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cherribalm-deactivated20140609

site that you can type in the definition of a word and get the word

site for when you can only remember part of a word/its definition

site that gives you words that rhyme with a word

site that gives you synonyms and antonyms

bumblebeebabie

THAT FIRST SITE IS EVERY WRITER’S DREAM DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY TIMES I’VE TRIED WRITING SOMETHING AND THOUGHT GOD DAMN IS THERE A SPECIFIC WORD FOR WHAT I’M USING TWO SENTENCES TO DESCRIBE AND JUST GETTING A BUNCH OF SHIT GOOGLE RESULTS

archivestorystuff006

OMG

dduane

This one’s an always-reblog, because who knows who needs it and hasn’t seen it yet?

towerofglass

caden

Boomers are like you couldn’t make Seinfeld today bc the woke mob would cancel it meanwhile every five seconds I see a tumblr post that’s like here’s my idea for an episode of Seinfeld where Jerry starts going by They/He. Idk what point there is to be made here but it does suggest something

omnidudes-deactivated20240202

It suggests that whilst Seinfeld was never exactly going out of its way to be outwardly progressive, it was a reflection of the values of the society it was born out of. The characters, whilst brilliant, were purely comedic with very little emotional depth or backstory given to them and therefore existed purely as vessels for comedy and thus they translate very easily to the modern day. George would absolutely get himself cancelled online but not because he’s a bigot, but because he’s an idiot who would think it was OK to make a bad taste joke. Elaine would go out of her way to be overly accepting of everyone’s identities and sexualities, not because she’s a good person but because she’s obsessed with everyone else’s image of her as a good person. Those archetypes can be taken very easily from the society of the early 1990s and the values there to the society and values of the 2020s without losing any sense of their core.

doubleca5t

The mark of a good sitcom cast is that you can drop them into pretty much any situation and they'll all react to it in ways that are both different and funny

thefloatingstone

there's a twitter account called "Modern Day Seinfeld" and when I tell you they are so spot on I mean I forget they're not real episodes because they are THAT on point.

bearotonin-international

Floofability score: sheep

homunculus-argument

I will not elaborate.

@sergle is correct

Ok so can someone explain to me how cryptocurrency pollutes? Like what crazy calculations are they running that they need enough brainpower to significantly effect things? Like I’m assuming what’s causing the pollution is increased electricity consumption but… how does sending lil pretend money tokens back and forth or whatever cause so much pollution?

Also, what the fuck is “mining”? How d'you mine… like bitcoin is not a naturally occurring resource, and I assume that you can’t just make it, cause that would make it instantly worthless… help?

commiemartyrshighschool

So you get “coins” as a reward for performing the cryptographic calculations necessary to update the public ledger which is the blockchain. This is, by design, an increasingly complex and resource intensive process to slow down the collection of (intentionally finite) coins.

So every transaction with bitcoins requires the ledger to be updated with the current ownership of every already existing bitcoin, which also requires encrypting and decrypting a bunch of information and sharing it across the public ledger. So every transaction made with bitcoins increases the energy requirements of updating the ledger making it harder and harder to complete the latest version and get the coin which is a reward for doing that work.

There’s a lot I don’t fully understand myself but the long and short of it is that the actual value of any crypto currency is pretty much just what people agree on, except instead of a fiat currency where a government says it’s worth something and a mint that makes physical currency, there’s a bunch of nerds who agree that solving certain math problems is worth rewarding.

brokenmachine3553

Feeling like adding on for a bit of context, I know it’s kind of hard to understand how mining for really any kind of crypto is hard to imagine, but seeing what a bitcoin mining facility looks like for the first time really helped me realize just how energy intensive it is.

See all these warehouses? They’re quite literally filled to the brim with specialized computers that do nothing but mine, each one filled with thousands of these computers, just row after row of this:

So all the power consumption winds up adding up like crazy.

white-throated-packrat

Yep, that’s why cryptocurrency and NFTs are considered major contributors to pollution – because the energy needs of all those computers doing the calculation are equivalent to a medium sized country. Currently, crypto consumes more energy than Argentina.

ralfmaximus

Guess what’s inside a lot of mining rigs? Gowan, guess.

Graphics cards!

Lots and lots of these puppies side by side, spinning their little fans as fast as they can go because as it turns out: GPUs are perfect for doing the calculations required for mining cryptocurrency.

Which means amateur miners buy a lot of these things.

So many, in fact, that there is now (May 2021) a world-wide shortage of NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards and building a new gaming rig is damn near impossible because of the shortage.

OR you can pay a ridiculously inflated price by GPU scalpers on eBay.

Seriously. Places that sell GPUs impose quantity limits because if they don’t… some crypto asshole will buy out their entire stock in one go.

But the “good” news is that the professional miners (like the Bitmain site up there, in the photos) use dedicated ASIC mining rigs which don’t use consumer GPUs. But (bad news) they DO use the same sort of chips that NVIDIA & AMD rely on to make their products, which just starves the supply pipeline at a different point.

Bottom line: not only does cryptocurrency mining consume terawatts of electricity, it also consumes megatons of computer hardware. Which is expensive to produce (in resource terms, like rare metals, petroleum, water, electricity, paper) and will, someday, require even MORE resources to recycle. Or else it ends up in a landfill.

Note that current dedicated mining rigs are so highly specialized they are useless for anything other than mining. They cannot be easily repurposed to (say) sequence DNA or fold proteins for miracle cures.

