Working tomorrow for a better today

Animorphs really has a way to turn every scifi trope on its head. "Why do alien invasions always start in America?" Actually the body snatchers first landed in a Middle Eastern farming community where they kidnapped the first guy they saw, read his mind, and concluded that, since he was terrified of the US soldiers who had brutally destroyed everything he knew and loved, the US would be the ideal place to center their invasion. This is revealed in the spin-off "Visser" which is an excellent stand-alone book that can be read without any prior knowledge of Animorphs. And you can read it for free and with the author's blessing right here:

https://files.animorphsfanforum.com/ebooks/pdf/Visser.pdf

The reviews are in!

okay if we're gonna talk about animorphs turning kinda racist alien invasion tropes upside down, i HAVE to share the 'aliens built the pyramids' bait-and-switch. from a scene in which the kids talk to an alien android:

--book 10: the android (marco POV)

like, that's just fucking hilarious. yeah aliens were there but they just carried rocks, the design part was 100% the ancient african civilization.

It should also get props for having an alien join the human heroes early on in the traditional Someone To Explain The Context And Alien Tech role... except he's a teenager who didn't pay attention in school because he was thinking about girls and sports. Like, yeah, he can hack computers and has a vague understanding of how the alien spaceships work, sort of, but just as often the kids will ask "hey Ax what's the deal with this weird physics portal thing" and he'll be like "well the thing is there was a really cute girl sitting in front of me in class that day. So I have no idea."

A lot of people will write about jobs like the point of the job is to give people a job, rather than to make or do a thing people at large want.

Like I'm all in favor of a social safety net, but that should be funded by, like, broad taxes, and not random industries getting propped up just because. The point of farmers is to grow food, not give farmers income. Either of those things can be done as a career, but if something happens to make that stuff cheaper at the expense of farmers but to the benefit of everyone else, you might just have to suck it up and get a new source of income. It is ridiculous to demand everyone else pay not only for you to have a social safety net, but for you to have the exact job and income you want just because you had it before.

Someone just liked this and I'm reminded of a post recently that claimed that the point of arts funding wasn't to make more art for people to see but so that "the most people can enjoy creation", which beyond being ill-targeted if it were the case (if you fund a sculptor to do a marble sculpture, then only one person has gotten the opportunity to create, instead of tons people getting to do art in a cheaper form) is incredibly myopic and creator centered. Yes, the point of art is to make sure you in particular are getting paid.

Sort of a similar mindset, I guess.

there was a good line is a SSC post approximately "if you only have a job because of regulation preventing you being replaced, you don't have a job, you just have a very inefficient welfare program." Unfortunately social attitudes are such that just giving people money is deeply unpopular even when its the cheapest thing

Yeah, essentially this. Radically changing what you do most of the time is actually very difficult and psychologically taxing for many people, and so is feeling like you aren't contributing anything; retirement is often very difficult for people for this reason.

Also as pointed out we deliberately design social safety nets to ensure that losing your job due to outside forces is costly in the monetary sense as well.

This but about posts

me: boy i can’t wait to find the email i need by putting the exact subject line in the search feature

outlook: you’ve never received an email in your life. there’s nothing here, asshole. 2000+ unread btw if you even care

never not mentally replaying this

this is the best video ive seen in my goddamn life

Let's say you're writing some code with graphical output. Like a game, or a gui, or whatever. It needs to write things to the screen every frame. But if you stick in a while loop or whatever, that's just gonna run as fast as the processor can run it, it will execute those lines of code as fast as it can. How do you... keep track of the frames, relative to this, and make everything work?

There's a few options here, most of them centered on buffering techniques. Conventionally you double-buffer graphics, which is that you have a buffer (front-buffer) that you are displaying and a buffer (back-buffer) that you are drawing to and you flip between them every time a new frame is due to be drawn, typically just by pointing the graphics card at a memory address every 1/60th or 1/144th or whatever of a second, which is cheap.

You can do this as fast as your CPU and graphics card can keep up with it, or you could delay certain tasks to try and line them up with a target framerate and the buffer flips. If you're going faster than the graphics card and display can actually display frames, you could end up overwriting the back-buffer multiple times before it draws, which is "wasted" work, since you won't see it. Frame rate limiters can take various approaches to preventing this wasted work, with varying effects on latency and performance.

There's all sorts of things that could go wrong here, like tearing, where you have started overwriting the back buffer and the graphic card decides it's time to flip buffers before you're done, so you draw a frame that is torn in half wherever you were when the flip occured. Vertical sync, triple-buffering, and other techniques can be used to avoid this.

Of course, if you have enough control of the hardware (like with, say, a variable refresh rate capable display and graphics card, or in my case, with this LED strip and microcontroller I'm working with) you can just tell the GPU "okay, time to draw now" and it'll flip and draw from the buffer on demand provided you aren't exceeding its capabilities.

