 1000x not to be envied or judged, and 1000x deserving. Oh yeah, 1000x noble and not at all 1000x sociopathic or obsessed.

I have a good example of "both are useful" on my second screen right now, but it's a difference in output and not input. I was watching system resource utilization a few minutes ago while running something, so I have plasma's graphical System Monitor on half the screen while I have a big ole terminal window with htop running next to it.

The GUI side uses the speed and bandwitdth of our visual processing to communicate complex historical data about a handful of values very quickly. It does it with graphs that, while accurate and to scale, are a bit analog and imprecise feeling to the eye.

The text-based side uses the speed and bandwidth of the hardware to show me a huge 2D array of values that constantly updates. It does it with monospaced text in a high-readability font that is very clear and precise.

The GUI does more processing on the computer first to communicate quickly about the targeted values, while the text side leaves more of that processing to be done on my end. But that's not a negative, because I can search through those hundreds of values as quickly as my eyes can dart around the screen. There's no navigating a GUI that quickly.

In general when it comes to GUI vs CLI, I like GUIs too. I am just old enough that I remember how awesome it was to start using graphical desktops and file managers and computer mice and all that. But I'm an engineer who uses the terminal every single day, and I often just leave it open when I'm at work with a bunch of monitors. To me, any decent computer must have a powerful CLI and text-based configuration and scripting and all that.

For most USERs, the GUI is all that matters. And since the GUI needs to be simple and rock solid, it can be advantageous to just leave the arcane shit in the text files and not try to cram everything into the GUI. If I want to change my screen resolution, system fonts, or change my network connection, I expect to find that in the GUI and I'll just go there. But when I want to be the dork customizing the colors on my GRUB screen or tweaking the swap/cache behavior of my OS, I'm quite glad to edit text for those.

Headlines like this are just a psyop at this point, to convince some of the people halfway paying attention that justice is happening even if slowly, or maybe more likely to convince them that Bondi was the beginning and end of the shit show that she starred in.

The problem is the ridiculous wannabe fascist dictatorship that's simultaneously in control of the world's biggest military while also dismantling the institutions that made it possible. Who gives a flying fuck if one of the underlings might get thrown to the leopards today instead of next month? All these disposable enablers can go on trial afterwards (imagine, accountability, lol).

If this particular deplorable piece of shit doing the dirty work of Trump and child predators everywhere loses her job and is replaced by a different deplorable piece of shit doing the dirty work of Trump and child predators everywhere... then so what??? The cast of ridiculous characters on the evening news gets somewhat more confusing and the same real-world horrific shit that actually affects real people just keeps on going.

I wonder how much of the push behind this is from asshole men worried that their kinder wife is secretly voting against the republicans.

We love dogs too in my household. I have four dogs, in addition to numerous other terrestrial and aquatic pets.

But unfortunately, much like other people can be the worst, other people's dogs can be the worst!

And for that matter I am the rare Lemmy user that also loves kids. I am the fun dad and uncle. other people's kids can also be the worst, lol.

People just need to pay attention to the world around them and how they affect others. That would be nice. (good luck, amirite?)

The same way you tell if it's copy & pasted from Stackoverflow or some other search result!

I mean if we already have a dictator anyway, how about some infrastructure to go with it?

To add more specifics here for you, note that the f-stop is usually shown as a fraction, like f/2.8, f/4.0, etc.

So first of all, since the number is on the bottom of the fraction, there's where you get smaller numbers = more light.

It's also shown as a fraction because it's a ratio, between your lens's focal length (not focal distance to the subject) and the diameter of the aperture.

So if I'm taking a telephoto shot with my 70-200 @ 200 with the aperture wide open at f/2.8, that means the aperture should appear as 200/2.8 = 71.4mm. And that seems right to me! If you're the subject looking into the lens the opening looks huge.

I keep saying this and I'm honestly surprised that some of the educated sociopaths in the Republican party haven't pushed back. But maybe they can't get anybody elected without feeding the hate.

The point is: Even if you remove all morality and you do not care one bit about the lived experience of other human beings who also only get to live once, it is STILL stupid to be ejecting people from the country. Our economy is built on infinite growth, and you cannot grow your portfolio of companies and/or stocks without a supply of laborers to underpay.

Good on us for driving away both ends of the spectrum -- the cheap laborers AND the Ph.D academics!

edit: I forgot to mention that this is happening in the context of the population of the entire developed world beginning to level off and even decline. I feel like one of the big social ills of the next generation could be developing nations still getting the shaft on the global stage as all the rich countries court their best workers.

If you look at the list & map here, you can see that the only continent still adding to the world population is Africa.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate

I bet some of the worst of them are psychopaths who don't directly enjoy it as much as they enjoy proving that they can do it and get away with it. Because they're special. They're better than everybody else. Clearly. /s