Amarok's recent activity

  1. Comment on US judges say Donald Trump administration must continue food aid during shutdown in ~society

    Amarok
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    I usually top off all family and friends' freezers and leave the rest with the butchers. I could butcher them myself but I hate the smell and the mess isn't pretty... plus the pros are better...

    I usually top off all family and friends' freezers and leave the rest with the butchers. I could butcher them myself but I hate the smell and the mess isn't pretty... plus the pros are better equipped for it and to sort out anything that's tainted. They'll also make use of the leather. I haven't added tanning skills to my portfolio yet. :P

    2 votes

  2. Comment on US judges say Donald Trump administration must continue food aid during shutdown in ~society

    Amarok
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    I hope you're right. I just wonder how long we can keep tempting fate with idiotic policy before something more permanent breaks.

    I hope you're right. I just wonder how long we can keep tempting fate with idiotic policy before something more permanent breaks.

  3. Comment on US judges say Donald Trump administration must continue food aid during shutdown in ~society

    Amarok
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    Neither does Trump's government. I'm almost certain he'll stall this court order as best he can. I've been on EBT before, and I have friends who still rely on it. I know how it works. I give away...

    Advice doesn't fill bellies

    Neither does Trump's government. I'm almost certain he'll stall this court order as best he can. I've been on EBT before, and I have friends who still rely on it. I know how it works.

    not how much you were donating, or how many families you're feeding

    I give away more meat than I keep, I haven't got the freezer space for it all even if I wanted to keep it. The deer really are a nuisance. I have no idea what the odds are that the food donated around here will ever make it to a city, though. It's the cities I worry about. They are the most sensitive to the disruptions.

    2 votes

  4. Comment on US judges say Donald Trump administration must continue food aid during shutdown in ~society

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    Just take a look at global shipping over time if you want to see the collapse. I must have missed the part where Trump's trade and tariff policies are working... or the part where the terminally...

    Just take a look at global shipping over time if you want to see the collapse. I must have missed the part where Trump's trade and tariff policies are working... or the part where the terminally aging demographics in the majority of world countries lead to a good resolution. Then we can mix in the ongoing wars on every continent and their trade disruptions just for kicks. Even ignoring all of that, the one single method the government has to pay off this much debt is by inflating it away and monetizing it. That means the dollar is going to go for a nice long steady ride on the inflation train.

    So yes, I'm rather bearish on the near term worldwide economic situation right now. It's not hopeless but it certainly looks like a bumpy trip for the next two decades, and largely at the expense of those who are living paycheck to paycheck (northwards of 70% of all US citizens right now). We've also got accelerated job losses from automation coming. I guess I brought it up because I see this food stamp mess as just another nail in the coffin coming from a government that is too dysfunctional to handle reality.

    1 vote

  5. Comment on US judges say Donald Trump administration must continue food aid during shutdown in ~society

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    It is life saving advice for any humans in this situation and I'll continue repeating it. The best way to offset the food disruption is for people to prepare for themselves and their immediate...

    But your solution of "buying beans" and hunting is not actually helpful.

    It is life saving advice for any humans in this situation and I'll continue repeating it. The best way to offset the food disruption is for people to prepare for themselves and their immediate family - and if possible for their neighbors. If everyone stocks up as best they can they'll have it much easier when things get bumpy. Without that resilience, things get desperate quickly, and desperation turns into violence. Frankly, I think that's what some of our leaders are hoping for pushing this shutdown on so long. I'd like to see us all disappoint them.

    3 votes

  6. Comment on US judges say Donald Trump administration must continue food aid during shutdown in ~society

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    I think the real issue is that everyone expects the food stamps to come back and never considers the possibility that they won't. We're on the edge of globalism collapsing - words won't solve this...

    I think the real issue is that everyone expects the food stamps to come back and never considers the possibility that they won't.

    We're on the edge of globalism collapsing - words won't solve this problem. People need to do what is practical for their survival more than they need feelings or illusions about status protected. That bag of coffee will last a lot longer if it goes to the basics, and if one hasn't got the basics covered, then skip the coffee. Tea costs less and still delivers the caffeine. This economy can get far, far worse in a hurry if the wrong things happen.

