If I’m fixing a minor spelling/grammar/formatting issue and no one has pointed it out, I just edit it
If it’s something like that that’s been pointed out I put a strikethrough through it and fix it
If I’m correcting myself for something that’s factually wrong, something I misunderstood what was being asked, I did my math wrong, etc. then I strikethrough through it, and edit in a note explaining why it was wrong
Almost Human
It wasn’t exactly breaking new ground, the writing and such wasn’t the greatest, but it was all good enough, and better than a lot of other shows out there, and I was definitely enjoying it enough to see where they went with it in season 2
Years later after I met my wife, I discovered that she felt the same way about it.
And I have a sneaking suspicion that someone at Quantic Dream felt the same way too and that’s how Detroit: Become Human came to be.
Work.
Not work.
1,2,5, & 6 - yes, I’m saying that these are issues that need to be addressed. What do you think you’re adding to the conversation here?
3&4- yes, because after working, often in excess of 40 hours a week, commuting, running errands, and with little money left over to show for it at the end (ties into point 6) what else is there for them to do? People do not have unlimited energy or money. People are tired and need time to relax and enjoy themselves as well, if they spent hours reading or knitting, or tinkering with electronics instead would you still begrudge them that? As far as physical health goes, that’s about the same. Planning and preparing a proper, balanced meal takes some time and energy, and a lot of people are running on empty, and if they want to have any time to enjoy their lives that may mean microwaving a frozen dinner or ordering takeout.
My wife has lost a lot of weight over the last year, getting up at the ass crack of dawn to hit the gym, and sometimes again after work, she’s often leaving the house before 5am, and doesn’t return home until 5 or even 7pm if she hits the gym twice. That leaves her with about 2-4 hours to herself when she gets in to have dinner, prep her breakfast and lunch for the next day because she won’t have time for it in the morning, and do whatever other chores she needs to do.
Imagine trying to squeeze that in if you also have kids or other obligations you need to take care of after work, or if you work more than the 40 hours a week she does.
And sure, if you stick to a diet of beans and kale or something, it can be an affordable diet, but most people aren’t going to last long eating such a limited diet, and a lot of the more diet-friendly foods can get pricey fast.
And food deserts are absolutely a thing, I live in one. It’s a solid 15 minute drive to a grocery store, there is no public transit in my area, it would be the better part of an hour one way to bike there, and close to 2 hours if I needed to walk, and those roads are absolutely not friendly to pedestrians and bikes. If we didn’t have cars, it would be pretty hard for us to get groceries, especially if I didn’t have friends I could get a ride from, and borderline impossible if we were elderly or disabled (especially since I work night shift which further limits when I can get to a grocery store while I’m awake.) I can get a couple things from a convenience store and CVS that are in a somewhat more reasonable walking distance (though those roads aren’t exactly pedestrian friendly either) but that’s mostly going to be prepackaged junk food, if I’m lucky maybe I can get a couple fresh apples and bananas or an overpriced premade salad.
I don’t think the two groups are as separate as you think.
Sure, there’s a lot of assholes in the Jake/Logan Paul group who were always that kind of asshole
But I’ve also seen more than a few of them who were neckbeard types who hit the gym and never really did anything to work on their personality.
There’s not a single, one-size-fits-all solution, there’s a lot of factors going into this
In no particular order, off the top of my head, a couple things that would need to change
Trackball, currently a Gameball Thumb and I’m pretty happy with it but I do wish it had just a couple programmable buttons.
I also have an old steam controller that filled the role pretty well once I got the settings figured out how I wanted them. After a lot of years though, the touchpad click has started to crap out on me though, I think I can fix it but I just haven’t gotten around to it. The new steam controller would probably be as good or better but I haven’t gotten my hands on one to say for sure yet.
I mean, Erasmus is a pretty well-known historical figure (and where, I assume, that programme gets its name)
That’s where my mind went first.
Turns out we’re both wrong and it’s just OP’s name like he said in the other comment, but I’m curious how you made that connection? Not passing any judgement on it, just curious since your brain reached a different conclusion than mine and I’m curious how you got there.
Going back a couple generations of this tech, I was a little excited about Google glass back in the day.
