I never understood why it's considered strange to take time off to just stay home. We spend so much time away from home, and then when we finally take a week off, we're expected to go through all the stress of travelling just to return back to work when its over?
What if someone actually wants to stay home, and relaxing and relieving stress is playing a new video game or working on some personal project, or even just you know... resting? I did not think the work/life balance meant never having any time to yourself. Even on weekends, people ask "What are your plans?" as if "nothing" is the wrong answer.
> What if someone actually wants to stay home, and relaxing and relieving stress is playing a new video game or working on some personal project, or even just you know... resting?
It's the "just you know...resting" one that might be a problem. It's not the resting itself that is a problem. Everybody needs to rest. The problem is when people need to take PTO in order to get time for that rest.
Any reasonable job already includes enough time off that workers should be able to get all the rest they need without having to use up some of their PTO.
I don't think it's strange to enjoy some time off at home, but also think it's bothersome for it to commonly be a "do we rest or have a vacation this year" kind of situation from the other extreme.
I have a feeling the problem here is more to do with reporting on a loosely worded poll than anything else though.
I don't know if I see the expectation part of it. A common reply, at least around me, to "what are your plans?" is "enjoying family time" or "just catching up on things" and that's met with some appreciative remark. However, in companies/neighborhoods with more wealthier and type A people, I could see relaxing seeming strange.
No, that's probably true. That's where the last part of my post applies: this is rarely a conscious application of the Protestant work ethic, and more just the way it has shaped our culture to say that rest for rest's sake, and especially taking time off from work just for that, is Wrong. Specifically, it's Lazy.
Vacation is a normal thing: culturally, we have a strong understanding of it, and an agreement that going to visit another country, or to Disneyworld, or for a camping trip, is what you're supposed to do with paid time off.
If you had legally purchased DVDs and blu rays during mega-upload's time, and hadn't tried to decrypt them for backup purposes (thus circumventing copyright measures, also using tools developed mostly by "outlaws"), those discs would now be suffering from bitrot and becoming unplayable.
But now we're moving away from physical media, we're fast moving to a world where all you can even "own" legally is a DRM laden copy that can be revoked at any moment by the digital store front providing it. Your windows 11 upgrade requires hardware TPM (a form of hardware DRM that everyone used to really fear) chip support to even install.
And this seems to be the world the hacker news what and tech crowd really wants. I personally miss the old mid 2000's slashdot days when everyone knew better. I haven't changed -- they changed.
Sure the world has changed -- it's somewhat like the world that many hackers invoked in the 2000s when they'd say "it's the industry that won't embrace digital -- the second they make it easier to watch/listen/access content than piracy the problem will go away".
That has more or less come to pass and naturally it's not perfect. But streaming is really young still, we're really just ending the first boom cycle now with predictable gnashing of teeth and disillusionment. For music, at least on the creator side, it's generally seen as a catastrophe. But it doesn't mean the future has to be like this.
The past had its own problems, which IMO is why "everyone knew better" -- everybody was dealing with the problems of physical distribution (but don't forget how many musicians in particular felt Napster was destroying music!).
I was never the hugest Kim Dotcom supporter back in the day or now, maybe that means I'm part of your sheeple crowd, but I supported torrenting, hated the RIAA, etc etc. I don't think about the RIAA these days -- my hatred is directed at Spotify and other rent-extractors, and I dream of a utopia where they are all permanently disrupted by decentralized technologies, or at least global forces are replaced by more local-serving ones.
I remember just learning to code at a young age, but not knowing trig or seeing how it applied because I only knew it as being about triangles.
I had learned to use some game graphics library (specifically DJGPP with Allegro, coding in C) and I was trying to make a 2d spaceship game, think like asteroids, where you can turn the ship and apply thrust. I couldn't figure out how to take the angle the ship was facing and get a direction to move. Basically I needed to understand the unit circle. I eventually found what I needed probably on some old internet forums. From that point on, trigonometry really started making sense to me.
Alas! Didn't get the memo? We're In the era where AI tools are all "software as a service," and you must pay for individual inferences from the model. How could they charge for inferences if they gave you the model to download?
I don't have access to any special model that I'm holding back from you in order to rent-seek.
Anyone can learn to build something like this. The parts are all available out there. There's Whisper. There's Mistral-7b. There's Tortoise, Coqui, SV2TTS. There's Python.
The bigger question is:
Would you want to?
I've been building web apps for several years now. I've sunk thousands of dollars into those projects. And literally years of my time. If I calculated my hourly wage, I'd be below a teenager mowing lawn. In Rwanda. And by a factor of 10x, probably.
The real ROI here is the learning. And that's not something I'm "taking" from anyone.
I don't think I will ever understand how the freedom of separate IRC servers got replaced by a single platform that mistakenly calls each community a "server" when it's clearly all on the same server and moderated by the same company.
I personally got a warning threat from discord for (I assume) joining some server, but I joined a lot of servers I never said anything and I wasn't even sure what happened on the server to warrant such a warning since it was shut down and I couldn't even see anything.
I read at the link that yt-dl uses ffmpeg and doesn't endorse avconv. Just curious if this is the place to ask, Does anyone know what the differences are between avconv and ffmpeg? Do they still basically do the same thing, or is there any reason to use one over the other. I remember years ago reading that one was a fork due to a disagreement or something, but I don't know how things have come along currently. I've mostly exclusively used ffmpeg any time I needed to convert a video, or more commonly for my use case, converted a directory full of images to a video.