    If it was up to me I'd cancel all other social welfare and turn social security into a healthy UBI, then back it up with a gold/asset backed crypto dollar... but that is not going to happen. The only way it could happen is if robotic manufacturing starts delivering on its potential for post-scarcity production, but we're still several years away from that best case. Be ready for depression-era living until that happens.

    I'd love to be wrong here, but I don't see a happy ending for Trump's presidency.

    3 votes

  7. Comment on US judges say Donald Trump administration must continue food aid during shutdown in ~society

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    New York is frankly too broke and in debt to handle the benefits. The budget hasn't recovered from covid, and as usual it's because of being forced to subsidize red state freeloading from our...

    New York is frankly too broke and in debt to handle the benefits. The budget hasn't recovered from covid, and as usual it's because of being forced to subsidize red state freeloading from our federal taxes all of the time. In lieu of food stamps, they are recommending everyone connect with local food banks and other programs.

    This has already made several people I know in real life pretty angry - and not 'rant and shake fist' angry, more like 'gun toting shoplifting spree' furious. Older people on fixed incomes are being hit the hardest and that tends to piss off their children. Out here in the countryside it's not such an issue - this is where most of the food is grown after all. People living in the city, however, are in much worse situations.

    Rice and beans, folks. Rice will keep you alive and it's a plant, healthier and far superior to any pasta. Keeps for literal decades without refrigeration. Beans will keep you hale and are a functional substitute for meat protein. Pick up any cheap gravy or broths or sauces and spices along with some other canned or frozen vegetables and you're set for a wide variety of meals. It's all still dirt cheap. Don't waste food stamps on stupid things like soda or hot pockets - switch to basics, you'll eat better and enjoy it more.

    For myself, I've already filled up two full-sized freezers with almost two hundred pounds of venison to top that off. We get nuisance tags around here and a proper butchering and rendering of the meat is still about $50 for the whole animal. No supermarket on earth can touch that price or the meat quality. Sometimes it's more economical to just cut the supermarkets out of your food chain entirely.

    10 votes

  8. Comment on What the hell are we doing with hierarchical tags? in ~tildes

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    I think it's worth pointing out that no matter what nomenclature is used, it'll fail when it comes into contact with reality. There's no cloud of tags one can point to on the entire internet that...

    I think it's worth pointing out that no matter what nomenclature is used, it'll fail when it comes into contact with reality. There's no cloud of tags one can point to on the entire internet that is correct or even standardized. Large data systems are always messy, that's an inevitability. It's also nothing to worry about - in fact it's better to embrace the chaos. There's no point in going into wikipedianesque flamewars over minor nomenclature issues that only a tiny fraction of people even care about. At some point one has to leave OCD at the door.

    The tags are for pedantic geek-centered categorization and all they really are is search++. They do a great job of zipping around the cloud of submissions for similar topics, and if a topic is important and busy enough, it gets a group which is where the tags yield to the community. I don't see any problem with that or even any missing features for the tags themselves. It's surprising how well even this simple system handles the organization.

    I think it works great as it is. It'll work even better if an LLM or smart script is importing and tagging everything that's submitted. Then the humans only need to tweak the bits it gets wrong and set up some aliases from time to time. Should scale just fine to any size data set, and since the tags aren't arbitrary they remain versatile for any nodes to use any way they like.

    I can't really think of a way to improve on it. I suppose some sort of confirm / reject / revert / pin mechanics might be useful to prevent vandalism on large nodes, but since there are no large Tildes nodes it's silly to bother about. Solving problems early usually leaves one a slave to old / bad assumptions. Best to wait until the problems materialize, at least then you've got better data on the causes and some real world use cases.

    10 votes

  9. Comment on Venus Hum - Look (2020) in ~music

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    New Venus Hum track dropped recently - I sense a new album coming within a year. ;)

    New Venus Hum track dropped recently - I sense a new album coming within a year. ;)

    1 vote

  10. Comment on Death in D&D 5e, the various revival spells, and their impact on the game in ~games.tabletop

    Amarok
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    They don't tend to follow the armor class into the high numbers that melee characters do - but they do often end up in personal combat, and I don't want them to be gimped by taking wounds at...

