Mildly related, but I think this is a good time for our yearly moment of silence for Radioshack.

The OLD Radioshack, obviously.

I was there, 3000 years ago when Walmart didn't even sell groceries, I still remember mom commenting "It feels weird buying food at Walmart now and not even going to [regional grocery chain]".

And now, decades later everything is full circle. I avoid Walmart and Amazon like the plague and try to only shop at smaller outlets, whether brick-and-mortar or online. It might be slightly more expensive but I assume that's just the tax you pay to avoid a corporate monopoly hellscape.

Your ancestors probably had plant-based cures like garlic or walnut hulls for the same infections. Modern medicine improved on the spectrum of parasites that can be treated but there's still some caveman-level stuff that works reliably for some species.

Fasting + salts would work to reduce parsite populations too?

>For a solid trilogy I can recommend the Gaea Trilogy (Titan, Wizard, and Demon),

I only read Wizard, how much am I missing out on the other two?

Strictly speaking, the beginning and the end of the whole saga. :)

I found the whole trilogy enjoyable, and quite unique. If you enjoyed Wizard, pick up the other two and (re)read the whole trilogy.

I found it pretty good as a standalone book, but what stuck me the most was this random interaction: I picked it up at a library discount sale, where they give you shopping bags and you can fill them up for a flat 10USD each. I was browsing and some old guy just walked by me and commented "oh YOU FOUND WIZARD! That's a good one" me- "I haven't read it before" him- "Oh if you like scifi you're in for a treat."

...But yes if the other two books are along the same lines, I might try going through the whole trilogy again, just... in order this time.

They are all three radical changes in story, but solidly entrenched in the same principal characters and worldview. It's a very satisfying trilogy.

Demon has some interesting additions to the ongoing “Gaea fucks with Scirocco” relationship but is mostly about Gaea getting senile and watching too many old 1950s movies. Varley was clearly enjoying writing the latter part but it dragged for me.

Titan introduced the setting and went through different parts of Gaea. Wizard summarized the basics of this, if you want more details of what happened to Scirocco’s whole crew then they are in there.

Question for both you and GPP; is this fear limited to real life depictions, or basically anything? E.g, if you ever played Skyrim or a game with spider-like enemies does it have the same effect as a real spider?

Answers I've seen to this question tend to vary wildly.

Spider-fear has never been triggered by fictional spiders for me. Very few works ever bother getting the face and body right though. 8 legs alone are not scary for me, the fangs and eyes and color patterns and the sneaky movement and webs are scary.

I'm not terribly afraid of real spiders though. Hairy crawling spiders like wolf spiders and tarantulas don't really bother me at all. It's the ones with the big web-spinning butts that dangle and drop down from above that make me go straight into fight-or-flight.

I did play Skyrim, and I was fine with it. Something about video games takes the fear out of it. I mean, they're definitely a little bit more unsettling than other video game creatures, but not by much, so I don't get a fear response. I'd react more to a "jump scare" in a game than a 3D spider.

I'm also really afraid of snakes, but spiders are okay. Movies with snakes are quite painful to watch too, and I'm very uncomfortable with snakes in video games, but at least I have some control (compared to TV) so it's a significantly better experience

Anyone find an actual link for the finished track? Credits are mentioned on his site and twitter but I didn't find it anywhere when searching for the artist names.

Ngl, I had a split second of "oh damn did I just pick up a url hijacker somewhere?" Especially with awkward gifs at the bottom.

So...... was there ever a resolution with that persistent incompatibility in ROCm/certain AMD drivers and Cycles that made it impossible to render in almost every version of blender? As in, it literally doesn't even detect the GPU outside of eevee

Can you link to a Blender issue?

Every time I hit a "buy" button it brings nothing but horrible anxiety over what future bullshit I'll have to deal with, either because the product will be garbage or the seller will be garbage. And that's after doing an hour of more research for every god damn thing.

Getting groceries is practically relaxing at this point

I'm having a hard time believing this site is honest, especially with how ridiculous the scaling and rotation of numbers is for most of them. I dumped his prompt into chatgpt to try it myself and it did create a very neat clock face with the numbers at the correct position+animated second hand, it just got the exact time wrong, being a few hours off.

Edit: the time may actually have been perfect now that I account for my isp's geo-located time zone

On the contrary, in my experience this is very typical of the average failure mode / output of early 2025 LLMs for HTML of SVG.

i read that the OP limited the output to 2000 tokens.

^ this! there's a lot of clocks to generate so I've challenged it to stick to a small(er) amount of code

I wonder if you would get better results if you tell the LLM there's a token limit in the prompt.

something like "You only have 1000 tokens. Generate an analog clock showing ${time}, with a CSS animated second hand. Make it responsive and use a white background. Return ONLY the HTML/CSS code with no markdown formatting"

I got a ~1600 character reply from gpt, including spaces and it worked first shot dumping into an html doc. I think that probably fits ok in the limit? (If I missed something obvious feel free to tell me I'm an idiot)

On the second minute I had the AI World Clocks site open the GPT-5 generated version displayed a perfect clock. Its clock before and every clock from it since has had very apparent issues though.

If you could get a perfect clock several times for the identical prompt in fresh contexts with the same model then it'd be a better comparison. Potentially the ChatGPT site you're using though is doing some adjustments that the API fed version isn't.