Recently my parents showed me some stuff they saw on Facebook. It was all just AI slop, rage bait, advertisements. Seriously, there was barely anything useful on it. They were very avoidant of acknowledging it tho. “But there’s also fun stuff on it”. They were constantly wondering whether what they were reading was real, yet it did plant seeds in their brains. It’s even influencing their politics, I had to have a whole discussion with them (traditionally centre left voters) about how our left wing parties didn’t want to let an unstoppable horde of immigrants into our country. And why voting for a centre right guy because “he looks pretty competent” will also fuck with poor people and important topics like abortion.

Try being permanently exhausted. Ever since I had mono and COVID in 2020 I basically fall asleep the moment I touch my bed. But unfortunately I also need that nap almost every day.

Your view is totally fine, but I guess you’re not understanding why people do this. I’m a millennial, around 30. Personally I buy CDs, I buy vinyl, and I even have some stuff on tape. I’ve also recently picked up film photography and among my friends it’s common nowadays to bring some 2000-2010 digicams.

So why? flac is perfect, and streaming services stream whatever high-quality music you’d ever want to play. Film is expensive, and digicams are often way more shit than whatever a modern smartphone that’s already in your pocket can do.

Personally I’ve become bored by perfection, overwhelmed by choice, and frustrated with the lack of owning anything. When I play a physical album I sit down for it, I am focused on the music. I cannot easily choose the music, I’ll just have to accept the order of the album. There are way fewer choices to overwhelm me. Likewise, with film photography, it feels simpler in a way. You shoot a few images in a go, because film isn’t cheap, and you’ll only get to see them weeks later when the roll is developed. No pressure of the perfect shot, no insane resolution to show any imperfection. And mistakes just happen, because you cannot see what you’re doing, so you just have to accept them. Digitally you can just take 20 pictures and take the best one.

So back to music. Why would one prefer vinyl or tape over CD? As a life-long CD collector, I wondered the same thing a few years ago. But when artists that I enjoy started skipping CD releases in favor of vinyl I hopped in, invested in a shit vinyl player, and didn’t really get it. Sure it had a character, but it wasn’t great in any way. After some more research I found out that it was probably just the vinyl player (please don’t get some cheap shit for a 100 bucks with a red unbranded needle). I invested in an Audiotechnica LP70XBT, and oh boy did stuff improve. I finally get it. The sound is gorgeous, though not necessarily better or worse than CD imo. It’s a bit warmer, with detailed bass but less clinical high end. And I love the whole tactile experience of it. Older vinyl definitely sounds worse than modern CD quality though.

I think it’s the whole experience that people enjoy. Putting the vinyl or cassette in the player, having something move and, as if it were magic, suddenly there’s music. With a slightly different character that differentiates it from the clean and clinical sound of high quality digital audio. Modern digital audio is great and definitely has its place, but at times it can feel sterile, too perfect. The crackles and warmth of vinyl, the grain and slightly off colours of photographic film, they feel like they have more personality. They stem from a time where the imperfections of the medium still kinda hid the imperfections of the artist.

(Okay this turned into quite a ramble but I hope there’s something useful in there :3 )

As a programmer I’ve found it infinitely times more useful for troubleshooting and setting up things than for programming. When my Arch Linux nukes itself again I know I’ll use an LLM, when I find a random old device or game at the thrift store and want to get it to work I’ll use an LLM, etc. For programming I only use the IntelliJ line completion models since they’re smart enough to see patterns for the dumb busywork, but don’t try to outsmart me most of the time which would only cost more time.

Yeah yeah I will. Right after another video

In some jobs you can. I switched to working 36 hours which effectively traded money for time and energy. The moment that money bar fills up with sufficient buffer again I’ll probably switch to 32. It mainly provides time though, not energy. But it’s better than nothing

Same. No wonder I’m burnt out. The human brain can only handle so many screens at the same time :/

Maybe we should nuke the rest if the world too

It’s horrendously slow, unusable imo. With the larger DeepSeek distilled models I tried that didn’t fit into VRAM you could easily wait 5 minutes until it was done writing its essay. Compared to just a few seconds when it does. Bit that’s with a RTX 3070 Ti, not something the average ChatGPT user has lying around probably.

Damn, maybe AI can replace me after all

Hmmm yeah. But most of it lives in an automatic cloud backup as well… Photos, important documents, game saves, programming projects. I’ve lost drives before and apart from one or two moments where I couldn’t find a very specific file I didn’t really miss anything. The only things that I really do need to backup at the moment are my music projects and the raw files from my photography

So I never really though about this before this post, but the Dutch name is actually really fucking weird. They’re called “pissebedden” here, which is a combination of “pissen” (to pee) and “bedden” (beds). I read that apparently there was a superstition that they would help against bed wetting of you put them in your bed before sleep. I guess that’d help because it’d be hard to sleep with those buggers crawling around in your bed. What’s also weird is that the name isn’t literally “bed wetters” because then the words should be reversed like “bedpissers” or something. So it’s more like “pissybeds” in English.