    They don't tend to follow the armor class into the high numbers that melee characters do - but they do often end up in personal combat, and I don't want them to be gimped by taking wounds at double the rate of a Fighter class. That makes players not want to engage, and Rogues are meant to engage. Giving them the dex bonus just makes them a little bit harder to injure in combat particularly at lower levels, which is when I think they need it the most. I chalk it up in RP to Rogues just knowing how to roll with a hit. I'd extend this to anyone using a light armor proficiency, not necessarily Rouge-specific. Barbarians in leather armor get it too.

    One could let the Fighters add in their Strength mod on the basis of being able to push back against a hit, but this sends the Fighter class wound thresholds up too high too fast for my tastes. Very quickly it becomes too hard for most level-appropriate encounters to have creatures that can actually wound them. That's less of a problem at around 12th level when monsters are hitting harder.

    1 vote

  11. Comment on Death in D&D 5e, the various revival spells, and their impact on the game in ~games.tabletop

    Amarok
    (edited )
    Link
    Simple method I use is adding one level of exhaustion to the characters every time a cantrip pops them back up for another round of combat. I'll let them ditch one level of exhaustion earned in...

    Simple method I use is adding one level of exhaustion to the characters every time a cantrip pops them back up for another round of combat. I'll let them ditch one level of exhaustion earned in combat if they take a short rest immediately after the combat it was earned in, or if the character benefits from some non-cantrip healing magic or potions. The exhaustion stacks, with one level being removed with each full long rest afterwards, until they've scrubbed it all. I do the same with monsters and npcs of course.

    Another way to handle it is with wounds, to borrow a mechanic from Earthdawn. This is more crunch but I find the way it changes how things work on the table to be a lot more interesting and tactical. You just have to calculate one new statistic for every character to use it.

    You calculate a character's wound threshold (WT) as their hit die type (maximum) plus their Constitution modifier. I further buff Melee by letting them add their AC (each point above 10) and Rouges by adding their AC and Dexterity modifier. This makes deciding who wades into melee a lot more intriguing than the base system. Rouges do a lot better than they expect and tanks take the lead in being able to take a hit after a couple levels pass. Casters take it worst with a low number, makes self and party buffs a lot more important.

    If you take more damage than your wound modifier in a single hit, you sustain a wound. I encourage determining the type/location on the fly (in the moment) and getting the players to roleplay the wounds for maximum cheese. The first one is free. Each wound after that is a cumulative -2 to all dice rolls. If you only take a 5' step that round, the penalty is halved, so you can trade your movement to halve the wound penalty. This keeps wounded characters from sprinting around and gives them an incentive to use other skills plus have some decent ranged attack gear.

    Wounds remain until after a rest where the character is already fully healed up - you can't heal wounds if you are not already at full hit points. You can only heal one at a time with a full day's rest, not a long rest. Think bedridden or sitting in a rocking chair all day kind of rest. Wounds stick around, and are meant to stick around. They make the party worried to charge through ten battles in a row. You could also go with a simple long rest healing one wound if you want your games to be more forgiving, works well enough both ways.

    I also make the Medicine skill a lot less useless by letting it bandage up and or stint/split those wounds, as long as you tie or beat the damage number that caused the wound with your skill check - and I will let players do a Take(20) on that skill check if they've got the time. Medicine can bandage up to two wounds per character (so you could theoretically ignore three wounds total).

    Wounds keep the party nervous about what else is coming down that corridor in the distance. They complicate things immensely for high level players as well, because monsters that can easily do 20+ damage in a single hit are a lot more threatening. ;)

    7 votes

  12. Comment on Spotify, the world's biggest music streaming service, has announced it is working with major labels on using artificial intelligence in a "responsible" way in ~music

    Amarok
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    I'll admit it's become hard even for music obsessives like me to tell. A track slipped by my internal AI detector just the other day, I shared it in this post. It's easy enough to tell that the...

    I'll admit it's become hard even for music obsessives like me to tell. A track slipped by my internal AI detector just the other day, I shared it in this post. It's easy enough to tell that the instrumentation is synthesized (which is true for most real artists who use digital production), but I was on my fourth repeat of it before my brain noticed that the vocals are also synthesized. It was tricking my 'soul detector' for lack of a better term. First time that has ever happened, and I don't like the implications of where this is heading at all.

