Libb

We re-watched Psycho and Rear Window. We also re-watched the first Jason Bourne movie.

And we started re-watching Star Wars (first trilogy). My humble apologies to all the fans out there, I simply don’t like to watch the other movies after those three. Even in those three, I may only like the first two and of of those two, the second would be my pick. Heck, I even don’t like any the added scenes in the first trilogy. I guess I’m just not a fan, but I still like to watch those 3 from time to time (I first watched them when they were released in theaters and was so much into them, as a kid and then as a teen) ;)

The one major exception is the neighbour’s dog, goddammit I hate her owner, the dog keeps barking and howling because she’s bloody bored, can’t anyone take her to a walk?

We have such a neighbor too. She is also also an alcoholic (and so is her adult son, btw). Which means that she will shout at any hour of the day or the night and will walk her dog likewise at any hour, it is one of those angry pocket dog that constantly barks.

It’s pitiful to watch and it’s a real pain to deal with them too (not mentioning they’re also very… abusive). They’ve become sort of legendary in the neighborhood… as well as with the local police. Real sad.

• earplugs. I still use them to this day. No battery required; real good noise reduction. I use them to isolate myself from the noise of the streets while I’m writing at home (a busy street, in a large city).
• There was kinda less noise too. I mean, there was traffic roaring in the streets, people being loud, and music playing like today. But seldom people owned one of those over amplified sound system that could blast music through walls, or I don’t know how much powerful car music that we can hear way before the car is in the street and long after she have passed.
• People also were not constantly talking to their hands on the streets (o be watching a movie or listen to some music), while ignoring everyone around them (polite version of what it really is: you can go all fuck yourself, I want to listen to whatever I want as loud as I want the hell with all of you). I’ve also notice more and more people (of all ages) using the loudpseaker to have actual phone conversation on the street or even in public transit, like if they were all alone. Back then, a lot more people actually talked to one another or they were silent. People also worried a lot more about disturbing their neighborhood (probably because neighbors used to talk to one another more too).

Nowadays, I see a lot of young people wearing noise canceling headsets on the streets and I do wonder if the solution to more noise is really to add even more noise, just to pretend it’s cancelling it? Shouldn’t we try to make less noise to begin with?

And what about the health risks for their hearing? I mean, I have no idea how those works, but isn’t white noise more noise?

Best answer ever.

Thx for sharing the quote. I did not know about that dude but you can be assured I’ll do my homework :)

That’s not embarrassing anyone. Check the definition of that word embarrassing is something that causes distress. I don’t know about you but I certainly don’t think putting someone I care about (or anyone, for that matter) in distress is a funny thing to do.

What you describe is being silly which can be real funny too, and hopefully is something we all do from time to time—even those seemingly joyless persons like myself… I will ask my wife, after almost 30 years together she must have had time enough to appreciate my lack of humor and my sad company I suppose, and let you know what she thinks.

Edit:

Since I, too, am not in a joyless relationship,

I should told you how my ex and I met and sympathized while I pretended to be a (drunk) German filmmaker (I was not a filmmaker, but I was drunk), that happened in some film short movie festival decades ago, so I could get for free the drinks I had no money to pay for. I was speaking in my absolutely not German-like worst German and well, I got the drinks I wanted, and I met the girl. We chatted and we laughed quite a bit for quite some time. But not once I tried to embarrass her, if anything I was the one who should have feel embarrassed (no one believed I was German).

Spare me the stupid lectures

The moment you spare her the stupid pranks. Do we have a deal?

and stop assuming the worst.

Not sure you said anything that could convince me I was wrong to assume the worst here, quite the opposite reading your reaction to my remark. So, instead of giving you the benefit of the doubt, what about this: I will, gladly not assume the worst the moment I see you stop trying to do your worst?

It’s a bit like handling a gun. One better be assuming the worst and be cautious because handling a gun carelessly rarely ends up with in ‘and they lived happily ever after’. More often than not, it ends up in tears and tragedy.

I also don’t intend to be completely joyless and uptight, because my relationship would be over very quickly.

I suppose this is your way of trying to be ‘embarrassing and funny’ at the same time at my expense? Fingers crossed you will do much better with your girlfriend.

