Reminds me of the Garbage Time video where they try like four different wrong ways to fix an exhaust. They didn’t do this one to their credit

I’ve found myself reading much older text and still being annoyed by it. I think I paused a YouTube video from like 2015 after hearing it spoken and having to pace a little before continuing. I’ve completely cut that out of my own writing style.

Text extrusion software will obviously favor some writing elements over others, and it is just a supercharged version of bland-yet-saccharine corporate writing style. So all of it, seen sparingly, wouldn’t make you feel like the society is falling apart. But when you see it 10000x more often you really question if anyone is even trying to communicate a novel idea anymore.

It’s been happening for ages already. What reality do you people live in?

I don’t understand, is this for keeping track of the charge level of battery powered sensors?

Also, the description in the page is painful to read. I haven’t gotten into HA yet but I’m keeping an eye on stuff I find interesting, but I really hope having to trudge through saccharine LLM output to understand what each project does isn’t the standard.

Hey, I’m seeing your posts all over the All page, I guess this is important to get out there.

They’ve removed all the towns everywhere, if you zoom out on the country you see the larger pins, but the entire country seems to be marked as not belonging to a town. Not just the South. Obviously it’s most disgusting to see places like Maroun el Ras wiped off the map, but this is weird.

So a few different places in iOS that show place names don’t work properly. For example, my family and devices in Find My still show pins but it says “Lebanon” and not a town name. It’s like the entire country is marked as wilderness.

I don’t actually suspect something meaningfully nefarious here, probably a disgruntled product manager who doesn’t think we’re human at worst or a bug more likely. But I’ll be thrilled if Apple gets a PR problem from this.

The terrorist mass murder entity has a history of renaming towns and settlements so this is an especially sensitive topic to me

This one is serialized, maybe it’s best not to post pages where unsuspecting readers can find them and be spoiled.

I didn’t realize it was still going! I read it about ten years ago, I’ll definitely have to read it again. I’d hate to have to filter it out to avoid these posts. Luckily I have zero context for what’s happening here.

Tom is an amazing artist and world builder, I had completely forgotten about this project

Yeah I’ve been involved in stuff on that level by pulling in a library in a university project. But there were higher level research projects going on where they were going into real nitty gritty fine control, I think they had a control model with an obscene number of degrees (as in xth order physical model implemented as a PPIIIIDDD system or whatever). That was a little intuitive since there was a physical process that you can observe.

But the theory is definitely something I’d like to at least understand a little

This was my weakest subject, I found it fascinating but my math was just not good enough for it.

Hopefully someone here has some interesting resources for this stuff, I would honestly love to integrate things like PIDs where they absolutely don’t belong in my bullshit hobby procrastination projects.

Baalbak is a city with a lot of targets during any period of bombing. Mercifully the temple complex site has never been hit and it hopefully stays that way.

They’re not above it though. They hit the archeological site in Sour/Tyre in the 2024 airstrikes though, and even though dozens of people and medics were murdered by then, my blood boiled white hot after that, I was angrier about it than the mass murder. I think the precision strikes on ambulances came after and those pissed me off even more though.

It’s never a good sign when you have an internal conflict about whether you’re a good person or not because you’re more mad about a bunch of old rocks getting pulverized than people like you being murdered.

They’ll fucking do it, they don’t care. They don’t think we’re people, they obviously don’t think our heritage matters, especially not in a poor city they routinely terrorize.

I live where people run to for safety. This is supposed to be a normal safe part of Beirut. It’s quiet now and I’m fine but every year is an innovation in terrorism from this criminal entity.

Thank you for the well wishes.

Death toll is higher than 300, injured over 1200. They’re pulling bodies and survivors still. This is worse than August 4 2020. And they’re still fucking bombing!

This is senseless, savage terrorism. I think I heard over a hundred thuds in Beirut during the first hour. What the fuck is wrong with these people

Worst day since the explosion in 2020. It is what it is

This feels like falling into the TVTropes rabbit hole for the first time. Neat

That’s one thing that’s been bothering me a lot about this AI worship era that I don’t see mentioned enough anywhere. Machine learning is a fucking incredible tool that can surely be used to do a lot of things in a novel or better way. Instead all of the investment and eyeballs are on overplayed party tricks

The average person, even well meaning, is missing a good 50 years of context to understand the situation here. I’d argue this starts in 1969 with the Cairo Agreement.

The Lebanese government, besides being completely corrupt and incompetent, is under extreme pressure from the US. It was basically given the ultimatum of either starting a civil war with the Hezb or being considered one and the same as it by the US and its buddies, about a month ago. It very gently picked the first option, announcing that it will work to make the Hezb a political-only entity and not a para/military one (and not go guns blazing civil war). It’s, regretfully, probably the more peaceful option.

Becoming country non grata by the US and the subsequent sanctions would literally kill the poorer half of the population, so that’s a non starter. Starting an armed civil war, against an entity that is extremely controversial but still openly celebrated for liberating the exact land being annexed now, if you can believe it, is also not good!

If the Lebanese army throws a single strand of hay in a southernly direction the entire Lebanese government is getting nuked to high heaven. We are in a uniquely terrible situation where our best friend the US has us by the balls and also is completely loyal to the crazy neighbor who very openly considers us rats to be eradicated. The Lebanese army’s only job is to do literally anything but fight the enemy, because if it does, we are dead. We are fertilizing kibbutz plantations.

Do not look up the size of the US embassy in Lebanon, it’s completely normal, just a normally sized diplomatic mission for paperwork, don’t worry about it.

If the UK decided to ally with Rhodesia in 1969, would you read it as anything other than an endorsement of it?

Huh. I picked that up from a used book stand on a whim just based on the tile and skimming it, like ten years ago. I should probably read it.

Our water infrastructure’s been shit for like fifty years at this point.

I’d conservatively say well over a million people are displaced right now. Racking up war crimes like it’s a checklist. How can anyone be this fucking evil. What’s happening here is nowhere near as bad as the crimes in Gaza, and I don’t think they deserve any less dignity than us over there, but my blood has been just boiling over the past month like never before. It’s different when you’re directly in the crosshairs. I haven’t lost anyone in this war yet but many of my acquaintances are grieving. The fact that this terrorist regime keeps getting free passes and special treatment and subsidized weapons and unlimited investment while we are being hit with fucking white phosphorus is just so hard to live with. You think your environment breeds doomerism? Come gamble with your life for the insolence of being born in the wrong fucking place, come watch every government and company pretend like your suffering is something expected and to be ignored. Fuck.

No no, we’re Arabs, it might not count, we have to wait and see in court in 2097 before making any rushed reactions.

The first time I discovered them they reminded me of people I did theater with back in the day and it threw me into a little existential crisis.

They’re great!