• 33 Posts
  • 225 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle



  • All or nothing perspectives with AI and zealous hate. It’s helped me through my toughest year yet of physical disability and social isolation. It has improved my Python, CPP, and writing bash scripts. I’ve used it with cooking ideas, and finding products. It has helped me discover an entire science fiction universe of my own creation and helps me explore subtle nuances. It has helped me gain a much better understanding of the variety of human functional thought and psychology, especially in ways where other people may not understand my abstractive thoughts and connections across different spaces. It has also shown me why I get frustrated at people with different functional thought. The bad attitudes and emotional perspectives suck and can be depressing here. That is my biggest pet peeve this year. I’ve responded to it the most, and I’ve disconnected from here to go do other things the most from people with a bad attitude on AI.



  • I’m a better person with Adderall. I feel more like myself, like I escape a frustrating fog. I’ve been on it for ~14 years. It doesn’t seem to have the same effects on everyone.

    Everything in life is ultimately brain chemistry and addictions. Most of the drugs in our chemistry soup are the substances the human body synthesises on its own. Biology is a funny thing. It can handle immense complexity, but can struggle with precision.

    If you have the self awareness to seek out and optimise your brain or body chemistry where it might be lacking, I’d argue that you are the better person than someone that suffers through the deficiencies of their natural biology.

    However, humans have a very difficult time assessing their own brain chemistry objectively without biases. It is both harmful and unsafe to self diagnose or self medicate without the assistance of someone that is trained to objectively asses your situation and needs.



  • A lot of it is from use too.

    My left and right hands have different sensitivities from playing guitar all my life. Auto body work also forces a person to dial in touch at a very atypical level, especially for a painter like myself. I’ve trained a few apprentices and even those with an initially poor sense of touch eventually dial in the skill. There is a level of imperfections in the final finishing steps where it is impossible to see the issue in oblique view due to the matte finish of primer/sealers. This is well after blocking and guide coats are no longer helpful. At this stage, there are still many imperfections that will create obvious errors after clear coat because the distorted reflections that may be present in the final gloss. These errors can be very color dependant. They can manifest in the way metallics settle within the color coat making the issue visible here as well. The worst color for reflective errors is black. With some whites a painter can get away with nearly any minor error at this stage without consequences as long as there is enough orange peel present in the factory finish.

    Anyway, there are two tricks to finding late stage errors in the primer. The easy way is to use a wax and grease remover solvent wiped liberally across the panel. This will temporarily create a clear coat like gloss that will show exactly what the final reflective properties will be like after clear is applied. This is always the final test before you shoot anything. However, doing this a whole bunch of times just because you can’t feel the issues is very amateur noob territory. Any skilled painter learns how to touch a panel in a sweeping feel using the center pad of each finger tip and sliding a hand along the surface in a way that one can feel even the most subtle of errors. I can feel the reflection–no joke.

    A painter spends a ton of time wet sanding by hand too. This leads to sanding off most of the outer skin on your hands. In fact, when I was really busy and working 12-14 hour days, I had to quit when my fingers started to bleed. They actually bleed the pattern of your fingerprints when you sand through them with a fine grit over time. The thin skin and heat sensitivity it creates helps to dial in the skill.

    That is my long bla bla bla about why, in my experience, anyone can dial in their sensitivity and awareness as a skill. When I worked on heavy equipment or in the machine shop, I had tough callused hands; with auto body thin soft and sensitive, and after all my crashes and battles with cars on a bicycle, like a seriously scared up brawler.


  • I don’t find myself making spontaneous buying decisions for frivolous nonsense in my life in general when I stick around here. All of my purchases are due to my needs and research only.

    Physical disability with social isolation gives one a potential ability to more deterministically decipher where and how interactions influence them. I have less inputs and influences and tend to remember what was suggested or peripheral to my intentions. I got into a lot of stuff over the last 10 years that, when I look back, I really don’t know why I did them. I know my surface reasoning, but like, why was I following those people and spaces in the first place–that kind of meta logic perplexed me. When I quit YouTube and switched to newpipe/reddit, those random tangents were drastically reduced. When I quit reddit they went away entirely. It is entirely speculation, and probably borderline paranoia, but I probably only bought stuff on AliEx because it seemed like everyone on YT was buying from there. I can’t say it was all bad or unwanted or anything like that. I can say I got stuff I didn’t need or use.

    I still explore new interests and projects I feel like trying when I see them here, but I have yet to feel influenced in a way that hints at manipulative intentions.

    I’ve seen people try with disingenuous arguments that have 5-10 upvotes instantaneously. I’ve seen posts that have supporting corpo replies seconds after posting or where a typical type of comment for Lemmy gets a large scale negative response quickly that is obviously not genuine or typical behavior. Unlike reddit, these seem so blatantly obvious here that I block the posters and commenter immediately. Blocking here is rather effective and blocking a lot of users makes for a pretty pleasant experience unlike anything I ever had on reddit. This is my only outlets to contact other humans and I feel rather balanced with it and self care. That is more than I can say about reddit.


  • Yeah, but it lacks the tree that tends to support more specialization. I still get on the EEVBlog forum from time to time but that kind of concentration of specialization is just not the default.