Or are you just trying to be mean with me? That would be cute but if that was so, I beg you to stop wasting your time with me. I was just trying to help but if you feel insulted and if this helps you feel reassured about yourself: I’m old and, quite obviously, I can’t understand the finest subtilties that are going on in younger people’s much smarter minds. I must be wrong and you must be right: that will be hilariously funny. Now, if you would allow sad-me to go back to my never ending hole of joyless uptightness (did I got it right?), the same hole in which my spouse is living with me and has been doing so for almost 30 years now.

Thinking about it, that’s odd! WTF is wrong with her? Could it be that my spouse is such a sad person too? Or worse? I mean, we have been together for so long! Worse than that, we have no TV at home which means that for the last 30 years or so every minute we have spent together we had no excuse to help us blissfully ignore the presence of the other. Meaning that we had to be and to do things together? Things like talk to one another or have activities (some more intimate than others), for 30 years? What the fuck is wrong with that girl I live with? She must be utterly stupid to be willing to live with such an uptight sad moron as I! Thank you for helping me understand that. I will divorce that worthless bimbo asap!

Or maybe not? Maybe we have reasons enough to appreciate the company of one another and to be willing to stay together for more than a fortnight of intense crazy sex? And just maybe, despite all that wisdom of yours and your undisputed gift for profiling people you have never met, you could be wrong?

I certainly can’t tell. Instead, I will leave it to your girlfriend to decide, after you purposefully chose to embarrass her in front of her/your friends, if that was a really funny idea. Or if that was that shitty idea I hinted at.

Meanwhile, my boring self (and my supposedly at least as boring spouse) will be wishing you the best in your endeavor.

Edit: typos/clarifications.

fun & embarrassing?

I’m not your girlfriend, I’m not even a girl (I’m a 50+ years old dude that has been married for almost 30 years and counting) but I can easily say that I can’t think of anything that I would find embarrassing and funny at the same time. Because, well, being embarrassed is not fun, it’s… embarrassing. What would be one thing that you would find at the same time to be real funny and real embarrassing if it was done to you on purpose by someone close to you?

That’s just my 2 cents but, luckily for one of us, it is not I you wish to harmlessly embarrass.

This is the way. And same here. I don’t use the mask of pseudo-anonymity to be a jackass. Anyone I know who discovers my online accounts will find I interact online and IRL exactly the same way.

One can use ‘pseudo-anonimity’ without being a jackass, we all better not forget that.

I mean, the issue with someone being a jackass is not their willingness to (try to) be anonymous, it’s them being a jackass.

Us forgetting that is akin to us allowing those people telling us that we should all let go of any notion of privacy and freedom of speech because ‘think of the children’. Freedom and privacy is the wrong issue, and their suppression is an even wronger solution to what’s the real problem.

Disclaimer: I use a pseudonym (the same one everywhere, even on my personal website), if you want to find any ‘jackass’ content be my guest.

Picking just one book is really unfair as I fell in love with various books at different times of my life.

But to answer your question, the very first book I remember falling in love with as a little kid is… two books. Jules Verne ‘Michel Strogoff’, and Conan Doyle’s ‘The Lost World’ which I read in French back then as ‘Le monde perdu’.

But I insist, this is absolutely unfair to the many other books I’ve loved and still love to this very day :p

future

:)

I would love something like a rich-text editor

but I do want that basic visual of formatted text without having to mentally parse the markdown code, so I’m not looking for a two-phase solution with VIM and LaTeX, a two-pane markdown editor with live preview, or a note-taking app.

I’m not sure to understand your requirements in regards to Markdown ‘behind the scene’? I mean, if you don’t need visual preview you should be able to use any text editor or word processor and save your work as a text file, right?

But I would say: Any recent version of LibreOffice, on a computer without Internet. It’s WYSIWIG and even though it’s not ‘markdown compatible’ one can easily write using Markdown with it.

Before switching back to pen and paper for drafting all texts (no more Markdown needed at all ;), that’s what I used to use.

No emulation, no hacks, no nothing to install. It comes with a decent speel checker (at least Grammalecte, in French and it used to work with Druide Antidote, non-free English and French speelchecker but they stopped offering a Linux version). Also, no two phases editors. Just plain WYSIWYG. And with styles it should even be possible to have kinda formatted/WYSISWYG Markdown combo but I never really tried to devise it as it was not worth the hassle for me: even on long form writings I barely need more than the occasional italics I can easily type by hand in Markdown, with the ability to save the work in a text file, and also LO can export to HTML or epub (using the right extension, as the native export is meh).

