Thanks, this helped. Although I keep yt-dlp installed with pip so for me instead of github it’s just a pip3 install yt-dlp -U.

2004 would be a bit late but it kind of reminds me of MPlayer.com. Here’s a video. The interface kind of looked like a radio, it also featured the first voice-chat I ever used, but everyone was on modem so it was unusably terrible.

There’s actually enough channels like this that I think it qualifies as a genre. They kind of give me “tradwife” vibes so I don’t really watch them, but it seems like quite a few are in France for some reason (maybe some government program where you can get these properties cheaply).

If you’re into visual arts, “The Art Spirit” by Robert Henri is pretty great.

So I quickly gave myself diabetes…

The A. americanum (lonestar) tick larvae are insane this year. I blame the wet summer. At least it’s hot and dry now, and I can imagine them dying by the truckload!

Given the opacity, unaccountability and character of ICE it’s almost certain that ICE agents are taking bribes, running drugs and guns, doing shakedowns, pimping, and engaging in all kinds of organized crime shit. If you’re a cartel, who better to pay than the masked mercenary who’s above the law and doesn’t give a shit about anything but power and money? Easiest partnership ever. Hell, they’re probably bribing from the top down and getting entire local chapters on the payroll.

I don’t want to die, but if I could un-exist like Marty McFly disappearing from a photograph I would choose it in an instant. I have a pretty privileged life but, even for me, if I try to honestly inventory my experience there appears to be more suffering than pleasure. I don’t think this is unfair or unnatural, I believe suffering is integral to being alive because it’s how organisms respond and adapt to a world that is constantly trying to dis-organize them. Basically you can’t have life without it, given the laws of physics.

I don’t think “humans are a virus” is correct because it’s a pejorative and I don’t think viruses or humans are inherently bad. If I was going to classify anything as bad it would be the capacity to suffer, which is so foundational it actually informs the concept of “bad” rather than they other way around. I think suffering also becomes more acute the more processing power you have. Unfortunately for Agent Smith, the “virus” is intelligence and the machines already caught it.

I admit my ideas are probably half-baked on this because I just don’t feel articulate or intelligent enough to describe it. All I have is my own experience. As far as I can see, it appears that more complex animals have a greater capacity for suffering than less complex ones. It seems that the mechanisms of suffering are “body stuff”, mainly nerves, and more complex organisms simply have more of those in more robust configurations. This might just be cope, because the alternative is horrific. As a kid I looked through a microscope and saw an entire world of rotifers and paramecia ripping each other apart, struggling for energy, and realized that if all organisms can experience the same “level” of suffering than we are truly in Hell. It was literally inconceivable.

I don’t care for the “antinatalist” label. I admit that suffering is hard to quantify and may be totally subjective. This is why I don’t mind what other people choose to believe. It’s none of my business. Based on my subjective experience I will not be doing so. Sometimes people pry into why I don’t have kids and I am forced to expose my beliefs. Suddenly, in their eyes, I become an evangelist. I’m not. They won’t engage with the notion of 'the non-existent mind". They constantly argue from the position of a hypothetical mind that chooses stuff. Eventually they think I’m suicidal because in their mind dying and non-existence are the same. They also get angry and insulted even though I’m leaving more resources for their own children by not having my own which, by their logic, should be good. So I just don’t bother. Do what you want. Maybe they are right.

I think some of the Reddit refuges honestly think Reddit sucks because Spez Man Bad. There’s no analysis of what creates Reddits and Spezes, and therefore they don’t recognize who made this platform and why.

I have to believe ultimately some of these people will come around, so that’s good at least.

Radio was huge. Some rapper could make slang local to his street corner famous and it would be in car commercials within two years.

I really like this website for exploring all the options. Not sure how up to date it is with this latest ffmpeg.

https://ffmpeg.lav.io/

I still think about the dude who repeatedly put massive amounts of paraquat on his balls, and died, instead of just getting some antibiotics.

Aside from Signal messenger, I feel like I could go back to having a casio watch, some sort of GPS in my vehicle, and a dumb phone. My phone is ancient and hasn’t gotten a security update in years, I was thinking of going Graphene next but maybe the solution is to just dump it and go full 1990s again.

In my experience people didn’t trust each other more, but it did feel like you had more autonomy. Cell phones are what really changed everything, for better and worse. I think the dumb phone era was the best because you were no longer in a position to need to walk miles in the countryside due to a breakdown, but also they weren’t ubiquitous enough that everyone demanded constant contact (old rules of phone etiquette were still in force). Also no algorithms. Brain rot was confined to TV, magazines, and radio.

At first I thought she meant ‘fantastic’ in its literal sense and I was optimistic. No, of course the former CFO of Morgan Stanley is a ghoul.

“Burgum, a Republican, used his speech to criticize Silicon Valley for having supported ‘the climate extremist agenda,’ which he defined as the idea that ‘a degree of temperature change in the year 2100 is the thing that we should drive every policy in America.’ Burgum added: ‘I’ve always been a little offended by that.’”

Well it’s like 3 or 4 degrees at this point, which is civilization-ending. Real, “we’re all going to die anyway” energy here. Glad we’re doing this to hallucinate the next Amazon show and not slow down the approaching catastophe or at least give poor people food or some shit. Is that a little offensive?

If jacking off constantly at age 14 doomed a person we would never have left the Miocene epoch.

It seems like a perpetual panic, sustained because it creates a lever of exploitation to control the gullible. Like you can read complaints about “oversexed youth” from time periods when pornography was totally banned and women were essentially chattel. And hey, Boomers didn’t have internet porn and they are fucked.

It would peel off a few for about a year but then they’d be back. The core would just joke that the child was a democrat.

Python is actually pretty baller with string operations too since so much of the C has been heavily optimized.

Stories from the USA. My mom said that when she was a little girl my grandparents used to take the kids on road trips and they would do this thing where when they got to the destination they wouldn’t leave the car. Like, they would drive hours to see the monument (or whatever) and when they got there they would roll down the windows, slowly pass by the object going, “wow! Look there it is!”, then they would roll up the window and drive away. This happened multiple times.

It’s a fucking mystery to us. Didn’t want to pay for a ticket? Savage, unmedicated ADHD? Just fucking with your children? All are totally plausible. She didn’t realize it was weird until later in life.