forgotmyoldname

Within the realm of what many people consider “bugs”, intelligence also exists. For example, jumping spiders have intelligence similar to mammals or birds. Research is ongoing with bees and they’re seeming similarly advanced, with some having the capacity to suffer depression.

In all likelihood, there exist insects with reasonably high levels intelligence that we’ve simply overlooked for centuries. Basically everyone today knows crows and octopuses are very intelligent animals, but that definitely was not a common sentiment when I was a kid. But nobody was really paying attention to animals then beyond “pest”, “edible”, “pet”, and “looks cool.”

Employing people to handle phone cancellations is way more money and effort than a cancellation script.

I’ve never encountered a small startup that relies on call to cancel—only big companies that actively know they’re making it hard to leave.

Nobody really knows what'll happen with housing.

There are a lot of people dumping in cash, hoping to double their investments in a span of a couple years. Many are successfully doing this.

There is also a growing percentage of people who are being completely priced out of housing due to it becoming a wealth exchange among the rich.

Can housing prices keep growing infinitely with fewer and fewer actual people buying them? When the last recession hit, a lot of people thought no, it can't happen and things will level out from here on. It turns out prices did simply keep going up and up.

China is making economic investments that may lean heavily in their favor in the future, but they're absolutely nowhere near behaving anything like old colonial powers.

Belgium was systematically cutting off hands and it's estimated that half the population of Congo died during their reign and resources completely stripped with nothing in exchange. China is, at worst, maybe leaving some countries with a hard to pay off debt and modern infrastructure in exchange for stripping their resources.

Always resorting to blaming a foreign boogeyman is dangerous thinking. Sometimes you need to accept that there are bad actors within your own country.

For a lot of news programs, the credits are publicly visible and verifiably citizens. The people talking are citizens of your own country. They could care about their country instead of money. They just don’t.

Most people who post more than once a year seem to have a Patreon or something set up.

I've been told this by various MLM salesmen multiple times. Seems NFT "investors" aren't hiding it anymore.

I can go and make an NFT by absolutely any artist I want and there's nothing that can be done to stop me. Nobody is forcing me to provide several levels of documentation to prove my identity before selling my image online.

In fact, it's pretty much daily that I see fellow artists warning people that fake NFTs are being sold in their name.

A signed inkjet print is harder to forge than an NFT. A hand-written signature is possible to forge, but it's substantially harder to forge than a copy-pasted digital file.

I mean, there are documented cases of it happening as well[1]. Faking an NFT is an incredibly easy way to get rich and there's no liability. It's wonderful for scammers.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58399338

It didn't. The Mona Lisa was a work specially commissioned by a family.

The modern version of that is someone paying an artist to commission a unique work. What changed? Nothing. The Mona Lisa was copied, and digital works can be copied. But nobody else is getting the custom ordered work that you paid for. Only you got your dream painting--everyone else just copied or downloaded a nice looking painting.

> otherwise the market wouldn't exist in the first place. That's not even remotely true.

Bubbles, scams, and artificially inflated markets have existed as long as artists have been signing their works to ensure scarcity and value exists. NFTs do absolutely nothing new. It's the 21st century version of beanie baby sellers saying "dude trust me it's totally worth investing in these haha you'll be rich haha these are totally rare hahaha."

NFTs don't create scarcity either. The image is freely available to anyone. Nobody knows you own an NFT unless you explicitly drop in and mention you own the image every single time it's posted somewhere, in which case people will mock you.

But the actual solution has been around for centuries. An artist can sign their work or tailor it directly for the purchaser. Artists have been doing commissions online forever now and you can have them write your name if you want. Anyone out there "stealing" work you bought is either saving something with your name on it, or they're modifying it to remove your name.

No artist views NFTs as a solution to an already solved problem. They're either seeing it as a scam and avoiding it, or they're seeing it as a scam that they can quickly cash in on. Countless artists are on twitter and various places online making rock-solid careers out of selling art commissions. NFTs were never a part of it. The people proposing it as a solution are the ones "investing" in NFTs.

So how exactly is the "gas money" calculated? I was led to believe it was expensive because putting all that data into the blockchain costed a significant amount.