    To replicate that kind of ecosystem I think the platform would need a similar complex branching hierarchy and far more effective utility for searching. The element of time is too prioritized on a link aggregator like Lemmy. Community depth of specialization remains shallow because more intellectual engagement is slower and the mechanics of most recent comment engagement are not effective/implemented. Places like the EEVBlog often have the most engagement on very old threads that also concentrate a ton of history and useful information within the single thread. These threads are the primary anchor for the whole community. I think it would take some novel innovation to bridge a link aggregator’s ADHD with a forum’s depth and utility.




  • Land acquisition cost and not in my backyard’ers. At least here in Southern California. There is no chance that a loosely regulated and toxic high salinity waste water plant would get past public and environmental scrutiny. The only really viable areas are the last local refuges for many.

    Like from Mexico to Santa Barbara, the camp Pendleton Marine Corps base is one of the only viable spots. The decommissioned nuclear power plant would be one of the mostly likely spots to build such a facility, but that is surrounded by a state park and some of the most prised undeveloped local surf real estate. Many municipal and commercial projects have vied for that land, but there is fierce local opposition from a wealthy and very politically well connected public.

    There has been occasional talk about opening up the Pacific side of the 5 freeway to public development as this is some of the federal government’s most valuable real estate. Even if this happened, that would become one of the most elite places to live in the country.

    Few people know this, but the Southern California coast around Orange County and North of San Diego is a spot of rare deep ocean upwelling. There is a micro climate here within a couple miles of the coast that is regulated by the ocean upwelling maintaining temperatures. It is always cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter here and almost always between 50°F and 80°F even when a few miles away it can be 40°F-100°F. This is one of the main reasons why real estate in these areas is so high.




  • Things have changed a lot since I painted. All of the paint systems I used have been phased out in favor of water based alternatives. Those changes largely stopped the way I did my work as water based colors require a very consistent and controlled environment like an advanced downdraft spray booth. I could control many behaviors with the evaporative speed of solvents and reducers in ways that are not possible any more. Now those behaviors (I assume) are handled with temperature, humidity, and a much larger feathering area for masking changes with less accurate paint. The funny part is that clear coat catalyst and solvents are the largest pollution and health hazard by far. The switch to water based color coats massively increases the overhead of a body shop, creates the need to have whole room IR heaters or integrate them into the booth, and then adds an extra panel to prep and feather the repair on every side. It amounts to a massive increase in the cost of auto body work that includes far more pollution and energy use just to say the most insignificant aspect, the color coat is water based. That is a big reason I stopped painting and why my experience is not exactly relevant to the present.


  • I agree to an extent, but light is invisible. Colors are a frequency phenomenon and the same property in both instances.

    Part of the art of mixing and matching paints for cars is abstracting the various spaces and focusing on each. I need to see the flat tone, opacity, coarseness and composition (metallics/pearls), layering (pearls), flop (how the color changes depending on facet angles and tint the tone of this independent of the perpendicular tone).

    I’m unusual in this space as well. I specialized in very small repairs where I am mixing paints in much smaller batches than the minimum recipe supplied by the paint vendor for the original color code of the vehicle. I knew paints on a much deeper level where I mixed mostly by eye and intuition. I had many techniques, but overall, I had to know the tinting properties of around a hundred different colors and how each one would behave in combination with the rest. My skills were very much a matter of flattening my perspective and observing three dimensional colors as if they were a two dimensional abstraction with several little 2d bubble universe facets to play with.

    It is a learned skill. I hired several employees over the years. It quickly becomes evident how a person thinks and their ability to see color on a level that most humans never encounter. Even now, I still know that white and black do not exist and are simply byproducts of other colors and properties. True black would be impossible to see, and white would be a blinding light source specifically tailored to the individual’s vision spectrum and neural processing. I see colors and complex properties in everything.




  • Boners are largely age dependent. I remember in high school I got random boners all the time and anything could trigger them. Now, at 40, I have way more control plus novelty matures and wears off IMO.

    You should have said hello or tried – YOLO. Those opportunities dwindle with age for the most part.

    Try to step out of your own perspective in a mental abstracted exercise and ask yourself, ‘If that was me is there any chance I would be touching someone like this and not notice?’ Then, ‘What is the least amount of meaning I would attribute to such a gesture? – (now conservatively divide that by /10).’ Finally, ‘If I were in this person’s state of mind, how would I perceive a stranger talking to me?’ IMO, when with a friend, the person is going to be on the high ground and feeling secure and safe from embarrassment. If you directly address the touching, you’re going to be at a disadvantage and get shut down. However, if you can find a way into making conversation, the touching was like an invitation to do so. By not addressing it directly you are using it as a step up into exploring more. The hard part is just the small talk. Many people are just more tactile, but in our present world, touching strangers (at least in the USA) is very rare.


  • This neglects that the breaks are not free time spent as desired and is entirely constrained to the circumstances of employment. You would not eat or do the same tasks in the timespan. Therefore it is not your time and should be compensated for. Like owning a vehicle, you still own it even when you are not driving it or it is broken down. Pretending ownership is only limited to the time the vehicle is in gear and moving is delusional logic for any such pro slavery State. Employment must include far more ethical responsibly than this.