Further reading:

The "ah fuck it's the 70's and a megabyte of memory costs as much as a house" mode is of course to say "fuck this, who needs a buffer" and begin

racing the beam is a technique most famously used on the Atari 2600 home computer, which did not have a frame buffer, but a line buffer. In fact, it had half a line buffer, which could be mirrored or copied across the centerline of the display depending on a register bit, and if you wanted the next line or even the second half of the display to look different from the half-line before it, you had to update it in the microseconds while the beam crossed the CRT display.

okay i think when people start talking about others becoming "disconnected from their humanity" they are going to have to specify what they mean by "humanity." they're going to have to say what they mean or i'll kill them

Let's say you're writing some code with graphical output. Like a game, or a gui, or whatever. It needs to write things to the screen every frame. But if you stick in a while loop or whatever, that's just gonna run as fast as the processor can run it, it will execute those lines of code as fast as it can. How do you... keep track of the frames, relative to this, and make everything work?

at a basic level you can make it wait x amount of time every loop. But also in practice e.g. if you want to do it in a browser, javascript has a 'request animation frame' method that takes the screen's refresh rate into account and does the delay automatically, where it'll wait until the next time the frame should be repainted to do the stuff you pass into it.

best comparison I can think of for the pope thing is. imagine an ESL bishop said the word “dykery” instead of “lesbianism.”

now. as a dyke, I'm not cool with straight people using it. obviously you don't need to be a native speaker to know slurs, but “dykery” is NOT a commonly used word if you're straight and want to insult queer women. it's the kind of derivative word you're way more likely to hear in a queer context. if a straight person randomly said “dykery” in the middle of a serious conversation, and a non native speaker at that, I'd be like... where on earth did they hear THAT from?

that's why I'm laughing my entire ass off at the pope thing. ofc the catholic church is homophobic. fork found in kitchen. but why is the pope using slang from drag race

"women under 19" is an interesting way to describe teenagers 15-19

I had not read this interview, this is very entertaining to think about.

Imagine GRRM handing them a lower fantasy political drama, where all the demigods are human and have normal human problems, and then a few years later he finds that one of his guys is now a giant snake.

Transcript:

I know I posted another meme that was almost the same as this, but here’s a different version for the Glorious 25th of May.

ER veterinarian: *reviewing patient's history* "and what food does your dog eat?"

client: "he eats yams."

vet: "... yams?"

client: "yeah, yams."

vet: "just yams? nothing else?"

client: "yeah."

vet: "the only food that you feed your dog is yams? no supplements?"

client:" "just yams."

vet: *increasingly distressed* "you cannot feed your dog only yams, ok? you NEED to feed something else. that is a very unbalanced diet and could be what's making him sick."

client: "well what should i be feeding?"

vet: "dog food! kibble, canned, anything from a pet store!"

client: "but that's where i buy the yams!"

vet: "what?"

client: "you mean i have to feed a bunch of different brands??"

vet: "what?"

(it was discovered, much to the vet's relief, that the client was mispronouncing the brand name "Iams")

> be me

> at work, building a new almond greebler

> coworker Slacks me

> "hey I noticed that the giraffe spotter hasn't been implemented yet, should I use the zebra striper instead?"

> tell him no, the giraffe spotter is supposed to work, and also I thought we already implemented it? But whatever, if we missed it we missed it, he can stub it out for now and I'll implement it when I'm done with the almond greebler

> btw is he also working on the almond greebler? I ask bc it's the only thing left in the project that uses the giraffe spotter. If he's working on the almond greebler he can stop, I've got it covered, he should just go implement the giraffe spotter instead

> "no, I'm working on the spline reticulator"

> I thought we finished the spline reticulator a week ago

> mfw

"You can have X and still feel empathy!" True, but the people who DON'T experience empathy don't deserve to get thrown under the bus either

"Having X doesn't mean you can't be smart!" True, but the people you WOULDN'T consider smart don't deserve to get thrown under the bus either

"Having X doesn't mean you're violent!" True, but the people who have been violent don't deserve to get thrown under the bus either

"You can have X and still take care of yourself!" True, but the people who genuinely can't don't deserve to get thrown under the bus either

"You can have X and still act normal!" True, but can you guess what I have to add about the people who CAN'T act normal?

Because if your activism is all about trying to separate your personal self from ableist dehumanization instead of actually challenging said dehumanization, your activism really sucks!

Submitter comment: I'd like to submit this '[s]tudy of defensive behavior of a venomous snake as a new approach to understand snakebite' not for it's topic (worth studying!) but for it's insane methodology, which... well, I'll just let the researcher speak for himself:

[Q: Why did you decide to do this experiment?

A: Snake behavior has been generally neglected as a field of research, especially in Brazil. And most studies don’t examine what factors make them want to bite. If you study malaria, you can research the parasite that causes the disease—but if you don’t study the mosquito that carries it, you will never solve the problem. Up until now, the popular wisdom was that the jararaca would only attack if you touched it or stepped on it. But that was not what we found.

Q: Why did you need to be the victim?

A: The best way to do this research is to put snakes and a human together. In this case, the human was me. We put the snakes inside a ring on the floor of our lab until they got used to it, then I stepped in wearing special protective boots. I stepped close to the snake and also lightly on top of it. I didn’t put my whole weight on my foot, so I did not hurt the snakes. I tested 116 animals and stepped 30 times on every animal, totaling 40,480 steps.]

From the recent (aptly named) interview: Researcher steps on deadly vipers 40,000 times to better predict snakebites