And to be clear, I don’t have, want, or like meta glasses or any of the other products out there right now. I don’t trust the companies behind them, I don’t like the people who have them, there’s enormous privacy issues with them, and they’re pretty much totally tied to AI at this point and I don’t think I need to get up on a soap box to explain why that’s a problem on Lemmy.
But if all of those issues were somehow solved, I could see them being pretty damn useful.
Part of what I liked about them was that they were obviously not just regular glasses. Not that every passerby is scrutinizing what the people around them are wearing on their face, but they weren’t pretending to be anything they weren’t.
I think they could be useful for capturing pictures and video of things in the moment. I recently went on a trip to Iceland and saw some geysers. I wanted to get a picture of them erupting but that meant I had to stand around holding up my phone for like 5 minutes because you don’t know exactly when it’s going to erupt, and that did take me out of the moment a bit. Would’ve been kind of nice to just set my glasses to record as I stood there watching and waiting.
When I can, I try to get around on foot. Having some sort of HUD to display directions and such would be pretty nice for that instead of constantly having to pull out my phone. Having directions in your earbuds works pretty well in most cases, but does somewhat impair your ability to hear what’s going on around you. Also, in cases like when I was in Iceland, my ears aren’t exactly used to hearing icelandic words, and it kind of seemed like Google’s text to speech isn’t quite up to it either, because it seemed to skip a lot of street names and just said “turn left” making me have to look at my phone to see which specific road I was supposed to be turning at. But even when it did attempt to pronounce the names, most of them sound like gobbledegook to me, and I wouldn’t necessarily be able to match what I heard up to a street sign.
Similarly, I had to pull out my phone to translate more than a few signs, menus, etc. while I was there. Being able to just look at the sign and have a translation pop up in the corner of my vision or overlaid on top of the icelandic words would have been nice.
There is no way to do this in a way that wouldn’t be horrifyingly invasive and disrespectful of other people’s privacy, but if there were, I’m pretty terrible with names, and being able to have a pop-up with name tags or something would be nice in a lot of social situations.
I have a pretty small house where storage and workspace is at a premium, and I can be a bit scatterbrained and disorganized. I often find myself working on my hobbies at a small, cluttered workbench with several in-progress projects scattered about. Having the camera rolling while I do that might be useful for me, so I can rewind and see where the hell I put that screwdriver down, I just had it 2 minutes ago and now it’s vanished into thin air.
Similarly, I like to cook, and I tend to wing it a lot, I’m not following recipes too closely, I taste, adjust and improvise as I go, and I’m certainly not writing my recipes down while I’m doing it. And not to toot my own horn, but I’m a pretty good cook, people tend to really like what I make and often ask me for recipes. Being able to go back and review the video of what I did would be pretty handy for when I actually do want to write one of those recipes down, and I could share some of the video to show exactly what I did for some more complicated steps.
And in cases where I am referencing a recipe or tutorial or whatever while I’m working on something, again, workspace is a valuable commodity in my house. I would rather not have some of it taken up by my phone if I can avoid it. If I’m moving between different areas, like from the counter to the stove, or from the bathroom where I’m working on something to the basement where the water shut off and circuit breaker is, or maybe I have my hands full, or I’m up on a ladder, or maybe my hands are dirty and I don’t want to touch my phone, or maybe I don’t want to be touching my phone while I’m cooking because phones are pretty gross, etc. it could be nice to just have the instructions or or video right there in my glasses.
If the cameras are good enough, they might also be able to take the place of the head mounted magnifier I sometimes use while working on small things, I could just zoom in with the camera.
I used to work in a warehouse, we had rows and rows of racks full of pallets with boxes on them. When we were filling orders, we sometimes only needed one or two things out of a box, and so every time we pulled something out we’d have to print out a new label so we could tell at a glance how many things were in a box. With some sort of smart glasses we could have just had maybe a unique QR code on each box, and the inventory count just got updated. It may have saved us a bit of time and definitely would have saved a ton of labels, and we wouldn’t have needed the portable label printers we had which would have saved a bit of money as well.
