So he is tolerant of you being a sexiest asshole?

Pretty much everyone is tolerant of sexiest asshole. Even me, and I’m not into assholes. But even I can appreciate the inherent value of a sexiest asshole.

I think blanket downvoting happens regularly in political communities and discussions, and a lot of time you can see it without even looking up any votes: if every single comment in a six-comment thread has two downvotes and three upvotes, it’s pretty clear. I looked those political ones up a few times but don’t even bother anymore. Everywhere else, by which I mean non-political and/or non-controversial topics, it genuinely seems to be just a core handful of users.

And no, you’re not an outlier, just a decent person. I like to think most of us vote for actual cause, and that it’s only a handful who don’t. But at some point I do think the admins are going to have to deal with it, because downvoting just to downvote IS toxic and does tend to have a stifling effect on the discussion and community as a whole.

Yeah, you’re definitely getting a better experience in Ireland with both Amazon and Temu/AliExpress, so I don’t blame you. Kinda have to cross your fingers and hope for the best, or have it shipped with all the added shipping costs: no truly good options. But people who don’t do a lot of art will never understand why you have to have so many different supplies, or why one paint is not the same as another, or why paper isn’t just paper, and “But you already have fifteen blues!” Yeah, and now I’m about to have sixteen, lol. Just the way it is.

These single downvotes were never followed up by further commentary, and at least one of them looks like a voting-only account with zero posts, so the more I looked the more they just seemed like fuck you votes.

I really don’t think there’s any link to content at all because I did this across multiple communities (whatever I don’t have actively blocked that crosses my feed) and it was largely the same handful of downvoters throughout, but with outliers here and there. I wasn’t taking notes, but when I started to see the same names over and over in wildly disparate communities it seemed less and less likely it had anything to do with content.

Because the fediverse is still fairly small, downvotes stick out a lot more. A number of them I think, “How could anybody downvote that?” and just wonder because often they seem to be “I had a shitty day and I particularly don’t like YOU” downvotes.

I often sort a thread by Top, and even the highest voted posts are often +(big number) -1. Because I personally do not downvote without cause, I assume they are sincere, but then it becomes a question of why, and I could never figure it out. Okay, whatever, no biggie.

But recently I had some time on my hands and I am aware of lemvotes.org, so one day I saw this again and decided to just informally start looking up these weird ass loner downvotes. Nothing sustained, just whenever one stuck out to me as being why??? I’d go and look it up. I’ve been doing this for roughly 2-3 months now, no schedule or commitment other than whenever I felt like it, across the board, no attention paid to community or post content (other than anything political pretty much not being worth the trouble, lol).

What I expected was a variety of usernames attached to these single downvotes.

But what I saw was a core handful of users across the board, with the occasional outlier.

Kinda pathetic, honestly.

Try https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ – it really cuts down on the slop, even for images.

I don’t know where you are located so this may not apply to you, but in the US for branded art supplies I always go with DickBlick or Jerry’s Artorama, because in addition to the usual “stick it in a bubble bag and see how damaged we can make it before it arrives” Amazon shipping policy, branded art supplies are now being counterfeited on Amazon, like so many other things.

I already could not safely buy liquids (Gamsol, OMS, etc) or soft supplies (paper or canvas pads, single watercolors) because of careless shipping, but now I won’t even try because of counterfeits. If you want the branded version of something that already has budget knockoffs, say an item like Holbein or Caran d’Ache colored pencils where the real thing is vastly more expensive than others in its category, you’re taking your chances on Amazon. Amazon has been selling counterfeit fountain pens for years, even low end pens like Lamy Safaris which always blew my mind, but now it’s a lot of things in the art supply world.

So now I only get cheap knockoffs there, anything under $50. Anything over that, or anything liquid or bendable/breakable, I go with a real art supply store. It’s absolutely worth it, they pack it all very carefully, excellent return service when I’ve needed it, and I can still pick up deals better than Amazon without ever having to worry about the possibility it’s a counterfeit and I just wasted hundreds on a scam.

If you’re not in the US you may be having a markedly better experience, so disregard. But in the US, Amazon for branded art supplies is a big NO for me.

Holy shit. Never saw that before. Watching Dani California right now:

“I’ve got to be clear about something. I don’t think it stinks because it’s a rip-off; I think it stinks AND it’s a rip-off. There’s a difference.”

