burninate

Hehe so funny seeing Trogdor references in 2024. :D

For YouTube stuff I’d recommend an alternative front end like freetube.

Just wanna add I’ve REALLY struggled with YouTube and found success with Firefox add-ons. One is called “unhook” which has a range of features, but namely it disables the front page and the side recommendations that keep you infini-clicking through more videos! (All of this is toggleable as well, in case you want to go on an algorithm odyssey for a bit.)

The other one is “clickbait blocker” I think it’s called. It replaces the video thumbnails with a frame from the middle of the video.

I swear both of these have seriously given me SO MUCH time back. YouTube opens to a main totally blank page now so I can go straight to my music playlists without getting mentally-hijacked, or search specific Blender tutorials or something without infinite recommendations. It’s awesome!!

This. Open source passion is the future if we’re gonna have any positive impact. Dedication to a single field has its advantages but the “system” is unfairly built with that being the only valid path.

EDIT: *Sorry I ended up writing a manifesto here but hey it’s an ADHD community I hope I’m among fellows LMAO. *

Our agile obsessions are a significant strength, especially with how we can combine so many disparate interests!

I look for example, at the maker communities around 3D printers with things like the RepRap project. Thanks to all those hackers and engineers, I learned how to turn my first printer, a literal fire-hazard China kit, into a decent fabrication device.

People are rescuing computers destined for landfills and deemed “obsolete” and “end of life”, and sticking Linux on them to be enjoyed for years to come, fighting for right-to-repair, hacking vendor-locked farm equipment, just because they can, and they’re trying to do something.

Also look at the “Corsi-Rosenthal Box” ! It’s just a simple elegant design, open sourced, that unlocks non-proprietary and effective air filtration! (“$800 air purifiers with wonky proprietary filters hate this one simple box!” Lol)

There’s also the Meshtastic project, using low powered devices to create an off-grid “internet” in rural locales.

And what about the very famous “project” that released a ton of paywalled academic literature to anybody with a curious mind? (What HEROES!)

I think OP’s plastics recycling research must go the same way, and I’m personally obsessed with it too, despite lacking a degree! I hate watching the world drown in the stuff, and profiteer-science isn’t gonna save us from the oceans and mountains of garbage they created. In fact, they’re likely too busy researching how to increase production. And the marketing departments are figuring out how to green-wash it.

Saving the world from plastic is going to involve a bunch of hobbyists deploying their home-built plastic-munching drones and breeding plastic-dissolving algae in their own greenhouses.

It’s happening already! I see a future of Game developers and database admins, former-gifted-kid baristas (I see you and love you <3), schoolteachers, Youtubers, Linux nerds, artists, political scientists…

…all becoming amateur engineers and arguing pedantically on Lemmy/Reddit/whatever about the optimal setups to breed plastic-dissolving mushroom enclosures or which motors work best for an open-source machine-learning plastics recognizer algorithm released on GitLab that grinds and funnels all the stuff into separate bins, or showing off how they safely filter VoC’s in their garage while they’re melting grocery bags into filament or something.

Capitalists will rush to take the credit when we succeed, obviously, but that’s another conversation.

The point is, especially in hard sciences, we’re all raised to think we need permission from mighty level 100 gatekeepers and assigners-of-credits and granters-of-certificates.

We DON’T need permission.

In fact, I’d say rigid academic science paradigms have largely failed us in many ways, at least in the U.S., where basic education is sabotaged in favor of breeding the ideal consumer-employee, and higher-ed is paywalled by zipcode.

Anecdotally, my spouse went to school for Earth Sciences to learn how to save the planet, but found out the most plentiful career opportunities were for helping oil, mining, and gas giants know where to plunder next. Saving the planet wasn’t paying out that with-a-degree money we were all promised.

Rogue scientists and hacker punk movements and ADHD hyperfixations are what we need more than anything right now. The most learned of them design the plans, and everyone else builds, deploys, and tinkers with it. It WORKS. Time and time again. Sometimes bumbling and messy, but it’s who actually drives the future. Not jackasses in turtlenecks strutting around on stage at CES!

Corpo R&D departments can’t DREAM of that kind of agility!

Get that degree if you’re getting it, I hope it opens many doors for you, truly. But in the end, it’s just a piece of paper.

In my experience, so many of “the professionals” are just busy trying to keep their jobs, which involves kowtowing to corporate masters and neo-gilded-age barons.

The future depends on amateurs. We have all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, and millions of eyes and ready hands in our bazaars and cathedrals.

So are Dragonflies! They are absolutely mind-blowing predictive hunters.

If you’re referring to the “many-worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, I think DeWitt . . .