I answered a similar question a few weeks back so I’m mostly just gonna copy/paste that
But TL;DR- Yes, we’d still have radiometric dating, arguably it would be less complicated since we wouldn’t need to account for nuclear testing and the bombs dropped on Japan messing with the ratio of different isotopes found in nature, but it does also offer some new opportunities for dating certain things. For example, since we started setting off nuclear bombs basically all steel we’ve made has been a tiny bit radioactive, so you can pretty reliably date steel to being from before or after WWII based on the presence of radioactive contaminants. (Those traces of radioactive material are pretty harmless and don’t affect things for most applications, but there are certain cases where it is actually very important so there’s a market for recycling WWII battle ships and such to get steel that’s free of radioactive contaminants)
There are 3 naturally occuring types of carbon, called isotopes, ¹²C, ¹³C, and ¹⁴C. These are all basically the same except for the number of neutrons in the nucleus of the atom. Living things can use all 3 types to build sugars and proteins and all those other organic molecules needed for life. Animals get it from the food they eat, plants get it from the air. These 3 isotopes all exist in nature in a pretty consistent ratio
¹⁴C, however, is unstable (radioactive) and over time decays into more stable elements.
But it also is constantly getting replenished from cosmic rays interacting with other gases in the atmosphere making more, so as long as something is alive the ratio of carbon 14 in that plant or animal to the other types of carbon stays pretty consistent. It breathes/poops out carbon and takes more in, keeping that ratio pretty consistent.
But once it dies, it’s not taking any new carbon in, so what was there when it died is all it’s ever going to have until it decomposes away entirely or gets eaten by scavengers or whatever. The ¹²C and ¹³C are basically going to stay put, while the ¹⁴C slowly decays.
So to date something you just need to look at the ratio of the different types of carbon and you can figure out how old it is.
Let’s say ¹⁴C has a half life (the time it takes for half of it to decay) of 1 year (its actually something like 5 or 6 thousand years but this makes the math easy with smaller, easier to digest numbers)
And let’s say the ratio is 1:1, ¹²C+¹³C to ¹⁴C (again, it’s more like 1% carbon 14 IRL)
So after a year, half of the ¹⁴C will be gone, and the ratio will be 2:1
After another year half of that remaining ¹⁴C will be gone and it’ll be a 4:1 ratio, another year and it’s 8:1, etc.
This of course has limitations. After a long enough time basically all of the carbon 14 will be gone and you can’t really date things that way anymore. I think the limit is something like 50,000 years.
It’s also only really useful for plants, animals, and stuff made from them (leather, textiles, the straw in mud brick buildings, food, etc.) so not particularly useful for dating inorganic matter.
There’s also a few things that can cause more ¹⁴C to form than normal, humans caused one with our nuclear testing, there was another event around the 8th century that we’ve discovered from measuring the carbon 14 in tree rings from that time that we think may have been caused by a supernova sending more cosmic rays our way than usual. So those events also need to be accounted for.
But there’s other similar techniques using elements with longer half lives that we can use to date older or inorganic materials.
For example uranium-lead dating. When the mineral Zircon forms, it tends to include uranium but exclude lead. But over time uranium decays into lead, so if you have a sample of zircon, you can measure how much lead is in it and figure out how long ago it must have formed because that lead must have once been uranium that has decayed at a steady pace over the centuries.
I have a relative with a phone by his pool
He uses an old rotary phone for it, because it’s all pretty basic electromechanical stuff that can’t really get messed up from it being out in the rain or whatever. It can’t make outgoing calls because modern phone systems don’t work with rotary phones, but it receives incoming calls just fine
It should maybe be noted that he’s an old school telephone lineman who really knows his stuff, so I don’t know if there were any other adapters or anything needed to make his setup work.
I got a few stories
If we want to count “smoke” as weather, wildfire smoke blowing in from Canada was pretty crazy
I work in 911 dispatch and was working the night in first started hitting our area. We got a couple calls about smoke, which didn’t immediately seem like anything too unusual. We sent the police and fire department out to look for where it was coming from and they confirmed that yeah, there was smoke, but no obvious source. It of course didn’t blanket our whole county at once, and as I recall the weather was fairly nice and at first we were kind of writing it off as a couple people having big bonfires somewhere.
But as the night went on we kept getting more calls. Eventually we were somehow alerted about the wildfire situation. When someone called about smoke we still sent someone to check in case there was actually a fire somewhere, but we also advised our callers about the wildfire smoke, and basically everyone I told was brown away by that.
