Random Dent

That’s good to know! It could also be because I just switched over, so it doesn’t have enough reference yet for what I’m listening to.

Yep! According to their site it sounds like it can run at up to 60Hz and there’s a video of it playing a YouTube video pretty smoothly, albeit in monochrome.

I bailed on YouTube a few years ago. I had a video with a very clearly public domain piece of music (both the song and the performance) in it, which I didn’t monetize just because I hate ads and the channel wasn’t very popular anyway. Some bot flagged the public domain song for copyright and YouTube not only gave me a copyright strike but also added paid ads into my video without my consent so they could send the ad money to whoever it was that flagged it.

I didn’t even bother to contest that one, I just deleted my entire channel and sent them a very angry message telling them to go fuck themselves lol.

I will never use them again because of that, and I’m so glad I got out before AI became a thing. Fuck YouTube.

I wonder if it could be that the AI trains on popular content, meaning AI slop sometimes looks like Kurzgesagt because it’s ripping it off, which means the slop filter learns to recognize the original content that got ripped off as slop…?

Yeah I switched over to Tidal and I like it so far. The music quality is good and there’s just a simple toggle in settings to turn off anything to do with AI.

The recommendations aren’t as good as Spotify’s but I’d rather deal with that than a barrage of AI bullshit.

That was my thought too lol, this is essentially my job but with better pay and benefits.

I have Arch (btw) on my laptop which is the tinkering machine that only I use, and a Win10/Linux dual-boot desktop which is the one other people use that I’m not allowed to break. I had Fedora Silverblue on there originally because I figured it would be pretty stable, but it honestly gave me nothing but trouble. I switched that one over to CachyOS and it’s been smooth sailing ever since.

I like using qemu with quickget personally for quickly setting up VMs. You can literally just be like quickget ubuntu 24.04 or whatever and it’ll do all the setup for you.

It can do Mac and Windows VMs too, but they take a little bit of fiddling.

I think if it was me I wouldn’t worry about it. As you say, it’s his money and you’ll presumably outlive him, so then your options are: a) just leave it and then your eventual funeral stuff is mostly sorted, saving your loved ones a bunch of money and stress one day or b) you can just disregard it and do whatever you want.

What the Lindsey Graham ladybugs thing means. Once known it can never be dis-known.

I try to live by a sort of chill flow chart:

A PROBLEM HAPPENS! CAN I DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT?

        |           |
       YES          NO
        |           |
        |           |
   DO THE THING     |
        |           |
        |           |
        -------------
              |
              |
    DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT

No, it’s not entirely awful. There are awful things in it for sure, but there are also amazing things, which is how it’s always been.

People growing up today live under the threat of climate change, fascism, rampant inequality etc. These threats are real. But there’s a lot of good stuff happening too - crime rates are falling constantly, and we’re on the verge of some big medical breakthroughs such as being able to treat cancer with CRISPR and Oncolytic viruses to give a couple of examples. We might be about to double the lifespan of cats.

Every generation grows up under some sort of threat - nuclear annihilation in the 80s, WW2 before that, WW1 before that etc. Mad kings, dictators, plagues, wars… you’re dealt the hand you’re dealt. But everything is cyclical - fascism flares up and then gets squashed, the economy booms and busts, politics swings right, then left again. Because of that, sometimes the cycles line up so that a few things suck at once. But nothing is permanent.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.

• Ursula Le Guin

That’s not to say everything will be fine, or that we’re doomed. Most likely some people who don’t deserve it will suffer and die, some people who don’t deserve it will live charmed and privileged lives and learn nothing, and some people will just be fine. As it has always been.

We don’t do the slippers thing but here in Canada we don’t wear shoes indoors either. I shake my head when I see people in American TV shows laying on a bed with their shoes on lol.

I’m an introverted person who finds people exhausting, and I’m around people all day long. I hit some kind of point of extreme burnout about three years ago and things never let up, so I’m functional pretty much all the time but if I get any peace and quiet for more than about 30 seconds I just pass out indefinitely until someone wakes me up again lol.

I kind of do that too, only I don’t start from the start each time. Mine’s just an ongoing thing that’s been going for years now.

There were some where the hit single on the album wasn’t even good, 'cause the version you liked turned out to be the radio edit!

I like the Wombats version too.

Oh and Heart’s cover of Stairway to Heaven (not 80s or 90s but still a banger)

I like Denzel Curry’s cover of Bulls on Parade.

They do a good Sheryl Crow one too!