Honestly the state of the gaming industry as a whole and general optimization practices really pisses me off.
Modern software practices too, everything's built on 50 years of gradual bloat and it seems like there's been almost no effort to reduce it.
Windows 11 is a good example, it's pretty much just Windows 7 with multiple layers of interfaces hiding the core functionality.
I get that Linux tries to solves these issues but its interface is too complex for the average person.
We really need a fresh start for all modern software imo, everything rn is just library on top of interface on top of driver on top of port for like 50 levels.
But pretty much everything runs on this bloat, and companies would rather stack CPU on top of CPU on top of RAM on top of RAM to accommodate the bloat instead of cutting it down.
Like imagine a world where an OS is a fraction of the size, or boots up almost instantly.
There'd probably have to be a restructuring of all component architecture to accommodate it but the revisions would fix so many problems with modern computing.
I fear for and also yearn for a singularity where there's just a reset of all computing systems.
Dang I get that feeling. At some point it was my dream to one day create such a thing for the public to use but I've come to realise that that's pretty much what many other popular Linux distros try to acheive as you said
I might be biased since I've used Linux for a long time but I would say that Linux as it is today offers you the option to have anything from the simplest and most easy-to-use OS ever to a full blown studio for software dev, music production or anything more technical
I do encourage any tech normie to try it out honestly, and see for yourself whether or not it works for you
-dont go to the emergency room with dental problems. go to the dentist
-bagged greens are cheaper than pre-made salads
-taco bell is NOT worth the money anymore. 1/4 cup mayo, 1/4 cup sour cream, 3 tblspoons pickled jalapenos+2tblspoons of the jar liquid, 2 tsp paprika 1 tsp cumin 1 tsp garlic powder 1 tsp onion powder salt+pepper. all in your blender. creamy jalapeno sauce
-dont quit your job unless you have a bunch of job interviews lined up immediately after
-use resources. food bank, unemployment, housing assistance, financial aid, etc. yes there will be paperwork. but Do It
-dont stay awake longer than 20 hours. you Will start to become impulsive and cranky. resting for 20 minutes is better than trying to stay awake
-for every 2 hours you spend looking up close at screens, spend 20 minutes looking at something far away from you. stretch your wrists a lot
-dont do that yoga stretch where you roll your head around your shoulders. youre grinding down the joints in your neck
-be nice to your friends, bullying them as a joke gets old. if you need a ride somewhere at least offer them gas money
-brush your teeth at any time of the day but especially before you sleep. dont snack in bed if you can help it. make your bed the Clean Teeth Zone. keep floss picks by your bed
-dont tell your boss youre adhd/autism/depression/suicidal. dont trust your coworkers with that. you NEVER know how people will take it and its none of their business
-train your pets to go to the front door when they hear a fire alarm
the thing that bothers me about "kids will get traumatized by media" type discourse, other than you know the fascism, is do you know what the most memorably upsetting media i experienced as a kid was? stuff that stuck with me for years, interfered with my sleep again for years, was the thing i saw when i closed my eyes at night for probably a decade and influences what freaks me out to this day?
a few specific incidences (from children's media) of the kind of physical harm or (often fantasy) violence widely considered to be totally appropriate for little kids
horror movie advertisements
when i was eight or nine i watched kill bill vol. 1 with my parents and had to ask my mom what a pedophile was. this didn't have a terribly profound effect on me, though i do remember it because usually at that age, when i had to ask my mom about the definition of a word, i formed a pretty strong memory of that. on the other hand, when my mom read my mrs. frisby and the rats of nimh at six or seven, the child mouse having pneumonia and being delirious with fever freaked me out so bad that it changed the trajectory of my life.
you actually don't know what will bother a kid in a book or movie. you can't predict it or really protect them in any meaningful way. some kids will freak out, it's developmentally normal and you can't stop it.
What if instead of calling them 'gender neutral' bathrooms we called them 'fully enclosed bathrooms?' Because like... every gender neutral bathroom ive been in that was built for that purpose was so super private and it was awesome.
YouTube’s AI Tracks Everything You Watch — Stop This Now
REBLOG THIS POST TO SPREAD AWARENESS!