Asking because, wanting to verify whether NFTs were really a scam or scheme instead of just following heated Twitter arguments, I looked into uploading my own NFT. Gas money for a single image was $250--estimated earnings for an NFT are in the low dollars for most people, so it certainly wasn't worth it for me. I told a friend how insane the price was and went back to attempt the process once more a few minutes later to get a screenshot showing him I wasn't lying--gas money for the same image was suddenly over $800.

I can't think of any reasonable way to justify such costs if it's just encoding a few bytes of text and not an actual image, so now I'm doubly suspicious of how these costs are actually calculated. It reminds me of countless other schemes where you put in a bunch of initial cash to "start your own business", then spend the rest of your days desperately trying to find buyers.

I also highly suggest reading Paul Krugman, and turning all his "wills" into "won'ts" and "won'ts" into "wills." His insights are worse than political talk between a couple drunk guys at a bar.

A lot of Americans are morbidly afraid of their children being away from adult supervision for more than a minute. I think suggesting 10 year olds ride a bike instead of taking a car or bus might infuriate more than a few people.

A rapidly evolving virus rapidly evolved, to the surprise of no one who paid attention in biology class.

I wonder if covid conspiracy folks also think influenza is a "happy accident" by the pharmaceutical industry.

Some spiders do.[1] They protect their own and viciously attack outsiders. People are terrified when they see a single massive huntsman spider--imagine 300 angry ones coming at you because you offended one of their friends.

And related to the main topic, I've sat bored at work and watched a jumping spider prowl around the office. It was initial terrified of me, and would face directly towards my face and follow my head around to see what I was doing. When it eventually realized I wasn't a threat, it continued prowling. I watched it often stop, gauge a distance, and squat a few times trying to find the perfect angle and location from which it could successfully make a jump. Sometimes getting it perfect, and sometimes failing, pulling itself up by its web, and trying again. Learning through trial and error seems to definitely cross the bar of intelligent life for me.

It also later directly approached me (after having earlier avoided me) and started crawling on my hands as I typed.

Felt almost like meeting a thumbnail sized cat.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delena_cancerides

Possibly most of the people in Tokyo aren’t even originally Tokyoites. They’re random people from other cities living there for a couple years for the big city experience and decent work. There’s nothing intrinsically unique about their culture and personality, compared to, say, people born and raised on a small island and who’ve never left.

Your experience is definitely very uncommon. I’ve been to Tokyo countless times and they’re not any different than the small town I currently live in in Japan. If anything, you probably talked to some people who are way too used to tourists asking them for “directions” then trying to turn it into a chance to hook up—way too many people try this and some people have learned to just avoid tourist-looking types, especially women.

I’ve had consistently the polar opposite experience. Tokyo people treat me fairly normal, but in Kyoto, people will absolutely insist upon broken English and ignoring what I’m saying despite speaking to them in Japanese. They’ll also look to others near me when I’m talking, waiting for them to translate my Japanese to…their Japanese?

I don’t have this experience elsewhere. I think Kyoto folks are just burnt out on tourists and many shut down when they see a foreign face. Not all people in Kyoto have this problem, but I’ve encountered this consistently each time I’ve been there but nowhere else in the country.

Treat crypto no different from stocks.

You can’t just buy, trade, and cash out stocks from some random guy online. Crypto is basically no different from stocks at this point—things change in value just because people think others expect the price to change and follow the herd.

I’m fine with nuclear, but producing excess nuclear waste simply to produce random bits to do absolutely nothing isn’t something I’d support.

> Market makers make a profit by buying things and then reselling them for slightly more.

When a lower middle class guy in your town does this, he’s called a scalper and seen as a villain.

When rich elites do this with life essentials, they’re market makers doing a useful service.

If world hunger isn’t just a hoax, why do I have food on my plate?

It’s really quite bizarre to say the US isn’t a war machine when it has the world’s biggest arms industry and readily sells to nearly anyone. That’s before even getting into its history of invading the most bizarre countries that most can’t point out on a map, going back to the Philippines over 100 years ago, to the insane level of competition it reached with Russia in the 20th century, to Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.