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Hurricane Ida hit my area pretty hard. It hit on my day off. About a year before my area had gotten hit pretty hard by another storm and we had historic flooding, power was out for a good chunk of the day, and with that in mind I ran out to get a battery backup for our sump pump the morning before it hit. My wife wasn’t sure if that was necessary, but we again lost power for like 16 hours so we were glad to have it.
Once the storm was well underway, of course I got the page from work that anyone able to come in was needed to handle the call volume. I made an attempt to get in, but every direction I went I encountered flooding, I don’t think I made it a half mile from home in any direction before needing to turn around.
The storm the year prior was the worst flooding in our area since they started keeping records, and it was by a pretty solid margin. Ida demolished that record. It took them a week or so to figure out how much it broke that record by because it totally swamped the gauge at the river where they measured it.
Like I said, we lost power for about 16 hours, I have some friends nearby who are on a well for their water. They have a generator to keep their fridge and freezer running but it’s not enough to also run their well pump. We’re on city water but have no generator, so after the storm passed we ran our perishables over to them to throw in their fridge, and they came to our house to take a shower and fill some jugs with water.
Before that, I had tried to go out to try to grab some ice for our cooler. Without power, the one store I could get to of course wasn’t open. I tried to get to somewhere else, and at that point I couldn’t make it much further than the night before. In some places it was because of downed trees and wires and such, but in others it was because some roads and bridges were just totally washed out.
Also, the main reason we lost power was because the substation that provides power to our area ended up underwater.
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If we want to count solar weather, seeing the northern lights from my home in 2024 was wild.
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Back when I was in scouts, I went out to Philmont, which is a big property in New Mexico for scouts to go backpacking.
I don’t think that area is technically considered a desert, but it was certainly a lot drier than what I’m used to at home.
At least it usually is.
We got to basecamp, everything was pretty dry and dusty. We do all of our orientation and checking in and such, and settle in for the night before starting our trek the next day. At Basecamp they have you in canvas wall tents on a wooden platform (if you search for something like “scout summer camp tents” you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about)
It downpoured that night, apparently the most rain they’d gotten in a single night in the last 10 years.
Coincidentally 10 years prior was the last time my troop sent a group to Philmont, and they also got rained on pretty hard.
I think because it was usually so dry they got a little lax in waterproofing their tents. It was blowing sideways and kind of worked its way through the seams of the tent. So if you were on one side you were fine, but on the other side of the tent you got wet.
I was on the wet side. Luckily the first couple drops hit my face and woke me up. I checked with my tent mate and he was fine. I packed up my sleeping bag so it wouldn’t get wet, pulled on some warm clothes and my rain gear and crawled under my cot, and that did a pretty solid job of keeping me dry. A lot of people ended up needing to dry out their gear the next morning before starting their trek.
Again, I don’t know if that area is technically a desert, but you hear about how the desert comes alive after the rain, plants bloom really quickly and all of that, and we did see a little bit of that happening, things were definitely greener the next day than when we arrived.
We also ended up having to hike an extra couple miles the first day that we planned because the bus that was supposed to drop us off at the trailhead wouldn’t be able to make it through some of the mud.
A few days into our trek, our itinerary had us camping near the top of a mountain. It would be a dry campsite with no potable water available, so we made the call to have our dinner for that day for lunch, since it was freeze dried stuff that needed water to cook, so we could refill our water when we had the chance to last us through the next day.
As we start up the mountain, a thick fog rolled in. By the time we made it to the top we were all pretty cold, damp and miserable and didn’t even have a hot meal to look forward to. We pretty much set up our tents and went to bed.
The next morning we woke up to a clear, beautiful day. We go to the top of the mountain to appreciate the view, and look down into the valley below and see… Clouds. Just a couple of them drifting by. And we realized that the fog we hiked through and camped in the day before had been a cloud.
If a mattress salesman ever tells you “it’s like sleeping on a cloud” - run. Clouds suck for sleeping.
We had two crews doing different trucks that took us through different parts of Philmont. The other crew at some point got caught in a thunderstorm where lightning was striking way too close for comfort and had to spend some time crouched down in the lightning position while it passed.
I remember when my wife and I watched Morbius, we were pretty impressed with the sound mixing. We could hear what everyone was saying without our ears getting blown out by the explosions and such.