Well, he’s not actually wrong, though I never expected anyone to bring all the receipts for it, much less to enjoy hearing them trotted out like I am right now. This is a legit song review and not just a parody. Thanks!

Might have to do with how Derek Muller sold the channel to private equity a while back.

Very similar to Martijn Doolaard, and in the same general area of northern Italy, is Stories from the Cascina. It’s a Belgian-Dutch couple renovating an old farm who film in roughly the same way as Martijn, with very little talking and absolutely beautiful photography. I came across them when people in the comments of a Martijn video were talking about how they were there because they saw a Martijn video playing on a laptop in a Stories from the Cascina video, and they’d never seen him before.

The only downside is that Stories from the Cascina did start taking sponsorships this year out of necessity, but it’s lowkey and I find them inoffensive. There have been a couple I didn’t even know were sponsorships until I kept seeing the product again in the same video, lol.

Rick Beato. His channel banner says “Everything Music” and it’s not a misnomer. I am not a musician, don’t know a Dorian from a pentatonic, but every time he throws something up I drop everything and sit and listen to it. It’s just that interesting.

You should know that he plugs his own music training courses (probably worth it) but has never once taken an outside sponsorship. He covers all genres and all fields of talent in music, and regularly pulls in younger unknowns for interviews as well as household names. He has nothing but praise for effort and talent, but no time for hacks. It is incredibly refreshing.

Even if you are only a listener and not a player, just getting the pro-level views on what things should sound like and even how to listen will take your own music listening up multiple notches. Be sure to look for his “What Makes This Song Great” videos, because they are not reactions, they are dissections: you will hear and learn things about songs you’ve heard a million times that you never noticed before.

Can’t say enough good about this channel. When life sucks, I go listen to some Rick Beato.

this is just dumb and you should feel bad for spending so much time writing it

I don’t think he did, though he may have touched it up. It’s old. I remember seeing it in the 90s with a number of “if [OS] were an airplane” schticks along the same line. Unix was the one where passengers all brought parts and tools and assembled it on the runway.

Well said.

Truth. Especially if someone suffers from anxiety: quitting social media will help immediately. They may jones for it for a few days, but the world is full of other things to do, and they’ll be so glad they did. Even if someone is forced to use it for work or business, the personal use of social media can be limited to exactly that.

Also, and it must be said, it’s much harder to become propagandized when you’re not allowing yourself to be exposed to a constant feed of it daily. When you find yourself emoting over something you’ve read, that’s usually a clue to step away. The world is full of horrible, saddening things, but we now have a bunch of oligarch techbros who want to use that to steer us via our own emotions, and that’s what social media excels at. If you’re feeling angry, if you’re feeling fearful, if you’re feeling hopeless about the world at large, social media is a very expensive short-term remedy. Get offline and occupy your body as well as your mind: you’ll be grateful you stopped it when you did.

They’re here to stay

Eh, probably. At least for as long as there is corporate will to shove them down the rest of our throats. But right now, in terms of sheer numbers, humans still rule, and LLMs are pissing off more and more of us every day while their makers are finding it increasingly harder to forge ahead in spite of us, which they are having to do ever more frequently.

and they’re going to get much better.

They’re already getting so much worse, with what is essentially the digital equivalent of kuru, that I’d be willing to bet they’ve already jumped the shark.

If their makers and funders had been patient, and worked the present nightmares out privately, they’d have a far better chance than they do right now, IMO.

Simply put, LLMs/“AI” were released far too soon, and with far too much “I Have a Dream!” fairy-tale promotion that the reality never came close to living up to, and then shoved with brute corporate force down too many throats.

As a result, now you have more and more people across every walk of society pushed into cleaning up the excesses of a product they never wanted in the first place, being forced to share their communities AND energy bills with datacenters, depleted water reserves, privacy violations, EXCESSIVE copyright violations and theft of creative property, having to seek non-AI operating systems just to avoid it . . . right down to the subject of this thread, the corruption of even the most basic video search.

Can LLMs figure out how to override an angry mob, or resolve a situation wherein the vast majority of the masses are against the current iteration of AI even though the makers of it need us all to be avid, ignorant consumers of AI for it to succeed? Because that’s where we’re going, and we’re already farther down that road than the makers ever foresaw, apparently having no idea just how thin the appeal is getting on the ground for the rest of us.

So yeah, I could be wrong, and you might be right. But at this point, unless something very significant changes, I’d put money on you being mostly wrong.