    7 votes

  13. Comment on This site is fast in ~tildes

    Amarok
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    You guys missed the most important point here. ;) It's low-bandwidth. I tested it myself and it's in a class all its own on that front. That's where the speed comes from - well that and having a...

    You guys missed the most important point here. ;)

    It's low-bandwidth. I tested it myself and it's in a class all its own on that front. That's where the speed comes from - well that and having a robust/simple backend database that can respond instantly. Tildes is so low-band that it even works when your cable internet is 'disabled' because you missed a bill - that's right, it functions slowly but well on their heartbeat-level 4kb/s internet connection. At 10kb/s it's fully performant. At traditional dialup modem speeds of 56kb/s to 256kb/s it's instant.

    I think a web proxy in front of it that can cache pages and maintain a lot of really slow internet connections using extended tcp timeout settings would improve that further. Also a good place to hook-in a Tor node - it'll run like lightning on Tor unlike most everything else.

    Compare this with reddit or twitter who shove 30MB of tracking scripts at you with every page refresh. They are forcing you to download and execute the software they use to invade your privacy. Small wonder their sites run like molasses.

    In the event of a major power grid disruption or anything that damages and shuts down a lot of data centers, most of these internet sites will vanish overnight because they can't exist on an internet that's been knocked back to 1994-style bandwidth and intermittent connections. Tildes nodes will yawn and continue on as if nothing happened. I'm sure the entire Tildes backup fits on a small thumb drive with plenty of room to spare, moving servers is easy.

    This software is old-school BBS-era DARPA-class internet survival software. Not that it was the goal, that's just what happens when good, efficient engineering is the goal. It's the most overlooked feature of this software. Anyone can use it to set up a bulletproof internet site. Taking the survivalist mentality to the next level would be adding some form of file hosting capability, so people can send files through the forum or maintain a directory of things to share. Not that we'd ever need that feature on this node but it'd be a nice feature for the ecosystem to have available.

    Tie in a self-hosted torrent tracker and you're not far off from everyone in the streaming game being able to use a Tildes to replace Patreon and self-host all their own video content on their own sites. Bundle in some form of node-to-node association and then the mobile apps can find all the nodes and weave them together. Then you've outclassed all commercial websites, and most of the centralized control and tracking with it. Bots have a zillion times more work to do trying to infect all the nodes.

    Tildes is dangerous software. It can get an awful lot more dangerous with a handful of serious code sprints in a rather short time frame, so remember to donate to the project! <3

    16 votes

  14. Comment on Financial collapse? in ~finance

    Amarok
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    Felix Phren just covered this about an hour ago. He has the most rational and well informed investing channel on the entire internet, far as I can find anyway.

    Felix Phren just covered this about an hour ago. He has the most rational and well informed investing channel on the entire internet, far as I can find anyway.

    1 vote

  15. Comment on Mr. Silver Grey - Risk It, Honey (2025) in ~music

    Amarok
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    Well, it finally happened. AI has learned to sing the blues well enough that it got past my spider senses. Seriously tempted to put this into #13.

    Well, it finally happened. AI has learned to sing the blues well enough that it got past my spider senses. Seriously tempted to put this into #13.

    2 votes

  17. Comment on Announcing the seventh annual Tildes' Make Something Month (Timasomo)! in ~tildes

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    I think the real fun is going to be in the upcoming bestofs. I file away an awful lot more albums than I use in the mixtapes, often just because they are off-topic for the current project. The...

    I think the real fun is going to be in the upcoming bestofs. I file away an awful lot more albums than I use in the mixtapes, often just because they are off-topic for the current project. The playlists on my spotify profile titled '20xx Maybe' are the albums that pinged me as being above average in musicianship and in the number of good tracks present. They are split by year but contain all sorts of genres. I'd normally go through them and trim out about 30% of them for the must-listens but it may be better to leave them like they are and let people do their own cratedigging because my tastes aren't the same as other people. At the least I can promise zero AI slop, just 100% real artists who have talent and at least a handful of hits (to my tastes) to recommend them.

    What's missing is ten more people like me who have totally different tastes but the same sort of standards, so that we can cover more stylistic ground and a much larger number of genres. When we pool all of that together, this is what happens. I'm ready to pick up with 2018 where listentothis left off and bring it right up to 2025, but it'll be much better if everyone on tildes throws in all of their own best finds from those years to cover more ground. I might take that up after the Timasomo is done, modern AI tools should be able to take an awful lot of work out of the process of making playlists and those massive album-filled link posts. There must be a way to automate most of it by now.

