CosmicShadow

There are tons of cool, creative, funny and wow stuff being done with AI. A third of my Instagram feed is AI creators and some of the stuff they do is mind blowing, but even when it's not super impressive, some of it is just so creative and well done. Saiyenfeld is amazing (DBZ Seinfeld mashup by grickusai). It's taking a medium that is familiar, putting a spin on it and doing it well. You can do things that you couldn't do otherwise. People with interesting concepts can finally get them out of their head into something really interesting. People are so doomer and depressed, but they purposely don't see the stuff that is just fucking fun. I spend all day with a 5090 and courses and I still can't make stuff as good, creative, cool or funny as these people who actually have those talents and they are just fuddling through with token services.

If you want to get inspired go to civitai and look through the top stuff and be wowed. Maybe they didn't draw it, but they figured out how to make it happen and when you look at enough generated stuff you can tell the average from the holy shit. It's easy to get inspired by what people can come up with and want to do something yourself, which is a positive impact I'd say.

I can't believe how many mind blowing targets they have access to compared to us, feels like a different world. I wonder if they are as jealous of our side as we are of theirs...I doubt it! Will have to either travel, move, or use remote facilities to image, but that feels like cheating.

Yeah, it's wild how hard it can be to find the most familiar things once you go from Bortle 7/8 to even Bortle 4

Yes, it's very trippy and disorienting to see something you know is in the sky at a way different altitude, it almost feels like you are on another planet.

Understanding what is in the sky and what's around it is a fun skill to have, you can always tell which direction is what, the time of year (in case you forgot) and the time of night, assuming you are looking outside frequently enough to notice the change. You can even tell how much time has past if you are in the same spot and have a point of reference (like in a hot tub facing a tall tree) using your hand to measure. You can use Stellarium on your computer or phone to help see what's up there as well as a planisphere to know exactly what is up today at your lattitude and where it is at what hour.

No mention of Alberta or Canada at all??

Hmm, that's good information to have, I had no idea. I just had an MRI appointment that I had completely forgotten about or what it was for I was waiting so long (and obviously not having the issue for anymore). I'll know this for next time and consider it.

As a Canadian that sells products to the US I can say that we absolutely pay tariffs to the US government in place of our customers who should be paying it, depending on what shipping provider you use. USPS doesn't have the infrastructure or care to collect tariffs, so they won't, meaning the shipper has to just pay them up front and either jack the shipping cost by an arm-and-a-leg or just eat the cost. Canada Post even requires you as the shipper to pay them. If I ship UPS I can have the buyer pay upon delivery. It's 100% bullshit. I'm luckily under CUSMA, but the first month of tariffs when no one knew what was going on I paid out the ass on shipping and never got any refunds for it like Americans supposedly did, I just got fucked. In Canada and most other places it's normal to pay tariffs and duties when you order anything international (upon delivery) and all carriers know how to collect at delivery (or collect ahead of time online), but the US does not and it's alien to them (as seen by many customers screaming bloody murder over a $4 duty fee that anyone else in the world would kill to only have to pay).

What I don't think most people realize is that for many consumer goods coming from Canada the Americans are not paying the tariffs, Canadians are paying it instead because USPS is not setup to actually collect tariff payments from their own people and refused to do so. When I buy USPS shipping labels for my business that ships to the US, as a Canadian, I have to pay the fucking US tariff out of my own pocket and I have no way to charge my customer other than jacking the fuck out of my price. I lost so much money last year after the tariffs first went into effect and no one (UPS, USPS, US Gov't) knew what to do, how to charge, how to collect, but eventually after a 1.5months I managed to get CUSMA figured out. This 50% tariff is still the same scenario, I'm expected to pay the tariff on behalf of my American customer, so WTF. Oh and I got no refunds from anyone for that first 1.5months of insane costs as I'm not from the US.

I can ship UPS instead and then push the tariff back where it belongs, but nobody wants to pay 4x for shipping and then get another bill afterwards. US Customers already screamed bloody murder about a total $4 duty fee, which anyone in Canada would kill for on an international purchase.

Who cares? It's probably not better than a TV anyone else can afford and why would a billionaire need a folding tv in one of their 24 room homes?

The fact that you can buy a 72" tv for less than $1k now is nuts, and I assume there is no secret HBO with higher quality content only for billionaires, they still have to watch the same shit as us, and there is some good stuff out there, even on Netflix (maybe not a lot, not anymore). Even rich people sometimes want to sit at home and just watch TV, it takes a lot of energy to go out to something every night, even if you can. I used to go to concerts every week, sometimes several, now it's far less as I get older and it becomes more draining. Box seats are not very good seats and if you get good seats you are still surrounded by other people that will ruin your time.

I'm not rich, but there isn't much that I covet from rich people, because they really don't get that much better shit than we do anymore, they get more "luxury" and convenience and opportunity, but they still have the same technology as us, and it still sucks. 20 years ago, they had things we would want and could never afford, now the gap has shrunk considerably. They can pay 100-1000x for 1-5% quality gain on what a regular consumer can buy.

Great article, finally something worth reading fully on here. As a serial entrepreneur this definitely hits home and is something I've had to learn the hard way over my 17 years of entrepreneurship. Just because you come across a great opportunity and you have the skills and gusto to make it happen doesn't mean it's a good fit. If you don't give a shit about the idea/problem/market it doesn't matter if you are good at every aspect of the business, it will be a slog and you just won't care and will set yourself up to fail sooner or later.

I think if you are in public, you can't expect to be in private. You can try, but it obviously doesn't always work and we are exposed to all types when out of the house.

So far since continuing coding/debugging with 4.7 it's failed to fix 3 simple bugs after explaining it like 5 times and having a previous working example to look at...hmmmmmm....

She checks them every time she's on her computer, no point in closing them and they are always posting to social media every day, whereas you may get a generic email once a month if they even have a mailing list. Instagram is admittedly a LOT better at showing what you want than FB, as she follows them all there as well, but sometimes they post different stuff on each. She wants to both support and help these bands and band members by engaging on their socials so they actually get shown to more people. These are metal bands, so not big by any means, although some of them are still "large" or well known in their genres, but still struggle to get any good traction online. Most people in metal bands still have full time jobs, even if they are at the top of their genre (excluding the mega bands people have heard of).

Yet my wife uses it daily and has to keep 16 separate tabs open to people and bands she wants updates from because Facebook refuses to put them on her feed, despite her commenting on every post and story from them; she instead gets all these random shitty "suggested" posts from things that she would never have interest in or actively hates and FB should know that. She constantly mutes and reports shit. I get the same thing, but I don't use FB nearly as much. Those same bands have to spam repeatedly because despite having tens of thousands of fans they show everyone that their posts are only shown to 16 people. It's a shit site that maybe works for some folks, but not at all for us active or not.