I feel like the effects and such were all petty solid too, but there’s no saving the fact that the story, writing, and acting were just trash.
I think my impact on the world is a nut positive. I make it a point to help other people when I can, I’ve given a bunch of strangers a jumpstart in the parking lot, helped them change a tire, gave a stranded bicyclist a lift home when his pedal broke, clear my schedule to help my friends move, put my shopping cart back the right way and even sometimes straighten out the ones that were carelessly pushed in the general direction of the cart corral by some degenerate, and generally try not to be a bother to others.
As for whether that makes me a good person, I think that’s kind of up for debate. At my core, my motivations tend to be pretty selfish. I do those good deeds because I want others to do the same kinds of things for me. If I need help moving, I can count on a small army of friends and acquaintances showing up to help me because I’ve always made time for them. I want to live in a world where other people treat me the right way, and if I’m not even willing to do that, why should I count on others to do that? Not that it’s all a 1:1 transactional thing, I don’t expect every good deed I do to directly come back around to benefit me, but I do kind of hope that I’m sort of kicking off a chain of “paying it forward” that maybe inspires even more people to do the same and eventually I get to be the recipient of some random acts of kindness.
So a lot of the time it’s not really some sort of selfless altruism that drives me to do the right thing, which is a big part of what people imagine when they think of a “good” person.
But what were talking about isn’t implemented a flawed system, it’s improving one that’s already flawed, and the result still wouldn’t be perfect but it’s better than what currently exists
And it doesn’t prevent passing even better laws further down the line, but I think you know that creating new more comprehensive survivor benefits that would cover everyone is a much harder sell than a comparatively small tweak to copyright laws.
And if we remove those copyright benefits before those new systems are ready, you’re leaving people in the lurch without any safety net until those new systems can be created (if in fact they ever are)
And? Doesn’t everyone deserve that kind of safety net? Should we take away people’s 401ks, pensions, life insurance, etc. because other people don’t have them?
I think I’d rather focus my energy on making sure that more people can make sure their families are secure if something should happen to them, not less
In the US, it’s a pretty common situation to have some kind of retirement plan through your job, like a 401k, or if you’re very lucky a pension. And if you die, in a lot of cases, that retirement plan gets paid to your spouse or children in some fashion. That’s a big part of how people plan for their families in case something happens to them. It might help to cover funeral expenses, or settle debts, or legal expenses, or just to make sure their spouse or children can afford to live if they die.
If you’re an independent artist though, you may not have that. Ideally you’d have some kind of life insurance, IRA, etc. to help fill that same role, but art is a fickle business, not everything sells well or is an instant classic, and sometimes it takes a while for something to get popular.
Let’s say I write a book and get it published, and it’s reasonably successful, but not exactly a bestseller. I probably got a nice little payment for selling the rights to the publisher, but I’m also expecting to have more money trickling in for at least a few years as long as it stays in print and keeps selling. And in the meantime I’ll hopefully get more books published, more payments, hopefully bigger, from the publisher, and then have even more money flowing in from book sales. If I’m really lucky, maybe one or more of those books will really be a hit, if not, hopefully I’ll at least have enough moderately successful books published to have a steady income from them, be able to save up some money, keep food on the table, save up for my kids’ college funds, my retirement, etc. it’s a long-term plan.
But instead I keel over and die. My spouse is now a single parent.
If I worked a normal job, hopefully some of those benefits are kicking in to help my spouse take care of herself, my funeral arrangements, and our kids. Survivor benefits from my pension start payment out to them or they get access to my 401k, maybe I even had some kind of life insurance through my job.
But since I didn’t work a normal job, all they get is that trickle of money from my book sales.
And you want to cut even that off for them.
And then to add insult to injury, now that I’m dead and it’s in the public domain, maybe my book gets turned into a movie which becomes an enormous hit and makes millions of dollars for some Hollywood studio, and my family doesn’t get a penny of it.
Yes, ideally we’d have better social safety nets in place to help people out in those kinds of circumstances, but we don’t, and until we do this is what we’re stuck with.
For an independent artist in the US, I think their lifetime +25 years & 9 months.
It’s something they made, they created it, they deserve to profit off of it.
Why the +25 years & 9 months?
