AnAmericanPotato
@AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev
- Comment on Short attention span 1 day ago:
After working for many years in a “fast pace environment” I can’t help but notice that I have increasing difficulties to do simple tasks.
How many years are we talking?
A lot of what you describe sounds like you’re starting to have “senior moments”. If you’re past 50, that’s pretty normal. Which is not to say it’s good. “Normal” does not mean good. It just means common. I don’t think you should look for anything exotic if the mundane explanation fits your observations.
Low-tech suggestion: Keep a notepad in your pocket. Make to-do lists. Cross items off it when you’re done. Maybe put the time in when you cross it off.
Put water on stoveTurn off stoveMake tea- Drink tea
- Comment on Why hasn't video quality improved much over the past ten years? 1 week ago:
Yep. On a Blu-ray disk, you have 25-100GB of space to work with. The Blu-ray standard allows up to 40mbps for 1080p video (not counting audio). Way more for 4K.
Netflix recommends a 5mbps internet connection for 1080p, and 15mbps for 4K. Reportedly they cut down their 4K streams to 8mbps last year, though I haven’t confirmed. That’s a fraction of what Blu-ray uses for 1080p, never mind 4K.
I have some 4K/UHD Blu-rays, and for comparison they’re about 80mbps for video.
They use similar codecs, too, so the bitrates are fairly comparable. UHD Blu-rays use H.265, which is still a good video codec. Some streaming sites use AV1 (at least on some supported devices) now, which is a bit more efficient, but nowhere near enough to close that kind of gap in bitrate.
- Comment on What is the minimum number of words needed to communicate 3 weeks ago:
I affect a British accent
Lower-effort life hack: wear a Canadian maple leaf prominently. Put a patch on your bags, get a baseball cap, wear a t-shirt. Project “Canadian” any way you can.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Lots of recent (meaning past 20 years or so) research shows that our gut bacteria play quite a large role in our mental functions, too.
The concept of “the self” as a single, indivisible, unchanging thing is simply not compatible with observed reality. To be alive is to be in a constant state of flux.
Is there such a thing as an eternal soul? Uh, maybe…but if there is, it’s not going to be responsible for the things we typically associate with individual living people. It’s not going to have your sense of humor, or your memories, or your opinions, or your math skills. We enough about all of those things to confidently say they are not eternal.
- Comment on Is anyone else getting a bit of schadenfreude from the news each day? 4 weeks ago:
If someone was uninformed and misinformed enough to think voting for Trump was even remotely in their own self-interest in the first place, then there is almost no disaster Trump can cause that will not be instantly reframed as “just imagine how much worse it would be under Dems!”
Dying of COVID? Well at least you’re not dying from forced vaccination!
Layoffs due to tariffs? LOL what’s a tariff?
Can’t get benefits you need to survive? Well clearly the Welfare Queens left him no choice! It’s their fault!
It’s no coincidence that Trump in particular and Republicans in general relentlessly attack education and free information. They’ve already brainwashed enough of the population to win elections, and they want to make sure the general population has no way out of that hole. This is why they’re attacking Wikipedia and Internet Archive. This is why Project 2025’s first order of business is to eliminate the Department of Education. This is why Musk bought fucking Twitter in the first place, most likely. This is why they’re now trying to repeal Section 230 (with the help of some Judas Dems), so they can bully any web site into taking down any information they don’t like.
The information apocalypse is upon us.
- Comment on Is thinly-veiled political whinging really a question just because you used a question mark? 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on people who drink, how long do your hangovers last? 1 month ago:
About half a day. If it’s really bad, a full day.
But I don’t usually let it get that bad. Hydrating and eating properly before, during, and after a night of drinking will do wonders. Ideally, you should be hydrating all through the evening, not just chugging a liter or two at the end.
- Comment on Does Gmail have more spam now? 1 month ago:
I’ve noticed an uptick as well. This isn’t the first time it’s happened over the years, though. Spam is a cat-and-mouse game. Every now and then spammers learn how to break through, and it takes some time for Google to adapt.
I’ve been surprised by the latest wave, because it’s so obviously spam. Mostly phishing attempts full of misspellings and even numbers in place of letters, like F1del1ty instead of Fidelity. Should be pretty easy to filter.