This isn’t just about protecting the kids anymore, it’s about invading their privacy and limiting their freedom. Spread awareness to everyone and hope that this doesn’t go forward.
A good barometer if you keep noticing that a certain length of time in your memory keeps being the hub of "when everything changed" or "Back before everything nebulously got weird" it's always worth checking if that year or time period coincides with a big change in your own life.
Did the world get a lot kinder and more reliable in 2014 or is that when you got a rich girlfriend and were spending more time in affluent areas? Was there a flourishing of queer culture in 2001 or is that just when you left home? Were winters harder before 2019 or was that just the last winter you spent working outdoors? Were pop stars more important in 1993 or were you just twelve?
I get a new song or a few at once, listen to them 80 times in a row ever day for a week then I wonder why the songs don't hit as much. Shuffling my whole playlist had to be the best idea ever, seriously
I've been thinking about rubiks cubes and their various permutations lately
I got some variants for Christmas like the silly triangle one (pyraminx), whatever the FUCK this is (this was originally a cube.)
and the other usual cube puzzles (even got the doecahedron/megaminx)
and trying out the different puzzles combined with remembering that one visualization of the actual mechanics of a rubiks cube (like it had rings that dots moved on n stuff if anyone knows where that visualization is can I have it please I love it so much) got me thinking about the properties of a rubiks cube style puzzle, if you twist a corner is it still solvable? and other things like fhat
what would have to change about the rubiks cube to change one property and nothing else (kinda like defining a puzzle by its properties like you can define a plane by 3 points or a line by 2)
I'm so glad I decided to not look up how to solve the original 3x3 because not only was it an extremely fun journey it's also taught me a lot about how the rubiks cube works that I just wouldn't have learned by looking it up
I can solve the 2x2 and 3x3 Rubik's cubes relatively fast but sometimes I wish to rewind time and learn to solve them myself before learning faster methods, it would have been a fun experience
At the moment at least, when I find myself trying a new kind of puzzle, I try to learn to solve it without looking at any tutorial by making use of my prior twisty puzzle knowledge and I confirm oh hell yes it's so fun to mess with it
This computer-simulated image shows a supermassive black hole at the core of a galaxy. The black region in the center represents the black hole’s event horizon, beyond which no light can escape the massive object’s gravitational grip. The black hole’s powerful gravity distorts space around it like a funhouse mirror. Light from background stars is stretched and smeared as it skims by the black hole.
You might wonder — if this Tumblr post is about invisible things, what’s with all the pictures? Even though we can’t see these things with our eyes or even our telescopes, we can still learn about them by studying how they affect their surroundings. Then, we can use what we know to make visualizations that represent our understanding.
When you think of the invisible, you might first picture something fantastical like a magic Ring or Wonder Woman’s airplane, but invisible things surround us every day. Read on to learn about seven of our favorite invisible things in the universe!
1. Black Holes
This animation illustrates what happens when an unlucky star strays too close to a monster black hole. Gravitational forces create intense tides that break the star apart into a stream of gas. The trailing part of the stream escapes the system, while the leading part swings back around, surrounding the black hole with a disk of debris. A powerful jet can also form. This cataclysmic phenomenon is called a tidal disruption event.
You know ‘em, and we love ‘em. Black holes are balls of matter packed so tight that their gravity allows nothing — not even light — to escape. Most black holes form when heavy stars collapse under their own weight, crushing their mass to a theoretical singular point of infinite density.
Although they don’t reflect or emit light, we know black holes exist because they influence the environment around them — like tugging on star orbits. Black holes distort space-time, warping the path light travels through, so scientists can also identify black holes by noticing tiny changes in star brightness or position.
2. Dark Matter
A simulation of dark matter forming large-scale structure due to gravity.
What do you call something that doesn’t interact with light, has a gravitational pull, and outnumbers all the visible stuff in the universe by five times? Scientists went with “dark matter,” and they think it's the backbone of our universe’s large-scale structure. We don’t know what dark matter is — we just know it's nothing we already understand.
We know about dark matter because of its gravitational effects on galaxies and galaxy clusters — observations of how they move tell us there must be something there that we can’t see. Like black holes, we can also see light bend as dark matter’s mass warps space-time.
