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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: March 15th, 2024

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  • So, there’s a lot of things to unpack here.

    First, the idea that your spouse is your primary sole emotional connection is a relatively weird new concept on the scale of things. There’s been a huge period of history where your primary emotional connection was your male companions and your spouse was infantalized by comparison. If you were well-off you might be so lucky and have your group of emotional companions, your group of romantic companions, and the person who bears your legitimate children.

    Second, there’s really not much of a good underlying working model for actual modern conservatism. The frontiersman/“house on the prairie” sort of rugged independence was never actually a thing back then and a lot of big issues like medical bills were a lot simpler when the answer to having any sort of illness was that you either get over it after relatively inexpensive and simple treatments or you die. So the conservative movement must necessarily sell you a false bill of goods. US politics are such that there is no actual fully-left political party, so that by default makes you a democrat.

    There’s also a bunch of added uniquely christian baggage. So there are left-wing christians who also have their own set of weird baggage.

    Third, mostly irrespective of politics, there’s a lot of cultural programming for males that they can’t actually worthwhile work though their emotions in a productive fashion. Movies, TV shows, books, literally everything in the media creates this idea of maleness and the writers are just trying to write a catchy story and seldom have time to think about what kind of male they are creating. This is, overall, a relatively recent concept.

    Fourth, “things men need emotionally that women cannot provide” is actually pretty silly. Outside of practical advice about what to do with specific pieces of anatomy where maybe it would be nice to have some reference, the things people do is a pretty wide field. “Oh, someone to watch football with” ignores female football fans, et al. This ties in a lot with right wing men because they can’t necessarily have an emotional connection with someone not-male because that’s equivalent to messing around with someone’s property. And it also ties in with the social programming that created a stereotype for how men are supposed to relate to each other that’s just a writer trying to put a good story together without thinking of the social implications.

    Radicalization doesn’t work on people who are emotionally connected and comfortable. Part of why we are where we are is that there’s a whole class of people whose happiness has been precluded by the structure of their lives and the best people who can take advantage of this are fraudsters selling a false bill of goods. And I don’t even really feel sympathy for those people anymore because they are hurting people who I do very much care about and after a point it doesn’t matter if they are just too dumb to see it.

    But, I guess, to return to your initial point, the idea that if you find a person and get married to them that you have “solved” connection, that’s the road to unhappiness. Partially because marriage generally requires a commitment and effort to stay together as things happen and people change… but also because relying on one single person without other social connectivity is not a stable equilibrium.






  • You need to control the current going through the LED, either by wasting it as heat (resistor or linear controller) or via switching power supply mechanisms.

    Non-intelligent LED strips (where the whole strip is the same color, as opposed to the intelligent kind where each LED can be a different color) are generally not using a resistor per LED because you can use a row of LEDs in series with a single resistor. Generally there’s a marking to designate where you can cut such that they’ve got several LEDs per resistor because each LED is going to be somewhere in the 2-3V range, depending on color.

    Strips are a design compromise built around convenience, of course. But there’s a lot of engineering compromises here because the switching power supply is going to burn up some energy running things as well.

    Manufacturers of finished LED products do make bright LEDs frequently by making a series-parallel array of LED chips on a single substrate such that they’ve pre-selected similar LEDs. But if you are building your own strips, you can use a constant-current switching supply to run a series of LEDs off of a relatively high voltage, somewhere in the 24v to 48v range, where you’d want to select for a relatively bright individual LED so you don’t need to make a bunch of the constant-current switching power supplies.



  • I have a pile of hobbies and I guess one common thread is obnoxious dude shit. And I say this as a male type person.

    3D printing is a weird one because 3D printers are hella good for all kinds of stuff, from the more “femme” coded hobbies to the “dude” hobbies. But somehow the not-male people I know engage with some of the same communities as I do and for some reason I always get a lot more useful answers to my questions. There’s a certain aesthetic to homebrew open source 3D printers and it’s kinda industrial.

    Electronics hackery is worse because it’s a lot more “masc” coded. Even software stuff isn’t quite as bad because at least there there’s been concerted social pressure.