- Comment on Is there anything my girlfriend and I have to consider when traveling to America based on our skin differences? 2 months ago:
Racism in America is real. Anyone telling you otherwise is probably just living a charmed life and incapable of accepting that their personal experience is not universal.
I don’t have the time or energy to prove this exhaustively, but here’s a starting point: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_while_black
And here are a few choice quotes.
In 2019, as reported by NBC, the Stanford Open Policing Project found that “police stopped and searched black and Latino drivers on the basis of less evidence than used in stopping white drivers, who are searched less often but are more likely to be found with illegal items.”
Please refer to the citations on that page for more details. Lots of studies in various states showing the same thing. The fact that the mere existence of racial profiling in America is still debated, when it has been consistently proven again and again for decades, is itself a clear indicator of a different kind of racism.
Here’s a little story that stuck in my memory, about how a white woman finally came to realize that racial harassment by police was a real thing. It’s kind of hilarious, in a dark, face-palmy kind of way. franklywrite.com/…/a-white-woman-racism-and-a-poo…
- Comment on Is there anything my girlfriend and I have to consider when traveling to America based on our skin differences? 2 months ago:
It’s explicitly forbidden for anyone to discriminate against you based on your race or ethnicity
Ironically, it’s very common to be asked for this information specifically because of anti-discrimination laws, so they can demonstrate statistically fair practices. I always see a box for this on medical forms, new-hire paperwork, etc. I believe the law requires it to be optional and only used for regulatory reports. So that’s probably what OP heard about.
- Comment on If AI spits out stuff it's been trained on 2 months ago:
which would indicate that it’s somehow needed to generate AI-generated CSAM
This is not strictly true in general. Generative AI is able to produce output that is not in the training data, by learning a broad range of concepts and applying them in novel ways. I can generate an image of a rollerskating astronaut even if there are no rollerskating astronauts in the training data.
It is true that some training sets include CSAM, at least in the past. Back in 2023, researches found a few thousand such images in the LAION-5B dataset (roughly one per million images). 404 Media has an excellent article with details: www.404media.co/laion-datasets-removed-stanford-c…
On learning of this, LAION took down their database until it could properly cleaned. Source: laion.ai/notes/laion-maintenance/
Those images were collected from the public web. LAION took steps to avoid linking to illicit content (details in the link above), but clearly it’s an imperfect system. God only knows what closed companies (OpenAI, Google, etc.) are doing. With open data sets, at least any interested parties can review, verify, and report this stuff. With closed data sets, who knows?
- Comment on How do I realistically get out of the US? 2 months ago:
Sorry, it looks like the real estate option in Portugal is no longer available. :( Now it would take a €500K investment in a local business or €250K in a nonprofit. If you’re that stinkin’ rich, you probably have better options already.
According to globalcitizensolutions.com/real-estate-citizenshi… , Cyprus offers a citizenship path with real estate purchase of €300K. Greece and some other countries do, as well.
- Comment on How do I realistically get out of the US? 2 months ago:
Are you able to spend a lot of money on it? Last I checked, there were a few places in the EU that had a citizenship track if you purchased substantial property. So if you’re in position to buy a nice house, that’s an option. I think Portugal is the most approachable cost-wise. But it’s been a while since I looked at this so I’m sure things have changed.
Several countries will allow extended student visas, even if you only speak English. I think Sweden allows this.
Then of course there’s the easy way: marry a Canadian.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
30 years ago, maybe. Post-Napster, not relevant. Most online piracy is non-commercial now, and it’s still illegal across most of the world.
- Comment on Are jabronis a necessity for a social media platform to be successful? 8 months ago:
- Comment on Is cloudflare breaking the internet or fixing it? 9 months ago:
If you have your day ruined by Cloudflare, I’m going to either assume you run a bot network, you’re trying to do something incorrectly, or you are part of the dark web.
Or you are unfortunate enough to share a subnet with someone who got on Cloudflare’s bad side, in which case there is basically no recourse.
There are a million legitimate reasons to use a VPN, for example, but Cloudflare doesn’t care.