BTW, Jonathan Franzen used to install a fresh copy for MS Word on a cheap laptop without WiFi card and whose Ethernet port he filled with glue so there was no way for him to connect it to the Internet. But that was before Microsoft switched to a sub-model that required a monthly check online to let the user run Word. Don’t know if he still does that, and how.

I used an old ThinkPad (X220) that was more than powerful enough to smoothly run LO (edit: with whatever was the latest release of Debian), hooked to an external display because its own display was shitty at best.

My spouse and I.

We tend to split everything quite naturally between us two, but maybe it’s because we have had quite some time to learn to do so? We’re slowly getting close to 30 years living together.

That being said, I never do bakery/pastries because I don’t like doing that (I just like to eat them) whereas she loves it. But I’ll do all the laundry because she doesn’t like doing it and I don’t mind.

Depends where you look. I also have no idea whats that ‘general Internet’ you mention. I mean, what are its biases?

That a diploma doesn’t mean shit beside someone being able to say what their teacher want them to say… but that was not really new, it was just a lot more sad to experiment as naive me was hoping for something more.

+1 to this.

But I would say any type of calm discussion is on its way out, not just politics. I see so many people constantly being triggered/offended that I don’t think they can have any discussion without instantly switching into aggressive mode. Even the colors one chose to wear is enough to start a dispute.

Democracy and human rights. But I may be wrong here as they aren’t disappearing that slowly.

I was never much into video games, but my first real interest was for Doom and then for StarCraft. I was also heavy into C&C… I was already an adult and fixed my own rules, deciding on what I wished to spend my time and waste my money.

The first video game I played as a kid was some kind of Pong version, on an Atari console. So, yeah… not much video games for me as a child. With the other kids, we played cards, board games, we played outside too (it’s great), we played chess and checkers, we also played doctor, we read a lot too. And there was no real need to set rules or limits (even less so on what we were allowed to read), not even when we played doctor, mind you—not even to tell us what was then obvious but that seems very much forgotten by too many nowadays, to not be a dick, because acting like one would warrant instant karma feedback from all the others players/participants involved… and that was kinda very quickly formative ;)

i believe that “far-right” sentiments are a natural defense mechanism against a perceived threat.

if your tribe is in danger, you start kicking the foreigners out, you start going back culturally to what you perceive as “safe”,

Correct. In a less obvious way we can even see it at play here, in this (interesting) discussion.

So far, in the comments trying to design a culprit, I have yet to read one that doesn’t blame some ‘other’ group, be it the far-tight, the rich, the boomers, the US, Russia, and so on. Forget the names and the personal preference: each one is that ‘foreigner’, someone that is not us on which we put teh blame. The issue is among us, with all our differences and contradictions (even sometimes our hatred of one another). It’s not ‘them’ causing the issue ‘we’ are the victims of.

As long as we keep looking for someone else than us to blame, well I don’t see things getting much better anytime soon. Which is sad because if they don’t start getting better soon they will get real worse, real a fast.

Posting that from France, a country that once valued freedom so much as to make it one of its three core principle. But that was back then.

I know the reputation that AI has on Lemmy, however I’ve found that some users (like myself) have found that LLMs can be useful tools

I know the reputation that AI has on Lemmy, however I’ve found that some users (like myself) have found that LLMs can be useful tools.

Their utility is not questioned. It’s their true cost and how they’re developed that’s the issue.

No doubt a machine able to do some quick and dirty jobs that would take us a lot more time is a fine tool (like mentioned already, denoise, quick text summaries and stuff like that) edit: even complex and highly skilled stuff. The tool is already impressive today, and I don’t doubt it will get much better quickly.

The issue is how it learned to do what it can do and how it is monoetized. I mean, learning from humanity common knowledge (no AI at all without it being allowed to learn from us all) and making it… subscription-based for us to use? WTF? The issue is also how it is destroying many things in the exclusive profit of a handful of very rich people and their shareholders. The issue is how we, mankind, have zero control over a tool that is threatening to make a lot of us go bankrupt…

Feel free to downvote, obviously.

And to answer your question:

What AI tools have you found useful?

I would say, the off button… of which there is none I can find.