3. Dark Energy
Animation showing a graph of the universe’s expansion over time. While cosmic expansion slowed following the end of inflation, it began picking up the pace around 5 billion years ago. Scientists still aren’t sure why.
No one knows what dark energy is either — just that it’s pushing our universe to expand faster and faster. Some potential theories include an ever-present energy, a defect in the universe’s fabric, or a flaw in our understanding of gravity.
Scientists previously thought that all the universe’s mass would gravitationally attract, slowing its expansion over time. But when they noticed distant galaxies moving away from us faster than expected, researchers knew something was beating gravity on cosmic scales. After further investigation, scientists found traces of dark energy’s influence everywhere — from large-scale structure to the background radiation that permeates the universe.
4. Gravitational Waves
Two black holes orbit each other and generate space-time ripples called gravitational waves in this animation.
Like the ripples in a pond, the most extreme events in the universe — such as black hole mergers — send waves through the fabric of space-time. All moving masses can create gravitational waves, but they are usually so small and weak that we can only detect those caused by massive collisions. Even then they only cause infinitesimal changes in space-time by the time they reach us. Scientists use lasers, like the ground-based LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) to detect this precise change. They also watch pulsar timing, like cosmic clocks, to catch tiny timing differences caused by gravitational waves.
This animation shows gamma rays (magenta), the most energetic form of light, and elusive particles called neutrinos (gray) formed in the jet of an active galaxy far, far away. The emission traveled for about 4 billion years before reaching Earth. On Sept. 22, 2017, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole detected the arrival of a single high-energy neutrino. NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope showed that the source was a black-hole-powered galaxy named TXS 0506+056, which at the time of the detection was producing the strongest gamma-ray activity Fermi had seen from it in a decade of observations.
5. Neutrinos
This animation shows gamma rays (magenta), the most energetic form of light, and elusive particles called neutrinos (gray) formed in the jet of an active galaxy far, far away. The emission traveled for about 4 billion years before reaching Earth. On Sept. 22, 2017, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole detected the arrival of a single high-energy neutrino. NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope showed that the source was a black-hole-powered galaxy named TXS 0506+056, which at the time of the detection was producing the strongest gamma-ray activity Fermi had seen from it in a decade of observations.
Because only gravity and the weak force affect neutrinos, they don’t easily interact with other matter — hundreds of trillions of these tiny, uncharged particles pass through you every second! Neutrinos come from unstable atom decay all around us, from nuclear reactions in the Sun to exploding stars, black holes, and even bananas.
Scientists theoretically predicted neutrinos, but we know they actually exist because, like black holes, they sometimes influence their surroundings. The National Science Foundation’s IceCube Neutrino Observatory detects when neutrinos interact with other subatomic particles in ice via the weak force.
6. Cosmic Rays
This animation illustrates cosmic ray particles striking Earth's atmosphere and creating showers of particles.
Every day, trillions of cosmic rays pelt Earth’s atmosphere, careening in at nearly light-speed — mostly from outside our solar system. Magnetic fields knock these tiny charged particles around space until we can hardly tell where they came from, but we think high energy events like supernovae can accelerate them. Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field protect us from cosmic rays, meaning few actually make it to the ground.
Though we don’t see the cosmic rays that make it to the ground, they tamper with equipment, showing up as radiation or as “bright” dots that come and go between pictures on some digital cameras. Cosmic rays can harm astronauts in space, so there are plenty of precautions to protect and monitor them.
7. (Most) Electromagnetic Radiation
The electromagnetic spectrum is the name we use when we talk about different types of light as a group. The parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, arranged from highest to lowest energy are: gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared light, microwaves, and radio waves. All the parts of the electromagnetic spectrum are the same thing — radiation. Radiation is made up of a stream of photons — particles without mass that move in a wave pattern all at the same speed, the speed of light. Each photon contains a certain amount of energy.
The light that we see is a small slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, which spans many wavelengths. We frequently use different wavelengths of light — from radios to airport security scanners and telescopes.