Independent artists may not have a more traditional retirement plan with a pension/401k, health benefits, etc. They work for themselves, their income can be inconsistent, sometimes their work may not become popular until years later or even after they pass away.
But that work is how they’re providing for their family, their children’s care and college funds and such, funeral expenses, help their spouses along after they pass, etc.
In the US you can usually stay on your parents healthcare up until 26, so I think it’s fair that we should allow their family to profit off that copyright for that long after their death.
If I were an artist, and immediately after getting my wife pregnant, keeled over dead, I’d want to know that I’ve left behind something that will help them along at least a bit hopefully at least until my kid is hopefully old enough to stand on their own since.
And sure, not every artist is going to be leaving behind a pregnant wife, but most people are going to have some sort of family who are going to be stuck with funeral expenses and other legal bullshit to sort out, and I think that 25ish years is a reasonable enough timeframe to keep the copyright tied up before releasing it to the public domain.
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For works created by/for a company (or owned by one if an individual creator sold it to them,) I think it can get a little murkier.
A lot of people cite the old 14 years + one 14 year extension that was the original US copyright law. And I get it, that sounds reasonable enough I guess.
But a lot of things have changed since then, companies are bigger, things like video games exist now that didn’t back then, and some things have gotten a lot more complex.
Let’s look at the MCU, just the main movies have come out over 18 years and is still going for the foreseeable future, and with spider man and Deadpool sort of tying in some of the pre-MCU movies into the shared multiverse, you can even argue that it’s 26 years at this point. Hell, Marvel and DC have been doing their thing since the 30s. New Star Trek stuff has been trickling out since the 60s. Mario first appeared in Donkey Kong 45 years ago. Skyrim came out in 2011, and the next elder scrolls game is still probably years away. We just didn’t have franchises like we do now back in 1790, I think it’s fair that the laws should reflect in some way how long-lived some franchises can last now.
I think it might be fair at this point to allow a company to hold copyright on something indefinitely (please put away your torches and pitchforks) but
Bridging parts 4 and 5. Let’s say you wanted to post a whole movie on YouTube. If your channel isn’t monetized you’re totally in the clear, you can do that. However YouTube might still make a profit off of it being there due to ads and such. So YouTube can either
A. Not allow copyrighted material in their TOS, and must take it down when (and only when) requested by the copyright holder.
Or
B. Choose to pay the appropriate licensing fee to stream that copyrighted material, which again would be a fixed, reasonably low rate set by the government. It might be worth it to them to pay that fee because it means increased traffic to their site.
If your channel is monetized, you would have to pay that fee. Again, these fees are going to be fixed and kept fairly low. What those fees are is probably going to depend on how it’s used. Using, let’s say, a clip that’s 30 seconds or less of something in another video might be a one time fee of $5, but if you’re posting the whole movie, maybe that deserves some percentage of what you earn from those views unless YouTube decides to pay for the streaming license for that movie (if you then owe anything to YouTube for that and how much would be part of whatever monetization agreement you have with YouTube)
Deciding exactly what those licensing fees for 50+ year old media should be is well outside of my pay-grade.
EDIT: There’s a lot more to intellectual property than just copyright, trademarks, patents, etc. so this is really only scraping the surface, but hopefully this kind of shows where my head is at with these kinds of matters.
You can’t really do it to yourself, but I’ve had really good luck ending other people’s hiccups by offering them $5 if they hiccup again
I find that there’s a pretty wide range in matcha quantity, and the stuff that’s actually really good is going to cost an arm and a leg, and it’s probably become a victim of its own popularity, to satisfy the demand they’re just importing more lower quality matcha.
The first time I tried it was probably like 15 years ago, I grabbed a little tin from a fancy grocery store on a whim that I think I remember costing about $20 and probably had less than an ounce of powder in it. And that stuff was really good. I then got a bigger bag of cheaper stuff somewhere and it tasted like straight-up swamp water. Most of what’s out there now that you’ve probably tried is somewhere in between. I don’t mind it, but it’s not good enough for me to want to seek it out, and the good stuff is hard to find and probably even more expensive these days.
And to make matters worse, I don’t think there’s really any official standardized grading or labeling for it, so it’s kind of hard to figure out what you’re getting, you might see things like “Ceremonial grade” thrown around, but that’s pretty much just a meaningless marketing term.