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.

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.

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.

If you do a search for something like “why is Rust safer than C++” you will find multiple examples of the fun ways we can screw ourselves in c/c++, lol.

Hello, friends in civilized lands, especially those of you who work at financial institutions…

Some of us in the states are excited to watch you do some damage to the entrenched middlemen that have been skimming from all of us for so long. Please do consider letting us sign up for the new stuff. Our money is still worth something, for now!

I ended up on AnyType and still really like it.

It’s kind of open source even if not proper FOSS, it has effortless cloud sync on free accounts INCLUDING mobile apps, and it is focused on privacy and local first. Like I don’t think I have a login and password - there’s just a 12-word passphrase that gets generated on device and that lets me connect my other devices to my “account.”

I don’t think it directly stores things in plain text, but the interface makes it easy to use it as an organized pile text pages, because that’s what I usually want to do. You can of course export it as well.

What color are they now, what color are they now?

A fine pink mist, oh a fine pink mist!

normal people realizing he was never killed

Or normal people realizing the connection to Mossad and/or other state actors.

(I saw the account was faked, but I still think this would be much more significant than him being alive)

I feel like the third panel really captures the essence “I am angry about everything and you’ve shown me something I don’t like, which I guess can exist as long as it hides in the shadows away from my righteous gaze, therefore you are SHOVING it down my THROAT and I am morally justified in attacking those people until they go away”

politicians argue “no one will want to be a cop if we hold them accountable for their actions.”

That sounds a lot like when they insist that nobody will ever innovate if they ever have to pay taxes when they get rich off their product.

Oh yeah agreed. Their role in the rat race makes up a significant part of their personal identity. That’s part of the design, to keep you focused on your consumption instead of your life.

I guess I should have referred to the noise as attention-grabbing things instead of serious things, lol.

My son was the prime age for Baby Shark when it blew up a few years ago.

I remember we were on a ride at a little local amusement park and some girls started singing Baby Shark.

I was the dad that stepped in right on the beat and bellowed out “DAAAAAADDY SHARK DOOT DOOT…” with as much bass in my voice as I could manage.

I grew up in a conservative household. Fuck that whole universe of attitudes.

If you’re putting it off you might be frustrated afterwards once you see how easy and fast it was, lol. If you make a bootable USB drive, which you should, you can boot to a live desktop and see linux running on your hardware before you install anything to a hard drive.

I have recently converted from Mint, including a brief stint with LMDE, to good old Debian + KDE Plasma and I absolutely love it. But I am also enough of an enthusiast that the few extra setup steps were fine.

Did anybody else here make the grave mistake of doing this in Oblivion, the game notorious for enemy auto-leveling?

I went off doing random shit the moment that Captain Picard let me out of that sewer, and by the time I showed up to be the Hero of Kvatch I was this crazy invisible assassin of doom, and probably at the top of the thieves guild or the dark brotherhood or both.

So then if memory serves, the town is under attack from monsters and is on fire. The game drops me into a small walled-in arena and instead of whatever lv 1 imps and cockroaches are normally there, I’m holding my bow and arrow and looking up the fiery eyes of half a dozen 12-foot-tall giga-chad linebacker demons from hell. Oh and look they are already sprinting in my direc-- DEAD!

I probably took some creative liberties there but you get the idea.

I think I had to lower the difficulty slider to get through that room. Then I put it back to normal assuming the worst was over, only to have the game put me through a CORRIDOR of hyper-strong enemies next! So twice I had to lower the difficulty.

On one hand, this happened because my character was a min-maxed glass cannon, and a stereotypical one at that (stealth archer, how original! /s). But that same character had no problem with the entire game before or after that town because the whole point of the game is to have the freedom to approach encounters as you wish.

So in many ways that situation was less about auto-leveling, and more about the meme-worthy situations where a boss late in the game requires completely new mechanics the player has never seen. Or even better, it was the anti-forced-stealth-mission!

I wonder, is hatred of advertising a common thing for folks with ADHD? They take away something you are giving your attention to because it interests you, and shove some other crap in your face just to serve their own interests.

I remember being enraged at the scheduled commercial breaks in the '80s and '90s. The only benefit they had was that I always knew which segment of the show I was in and therefore roughly what time it was.

But now? It is so much damn worse and the normies just seem more OK with it than ever. I just remind myself they are living in a society that conditions them to accept it and gives them a thousand more serious things to worry about.

Edit: some words not have right letters

Watching TV of any kind at other people’s homes, and especially my parents’ place, can feel like some real black mirror shit.