Idk what tf they were smoking tbh, but it’s the normal word for them and is even used on Wikipedia. Li they’re talking about the zoetwaterpissebedden (fresh water pissybed) as if this is a reasonable scientific name.

Had this multiple times. Reading code from 2 years ago and being like “what idiot wrote this” only to find out the culprit was me. Then the memories came back and I remember why the compromises were made. What I learned from that is not to judge people too much on their code. What you see is a combination of both their skill and also a whole bunch of necessary compromises for which you may not know the reason. Nowadays I don’t get too annoyed if the code is a bit messy. As long as it’s well tested and documented.

I used a PS/2 keyboard until like 2 years ago. At some point over 10 years ago I decided that I’d only replace it when it died. But it wasn’t very good at dying, and 2years ago I finally had enough of the cheap rubbery switches and the fact that I couldn’t press enough keys at the same time

Yeah exactly. I’ve been on the receiving end on of (male) bullying quite a bit and also haven’t always been nice to others myself in order to try and fit in. I can only remember one physical incident in all those years. That guy was the classic “movie” bully, just an asshole terrorizing everyone around him, so naturally I decided that something had to be done (it did not go well). Other than that it was all psychological. “Friends” that started saying mean things the moment they were around people they looked up to.

Something that makes it a bit more difficult is also that bullying in these cases was often not black and white. The line between friendly teasing and psychological bullying was often quite thin. In hindsight I interpreted a lot of teasing jokes as bullying because I took everything literally and was very protective of my stuff. That doesn’t excuse them because it was very clear that it hurt me, but it’s interesting that some of those interactions now have become regular interactions between me and my friends that both sides clearly enjoy.

I thought the same, so I bought some Blu-rays and DVDs. DVDs are fine as long as you’re okay with the quality. Blu-rays have DRM though, which in Linux feels like you’re pirating even when playing legit content

True, but it’s still work that’s usually volunteering work. So it’s probably a good idea to call it volunteering so the kids associate it with that. It’s to give kids a taste of what kind of work volunteers do so they might do it voluntarily in the future (like the kid in this post).

Personally I also didn’t really mind it in school. I had to spend a few days at a thrift store and had lots of fun. They installed Ubuntu on their laptops, which was my first contact with Linux. I got to help customers with that. And one time we were moving a couch and accidentally hit a stand that wasn’t attached properly. It fell over and almost hit a customer lol.

I used to dislike singing in music. I mostly listen to electronic music and honestly I found the sound design much more interesting. Nowadays that has shifted though. I’m more connected to and aware of my emotions. Sometimes I need music with the same energy as I used to love, but with some nice vocals to match my emotions. Nowadays it’s more of a mix, buy my taste is still faster and harder than most people.

Only one hour a day initially. And my mom hated any games with guns, so no games with guns. Creating an absolute bloodbath in Age of Empires was completely okidoki tho. At some point I wanted to buy GTA 3. My mom obviously said no (and fairly so, I was like 12 or something). But my dad, in an absolute chad move, said “oh I know that game, it’s fine”. I tended to play at the houses of friends who had less strict rules. I remember playing GTA Vice City on the original Xbox some time before I was allowed to buy GTA myself.

A bit over 5 years ago I was not in a good place myself. Struggling to be motivated for anything, only seeing trouble in the future, and often I just randomly started crying and was just out of it for a few hours. Things got pretty dark, and thus I sought and found help with a psychologist. I also discussed all of these things with my friends. Slowly my outlook started to change, and a few months later I started seeing some light again. I was barely on my feet again, feeling rebuilt and filled with a new spirit of hope.

At this moment a couple of other friends were also dealing with their demons, but most of them discussed these and we generally managed to help each other. One of them did not. Instead he chose to end it all. The situation hit us like a truck. While I cannot possibly compare our situations, nor do I know what exactly went through his mind, it always felt like a mirror. A parallel path that I could’ve chosen. The scars of this never went away, the damage it did to all of us will remain forever. I don’t blame him for anything, nor do I think it was the “weak” option. But I’m just sad, because I feel like it shouldn’t have happened. A culture where men (or people in general I guess) feel ashamed to share their struggles, where they feel like they have to lie to maintain their “pride”, creates an environment where people corner themselves in lies and darkness until there is no way out.

What I personally learned from this whole ordeal is how much damage something like this does. Not only did we lose someone bright, it also permanently damaged many people who loved him. It might not feel like people around you care, but for pretty much everyone there are people in your life who do care. I’ve also seen how I personally can pull out of a very dark place and suddenly feel happiness with the most mundane things again. And seeing these 2 paths, I will always remember that no matter how shit the current situation is, as long as there’s any hope that in the future things may be better, then that’s a hope worth fighting for. In almost every situation there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, you may not see it and it may be far away, but once you reach it you can have many years of happy life ahead of you.