madaxe_again

Bad luck: I have built multiple bridges.

I even recently used AI to do the FEA for a 80m long pedestrian suspension bridge, and to model where to anchor along the span to avoid bounce.

Entirely my own risk, on my own land, and the bridge is sound.

Glue factories are seemingly a fixture of history. One can but hope to be a favoured horse.

Sure, but horses today have unbelievably good lives compared to horses of the past. The Industrial Revolution basically introduced post-scarcity for horses.

For me; no identity crisis. Or at least a very short lived one until I realised what makes me tick.

I’ve been coding since I was 6. In my 40s now. Making stuff. Making stuff in meatspace, too.

I always told myself that I enjoyed coding, that I enjoyed making stuff.

I was wrong. I hate coding. I hate standing in a ditch with heavy cables slung over me. I hate neck and eye strain from hours bent over a soldering iron.

What I like, what drives me - the outcomes. The neat bit of software that I conceptualised and now have in my hands. The mad Heath Robinson contraption that somehow makes the machine that goes “ping!”, in fact, go ping.

I’ve always recognised that I am a lazy asshole - but there has always been a carve-out for creating - yet the giant heap of unfinished projects tells me my “eh, amanhã” attitude does in fact persist throughout many avenues of my life, even those I thought I enjoyed.

Me, I fucking love vibe coding. I get to go to bed at a sensible hour, and wake up in the morning like it’s bloody Christmas Day, as I know there’s going to be something cracking to play with. The ideas I have, realised, without me having to slog through the weeds. Nobody sucking their teeth at the scope. No “madaxe got distracted by another shiny object”.

I’ve executed on basically every digital must and should that I’ve come up with over the last decade, in the last nine months. I’m now onto the “could haves” and “would like to haves”.

And… I’ll be honest. Maintainability, understanding what it does under the hood - for the first time in my life I barely care about, as next year I can have a better model do it again, and better.

So, I like the outcome. I like having an idea and seeing it come to life. What happens between A and B isn’t terribly important, as it turns out that not all paths are the goal.

And I think the same may apply to a lot of creative people - I mean, artists had and have artisans for a reason - and now we can all have an ever-improving artisan.

Floriensis is a particularly good one, due to the Ebu Gogo mythology - and they seemingly died out 50kya ago. The locals specifically didn’t have giant humans in their mythology, rather tiny ones.

And then you go look at where there were Denisovans and Neanderthals, and those cultures have mythologies with trolls and ogres.

The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - in fact, it is speculated that floriensis perhaps hung on much, much later than 50kya ago - and I see no reason the same shouldn’t apply to Neanderthals or denisovans.

On a similar note - cultural memory runs deep. Take hill forts in the U.K. for instance. Commonly accepted as defensive structures. Except… the populations of these places, the topography, all of it, made them pretty crap defences - and the top of a windy hill, far from water, isn’t such a great place to live. So why? My take: the doggerland flood, and cultural memory. When the sea is slowly encroaching, building on top of a hill, building a dyke, a berm, sensible.

5000 years later, still doing the same thing. Why? Nobody quite remembers, but it’s important.

Presumably he used software for this rather than doing it in a darkroom?

FWIW I’m an astrophotographer, and I don’t really view 30 hours of stacked exposures as “a photo I took”, rather as the outcome of a lengthy signals processing chain.

I suppose the question is where the line is drawn. Ten years ago, I doubt “I made this picture in photoshop” would have qualified as photography. Now that we have AI, the window has moved.

When BMW sell you a car, and you buy it on finance (hire-purchase etc.) where they are lending you the money to buy it, they recognise the entire sale value of the car there and then. They even pay tax on the cash they don’t yet have in their pocket.

Meanwhile, you amortise it over years.

For some reason, nobody argues that this isn’t a real sale of a real car.

If it’s all just circular financing, then tax day will be the reveal, as there will simply be no money to pay the corporation tax on the profits.

"I did not leave the country, for Brazil is always in my heart. I will surrender my passports. One day. After I am finished defending myself against this outrage."

Slither slither

He doesn't think that far ahead. He'll be like "we'll grab Lula and install our guy", without thinking about what happens the next day.

Well, he'll get a sympathetic reception - Trump has already called the election rigged, and is refusing to recognise Lula.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are marines and/or mercs on the eixo monumental in November. Trump will need another war/conflict/invasion/occupation, sorry, special military operation, to distract from the midterm losses, and nabbing Maduro played well in Peoria.

The US is hardly alone in this. The UK voted to shoot themselves in the face, because brown people are scary.

Elections (and referenda) do indeed have consequences.

It is however perfectly reasonable to look further up the causal chain and say "propaganda influences elections".

No. She comes from a culture where there’s a huge stigma around mental health, and you can lead a horse to water and all that.

Right now, I’m rolling with her hypothesis that it’s purely environmental, and finish our intercontinental move next week.

Honestly, I don’t hold out hope, but at least our destination country is one with a good cultural attitude to mental health, which I’m hoping may rub off on her. And me - I come from the “keep calm and carry on” school, often to my detriment.

Dunno if the forced cycle makes a difference.

My wife often goes to bed shortly before I get up in the morning, and doesn’t rise until mid afternoon - exhausted, pissed off, tearful, all of it.

There’s zero pressure on her to conform to any particular day/night cycle. By the time she gets up my day is half over, the housework is done, the meals prepared, the business for the day concluded, the kid at school, who I’ll pick up later.

I used to be a night owl, but as she has become more and more nocturnal over the years, I’ve adapted to live on 5 hours of sleep and became an early riser, so I actually get to spend some time with her in the evenings, and am up and ready to deal with the day so she doesn’t have to.

So. I don’t think it’s society. Sure, it’s a sample of precisely 1, but this phenomenon seems to be largely internally driven.

Is it worse than the usual fairground airbrushed abominations, though? Because that’s essentially what it’s competing with.