I don’t use an YouTube account and haven’t used for years for privacy reasons.

Same here. Trick is to not use the YT search function. My strategy changes depending on specifically what I’m looking for, but in general for anything factual I start with a no-AI text search on DDG and then go to YT once I know what I want to see, or just use DDG to trawl through the videos. It’s not perfect but it cuts out a LOT of the slop.

For entertainment, if my current list of “known good” seems exhausted, I keep my subscriptions in FreeTube and go with the recommendations there where I can hide channels more effectively, but that’s pretty rare because I collect what look like promising channels as I go along in regular browsing, like Lemmy or news articles, and not from any algorithm.

Mierde en palito = shit on a stick. I learned it from an old school Puerto Rican, and he used it for two things: an arrogant person (not just regular shit, but shit on a stick) and also for when someone is “stirring the pot” or making a drama filled situation worse via gossip, etc (stirring a pot full of shit). But primarily, it is well suited for the arrogant person huffing their own farts and thinking it is the aroma of personal worth.

(There was also the time a friend of mine got tired of looking after young kids and sent two demented nephews of his running through Disney World to see how many people they could greet in Spanish after sincerely telling them that the standard greeting in Spanish is mama me la pinga, but that’s more of a direction as opposed to a label. Try mama me la pinga, pinchi pendejo for a nice combo phrase. Also note that online dictionaries often get this wrong: it’s the verb mamar and you’re not telling your mom you’re a dick, lol)

If you allow artists to display their work in various communities along with the ability to post links in their profiles, but you restrict actual posts to disallow self-promotion, it’s the best of both worlds, IMO.

In other words, if you can’t include self-promotion in your community posts, but everyone knows you have the links in your profile, it attracts less grifters and keeps the feed clean, while allowing anyone interested to contact a poster directly or ask them promotional questions via DMs.

That said, hosting a full-fledged marketplace is not a good idea, IMO. There are laws and banks involved, which mean lawyers and taxes, and volunteer management does not work for that. There are already marketplaces that do that well, and allowing artists to post their own links of choice in their profiles will let them steer actual business to other platforms, while keeping the fediverse for display, review, share and critique. My opinion, anyway.

This is the way. I have a decade+ old HP OfficeJet that I more or less inherited, and it has pigment black ink but dye color inks. When the colors are fine but the black is not, it’s because the black (pigment) cartridge is blocked again. It does this with both HP and third party blacks, though, so it’s definitely pigment vs. dye thing. Easy enough to clean with isopropyl, as you said.

But just to be clear, when we bought new earlier this year, it sure as hell wasn’t HP. I’ll ride that old OfficeJet and my 20+ year old LaserJet until they die, there’s no chipping of cartridges and I’m quite good at printer repair as long as parts are available and it’s not too complex, but otherwise I’m done with HP.

Music is art to me, no question at all. I care a great deal about it, and don’t listen, and by that I mean really sit and listen, often enough. But yesterday I came across a video by Mary Spender about some emails she got in regard to some Spotify statements she made, and it reminded me of what a real pleasure music is when I actually attend to it, so last night I sat and listened to two full albums start to finish, and it was a joy. I used to do that frequently, that’s how my generation did it back in the day, and now I’m reminded so I will likely do that more often. I don’t talk with passion about my favorites because nobody knows who the fuck I’m talking about anymore, but I definitely think of them that way.

My headset is decent, and I have good speakers, but I don’t do earbuds. I never need the very very best of devices because back in the day, these analog releases had to sound good on the shittiest of car speakers and even transistor radios, so while I absolutely get more nuance from better devices, it’s not the be-all end-all.

The only streaming service I have is my own CD library ripped into MP3s, because of course the vast majority of artists I listen to recorded back in the days of analog and full albums, plus I have bought MP3s of various one-hit wonders, so there is literally zero upside to me in a subscription service. As others far more astute than myself have noted, the algorithms don’t even really direct you toward new-to-you music, nor to music that will actually “interest” you, nearly as much as it is designed to suggest music that you will not click away from. I used to try suggested music but have never actually liked anything musically I got from a “Suggested for You” source, so I don’t bother anymore, and to me I miss nothing.

I have often searched YT for more of the same by a specific artist I am already into, or for something I heard while watching a movie, but other than that, no, I do not search for new music. I’ve already got so much to enjoy, I don’t ever want it to fade into background noise.