> I don't think you understand how the value of these assets is supposed to rise. When you buy a flat in the center of town, it's supposed to increase it's value for being in the center while town is expanding.

Why is it "supposed" to be this way?

It doesn't work this way in a lot of Asia. People don't want old, used homes and they lose value over time. Cities often don't have one specific point in the center (America's zoning is absolutely horrendous and forces this to happen) and so businesses, restaurants, shopping, activities, and so on are fairly equally spread across towns.

When American cities expand, they build more houses farther away but further condense business in the downtown core. But that's a problem that's politically invented and not so much a problem elsewhere.

I wasn't talking about adderall. Desoxyn is literally methamphetamine and available by prescription.

What should happen when someone violates the legal protocols in which they're controlled?

Meth is already legal, in actuality. It's just controlled in production and distribution and only available by prescription. There are millions in America taking legal meth right now.

One problem is a lot of people really will buy the cheapest thing without even thinking about it.

Then 5 years later they'll complain that wages are down, local shops are closed up, the quality of products they bought went to hell, and the only thing their town has is a raggedy Walmart.

It's kind of hard to compete with a multinational trillion dollar corporation that actively seeks to crush your small business through unreasonably low prices and third world manufacturing just to eliminate future competition and secure a profit stream. And now that people thought they'd saved their town from Walmart, Amazon is coming in to clean out the rest.

I remember in the 90s sitting on my grandmother's porch in rural PA at night. Huge moths everywhere. Luna moths being just about as common as mosquitos. Beetles bangings into the walls. Chubby spiders having so much food they couldn't even eat half of it. The walls were absolutely plastered with insects and you'd have to try to not get covered fireflies while walking through the grass.

Now there are some mosquitoes and crickets. Maybe a few moths sometimes. The walls outside are spotless.

Living in Asia now, I see insects about as much as I saw them back then. I have to wonder if there were even more back in the 90s, or if things are as good as ever here. But it's nice to see life.

> I see this "I've tried one solution and I'm all out of ideas" approach a lot.

Not sure where you've seen it, because it sure wasn't in my post.

I've tried the alternatives. I once (regretfully) paid for Pixelmator. I tried Krita. I suffered through GIMP. I've fiddled with Clip Studio Paint.

Photoshop is quite simply better, more full-featured, and stable. Pixelmator would crash fairly often and I'd lose progress. The others just don't have good UI, and in GIMP's case, it's outright user-hostile.

I've managed to switch most of my software to free/cheaper alternatives (Blender has improved a lot lately and I was glad to leave Maya), but when it comes to 2D art on desktops, Photoshop is unfortunately still the best.

I use Photoshop for art. Unfortunately, all other desktop software just isn't good, but thankfully Procreate is absolutely amazing software that I can use on my iPad (if you're reading this, devs, please port it to macOS. There are countless artists that'll pay to switch to a non-subscription based, non-Adobe piece of software that doesn't suck). But for desktop, I really have no choice but to buy into the Adobe scheme.

But yes, Creative Cloud is seriously completely fucking nuts. It's shit I do not and will not ever need or want for any reason and exists just to burn through my electric bill and contribute to climate change. Trying to find ways to disable it gives you cheeky employees who post marketing fluff about how it enables consumer whatever BS, but nobody can explain what those 8 dozen background tasks are doing or why we can't disable it.

I resorted to just deleting parts of the software package one by one. Most background tasks are gone. I made the mistake of updating one (1) time and the number of background tasks doubled. Absolute insanity. Nearly gigabytes of memory swallowed and CPU cycles wasted doing nothing. For all I know, it's nothing but crypto mining processes--and honestly, it probably is since Adobe has shown themselves to be money hungry and absolutely nobody can or will say what those processes are.

Graphics cards don’t really have anything to do with the pandemic. It’s more to do with scalpers and crypto clownery.

Some countries have had absolutely disastrous bouts of covid this past year (like Vietnam) and it screwed up supply chains a lot. Companies canceling orders because of expected drop in demand that didn’t happen are all rushing to put those orders back in, and it turned into a mess. There are plenty of factors at work here because each country that contributes to the chain had some different sort of problem.