I don't know the details of what happened between the two projects, but according to Wikipedia [1], libav was abandoned a bit over 5 years ago. Looks like their website (and main git repo) no longer exist.
Assuming this is real, I would ask what could it possibly be. The whole popular culture "x-files" narrative doesn't make sense to me. If these are craft which are manned with some beings, why would they be leisurely flying around earth's atmosphere unless they have some destination. Why haven't we found the source or destination?
Perhaps it's actually Von-Neumann probes, or unmanned craft collecting data and observing. I would find this much more likely, but even still, why would they need to keep traveling on earth?
Personally, I keep an open mind about everything, regarding what is possible. I just imagine some civilization thousands or millions of years ahead of us could do things that would seem like magic. It certainly seems plausible in terms of the fermi paradox that we would be being visited. It's just incredibly odd that it would happen this way, and I have very basic questions as to the nature of what this phenomenon even is.
Maybe they’re from here. Maybe they’re stuck here. Maybe they’ve been guiding humanity since the murky dawn of our prehistory. Maybe we are their genetically engineered creation. Maybe they have a vested interest in us not making our beautiful blue marble uninhabitable. Maybe they are tending to this planet like a gardener would his garden, and for that reason they’d prefer us not to annihilate each other.
If a civilization is so advanced as to appear magical then why do you expect we would be able to comprehend what they are doing? By assumption we are already ignorant.
My dad's theory is they they see us as some sort of exotic animal park, take a drive(fly) through safari - keep your appendages inside the vehicle at all times - take some photos and have some tales to tell when you get back home. ;)
Most people don't get enough vitamin D. It's probably good advice for everyone to take a little. Above average vitamin D levels have been shown to correlate strongly with many beneficial things, including covid resistance. Low levels correlate strongly with many negative health problems. Correlation does not imply causation, but after seeing some data and studies, I think I'd prefer to be on the above average side.
I personally have a theory that our skin color evolved to reflect optimal vitamin D absorption. People living in tropical areas where they get more sun have darker skin, which blocks vitamin D but protects from the harmful affects of the sun, where lighter skin has the opposite trade off. If getting enough vitamin D was important enough to literally affect natural selection to change our skin color, it must be very important.
I also learned that furry animals like cats obviously can't absorb it through their skin since it is blocked by fur, but when they lick their fur grooming after sun bathing, they consume it orally from the oils in their fur.
Of course too much of anything is bad, 150,000 IU per day is an insane amount, that would literally be 150 pills of the 1,000 iu variety, which I personally take maybe 1 a day if I don't forget (as I was advised by a doctor).
What does CNN mean by this being a "cautionary tale for people who are considering adding supplements to their lives". Why don't we just encourage people to take some but not too much, and not treat people like they're too dumb to figure it out. To be fair, the article does point out that a daily dose is recommended for most people.
The old tech/nerd crowd I remember was very strongly against censorship of any kind. Thinking back to the slashdot days of early 2000s. Everyone used to talk about how bad it is to see the great firewall of China ( for example). Also the idea of companies controlling what music everyone had access to was appalling (another example). Most everyone was also very liberal. It's sad to see most tech companies turn into the thing I thought everyone was against. The justification seems to be that it's ok to do it to people we disagree with. It seemed to really start when all the tech companies decided to control what they deemed COVID misinformation. This is during a time when the truth we know was dynamic and changing -- that is what was misinformation before sometimes later turned out to be correct. Of course it all turned political as well. I don't know what to do about it but it's no wonder many people are losing all trust in tech platforms. I miss the old open internet when most people seemed to be against such things.
The old tech/nerd crowd I remember was very strongly against censorship of any kind.
That was me, once! I thought the people of the world would use the internet to enlighten themselves. After social media exploded, I had to face the fact that I was wrong.
Everyone used to talk about how bad it is to see the great firewall of China
That was back when it was laughable to suggest a firewall might be a preventative measure against an authoritarian government (and subsequent higher firewall). I no longer trust the public to think critically about online information. You can bet plenty of Americans crying this week over Roe v Wade voted Republican.
Also the idea of companies controlling what music everyone had access to was appalling
I was appalled back then, but I was also high on internet utopianism. In retrospect, I'd be less dogmatic. Today, artists still don't profit from recorded music, only now the labels also take a cut of their live performances too.
Most everyone was also very liberal.
I consider myself as liberal as a person can be after waking up in a world full of illiberal lunatics.
It seemed to really start when all the tech companies decided to control what
they deemed COVID misinformation.
Well, I've never been quite that liberal. If there's a war, natural disaster, or a dangerous pandemic, I don't demand the same freedoms (even if we're talking about government)
it's no wonder many people are losing all trust in tech platforms. I miss the old open internet when most people seemed to be against such things.
I miss the old people on the internet, who were just barely civilized enough to make me think it would all work out in the end :(
Being willing to give up freedoms to the government whenever disasters occur is highly illiberal. After all that talk of how little you trust people with the internet, you’re telling me you trust the people in power to take your freedom and then give it back? Cmon
If my comment seems to approve of a government reaching for emergency powers 'whenever' then I worded it poorly.
There needs to be an actual, dire emergency, and the law should lay out what the extra powers are, the process by which a government obtains them, and their duration.
What if someone actually wants to stay home, and relaxing and relieving stress is playing a new video game or working on some personal project, or even just you know... resting? I did not think the work/life balance meant never having any time to yourself. Even on weekends, people ask "What are your plans?" as if "nothing" is the wrong answer.