mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
mdlbear ([personal profile] mdlbear) wrote2025-12-21 06:26 pm
Entry tags:

Done Since 2025-12-14

Damned if I know how to summarize this week. Mixed?

Embarrassingly, I managed to confuse two deliveries (see Monday) -- I think because they had the same last digit or so in their package numbers -- so I had to delete a couple of annoyed-sounding posts. Hopefully before anyone noticed. The Roamate (combo rollator/powered wheelchair) arrived less than an hour later. Karma, I guess. The device itself seems pretty good, modulo some wierd design decisions, but will take some getting used to before I can write a proper review.

On the other hand, Bronx has been becoming an absolute cuddle-bug. He likes to be picked up and carried, which can be very useful. He doesn't always settle down into my lap after that, but when he does he has a nice rumbly purr. And my medication is still being adjusted; I seem to be getting into somewhat better shape. It's still not great, but I'm not complaining.

On the gripping hand, (covered mobility scooter)Scarlet the Carlet is broken, with a circuit breaker that doesn't want to stay reset. N, G, and j managed to push her home (under a kilometer, and NL is basically flat) -- we'll call for repairs tomorrow sometime.

In the links: MIT physicists peer inside an atom’s nucleus using the fact that Radium monofluoride's electron cloud extends inside the Radium's somewhat pear-shaped nucleus. Wild. Both the technique, and the fact that that compound exists at all. At least it's nowhere near as unstable as FOOF.

The Star Gauge is fascinating. (m sent us a link on the family Discord, but it was to tumblr -- the wikipedia article is less problematic.)

Notes & links, as usual )

andrewducker: (livejournal blackout)
andrewducker ([personal profile] andrewducker) wrote2025-12-21 10:59 am
Entry tags:

Posting from the abyssal depths

7 days ago was our earliest sunset (15:37)
7 days from now is our latest sunrise (08:44)
Today is our shortest day (6:57:37)

I am looking forward to the return of the light.
andrewducker: (bullshit detector)
andrewducker ([personal profile] andrewducker) wrote2025-12-20 08:16 pm
Entry tags:

What does AI think of my Hacker News profile?

Someone set up a bot to process a year's worth of Hacker News submissions/comments and generate an amusing summary, complete with a personalised XKCD. And, frankly, it did a great job.

"The Legacy Defender General"

A seasoned architect who spends their days patrolling the wall between actual engineering and unsustainable AI hype while desperately trying to keep their Windows 10 box alive until the heat death of the universe.
You are the only person on the internet who still remembers what a build script does and why we shouldn't let LLMs touch them without adult supervision.

Roasts

🔥 You have the energy of a man who would rather spend four hours debugging a custom Git hook than thirty seconds clicking a button in a GUI.
🔥 Your posting history is just a very long, very polite scream into the void about how AI is basically just Accenture in a trench coat.
🔥 I haven't seen someone this committed to public transport and vertical taskbars since the last time a Linux kernel developer got stuck in an elevator.

Predictions 2026

🔮 The Great Migration - You will finally buy a Steam Cube after your Windows 10 machine starts emitting a high-pitched whistle every time you open a browser tab.
🔮 AI Realization - You'll post a 4,000-word manifesto titled 'I Told You So' after an LLM successfully deletes a production database using a build script it 'hallucinated' was optimized.
🔮 Local Hero - You will be appointed the unofficial 'Minister of Trams' for Edinburgh after submitting your 100th link about geoblocking and public transport network maps.
🔮 Rust Awakening - You will successfully convince a junior developer that Rust is 'woke' but only because it respects the personal space of memory addresses.



(If you're on HN, and the site hasn't been melted down from demand yet, you can get your own here.)
andrewducker: (Default)
andrewducker ([personal profile] andrewducker) wrote2025-12-20 09:31 am

A long awaited victory

9 years ago I bought Bloodborne as one of my first Playstation games.
I was rubbish at it.
I'd play for a bit, get stuck on Father Gascoigne, go play something else, come back two years later, repeat.

Today, having not played Bloodborne for months, I thought I'd give the fight a few goes through, to warm up on the game again. It took me at least ten minutes of wandering about to remember what the buttons did.

And then I beat him first time, without it even feeling that hard.

I made mistakes, I nearly died twice, and I'm not sure I *deserved* the win, but for the first time he felt clumsy, and like he was giving me space to breathe, and I wasn't panicking all the way through the fight.

And now I get to play the other 90% of Bloodborne.