    3 votes

  18. Comment on Denmark airport closed due to drones, two days after incursions in Copenhagen and Oslo in ~society

    Amarok
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    I think we need a bigger drone that's really fast, shorter range, and carries a very large net. Just bag the enemy drone and fly it back to wherever you like. The net would be able to compromise...

    I think we need a bigger drone that's really fast, shorter range, and carries a very large net. Just bag the enemy drone and fly it back to wherever you like. The net would be able to compromise the propulsion systems almost immediately be it a jet or propeller. It'd lodge in there nice and tight, like hooking a fish.

    4 votes

  19. Comment on Denmark airport closed due to drones, two days after incursions in Copenhagen and Oslo in ~society

    Amarok
    Link
    I'm just wondering how long it'll take before NATO wises up and shoots down each and every unidentified drone immediately upon detection, no exceptions, no excuses, and no apologies. It's just...

    I'm just wondering how long it'll take before NATO wises up and shoots down each and every unidentified drone immediately upon detection, no exceptions, no excuses, and no apologies. It's just ridiculous in my view to put up with it at all - there are no lives lost taking out these drones, assuming you down them over a field instead of into someone's roof.

    Russia always pushes everything, the only thing they respect is strength. The more NATO puts up with it, the more they embolden Putin, and he's getting really, really desperate right now since Russia's economy has flatlined and Ukraine is punishing them more and more brutally every single day. This situation is going to come to a head soon, and Russia won't even put up as much of a fight as Iraq did during desert storm if NATO decides to reclaim Ukraine and Crimea. Their troop numbers count for nothing at all and they've been reduced to rusty equipment from the 60s and mules or horses for transport. It's bad.

    They could just as easily take out Moscow in a matter of weeks - the nukes are the only thing holding them at bay. NATO has overwhelming technological hardware and air superiority even without the US helping. Ukraine did catastrophic damage to Russia's nuclear command and control systems earlier this week, which is why things are heating up. Just yesterday, Ukraine took out more of the Black Sea fleet and most of the ports used for oil shipping. Russia has already lost this war and they know it. That makes them more dangerous and reckless than ever - I'll wager Putin is a very sore loser.

    13 votes

  20. Comment on Announcing the seventh annual Tildes' Make Something Month (Timasomo)! in ~tildes

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    I have what you might call a debilitating addiction to music - always on, at work, at home, in the car, so every day is hours of listening, since around 1994. My headphones are as always-on as my...

    I have what you might call a debilitating addiction to music - always on, at work, at home, in the car, so every day is hours of listening, since around 1994. My headphones are as always-on as my eyeglasses. At this point I'm so far past caring about genre it's almost comical, they are all great genres in my book, it's the best tracks I'm after. I'm like a psycho apache scalper who will raid an artist, burn through their entire discography, and walk away with three tracks impaled on a pike to put in my playlists. Almost always that's upbeat or positive in some way, I don't have much patience for dull harmony or trite lyrics anymore.

    Since I'm always filling up playlists with my favorites I have a lot of them, and I group them impulsively by moods, or eras, or styles. Eventually when the playlists are pushing past ten hours I jump in and look for whatever story the tracks are already telling. I don't pick the themes, those just emerge from the collections of tracks and I stitch them together so that the lyrics all read like a single perfect letter. Then I listen to them about a hundred times before they are finished (yes, some of those I've spun for 300+ hours each already while making them). The tracks that wear out get cut, and once I know the theme I'm hunting new ones always pop out of the usual cratedigging at me and I file them into the appropriate mixtape. I suppose you could say these mixtapes make themselves, and I was just listening.

    It's more fun and challenging than a jigsaw puzzle, I guess. I make these for my own infinite repeat enjoyment and they always take me back to when I was making them, like a photograph. Plus I get to share them which is always a lot of fun. I'll probably keep making them until I'm in the ground. It's just how I listen now. Might have something to do with modding /r/listentothis for ten years and listening to that non-stop while doing it, got me into the habit.

    5 votes