Visible light makes it possible for many of us to perceive the universe every day, but this range of light is just 0.0035 percent of the entire spectrum. With this in mind, it seems that we live in a universe that’s more invisible than not! NASA missions like NASA's Fermi, James Webb, and Nancy Grace Roman space telescopes will continue to uncloak the cosmos and answer some of science’s most mysterious questions.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!
My mother- who was a single parent raising me alone in my early youth- has never believed in baby talk. So when I was born, she started from day one talking to me and treating me like I was an adult.
As a result of this, I had rather high expectations of other adults from a very young age, and despised being talked down to. The worst was being asked sweetly and stupidly y over and over, “can you say “hello”?” in a way that felt like I was an animal being coaxed into performing a trick.
In my earliest years, I learned that using certain words and phrases could convince new adults to treat me the way I preferred. So to combat the annoyances of being treated like a subhuman idiot, I began purposefully expressing myself with a broad vocabulary.
My mother started teaching me how to read when I was three. By the time I was five, my favourite thing to read was Calvin and Hobbes anthologies, partly because I loved tigers, but mostly because in every other book I’d read, kids my age were written as stupid babies with no thought process or agency who nobody seemed to think of as capable of thinking or contributing. Calvin, though, was only a year older than me, and had a rich inner world, and was capable of speaking meaningfully and eloquently while still being a kid. Calvin was a kid the way that kids WERE, not the way adults saw us.
As a consequence of this, I think, I developed a prematurely warped sense of humour wherein- again, starting around age five- the funniest thing in the world to me was to approach adults and instigate conversations wildly beyond my age range. Like “oh, you’re slowing yourself down for me? Bold of you to assume I’m not already four steps ahead”.
I imagine this was probably very annoying, as I mostly didn’t actually have the experience or context to fully understand a lot of the subjects I was talking about and was mostly just imitating the persona of a mildly disinterested and somewhat philosophical old woman, but I genuinely understood enough vocab to bluff around the gaps in my knowledge long enough for the funny part to happen.
My preferences to spend more of my time fucking with adults instead of my peers slowly widened the already-existing gap between me and the majority of my schoolmates, which honestly didn’t bug me much because the two friends I DID have were way more fun than the rest of them anyways. But I was probably a bit emotionally stunted by this point anyways
Cut to me, age nine or so. Annoying know-it-all, deeply ironic, and the kind of kid who would rather lick a carrot peeler than suffer through the torture of meaningful emotional vulnerability with any adult ever
First real health class
We get the Puberty talk
Skin-peelingly awkward
Mr. Q, our fifty-ish something teacher, brings out a question box and a bunch of scraps of paper. Says he wants everyone to write down at least one question and he would pull a handful of them out anonymously to answer.
I cannot resist
We all submit our questions
Question one. “What is a vulva”
Diagram. Clinical and age-appropriate response.
Question two. “Is love nothing more than a chemical reaction designed to ensure the survival of the species?”
Long awkward pause
Teacher clears his throat
[This is hilarious]
Teacher speaks
“Uh…….”
“Well, um. I suppose… I love my wife. And I love my children. Or I would describe what I feel for them as love.”
Oh No
[Dawning realization that I have trapped myself and everyone in this room in a Feelings Talk]
[Panic and stare directly through the floor until he stops talking about his personal emotions regarding family and society and shit]
[Pain And Suffering And Hell because this is, in fact, what I signed us all up for, because boarding a plane to Alaska means that you are definitely going to Alaska, no matter if it was a joke or not, because the plane doesn’t give a fuck, because it is a plane and you are a moron]
The lessons in humour I learned that day have stuck with me ever since
Sincerity always wins
You Can Press The Big Red Button Whenever You Like But You Cannot Un-Send The Nuke
Now I feel lucky for making that joke and not getting that kind of response. At this point I can't tell how many times I made a joke just for the pain and cringe and regret to do their job. Learned lesson un-learned, rip
Also if you're like me and impulsivity is your default reaction time, you and I gotta learn to not fall for this Big Red Glowing Pretty Button lmao
Every time I read an empirical study on the actual performance of "agentic" AI, I can't help but think of that one experiment where they tried to get an AI to design a robot that can walk, but it never did because it figured out that just building a really tall robot that immediately falls over is a much cheaper way to maximise distance travelled.