(I'm now trembling quite a lot, as my adrenaline levels drop back to a reasonable level. If you'd like to see what the fight looks like, for someone rather better than me, here's an example).
mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)
mdlbear ([personal profile] mdlbear) wrote2025-12-18 04:05 pm
Entry tags:

Thankful Thursday

Today I am thankful for...

  • The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. (See also, the Wikipedia article, Watch out for the rabbit hole -- this is a deep one.
  • Mail arriving in time (though just barely). Don't count on UK's Royal Mail being as fast and consistent as Postnl.
  • Receiving packages that I feared had gone astray. Looking deeply enough into them to realized that, in addition to failing to provide my house number on one order, I had mixed them up because their package numbers had the same last digit.
  • Nanobag and Roamate. (See above.) (I want to review the latter eventually. However, the best-laid plans, etc.)
  • Not sure how thankful to be for decade-old scratch tracks, but they deserve a listen at least.

solarbird: (pindar-most-unpleasant)
solarbird ([personal profile] solarbird) wrote2025-12-16 09:14 am
Entry tags:

it took me a while to understand, hayao

Meta, the company controlled by babyfash Trump fan Mark Zuckerberg, the board of which thought it was reasonable to support Fascist politicians in the hope of avoiding regulation, and whose Facebook service has or had a “17-strike” policy for known sex trafficking accounts and not only doesn’t remove fraud posts but charges known fraud operations higher rates for their ads, puked this vile mixture of plagiarism, artist’s blood, and AI sludge posing as photography onto BART station walls in San Francisco:

an AI-generated wall-sized "Look Forward" ad from Facebook for their AI "enhansed reality" glasses, showing a woman in centre wearing their RayBan model, surrounded by AI renders of people looking down at their phones. The AI-ness is sloppy, obvious, and insulting.

And of course it’s shit. Of course it’s shit. Holy gods, it is such hot garbage, and I’m not even talking about the implied higher situational awareness of someone wearing an AI PHONE ON THEIR FACE over people looking down at their regular phones

tho’ that’s a pretty fuckin’ hot take for them to have right there too, I have to say

I’m talking about the raw clownery of this image. Holy hell. Let’s zoom in at one of the insults to imagery:

A Black man to audience right of the central figure with extremely unmatched distorted ears, one white hand and one black hand, vestigial third cuffs and buttons on his left arm, and two wedding rings, just for starters

And I’m not even mentioning the ghost in the room, by which I mean the four ghosts in this one particular rendered room:

Clip of the insult with the word GHOSTS in red and four arrows pointing to the translucent faces and heads in the crowd

And I have to ask:

HOW CAN ALL THIS STILL BE THIS SHITTY AND PASS MUSTER FOR THEM? HOW?

Christ it’s so insultingly bad. It’s infuriatingly bad. As photography substitute, as AI generated Not Art. It’s… it’s like it’s Anti-art, an opposite of art that mocks the real, that imitates while degrading both itself and its opposite.

Anybody can make bad art. I’ve made plenty. Also some good art.

But it takes real work to make anti-art.

And that’s what makes me want to fucking scream.

We all know how monstrously wealthy Fuckerberg is. How much money he and his company have. How he could jerk off with thousand dollar bills, wipe himself clean, and burn the dirties the rest of his wretched life and not even notice the difference.

So when you see that they’d rather put out this slapdash, revolting, uncaring – no sneering insult of a render than pay a photographer and a few models a few bucks for an afternoon photo shoot, what’s that say?

It’s not the money. He has all the money. All of it. Well, him, and the other TESCREAL fascists.

I think… I think I have to think… that it’s a matter of principle for them. A sick principle, but a principle nonetheless. It has to be, because otherwise it makes no. goddamn. sense.

I literally have to conclude that they hate art, and even more, hate artists. They have to, to consider this better. It must be principle for them to not care about artistic creative work, to not pay artistic workers. It has to be principle to hold all that in contempt, to say, “see? We just steal everything you’ve ever done, throw it into our churn machine, and then rub out our own version in half an hour to show you’re not any better than us. And you can’t do shit about it.”

They’ve made it clear that they’d not only spew this kind of rancid splatter, this metaphorical scrawl of shit, urine, blood, and theft across the walls of a city than break that principle.

And they’ll enjoy it.

I used to think, once upon a time, that Syndrome from The Incredibles was a little too on the nose,a little too pointed, maybe – dare I say it – a little too cartoonish for even a cartoon.

I’m starting to think maybe he wasn’t on the nose enough.

