I’m 51, I grew up with media fear mongering of the Cold War, the hole in the ozone layer and AIDS. I don’t think there has ever been a period in my life where there hasn’t been a threat in some form or another, and I sleep like a baby. We aren’t going backwards, it’s just another day at the office.
If you find yourself worrying about events on the other side of the world then you need to switch off the news and focus on what you can control in your own life. Sure, WW3 could be around the corner, Covid 2 Electric Boogaloo could be more lethal or the icebergs could melt, but we can’t do a goddamn thing about it, so what is worrying going to accomplish?
Worry about paying the mortgage, making sure your family are fed, and stay safe.
Isn’t this a mindset for complacent people, though?
Don’t get me wrong, I think exactly like you. But sometimes, I feel that by thinking this way, I’m just taking a shortcut. It seems like an easy way out for issues that should be tackled by humanity (of which you and I are a part), and instead of contributing, we’re just letting it happen.
Think about activists, for example. To do what they do, they can’t just turn off the news and be oblivious to what’s happening. They might not be directly solving the problems, but they are doing something within their reach, even if it means feeling overwhelmed, like OP seems to be feeling.
Agreed. If enough of us look the fuck up instead of taking what we’re fed… maybe it doesn’t have to be “another day at the office”? I was in middle school when we had the ill-fated assembly in the cafeteria to watch the first teacher astronaut go up, but that didn’t kill my dreams of exploring the stars (the realization in my teens of its extreme unlikelihood did).
If the “best advice” is just to keep your head down and focus on your work, then that’s more about accepting your fate as an infinitesimally tiny cog in someone else’s cash engine. Fuck that.
Beginners/basic programming for non-IT. There’s a lot of people that might want to do very simple things with arduino or other mini computers. Python, or even simple Linux tasks, that don’t want to start a whole “Programming lessons A-z” multi-stage class-format learning adventure.
Hmm… I bet the owners of r/roguelikedev could be convinced to run a Lemmy community, seems their style. I think they can be reached via discord. I might look into that, they were a good group, and helpful.
Having a penis. Though, it’s only the conservatives who consider that unattractive, and based on how popular that kind of porn is in the deep south, they’re lying about it anyway.
I think there may be a factor of sample size; There’s something like 40 million Canadians, 40 million Australians, 60 million British, and 340 million Americans. So if you take a random sample of English speech on any topic, it’s statistically most likely to be from an American.
I want to live in a Star Trek Federation post-scarcity world. No need to work unless one wants to, no need for a salary. And that applies to everyone around me too.
That won’t stop population growth. Remember… the stress of work is gone. Now we all can have big happy families if we want without ANY pressure to ever juggle all those stressful conflicting priorities that take up familial resources. Voluntary contraception would not keep population stable or provide a sustainable ecosystem. I personally would have at least six kids. My wife would want more than that. You are free to be childless if you so choose of course, but statistically proven biological imperative drives us to procreate as-is, it’s literally human nature.
The biggest problem will quite literally be real estate. Unless you can picture a fully urbanized earth where everyone lives in tiny little cubby holes and not much else as being some kind of utopia. Even then the land on earth is finite.
Eh? Why does birth rate drop in countries with top economies versus those that don’t?
Developed countries tend to have a lower fertility rate due to lifestyle choices associated with economic affluence where mortality rates are low, birth control is easily accessible and children often can become an economic drain caused by housing, education cost and other cost involved in bringing up children. Higher education and professional careers often mean that women have children late in life. This can result in a demographic economic paradox.sauce
In order to maintain that high quality of life you have to work a shitload and to get those high paying jobs you have to spend years of your life upskilling and competing for better jobs.
Remove the economic factor and give everyone that astounding QOL and boom… we can breed without worries of providing and we don’t even have to stress about maintaining our QOL. We can all be stay at home parents who just raise our kids if we choose to.
I can’t afford a 4-6+++ bedroom house in the Greater Boston area where my friends and family are without having soul-crushing long commute times. I need a commute because I need to work to put food on the table and pay for rent. Remove the barriers and keep at least even QOL and I will not work, i’ll instead devote my time to doing literally anything else.
Missing a lot of other pieces from that same source:
In developing countries children are needed as a labour force and to provide care for their parents in old age. In these countries, fertility rates are higher due to the lack of access to contraceptives and generally lower levels of female education. The social structure, religious beliefs, economic prosperity and urbanisation within each country are likely to affect birth rates as well as abortion rates,
Also:
fertility rates of immigrants to the US have been found to decrease sharply in the second generation as a result of improving education and income.
Quite a bit there that contradicts your thesis of people moving to improved economic situations suddenly wanting 6+ kids and the population growing out of control. If people don’t need kids for labor, don’t need kids to support them in their old age, and women are educated and in control of their own bodies, there is reason to think the world might not even reach replacement rates.
