celluloid_dream
No bio...
User ID: 758
Not an intro, but I really like Alex Yard's Sonic 3 Music Theory series on YouTube.
It does a lot of going over why things sound the way they do. Also plays the track with alternate choices and you can hear how it sounds different. It assumes some music theory knowledge, but I only have a little formal education, and I still find them enjoyable.
celluloid_dream
15d ago
braindead / slacker jobs tend to exist wherever there are stupid rules. They are largely unique to the specific stupid rules, but for example:
- a company needs to send confidential files to other companies. There are rules about who is allowed to touch the files. The company employs a small team of professional uploaders/downloaders who literally click upload and download on some professional file transfer software, then watch the progress bar, then unpack the files and email someone to tell them it's done.
- property owner is renting out some property for temporary use. In addition to security, they also hire a representative to be physically present on the property to be the first point of contact for questions or concerns. Job consists of sitting on the property, and maybe once a day answering some questions, or escalating if required. I don't entirely know why these jobs exist, but it's probably because they are making so much money on the rental, it's worth it to them, or possibly some insurance reason.
- government agency is allotted a yearly budget. If they do not spend this entire budget, it shrinks, and is hard to get back. They hire staff and contractors to fill the budget, even though there's very little actual work to be done, and indeed very little work is allowed to be done. Days mostly consist of going for coffee, applying to get something purchased, and perhaps working on small projects that don't need approval from anyone.
celluloid_dream
18d ago
I was amused to discover a few weeks ago someone had stolen my old Riot account that I hadn't touched in well over a decade.
They didn't compromise the password or email. They apparently just asked for the account and got it. I only found out because they tried to change the email - did successfully change the email in fact - and password. You would assume at this point, the account was gone. Not so. I just asked for it back, and got it. Their automated support was like "yeah, sure whatever, sounds right. here ya go". Then I changed the password and email, and now it's mine again.
What is even going on? How does the internet work any more?
celluloid_dream
21d ago
"Help me cultivate the virtue of curiosity"
-- but, to your points:
- A custom app isn't going to brick your phone. They're sandboxed, and at worst, they'll run inefficiently and have to be killed.
- do you not read books? If you do read books, do you immediately comprehend everything about them? If so, I take it back.
- Are you not interested to know how things work? How products are made, and what goes into them? Maybe you already know everything. In that case, ignore the suggestion.
- If you want to know where that cool photo was taken, because maybe you want to go there someday? Maybe you're stalking someone. idk. Maybe you're bored and it's entertaining.
- the tpot character creator was supposed to be illustrative of how it can take pop cultural knowledge and work with it.
- what game? idk? What games are you playing? "Men are born for games. Nothing else". Maybe you're pretty sure a thing can be optimized but don't know how to math it out.
- You can get youtube transcripts by expanding the description, scrolling down to the "show transcript" button, then copy/pasting from the text window that pops up. There are probably also browser extensions that will do it, or you could ask an LLM to make one for you.
celluloid_dream
21d ago
"Here is everything I've ever written down, public and private. Tell me what patterns exist that I might have overlooked"
"I always wanted an app that would do X. Please build one and install it on my phone."
"I'm reading this book (pdf attached). Do a deep analysis of chapters 1-3, as if for a book club, and let's discuss"
"(attached photo of a product's ingredients) explain what all these ingredients do individually, and how they come together to form a complete product"
"Geoguessr this photo and explain your answer"
"create a custom tpot (twitter) character creator, complete with all the obscure classifications, kiki/bouba, apollo/dionysus, theatre kid/band kid, Kegan stages, the works"
"calculate the optimal talent build for this game given these specifics about its combat system. explain and show your work"
"help me unpack why I irrationally hate this popular thing"
"give me the tl;dr of this 2 hour youtube transcript so I can decide if it's worth my time"
"educate me on the background context I need to understand this current world event"
celluloid_dream
21d ago
It's a slow accumulation of shit.
- search engines failing to find exact quotes that I know for a fact exist online, and I'm just being lazy using a search engine to navigate to them. The text is still there, but the search engine is either hiding it, or not indexing it.
- I get blocked searching in incognito windows (which I do by habit for tracking/profile reasons). Search engine says no. Do a captcha - the really annoying kind of captcha, like "click on 8 grainy pictures of buses". No thank you. If your browser isn't full of tracking cookies, it assumes you're a bot now.
- minor annoyance: when opening a new tab in a private session and browsing to Google manually, it has a focus-stealing popup that means you can't just start typing. You have to click it off first.
- a page of AI answers first - admittedly, this has gotten a lot better. It used to be comically bad, but I'd say it's now pretty good, so long as the thing you searched is mainstream enough.
- but if I wanted a nice AI answer, I'd go to perplexity, except perplexity hits me with a login wall half the time now. No thank you.
- been trying alternatives to get around the captcha problem, but they invariably suck. Google is still the best, even in its degraded state. Of the others I've tried, Bing is probably second best. Then Brave. Main problem I see with Bing/Brave is lack of contextual precision, and lack of updated/current results.
- oh, and then there's the censorship. There is no substitute for yandex when you're searching for something the googs doesn't want you to see, like sports streams or TV or whatever.
celluloid_dream
25d ago
Bored of most games at the moment.
Have an itch to return to modding Starfield, but it'd be casting pearls before swine. The game itself is wide open for adding depth, systems, gameplay, meaning, purpose, lore.
But, if downloads and hype are anything to go by, the player base does not want meaning, or purpose, or lore. They want their character to be hotter. They want the companions to be hotter. They want their hot companion to have blonde hair and not black. They want to be able to fuck all of the hot companions at once.
Oh, and they want guns. Not cool sci-fi lasers and particle beams appropriate for the setting. They want their AR-15 lovingly ported in so they can sling lead around like the game's not set 300 years in the future.
I was under the impression that among ASOIAF snobs, AFFC is considered the better book, but is liked less because it follows PoV characters most of the fandom doesn't care about. Meanwhile ASOS is considered a bit sloppy by George's standards because he wrote the whole thing relatively quickly and was just throwing stuff out there. Less attention to detail.
More options
Context Copy link