anotherandrew

flat metal discs

symbolic

I see what you did there

I think mass media reporting makes it feel that way but it’s been my experience that it’s not true. I think the average American is doing their best to be a good person with what they’ve got. Their electoral system is broken in a similar way to the Canadian one: boiling down to a binary, two party decision that has no basis in reality, and a media that encourages extreme, polarizing positions.

Even this last election doesn’t (in my mind) reflect the average American. Less than half the eligible population cast their ballots. That’s a separate issue (voter disillusionment) but to me it means that those who did vote aren’t actually representative of what the average American wants or feels.

This all could be me being completely out of touch with the average American, but I don’t think it is based on my daily in-person interactions with them.

This is exactly how I feel. it’s like somewhere after 2000 people just gave up being civil, not just in politics although it feels like that’s where it’s become not just acceptable but almost required to demonize your opponent.

I’m not quite old enough to really have first hand experience or interest in politics before 1995 or so, but a lot of people seem to mark the time around Reagan as an inflection point.

Calling anyone who doesn’t immediately agree with you a nazi doesn’t make it so. That’s just a weak excuse for not having to think critically, which is the very definition of an echo chamber. A left-leaning Canadian is a “left leaning nazi”? Are you calling all Canadians nazis? Did it make you feel brave to do that? Did your internet friends congratulate you on standing up to someone who doesn’t think just like you do? Give your fucking head a shake and go touch grass. What a joke.

The internet is what you make it to be. I use it for information exchange; it appears you use it to feel safe, safe enough to make ridiculous accusations and pithy remarks to people you not only know nothing about, but don’t care to.

Like I said: enjoy your echo chamber.

a good old fashioned German rouladen. Gotta dice up the bacon though, no cheating.

After that, maybe Romanian sarmale, but only my wife’s. I’ve had dozens of variants, including what my wife says is superior, but it’s hers that’s the best.

After that, a specific Mici recipe.

Dammit, now I’m really hungry!

you could be right; I’m not great with keeping up with the right terminology. I mentioned in another reply that what I’m really after is finding the quieter “middle 80%”; the problem is that the nutters on either end get all the media attention and ratchet up the rhetoric because they’ll do anything to keep the attention.

I agree: it’s extremely difficult to find what I would call the “middle 80%” since the only people who tend to get all the media attention are the extremes at both ends who are hell bent on maintaining their airtime with ever more insane stunts.

I don’t understand how people can vote for someone who did such a piss poor job his first time around, but then again my province elected a drug dealer who ran with literally no election platform whatsoever and won, twice. It boggles the mind. Populism is a cancer.

Your original comment still shows up for me, but I struggle to understand how weak your positions must be if you simply cannot stand the thought anyone not being in total agreement with you to the point of dismissing complete strangers as being weirdos and telling them to fuck off.

I mean seriously, how do you function in society with this kind of mentality?

I’m definitely not conservative in the sense you must think I am, and even at its noisiest there is still only one voice in my head. Do you jump to conspiracy being the only possible explanation for everything you don’t agree with or is it just me which makes you feel this way?

🙄

Enjoy your echo chamber.

None of the above really; I’d consider those more far-right and not at all interested in. I’m talking about people aligned with ideas like smaller government, government accountability (particularly with respect to spending), the combination of personal responsibility and freedoms, etc.

Not OP, but interested in right-leaning communities that aren’t pants-on-head insane, just like I am interested in left-leaning communities with a similar constraint. /r/conservative generally isn’t bad (I find they tend to be a LOT more level headed than /r/politics, for example) but things like /r/the_donald or whatever it was called is way too out there for my tastes.

the tolerant left, right here on display for everyone.

I actually (as a left leaning Canadian) seek out conservative/libertarian/right-leaning news sources because I believe it’s important to take in a wide variety of information, especially from sources which I might not agree with. There is a lot you can learn from anyone not on the extremes.

It’s funny; I recommend Apple stuff for practically all the same reasons you don’t. The walled garden pisses me off sometimes but when I talk to friends using Android stuff and their gripes it really reinforces that I made the right decision for my family, just as you have for yours. What I find even more amusing is that I design embedded linux devices, all my servers/vms are Linux based and I really enjoy using Linux… just not supporting/using it as a primary UI.

