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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: April 17th, 2024

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  • 10K is a home solar investment. Where I live, people tend to live in multi-family buildings about 3-6 floors high, often split between siblings and their families. Depending on how many are in the country year-round, that might even be enough for the whole building with careful management. Obviously wouldn’t be the same if the neighbors are strangers. (I appreciate that the familial emphasis might seem a bit random in your culture). Ideally 10K might just be enough for one or two households.

    The much more interesting prompt is 10B, imo.

    10B? Oh man. I’m in Lebanon. We’ve effortlessly squandered more generous fortunes than a measly 10B grant, but here’s how I’d do it:

    1B: buses, trams and parking garages to decongest some of the nicer (and underperforming, touristy) old town areas. Should give them a sorely needed boost 3B: modern seaside train running from north to south, with a small number of branches into the interior. Mostly freight. 3B: start phase of a Beirut metro. It’s not enough for a full metro system especially with our geological conditions, but the core city isn’t too big and one line should be feasible? 2B: functional army so we still have civilian infrastructure next time our noisy neighbor gets a hissy fit (infrastructure is worthless if it’s destroyed) 1B: modern fossil fuel power plant. Yeah it’s not green, but we generate a fraction of our needed power, meaning most people have to pay off a local generator mob for electricity. They use diesel and relatively inefficient smaller generators. Our existing ancient power plants use dogshit-tier diesel. I insist that some kind of LNG plant maybe would actually make the situation more green. As it stands the convenience of combustible fuel is more pertinent than the environmental cost







  • I find the technology interesting but AI as a social phenomenon has been abhorrent.

    I think most of us here have a similar view. Plagiarism machine is accurate, but that’s what a Google search looks like to someone from 1985. Not that I don’t prefer getting linked to information sources rather than getting incoherent slop.

    I’ve not hated using local image generation to mock up ideas or turn around a private joke meme with friends. I have hated every advertisement bombarding me with nonsense buzzwords and leaders at work not understanding the technology. But I’m not an artist or writer whose work is getting chewed into a machine that gets all the credit. And I’m not a woman who could be blackmailed (or at least be robbed of agency) by fake nudes. Machine learning is a power tool, unfortunately people are just bastards.


  • ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.comtohmmm@lemmy.worldhmmm
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    2 months ago

    Not going to lie, as someone from a society where religious buildings are generally never reused into something else, I get mixed feelings seeing them being reused. Yes it’s good that they can still bring people together, it’s good not to knock decent walls down, but I don’t know. I’m not very religious but I often feel like in my community the church brings people together, even if the services don’t mean very much to me after two decades of Catholic school all but beat my faith out of me.

    “Churches in the west being changed into parking garages/clubs/restaurants/forced toddler trans surgery centers/mosques” is kind of a meme among the older generation of Christians in Lebanon. And by meme I mean they believe that 110% of western churches have been destroyed and that it’s a sign of the end times.

    I have mixed feelings on this topic usually. But boxing? Boxing in an old church sounds rad as hell.

    I don’t know why but it feels like it works. Community space, an activity that requires mutual respect, something raw that people have done for thousands of years, there’s an undeniable cool factor.



  • There’s always some chud who stumbles in from the wrong instance to say “No You!” whenever Israel commits a new war crime. I’m looking forward to hearing how you’re going to justify

    I’ve learned to mentally prepare myself before reading comments and accept that some people will never fundamentally see me as a human being. And that’s fucked up but it’s something I need to understand to be able to explain the situation we’re in to those who are actually worth the time to convince.

    Some people will look at photos of war destruction and maybe even feel sad about it. But it’ll never be their cities and communities, so they look at these photos and think it only happens to “those” countries. They’re countries “with war”, “probably because of terrorism”, essentially the “enlightened” understanding is that “these people are born to die from war”.

    These people will never understand that the rubble they see on their screens was vibrant communities, places where people who watched the same TV shows and football matches as them lived. War victims aren’t a special type of human who exist only to suffer to make your news segments sad. I struggle to get across how normal these people are.