    Photography is sad because if I work with a female model I have to go through a whole process for her to make sure that she’s going to be safe during our shoot, some of which I didn’t even fully realize that was part of the process for a while. And pretty much all of the semi-pro-to-pro experienced models have at least one story and sometimes Names Are Named and it’s someone I’ve met, so I have to be constantly on guard.


  • We, the people who all roughly simultaneously chose the same name at roughly the same time only to engage in endless wars over who gets it on a new site, actually exist in a diverse multi-gendered animal-loving book-reading population, of which I am only one example, merely the member of our tribe who happened to nab it here. I’ve actually talked with other Wireheads and the similarities are interesting.

    All I know is that it somehow appeared in my brain before I read the Niven book that introduced it to me. And, also, at this point in history, I find Niven and many people who operated in his orbit deeply disgusting and disturbing examples of humanity, so it’s good that I came up with it on my own.



  • Funny, just this morning I woke up to someone commenting on one of my pieces of art that I’d posted on Reddit that if I hadn’t put in the comment how I did it, they’d have thought it was an AI generated picture.

    It’s super-painful to be a technologist and an artist at the same time right now because there are way too many people in tech who have no understanding of what it means to create art. There’s people in the art community who don’t really get AI either, of course, but since they are trending towards probably the right opinion based on an incomplete understanding of what the things we see as AI actually are, it’s much easier to listen to them. If anything, the artists can labor under the misapprehension that the current crop of AI tools are doing more than they actually are.

    In the golden age of analog photography, people would do a print and include the raw borders of the image. So you’d see sprocket holes if it’s 35mm film or a variety of rough boundaries for other film formats. And it was a known artistic convention that you were showing exactly what you shot, no cropping, no edits, etc. The early first version of Instagram decided that those film borders meant “art” so of course they added the fake film borders and it grated on my nerves because I think it was the edges from a roll of Velvia, which is a brilliant color slide film. And then someone would have the photo with the B&W filter because that also means “art” but you would never see a B&W Velvia shot unless you were working really hard on a thing. So this is far from the first time that a bunch of clueless people on the tech side of the fence did something silly out of ego and ignorance.

    The picture I posted is the result of a bunch of work on fabbing, 3D printing, FastLED programming, photographic technique, providing an interesting concept to a person and an existing body of work such that said person would want to show up to some random eccentric’s place for a shoot, et al. And, well… captions on art exist for a reason, right? It adds layers to the work to know that the artist was half-mad when they painted it and maybe you can tell by the painting’s brushwork or just know your art history really well but maybe you can’t and so a caption helps create context for people not skilled in that particular art.

    And, there’s not really “secrets” in art. Lots of curators and art critics will take great pains to explain why Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko so if you are still wandering around saying “BUT IT LOOKS LIKE GIANT SQUARES” that’s intentional ignorance.

    Now, I’ve been exploring my particular weird genre of art for a while now. Before AI, Photoshop was the thing. Much in the same way as I could have thrown a long enough prompt into a spicy-autocomplete image generator, I also could have probably photoshopped it. Then again, the tutorials for the Photoshop version of the technique all refer back to the actual photographic effect.

    Describing something as it’s not has long been a violation of social norms that people who are stuck in a world of intentional ignorance, ego, and disrespect for the artistic process have engaged in. In the simultaneous heyday of Second Life and Flickr, people wanting to treat their Second Life as their primary life caused Flickr to create features so people could mediate this boundary. So, on one level, this isn’t entirely new and posting AI art in the painting reddit is no different from posting filtered Second Life to the portrait group on flickr. It’s simple rudeness of the sort that the unglamorous aspects of community moderation are there to solve for.

    I have gotten quizzed about how I make my art, but I’ve never seen anybody go off and then create a replica of my art, they’ve always gone off and created something new and novel and interesting and you might not even realize that what got them there was tricks I shared with them it’s so different. Artists don’t see other art in the gallery and autocomplete art that looks like what they saw, they incorporate ideas into their own work with their own flair.

    Thus, there’s more going on than just mere rudeness. I’ve been doing this for a long time now and the AI companies have a habit of misrepresenting exactly what content they have stolen to train their image models. So it’s entirely likely that the cool AI picture that someone thinks my art looks like is really just autocompleted using parts of my art. Except I can’t say “no” and if there was a market for people making art that looks roughly like mine, I’d offer paid workshops or something.