It just hit me like a truck, why the main character in Bioshock Infinite was Booker DeWitt. Beautiful writing, that game…

They will likely be very upset by how the outcomes actually affect them… And then blame those (unimaginative schoolyard insult) dEmOcRaT lEfTiSt LiBeRaLS for things like getting abused by their bosses even more, past the point where it turned them on. =\

Lol the first 99 are just the lyrics to “God bless the U.S.A” over and over and over and over…

That’s the scary thing about “banning” on an international scale…Somewhere, somebody’s gonna do it, and a fair number of countries are still run by madmen who can’t (and/or just won’t) feed their own people but think enriching uranium is priority 1.

It’s an ugly reality.

I prefer to think of it as a colosseum. :D

Hey that’s very kind of you. Thanks! :)

Sometimes a topic hits me and I end up using Lemmy as a writing prompt haha. I’m glad if it resonates with people though. One day I’ll start a blog even if people don’t really bother with those much anymore. :p

Hope you’re having a fantastic one!

It’s worth a lot to investors but not a lot to society.

Man, why does this seem to be where ALL the money is at anymore? =\

“In a negotiation about wearing black vs. brown shoes, compromise is wearing two different colored shoes. Nobody gets what they want and one of you ends up looking like an idiot.”

Paraphrased from memory from a book called “Never Split the Difference: Negotiate as if Your Life Depends on it”

This is the most hilariously written PSA against the whole “cats and a saucer of milk” trope holy crap LOL.

I don’t know where that nonsense started but it’s definitely not beneficial to the

Little snake eyed bean toed fluff cheeked lactose intolerating quadrupeds.

Points for the interrobang! :)

Before I post this, I apologize for the content length:

Yeah this one hurts, because I’ve heard it all my life yet in MOST situations when I research a job and think “Hey that could be alright!”

There’s always some nasty hidden majority of it that seems to exist solely to make sure nobody enjoys doing it too much. Like there’s some misery quotient to be filled. Misery must be some kind of profit currency as a means of doing business…

As a hypothetical example: You like working with your hands and think assembling widgets or tools might be your thing. You romanticize taking pride in your work and imagining the end user being happy with your efforts.

But you find that once you get there, you’re a slave to some Taylorism machine that demands infinite widgets in increasingly unrealistic timespans or else. And you never see the finished product. They also ban music and glare at you like criminals the entire time.

Or perhaps you envision that hardworking but noble slice-of-life-anime vibe, where you and some cool co-workers run a coffee shop and you’re determined to earn a reputation for the perfect brew… except it’s just you, by yourself, and a long line of grouchy jerks, and some machine is there yelling at you if you’re not doing so many transactions-per-hour and your manager is displeased because you aren’t selling two-coffees-and-a-plastic-tumbler per customer or something.

Less hypothetical: People tell me I’d make a great teacher. Yeah, I don’t need to elaborate on those realities. (God bless you, teachers. Seriously.)

The education system is also just a human conveyor belt at this point.

Where are the jobs that are “just okay” or “fine”? What happened to the humble honest living? It seems like everything can fit under David Graeber’s "Bullshit Jobs" checklist anymore.

With job satisfaction it seems either 1:100,000 odds like “career actor” or “beloved artist” or something, or you’re just in the soul-grind machine that takes a perfectly human craft or interaction and forces it through a filter of spreadsheets and “KPIs” and “metrics” and “management” that makes everyone want to stop waking up.

I find a lot of resonance in this comment, but my experience is striking out in 3D art.

Thankfully I’m friends with the client and it’s not a hard deadline but I’m a month over on a sculpt because I have to learn new techniques, particular to this model, and I feel the need to get it right the first time because it reflects on me.

I know I’ll get faster with experience but I’m asking myself if doing this professionally from a for-hire standpoint is going to make me loathe it in the long run, because business is all about faster and more and more and faster. I’m considering making my own work to sell as 3D printables or games in the future while I keep the lights on by slinging coffee or something…

You’re totally right. I just want to be in a position where I’m not “face of the house” and actually get to talk with coworkers once in a while.

Jobs these days seem to love putting people by themselves. I don’t even mind being by myself with a task where I can listen to music or something, but with whiny customers? Nightmare.

The coworkers on the other side of the building who weren’t about to snap had something in common: They worked beside someone else occasionally, who wasn’t their boss.

Before that, I was in a retail situation where I would have a cool coworker, in a small space, otherwise empty store, getting things done. But the manager would squawk at us about “hearing a lot of talking” and “that doesn’t sound like work.” Absolutely psychotic and I have no idea how I put up with that behavior.

If you’ll be my bodyguard, I can be your long lost pal!

This is comedy gold where the heck is the recognition over here, can we get some recognition for this comment up here please!?

I bet the Solarpunk and homesteading / permaculture communities might have some ideas on this!