    I think in part I used to be someone who thought this way. Lebanon isn’t Syria, Iraq, Palestine, it’s not an African country undergoing civil war, it’s not Serbia in the 90s and it’s not Haiti after a natural disaster. It hadn’t been any of these things since the early 90s. When I saw cities in Syria getting flattened on the TV it was sad but all those people were War People, not like us, couldn’t be us. (Situation is more complicated with Syria because at one point over a million Syrian people were displaced into Lebanon, a country with an official population of 4 million. I’m sure even the most accepting person of refugees could see how this is unsustainable)

    The reason people cheer when Israel murders us is that they don’t think we’re people. It’s that simple. They think we’re destined for the slaughterhouse anyway and that we’re essentially terrorists for standing in the way instead of lying down to make the process easier on the Merkava’s suspension. Just look at that war footage! We are just blood for the blood god.

    There’s nothing ironic about how every single person who has been murdered in this war who I personally know are people who hate the “terrorists” who they have been executed for “being a part of”. It’s how this works, it’s murder of normal people who are exactly like you and exactly like me. The cruelty has always been the point.




  • I once read a comment on the old site about how Skyrim’s combat is like mashing WWE action figures together.

    I completely agree but I don’t think that’s a weakness at all. Maybe when it released, the game was seen as a grand RPG by more casual people and as a watered down Oblivion by older ES players.

    But I think by looking at it not through the lens of a grand RPG, but as a familiar, comforting brain-off experience, it really shines. It really gave us the most it could for how low effort it is to play, and I mean that in a good way.

    I remember getting recommended a YouTube video (by the algorithm) called something like “why do we still like Skyrim” and I thought the video was very disappointing. And I think the video’s thesis was about the same as mine in this comment. I wanted it to be something like this:


    I associate the game with a long tradition of RPGs that I wasn’t around for, as one of the last great games we got before the priorities of the industry shifted again. The graphics didn’t need to be perfect, the comically small number of VAs didn’t need AI bullshit, the straightforward story lines don’t need to be groundbreaking. The music and atmosphere though are immaculate. It’s a game with a ton of flaws, even some jank that is endearing in hindsight. It just works!

    Throw on the modding aspect and you have a very “pure” PC gaming experience. This is exactly what I want from a game, something that’s good enough to just be fun to run around aimlessly in, without feeling like I need a podcast to play in the background, that I can just lose hours in.

    I’m playing a much higher effort game now. Workers and Resources Soviet Republic makes the Cities Skylines 2 look like drawing stick figure houses. WRSR is absurdly complex and is super engrossing when you’re in it, if you’re wired to enjoy these types of games. However, I need to be mentally ready to jump in.

    With Skyrim I just launched it when I was bored, and I was less bored after.

    I insist: Skyrim’s simplicity is what made it work.


  • Role playing? Parading on social media?

    I’m literally in Lebanon. My original hometown is being bombed, and might be annexed like in the 1980s. I’m helping the displaced folks in shelters every goddamn day. Our EMTs and their centers are being struck (100 of our medical staff killed so far). It’s an absolute apocalypse for many people, many of the most vulnerable here. Neighborhoods are gone, do you understand? One day we plan to help displaced friends get their valuable stuff out of their homes, the next day the homes are just gone. Ashes. No combatants or weapons, just homes turned to ashes. I’m lucky enough to only hear the bombs and sonic booms where I live, and to feel the occasional distant thud.

    And what’s happening in Lebanon is only a fraction of the misery in Gaza.

    When we see them drop a strike over the city, we don’t think “yay bingo buzzword”. We’re not selling you on feeling bad for us. Just because you live in a coddled country it doesn’t mean the real crimes happening elsewhere are buzzwords to annoy you. If there’s an absolute laundry list of crimes we are facing, how is it our fault?

    If it makes you feel better, your marches in the west are what looks like role play to us. You ask your governments and supposed representatives too nicely to stop supporting these crimes and in return they make fun of you and ignore these urgent pleas. They dare you to not support them even when they do the opposite of what you want.

    Don’t patronize me. I’m not the one who’s only angrily typing online. I’m blocking you.