mesaprotector

Agora's been absurdly slow to load for me since yesterday (pretty much all pages). It hangs on "connecting to voicedrew.xyz" for a solid thirty seconds.

In ancient times, if you wanted to hear a story you had to have 3 people: a storyteller or performer, an author, and an audience. (Yeah the storyteller can be the same person as the author, but they usually weren't, which is why there were oral traditions lasting centuries.) After the invention of novels you only needed 2 people: the author and the audience, because the "performer" could be replaced by a printed book. Since the invention of generative AI you need only 1 person: just the audience, because the "author" can be replaced by an algorithm. Maybe the future will need 0 people. If AI can make purchasing decisions, why even have an audience. Just market your videos and stories directly to the AI.

I wonder if the cages of stimulation we're being trapped in for the sake of maximizing profit, will actually leave us alone after this shift happens. We're being fed a heavier and heavier diet of slop because we have economic value, but maybe once we stop having that we'll actually be free.

Bought a bus ticket to go nine hours to the north, to a town I don't know at all. The way my motivation works is utterly fucked. As long as I have a modicum of comfort I get nothing done; if I force myself into a desperate situation, suddenly I can just do anything. But I'm getting too damn old and too tired of not having figured out my own life, at all. Maybe if I convince myself to be really, truly scared of dying a failure and a loser, I'll have a stable career by this time next year. Fuck.

Reading about a vegan rationalist trans death cult that's killed at least six people (relevant newspaper article, soft paywalled; one more source that covers more of the "philosophy"). Without doxxing myself too hard, there are a couple overlaps with my own background that make feel in some parallel universe I might have joined them. It's a wild story, anyway, and would be worth a full thread if I weren't lazy af.

Bing has started putting AI "summaries" on all its search results, and because DuckDuckGo mainly just scraped Bing it has them too. Just awful. I guess I'm adding "!s" to every search from now on, since I really like DDG's functionality but I will not look at generated slop every day. I'm dumb enough already without it.

Last week when the aurora was happening I took a train out to a quiet suburb and then hiked up into the hills in the hope of seeing it again. Didn't see much; maybe some vague flickering. Nothing that showed up on camera. But I realized I've been in the city too long, gotten scared and useless; spent half the time up in the hills worrying about bears and cougars instead of happily lazing around in the night air like I used to all the time.

I'm starting to think it's time to shake up my life again. I always seem to get like this when I stay in one place. No idea where I'll move or what I'll do next.

It's very hard to tell between a human and a bot if you try having an intelligent conversation. So I tried a different strategy (green is me).

I hate rounded corners so much, I used 4 lines of CSS to delete them from the entire Internet.

* {
border-radius: 0 !important;
clip-path: none !important
}

My old hard drive finally died, just before I had the chance to move everything off of it. Saved all my personal shit but now I'm tying up the wifi for the whole country downloading 300+ GB of media I lost. I definitely don't remember every single song and album I had, but I guess that's just a chance for a new beginning. Cycle of life and death and all that.

Agora's default background (Macintosh After Dark) looks like a Spongebob title card.

Friend and I got into homebrewing, probably bottling the beer tomorrow. Found this application to save recipes and calculate how alcoholic/hoppy etc. you should expect your brews to be. Happy to see the UI is straight from Windows 98. Anyone who complains about this and prefers modern flat UI baffles me. It's so functional, I love it.

/r/unixporn is really a whole different beast from the rest of the Linux community. The rices are pretty, but it's odd that showing off Spotify (with that one visualizer) is almost mandatory to get a top post. Guess it's better than nerds screeching about open source. They do seem very chill.

Ever since I learned most of the "click the fire hydrant"-style captchas have 3 control items to make sure you're not a bot and 1 test item, I get the test item wrong on purpose just to make Google's AI a little dumber. I'm doing my part

Just had to go shopping and feeling that I really wish gaming laptops looked less "gamer". If one of y'all can get Lenovo to sell a cottagecore-themed laptop that can run Valheim at good quality I'm all in

Started watching Lain since it seems popular here + I'm a conformist sheep. Made some horrible mixed drink to go along with it and dyed it blue. My soul is now floating in an infinite cerulean ocean.

I wonder how I'll look back on my 20s later in life.
Am I going to think "that was a difficult, wild, panicked time but I wouldn't be who I am now without it"?
Or am I going to think "if only I'd gotten over myself and starting living for real ten years earlier"?