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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Assuming it’s not just using body doubles which is the easiest way, usually you film the same actor twice with the camera left in place and then splice the two films together either by physically cutting and pasting the film or more recently with software. The software also has the advantage that it can blend things better, and fix lighting differences, and differences in film exposure which isn’t as big of an issue now with film quality being more consistent. Often in older films you can often see an obvious difference between the two shots.

    There’s also some films where they take a much easier approach where they film one scene and then use a green screen for the second take. This allows for doing the takes at different times since the camera might get moved or other small changes that are difficult to work around in a single day and allows for multiple camera angles to be used more easily, but it can be difficult to get the aspect ratios and depth just right, so it often looks less natural if the first take has the character along the same or too similar of a plane of depth as the second.



  • Unless you have in depth knowledge of the company operations or at least the very specific industry a company is in and all of their major investors, most stock investing is gambling these days. And with options, shorting, etc., even moreso. It’s more about knowing when a stock will make large changes and taking advantage of those changes than actually investing in a company that you believe in. And the value of companies has little to do with actual viability of the company or it’s assets, only the short term estimation by major investors of their profit. A single wealthy investor or investment firm can easily manipulate the price simply by buy or selling in large enough amounts and automated investment platforms cause a lot of fluctuations. It only works because retirement funds now are used to keep the market stable because no one wealthy and powerful has them, so they’re good for sacrifice.



  • Most garbage disposals just cause more trouble that they’re worth since they turn small chunks of food into paste and that’s more likely to stick to the insides of drains and cause more clogs than the small chunks, as long as your drains are properly maintained. And a halfway decent strainer will keep out the larger pieces. It’s also not good for your city drains and makes sewage processing more expensive. Better to use composting for your food scraps if you can.


  • Also grew up poor. But, wow, I wish earning over $100k was enough for vacations and hobbies in Seattle… I make around $150k, have a tiny home, and have only had one vacation since before COVID. I mean owning a home at all is pretty significant here, I guess.

    I could probably do better if I moved far enough out of the city, but I’d lose a lot of conveniences that would cost me lots of time and money mostly around transportation, parking, shopping, etc. I do have a few hobbies, but most of my hobby time is used in home maintenance because it’s a 118 year old home… These days it takes about $250k around here to really start to have extra money for nice vacations and hobbies.


  • Protecting my privacy. I am gender nonconforming and on HRT. So with the current political atmosphere and the fact that it has enabled and encouraged hate speech and attacks, I’ll new to be more careful on platforms that my identity is more prevalent.

    I’m not going to hide, as I’m not hiding by posting here. But I’m going to remove my data from corporate platforms that have connections to law enforcement and have poor security that insist on keeping my personal details. Can’t trust the federal government or any company, starting next year if the Project 2025 or Trump’s plan are truly put in place.


  • It’s not very different if you don’t dig into the guts of the thing. I think the people most afraid of making the switch are actually the ones it is easiest for. If you’re not used to digging into the windows registry and haven’t upgraded to powershell 7, then you probably won’t touch much of what’s different in Linux.

    The hardest part is picking a distribution – I usually recommend either Fedora or Ubuntu. – and an xwindows system – and coming from Windows I usually recommend KDE Plasma or from MAC I’d recommended GNOME. So either:

    https://fedoraproject.org/spins/kde/

    OR

    https://kubuntu.org/

    The only reason I stuck with Windows for so long was PC gaming. But I don’t do much of that anymore and what I do actually do runs fine on Linux these days. So I haven’t looked back. But you can always install Linux after Windows is already present if you have a spare hard drive and boot into either at will. Just don’t try to do the opposite since Windows installer will corrupt your Linux boot setup.

    But to each his own. Windows is now a platform like many others where you trade your personal information for services instead of or in addition to your money. Some people are OK with that and that’s totally fair.



  • Where do you live? What are the laws around recording another person without their consent. Note that usually audio recording in public is more restrictive than video in public, so assuming he didn’t mute the audio of the clip, you probably have a case there.

    As for the suggestion about DMCA takedowns, that depends on of the information you shared could be considered copyrightable since the recording copyright belongs to the person doing the recording. That’s not common, so you could file a DMCA takedown, but I have a feeling it might not be legitimate. There might be other YouTube terms and conditions that they violated, though. Check the “Report” button for the options. I don’t have an account anymore to look.






  • The only issue with current systems is that the “AI” is tweaked to the specific game mechanics. You can easily enough build multiple algorithms for varying play styles and then have it adapt to counter the play style of the player. The problems is that the current way that many games are monetized is through expansions, gameplay tweaks, etc., as well as those being necessary when a game mechanic turns out to be really poorly implemented or just unpopular and the mechanics change. If the “AI” isn’t modified at the same time to rake advantage of the changes, then it becomes easy to beat. The other issue is that eventually a human can learn all of the play style algorithms and learn to counter them and then it becomes boring.

    Unfortunately, generative “AI” is not a true learning model and thus not truly intelligent in any sense of the word. It requires that it is only “taught” with good information. So if it gets any data that includes even slight mistakes, it can end up making lots of those mistakes repeatedly. And if those mistakes aren’t corrected by a human, it doesn’t understand which things were mistakes and how they contributed to winning or losing. It can’t learn that they were mistakes or to not do them. It doesn’t truly understand how to decide something is wrong on its own, only that things are related and how often it should use those relationships over others. Which means manual training is required, which due to the sheer volume of information required to train a generative “AI”, is not possible in a complex game where the player has thousand of possible moves that each branch to thousands of possible combinations of moves, etc.



  • Depends on context. If you’re discussing it in a medical context, the terms are separate. Dependence refers specifically to the severity of the effects of stopping the drug, both physical and psychological. Addiction is more about the behavior of a person when exposed to the substances and is not as strictly defined of a term in a medical sense. But generally, dependence is a component addiction. So not all dependence results from addiction, but most definitions of addiction include some kind of dependence.

    So, not the same thing, but also, outside of medical context, most people don’t differentiate the terms and use the word addiction to refer to the dependence component of addiction.