But that’s flippant, and maybe a little too easy.

What I really feel is that… I’m finally starting to understand – really understand, at a gut level – what Hayao Miyazaki meant when he called AI “art” an insult to life itself.

Because, well, almost anything can be art. Art is an observation and an intent, as much as anything else, and handing that mantle to something which has no awareness, no observation, no actual knowledge of meaning, no ability to opine, no personhood at all, a chum machine with less actual awareness than a housefly maggot…

…how could that be anything less than an insult to life, itself?

It took me a while to understand, Hayao. But I think I’ve finally got there.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

cupcake_goth: (Default)
cupcake_goth ([personal profile] cupcake_goth) wrote2025-12-15 12:47 pm

Random fashion pondering

I used to have this skirt by Kambriel. I have since sold it on to [personal profile] sistawendy , and it looks fabulous on her. But I miss the idea of the skirt.






I'm pondering buying yardage of both those fabrics to make myself an ankle-length version. I'd be making it myself, because if I asked the Madwoman in the Attic to make something with both those patterns together, her head would explode. 
cupcake_goth: (Leeches)
cupcake_goth ([personal profile] cupcake_goth) wrote2025-12-15 10:57 am

Dear Body, that wasn't the plan

Originally, I was supposed to be getting my COVID vax on Friday and thus spend the weekend recovering. (COVID vaccinations hit me hard.) But then other things meant moving things around, and now I'm planning on getting my vaccination on 12/27, which gives me more days to recover. 

So we could go do the other things, right? AHAHAHAHAHA Friday night my back decided to ~do the thing~, the thing that sent me to the ER at the end of 2019. This round wasn't quite as bad, but I did need the Stroppy One to help me stand up from any seated position and to escort me up and down stairs in case my left leg randomly decided not to work for a few seconds.

I lost the whole weekend to heavy drugs and being covered in lidocaine patches. Luckily I have a Dr. appointment on Thursday; I will go over all of this with her, say, "I've done all the things that can be done before medical procedures are discussed", and then ask what tests I need to get before I can get steroid shots. (Steroid shots are the next step, with the ultimate step being surgery.) The Stroppy One will be in the appointment with me, because there's a good chance I'll forget to mention something, so having a backup brain is a good idea.

Stupid bodies. 
solarbird: our bike hill girl standing back to the camera facing her bike, which spans the image (biking)
solarbird ([personal profile] solarbird) wrote2025-12-14 10:26 am

I bought something today

I bought something for my second bike trailer build on Saturday.

The trailer’s basically been done for weeks already. I’m adding details and accessories now, like, I want to sew a cover, and I want to add reflectors. So I took it for another little shakedown ride, this time to a hardware store I found out had DOT-grade adhesive reflectors in stock for… more money than I’d like, but not unreasonable money.

Here’s what I’ve done with those stickers so far. I think it’s pretty good. The rear view is my biggest concern, given that my bike is well-lit, and this… frankly ugly flash photo… makes the reflectors pop well, showing how they’d reflect headlights. It’ll help:

A flash photograph of the back of the cargo wagon, which makes all the reflective patches light up to and past the point of whiting out in the camera. There are two rectangular reflectors on each side of the back, one about twice as high up on the frame as the other, and a horizontal bar across most of the width just above the lower pair. All the reflectors are red except for a 5cm section in the middle of the bar, which is white.

But it occurred to me as I was doing all this that…

This is the first time I’ve bought something for this project.

The trailer frame was salvaged from a semi-wrecked kiddo hauler abandoned outdoors for over a year. The platform is made from a cargo pallet someone illegally dumped and I salvaged; the metal clamps holding it in place I shaped out of old building strapping. I literally found the warning flag pole on the street, and it inserts into a metal tube salvaged from a housemate’s broken laundry rack. I made a flag for it from scrap fabric. The cage is made from Buy Nothing-listed DIY cube shelving, the kind that never really works right, but there’s nothing wrong with the wire squares that a whole bunch of zip ties can’t fix. Other parts are 3D-printed, designed by me, printed by me, at home.

Everything else was just ordinary supplies I already had.

But when it came to the reflectors… I looked around a little, but then… I just went and bought something. And I have kind of mixed feelings about that!

I mean, it’s fine. Really. At some point, I’m going to want to replace these tyres, too, and that’s a purchase – they were also in the outdoors for at least a year and as a result are semi-rotted. They’re only still usable because I used a lot of silicone glue to make a reinforcement coat on the walls. (Hey, it’s not stupid if it works, and it works.) So sooner or later, money was going to be spent.