Not shitting on your choices at all, I know that many people really like/enjoy the Android side as much as I do the Apple side. Chacun à son goût and all that.

I’ve been lucky I guess – haven’t had a failure with force formats before, I always thought if it couldn’t download the format I wanted it was spinning the conversion over to ffmpeg. I haven’t really paid that close attention to the output. :-)

I have two depending on what I’m grabbing is part of a playlist (where I want to maintain order) or not:

--download-archive archive.txt --write-auto-subs --sub-langs en --embed-subs -o "%(upload_date)s_%(title)s_%(id)s.%(ext)s" -S res,vcodec:h264,acodec:m4a

or

--download-archive archive.txt --write-auto-subs --sub-langs en --embed-subs -o "%(playlist_title)s/%(playlist_index)s_%(upload_date)s_%(title)s_%(id)s.%(ext)s" -S res,vcodec:h264,acodec:m4a

that --download-archive archive.txt is a godsend for when I rediscover something I’ve already grabbed. I often move the files to better locations after, but archive.txt doesn’t care. Embedding the subtitles, forcing h264/m4a (because more and more things are webp it seems), and renaming the file to the title + youtube ID are what make up the rest.

I’m on the fence.

I’ve used Perplexity to take a javascript fragment, identify the language it was written in and describe what it’s doing. I then asked it to refactor it into something a human could understand. It nailed both of these, even the variable names were meaningful (the original ones were just single letters). I then asked it to port it to C and use SDL, which it did a pretty good job of.

I also used it to “untangle” some really gnarly mathy Javascript and port it to C so I could better understand it. That is still a work in progress and I don’t know enough math to know if it’s doing a good job or not, but it’ll give me some ability to work with the codebase.

I’ve also used it to create some nice helper python scripts like pulling all repositories from a github user account or using YouTube’s API to pull the video title and author data if given a URL. It also wrote the skeleton of some Python scripts which interact with a RESTful API. These kinds of things it excelled at.

My most recent success was using it to decode DTMF in a .WAV file, then create a new .WAV file using the DTMF start/end times to create cue points to visually show me what it saw and where. This was a mixed bag: I started out with Python, it used FFT (which was the obvious but wrong choice), then I had it implement a Goertzel filter which it did flawlessly. It even ported over to C without any real trouble. Where it utterly failed was with the WAV file creation/cue points. Part of this is because cue points are rather poorly described in any RIFF documentation, the python wrapper for the C wave processing library was incomplete and even then, various audio editors wanting the cue data in different ways, but this didn’t stop the LLM from lying through its damn teeth about not only knowing how to implement it, but assure me that the slop it created functioned as expected.

I’ve found that it tends to come apart at the seams with longer sessions. When its answers start being nonsensical I sometimes get a bit of benefit from starting over without all the work leading up to that point. LLMs are really good at churning out basic frameworks which aren’t exactly difficult but can be tedious. I then take this skeleton and start hanging the meat on it, occasionally getting help from the LLM but usually that’s the stuff I need to think about and implement. I find that this is where LLMs really struggle, and I waste more time trying to explain what I want to the LLM than if I just wrote it myself.

I’m presently reading a book called the Botany of Desire which discusses the relationships between plants and humans and perhaps who evolved for whom. Pretty interesting read so far.

Canadian living in LA: Crossed from LAX -> YVR and back about 6 weeks ago. Zero issues in either direction. Back in February went from LAX -> YYZ and back. I landed exactly 24h before that DC9 flipped on its roof in Toronto. Other than bad weather coming in to YYZ, zero issues. Went from SNA -> YYZ and back for Christmas. Zero issues.

My wife flew from YVR -> LAX and back last week. Zero issues, although she was really nervous from everything she’d read.

IMO there are zero issues crossing the border, at least through airports. I believe most of the goofiness I’ve heard about was at land crossings, although I’ve heard from friends that they’ve had zero issues at land crossings either.

FWIW I’m a 50 year old white guy, and at least half the time I’ve got one or two teenage boys with me, the rest of the time just me. I work with another Canadian “import” but he’s originally from Iran. He said that while he was nervous, he did not notice any increased scrutiny for himself or for his wife, who flew separately recently to Toronto and back.