We’re talking about a potential utopia where education is available to everyone, not restricted to first world countries. If you bring everyone UP to western world QOL and they are educated, you have to consider it in that aspect.
The immigrant fertility rate thing is because they come from a place with low expected QOL so they don’t think they need the american dream with air conditioning, going out to eat or having nice things and instead go with more kids because they were raised that way. The second generation gets used to say american QOL and wants to have those same nice things the neighbors have- after all they grow up in the american school system meeting other kids right?.. so you need to work to get those high QOL things and suddenly you’re in the situation I have described: needing more professional attainment to keep up the expected QOL and delaying children.
Does that make sense?
Do you have any kind of evidence showing that free of all financial constraints people will not have children in a mid-high COL area?
Do you have any evidence that free-from-labor and wholly financially stable people would want 6+ kids?
Billionaires basically live in a utopia now and they don’t (generally) have 6+ kids. Musk is considered a weirdo and probably racist for wanting so many “genetically superior” offspring.
I don’t mind AI art at all as long as it’s not posted in any art of photo based communities (besides ones intended for AI art.)
When it comes to memes, I don’t even care if those are labeled as containing AI art. Memes are naturally derivative, so labeling it as AI art would be like linking the exact stock photo you used. Wouldn’t be mad if we did label them though. Just don’t want there to be a double standard.
Encountering AI art in photo communities is super annoying though. It’s increasingly common for people to submit obviously AI photos and that’s super annoying.
I don’t enjoy it. And I see issue with many of the big AI companies but I don’t object to people posting AI art if that brings them pleasure in this world of ours. I just block the dedicated AI art communities, and let them continue as they were.
I think it’s important to keep the ai art inside the communities made specially for it.
Outside of a specific community, label, label, watermark, and label again.
I do enjoy messing with ideas in ai generators, it’s most of what I’ve engaged with here. I just don’t want it shoved into everyone’s feed if it’s not something you’re into. Kinda defeats the purpose of a fediverse.
The grand piano is the latest and greatest evolution of the piano. It’s become what it is over improvements over centuries.
The upright is a compromise. People want to play a suitable size for most homes and isn’t as expensive.
That doesn’t make an upright bad at all. It’s good in that it got the piano into the homes and hands of many more people. A good upright can be as good or better than a poorly built or maintained grand. Most people are also not capable of outplaying the quality of their instruments as well.
What the other commenter said is true. The mass of all that wire and wood vibrating generates the harmonics that make the sound louder or more expressive. Think the sound differences between a guitar and a uekele. Same basic design, but different string length and mass. You get richer, more complex and nuanced sound, and it’s also naturally capable of being louder and has better projection for performing in an age before application.
Is a grand piano necessary for good sound? That’s subjective like any other form of art. I take my piano lessons on an upright at my teacher’s house. It’s an ok piano, and still way better than I am at playing it for a long time. For some types of music, it is probably even a better choice, as some pieces will be written for or more commonly heard through an upright, making that the “proper” sound.
At home, I have an electric piano, a Rhodes. That uses no piano wire and instead makes sound by the hammers hitting pieces of what is essentially coat hanger wire fastened onto rectangular steel weights. Does it sound like a grand or upright? Not at all. But it still sounds great! I practice my classical pieces on it, but other types of music will sound more appropriate on it. Plus it’s smaller than an upright, and comes in at a featherweight 150 pounds or so.
People discuss and debate these things with every instrument and it can get quite intense as possible debate string brands, what woods different pieces are made of, and all that stuff, but it ultimately comes down to what you think best. Every individual instrument has its own voice to some extent. Even in pure electric instruments, people will prefer a Yamaha sound to Roland or Nord, etc.
Future pianos will probably have a different sound from today’s as well. As we develop new materials and new key actions, etc the sound will change and get better or worse depending who you asked. Bach’s piano sat on a table and had no foot pedals. Some people will play Bach pieces with pedals while others call it blasphemy!
But between me and the other person, I hope this has helped with your question!
I don’t consider it art. The only “creative” part is the prompt itself. Even then, it’s really just users trying to be as fanciful (or perverted) as possible. Once the prompt is ingested, the code takes its cues to remix the turgid crap that’s called the internet today.
Yes, once in a while it produces something “interesting” but this is an accident and not the desired outcome. Ask any artist about this - I’ve never met any that consider all their work as “good” (Ahem, Damien Hirst) and purposefully filter their own output. Ask AI to do that. It can’t. It will literally continue to shit things out until you ask it to stop. Again, like Damien Hirst…
The downside is it’s cheap and requires literally no skill. This means that soon, it will be pretty much everywhere, and thus we’ll continue the inexorable slide into abject mediocrity.
I’m not scared of the AI uprising. I’m scared it’s going to bore us all to death.
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