But even so, just buying something – even if it’s something you legitimately can’t make at home, like DOT-spec reflective material – feels like cheating. I kinda don’t like it.

Part of it is that I started making these cargo carriers around the time Anna got laid off, and even after she finally got a new job earlier this year, I kept the same approach. Sure, it helped that I already had basically everything I needed by that time, but also, we’re trying to make up for a lot of lost money and time, so I kept doing things the same way.

Until today, when I didn’t. I did it the normal way instead. It’s a very normal thing. You need an item, a part, whatever – you can just buy it.

And… maybe… maybe it’s just how extremely abnormal everything else is right now, in this endless emergency… but…

I just don’t know how I feel about that.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
mdlbear ([personal profile] mdlbear) wrote2025-12-14 11:58 am
Entry tags:

Done Since 2025-12-07 with bonus s4s

Not a great week. Started out well, with cat cuddles and walks Sunday and Monday mornings. Then came my GP appointment.

CW: medical, whingeing. Since April or therabouts, my "GP" is a clinic with a handful of doctors and a bunch of assistants. It took me a while (months) to finally figure this out. Anyway, Carmen -- the assistant I saw on Monday -- couldn't find my lab results from 20 November. Fortunately I'd asked for a printout at my previous appointment, so I scanned that and sent it by email. I got my BP meds changed somewhat. Then labs on Wednesday.

Of course, I was supposed to be fasting, so that was a bust. And I picked up my re-filled prescriptions (the pharmacy is across the street), but there was one missing. So I went in again for labs on Thursday, and they couldn't find a vein. WTF? They advised me to try at the hospital. Labs at HagaZiekenhuis require an appointment, but fortunately I already had an appointment, following up on my anemia. So that was Friday. Skipped breakfast, went in, handed them both lab forms, one stick and done. And their website works, so I got to see the results ahead of the appointment next week.

Oh yeah, I also had a psych appointment Thursday afternoon, to discuss antidepressants, which actually went well. I really don't have any idea how to make use of therapy, but I like talking about myself, my problems, and my family. Follow-up in two weeks.

Then yesterday I tried attending Festival of the Living Rooms, the quarterly online filk con that started almost by accident during Covid. But instead of using the Zoom app, which just works, they insisted on going through the web app embedded on their shiny new website. Calling it beta quality is being generous. FotLR may have jumped the shark this time.

Naturally I didn't get much done otherwise, although I did go back and look at the scratch tracks I'd recorded for my next album, Amethyst Rose. Um... They were recorded between 2004 and 2010! WTF? I'll have to see whether anything can be rescued from that debacle.

Enough griping. Links! How about Grooming a Giant Rescue Maine Coon Cat? And Monday's APOD, Flying Over the Earth at Night, a time-lapse from the ISS. Particularly noteworthy for the footage of the Aurora Australis starting at 1:20

If you have lots of free time, take a look at WikiFlix. CONTENT WARNING: very deep rabbit hole full of old movies.

And finally, because of the season and because it's incredibly cool, here's The Ukrainian Origin of “Carol of the Bells” | The Story of Shchedryk (Щедрик). Turns out the tune was taken from an old New Year's Day chant, from back when New Years Day was celebrated on Beltane. Better, here's the Original Ukrainian Version, sung first in a pretty littleral English translation (with Ukranian subtitles!), then in Ukranian. And best of all, here's a Remix by the B&B project for bandura and button accordion.

Notes & links, as usual )

andrewducker: (Teddy of Borg)
andrewducker ([personal profile] andrewducker) wrote2025-12-13 08:46 pm
Entry tags:

Life with two children: Renting realms

About a month ago Gideon watched a bunch of videos about Minecraft, asked if he could play it on her tablet, got a few pointers from me to get him going and then dove in and started building stuff. At an impressive rate considering that he can't read any word more than 4 letters long.

Yesterday I mentioned Minecraft to Sophia, and she showed interest, so I set her up on my desktop and she got stuck in. She's asked for more help than Gideon has, but has been happily building herself an underground house. And just now I wanderd into my office to see her on the desktop and Gideon sitting on the floor with his tablet, with the two of them intermittently showing each other cool things that they'd found.

So tonight, after they're asleep, I'm going to set them both up for online play, and rent a realm*, so that they can be in the same world with each other.



*I am totally willing to pay £3.99 per month to not have to maintain my own server.