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Cake day: January 16th, 2024

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  • JasonDJ@lemmy.ziptoPeople Twitter@sh.itjust.worksWhat a save
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    2 days ago

    Ehhh…it breaks the half-plus-7 rule (I’d call 37 ‘late 30s’)…but it beats 20s. I’m only forty and I can barely relate to my 20-something BILs. I couldn’t imagine dating someone in their 20s, and not just because I’m happily married. The culture gap is so real. I could relate to X so much more than Z.

    Still…even mid-30s doesn’t give much time to plant the seed before you have to worry about the first frost. You gotta sow while the soil is warm. Having your own kid is great and all but maybe look for a divorcee/widow with a toddler…






  • JasonDJ@lemmy.ziptoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldHow?!?
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    6 days ago

    One of the best examples of how it’s expensive to be poor.

    We got a BJs (regional wholesale club) membership around the time our first was born. It was worth it just for diapers and wipes. Hell, when he was on formula, a giant jar at BJs cost the same as a medium jar at the supermarket.

    A lot of things were like this, but the best examples were the ones that take up the most space and either get used (comparatively) slowly or go bad relatively quickly. Like paper goods. Frozen anything. Fresh meat, produce, dairy.

    But if you don’t have the space to store that stuff (and especially to stock up when there are coupons/sales), you’re missing out.

    I’m thinking of buying a chest freezer just so I have a bunch of frozen pizzas on hand so we have no excuse to order delivery when we get home too tired to cook. On that use case alone, the freezer would probably pay for itself by 6 months, including electricity.

    Can’t do that if you’ve got a 600sqft studio.

    Sometimes one big purchase might be worth it to get a membership for. Like tires. How much you’d save on a set of tires would be less than the cost of a first-year membership, especially if you got a Groupon. But if you don’t have the space to store wholesale goods, it’s probably not even on your radar.

    That happened to me on vacation, and why I was a member of the Houston Museum of Natural History (I think that’s what it was called), despite only being there one time and living like 1200mi away. For my family of four to go and park, tour the museum, see a planetarium show, etc, it was cheaper to become a member, even if we’d never be coming back during its term.


  • Is she…staring directly at the X-ray itself?

    Like, I don’t pretend to understand how X-rays work. I know they emit a wavelength of light that goes through soft tissue like nothing.

    And I know normally, nowadays (or at least before digital came around), there would be a piece of x-ray sensitive film on one side of the object, and a bulb that shone x-ray onto it, which would then be developed (i think in a process sort of similar to polaroid but I could be mistaken again).

    The dentists panoramic X-ray that swung around your head like something out of a sci-fi VR movie was the coolest, imo.

    But…it looks like she’s looking directly at his foot through a special lens? Does it just put some sort of filter between her and the X-ray that makes it look like a really bright flashlight through the fleshy bits between your fingers?







  • That first picture is great. That’s essentially generative AI, right? You cast out a problem and have it solved multiple times asynchronously, then find the (mean/median/mode) value.

    I do wonder how many of those ladies (weird how “computer” was a largely female profession, and then IT quickly became a largely male profession. Not making any commentary here, just kind of a showerthought observation) got laid off because of the computer. I wonder what they did after their jobs were replaced by it, and if that in turn was a net positive for them/their families.

    I guess this was right around the peak of the babyboom, so I think I know what they did. And for a while there, it was feasible for a typical family to do well on a single income.

    That’d be nice. Maybe next time around we can get it so that families can do well on a single part-time income. Or more gender-equality for who stays home and who works. Hell, I think a lot of families would be happy to be able to do well on two full-time incomes now. But this is getting into the devaluation of human labor now, instead of the evolution of technology.


  • On the one hand, I get it. I really do. It takes an absurd amount of resources for what it does.

    On the other hand, I wonder if people said the same of early generation comptuers. UNIVAC used tubes of mercury for RAM and consumed 125KW of electricity to process a whopping 2k operations per second.

    Probably not. Most people weren’t aware of it, nor did they have a care for power consumption, water consumption, etc. We were in peak-American Exceptionalism in the post-war era.

    But, had they, and computers kinda just…died. Right there, in the 1950s. Would we have gone to the moon? Would we have HDTV? iPhones? Social Media? A treacherous imbecile in charge of the most powerful military the world has ever seen?

    Probably not.

    So…I do worry about the consumption, and the ecological and environmental impact. But, what if that is a necessary evil for the continued evolution of technology, and with it, society? And, if it is, do we want that?

    And, to go a step further, could AI potentially aid in finding realistic ways to undo the harms that it had caused? Or those of anthropogenic climate change? Or uncover new unforseen dangers?

    Did the inventors of UNIVAC ponder if its descendants would one day aid in curing terminal illness, or predicting intense weather, or realize how much it would evolve in the coming decades? Moore wouldn’t have even coined his iconic law for another 14 years.

    What I don’t like…what I really don’t like…is that this phase of technological evolution is coinciding with rampant pro-capital/anti-social rhetoric and governance. I like that it’s forcing conversations around modernizing copyright law, licenses, etc…but I don’t like who is involved in those conversations.