On one hand, nice to have my country mentioned in a context where we’re not being warcrimed, on the other, I’m somewhat disappointed that our government actually lifted a finger in the investigation of a foreign intellectual property case.

It’s so ubiquitous that for about a second I thought wait what I thought that was the good one until I remembered that I’ve been using qBittorrent for a decade.

For a time, it just was the client.

The Flintstones was originally an adult-oriented cartoon, and became seen as family friendly as time went on and more things became available on TV.

Its role was closer to the Simpsons when that was new, which also became more acceptable for younger people to watch over time.

This is exactly why I’d want a GPU in a home server.

That and transcoding. Wonder what the best option would be without breaking the bank/wasting too much idle power. All the GPU talk online seems to be for gaming.

It works as long as you’re on an IP address that Meta approves. If you’re using a VPN (or even PiHole iirc) it doesn’t work.

So I have to use their malware on my phone when someone sends me a DM on there.

I’ve done only a little bare metal work back when I was a student and I felt like a goddamn wizard.

Like… yes. Of course everything looks the same, just an ocean of ones and zeroes that is just coherent enough to make a processor do something, such as fetch the right ones and zeroes from somewhere else. Of course folders aren’t dedicated physical sectors of a storage device. Of course like half of anything we ask a computer to do is manipulating storage, and taking this storage and feeding it into the actual memory of whatever is going to process it.

When you zoom back out and realize that the majority of data processing happening right now is people streaming short form video on an unfathomably massive scale, that’s when it just falls apart for me and can’t exist outside the abstractions that make the concept digestible.

Like I can kind of understand Lemmy, as software. I can see where all this data sits and gets queried and how it works. I can vaguely conceive of a few possible federation protocols. That vast ocean of unindexed “content” over on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube? That the algorithms can serve you up no problem but that you can’t even always search for manually? That’s terrifying, on the scale of these platforms. It’s like a leviathan sci-fi body horror meat machine but of data. Yeah yeah I vaguely understand CDNs but I’m talking about the whole thing: the algorithms, the video files, streaming all this data, the impossibly complex social phenomena built around the data… the fact that this monumental achievement is only used to sell ads, landfill fodder, and to fuck with people’s brains and worldviews, it’s legitimately horrifying. I especially think about this when I’m in a public place surrounded by people watching videos on their phones and swiping through them at dizzying speed.

Is this how computer people end up chopping wood in the forest?

I have been fascinated with depictions of cities particularly from when I was a kid. Tall, blocky modernist buildings with illuminated yellow windows. We didn’t have too many in Beirut that fit that bill, relatively few buildings here are taller than like 10 floors. Social connotations of “the city” also seemed to be much more positive in these movies and shows.

No points for guessing why I’m retreating into the recesses of my childhood memories right now.

This kind of reminds me of older deep dream style images.

I miss those and the VQGAN images. I wonder if there’s a way to run those original old models and algorithms on newer hardware, faster. I feel like they were more interesting to probe around to see how the model works.

Not that the new stuff can’t be interesting to play with, it’s just that the older ones felt more like toys and less consequential.

I only ever participated in the original Place years and years ago, putting down maybe two or three pixels.

Maybe where you’re from it’s easy to separate your government flag as its own symbol that doesn’t represent real people but when you’ve got like 20x30 pixels it’s hard to represent a local community online with something better than a flag. I think we ended up with less than ten pixels inside of a heart iirc.

At least for me, in my own country, I associate flags with popular protests and other symbols make me think of the government. Law enforcement uniforms and mismatched old automatic rifles from fifty years ago. Crippling bureaucracy that operates four hours a week that stretches five hours of paperwork errands into a six month chapter of your life (not a symbol but when you say government that’s what I think of).

Point being I don’t find it weird at all that people wanting to represent themselves will default to a national flag. My understanding is that in like Germany there’s a line where nobody wants to seem too proud of the flag, and in the US people are so desensitized to seeing every McDonald’s have 4000 flags on display, in England the red and white flag has different connotations if it’s in a football context or not, etc etc etc

A lot of flagpoles here are faded and tattered and often with one of the stripes almost separating off the flag. Might be doomerism but I think it looks cool, I think it very much is an appropriate representation.

I’m from Lebanon, this flag is for me, and when the government uses it, it’s using it deceptively to pretend it has any interest in our lives and our problems