What a waste.

smute

was anyone gonna tell me that some nerds peepee poopoo “currency” is the reason why graphics cards are sold out everywhere or was i supposed to find that out from comments under a screenshot from twitter user whoreganic cop puncher explaining how bitcoin is just an artificially complicated math problem

hotvampireadjacent

Also I’ve read be very wary about buying used graphic cards cause there’s a chance it’s one that’s mostly heavily used from one of these bastards. These thing are very heavily used so a used one sold by one of these guys would be on its last leg of life from being on 24/7

Make sure there’s a return policy just be very careful if you’re buying used.

commiemartyrshighschool

To be more fair than Crypto miners deserve, they’re only one of the factors driving the current chip shortage.

The other issues are both related to the pandemic. The first one is that manufacturing of a many things, especially cars, slowed down quite a bit until recently when the factories reopened. But so many reopened at the same time and went full blast that the demand far outstripped the supply, a supply already reduced by the shutdown of those factories.

The other bottleneck is literal mining. Computer chips rely on silicon and various metals, especially gold and copper to conduct electricity to do their work. In normal times this means that crypto’s environmental impact is even higher than just the energy requirements. But in the meantime the mines and refineries that provide the raw materials were also shut down in many cases due to the pandemic, squeezing the supply further.

Mining shutdowns have also caused a huge shortage of ammunition in the US (brass bullet casings need copper). Which means for anybody wanting to buy consumer electronics of a reasonable complexity you’re competing against both ends of the libertarian spectrum, the crypto techies and the gun nuts.

blackwoolncrown

Really glad someone brought this home to actual mining, and I want to show you what the mines look like:

These are silica mines, necessary for making ALL things requiring silicon, among other things.

These are rare-earth mineral mines.

Both are required for the manufacture of computer technologies. Both requre excavating huge amounts of earth, decimating all life in that area and more often than not, ruining land that is supposed to be stewarded by indigenous people.

They’re very, very bad for the environment.

This is where the ‘online’ world comes from. It’s not another place. Every transaction, every pixel comes from the ground.

So yeah, crypto mining is definitely deceptive. That ‘value’ isn’t coming from nowhere. It’s ripped from the earth.

anarchistmemedistro

barbariansensitivities

Just picture it. Imagine what all this computing power could be used for. The energy expense of a 45 million inhabitants country spent on chip board heat. Imagine the scientific calculations. Picture a world where all this computing power goes into solving poverty and resource allocation. Imagine a world where profit doesn’t come first.

ultranos

So, here’s some more fun ways this gets entirely fucked up:

see, the semiconductor industry is notoriously cyclic. You get a few years where chips sell like crazy, profits go crazy. And then, like clockwork, there’s a crunch and the production starts to go down as engineers and fab plants start retooling for the next boom cycle. This is when you get to see new tech and new processes start getting implemented in the fabs. The entire industry plans around this very predictable cycle.

The end of the last boom cycle was supposed to be around, oh, 2019. 2020, however, saw people buying a hell of a lot of tech that no one accounted for.

The entire cycle is turned on it’s head and no one knows what the fuck to do other than to keep making the same old stuff. So the big fab companies are throwing up new plants, but these aren’t using new tech (like, say, environmentally-friendlier tech) because the engineers who design that tech? Use the same fucking chips that are getting eaten up by crypto.

And then we added on the fucking pandemic, which fucked up supply chain and mining even more. This has literally been my life for the past two years. I have seen lead times of over 28 weeks for a goddamn $0.08 resistor.

You want to know why you can’t get your chips? Because we literally cannot get the chips to make the machines that build the fucking chips to make more chips.

peppermintquartz

it's time for ✨GLAM SALSA✨

pfaugh

i wanna meet the person behind the camera so bad

who are they

which shots are they filming

how do they manage to stay so quiet

did they get to try the salsa? did they like the salsa?

borgevino

her husband! you see him sometimes on her tiktok. he does get to eat the things.

nyxetoile

*blesses in Spanish*

“May the dead leave me alone.”

itsapmseymour

Caramelldansen turns 20 this year and frankly I am not prepared for that.

itsapmseymour

roseverdict

So it’s settled? When November 2 rolls around, we’re all laying facedown and blasting Caramelldansen?

kazooyah

no we’re gonna put our big boy pants on and do the goddamn caramelldansen dance for once in our lives

club-cryptid-by-sarah

rasputinaillyanna

halftruthsandhyperbole

Today I learned

ouijubell

Free Audiobooks and Ebooks on OVERDRIVE.

Free Graphic Novels (DC, Marvel, Image, etc), Music, TV shows, and music on HOOPLA.

Free music that you can KEEP on FREEGAL

You are PAYING for all this with your tax money - USE THEM. Most likely systems will have all 3 or 2 out of 3, so if you aren’t sure call your local library’s reference/information desk and how you can get set-up or started.

horrorinthegraveyard

Hey, highkey from a library worker:

Overdrive has a new mobile app called LIBBY I find it easier to use. It’s the same content as Overdrive just better for mobile. Overdrive and Libby both let you send items to your kindle as well.

tusks-and-tonics-deactivated202

Can confirm Overdrive is amazing.

I work in the largest library system in my state (17 branches in total).

I use it not only for ebooks, but movies as well.

Other FREE resources to check with your library for are:

Freegal Music (download and keep music, including current music)

Hoopla Digital (borrow ebooks, e-audiobooks, e-graphic novels, stream movies)

Kanopy (stream movies; also available on Roku!)

Axis360 (usually hot or just released ebooks)

If you don’t have a library card…

GET ONE!

If someone says libraries are a thing of the past…

BOOP THEM IN THE NOSE WITH YOUR KINDLE!

Don’t discount libraries as “quiet” places.

THEY ARE ALIVE!!!

THEY ARE LOUD!!!

THEY ARE YOUR DOORWAYS TO KNOWLEDGE!!

i-will-not-be-caged

Also if you can’t find something particular at your library and want to support local book stores, Libro.fm is basically the exact same thing as audible, but it lets you choose an indie bookstore to purchase through instead of your money going to Amazon.