Noxy

I’ve seen nothing that AI can do that justifies the economic or ecological cost.

this sentence is worthy of being on a bumper sticker. very well said!

Cascadia would be interesting. Washington, Oregon, California, maybe British Columbia too.

I’m not even remotely an expert on any of this, but some thoughts:

Document all of this, and make sure thay documentation is securely stored somewhere where he can’t access it or destroy it, and be sure to keep backups.

I’d say this should be enough for a restraining order, but I believe you when you say that could provoke him, so I suppose prepare and protect the info you would need for a restraining order just in case it ever gets that bad.

I’d also gently suggest avoiding most social media (twitter, bluesky, facebook, instagram, tiktok) since that could be used to locate you, tho if you’re already on Lemmy I’m probably preaching to the choir on that point!

As for self defense, pepper spray is probably your best bet. If you can start taking some self defense classes as well, even better. A concealed pistol is also another option but that of course makes the risk of any potential encounter a lot more complicated and you’d really need to practice with it regularly, which gets expensive with ammo (on top of the actual gun, permit fees, holster, etc), not to mention the risks of merely having a gun in your home, but that’s of course only an informed decision you can make

I will never respect Facebook’s attempted rebranding, especially not a rebranding based on the name of their hilariously failed product.

facebook is facebook. instagram is facebook. whatsapp is facebook.

Fix It Again, Tony

I genuinely can’t remember my parents ever talking to me about sex.

Catholic middle school “educated” me. I remember going to see a lady who yelled out a dozen or two names of various STIs as part of some abstinence bullshit.

Honestly not sure if it was a good or bad thing that I didn’t really know I was gay back then. but I sure as hell am glad I went to public high school instead of a catholic one.

Ferrari Luce.

Sure it looks goofy but nobody whose opinion matters can afford it anyways. I similarly cannot afford it but I think it’s probably fine.

Problem is, even tho I don’t subscribe, the data connection is still there, and it’s still used to deliver some OTA updates, and a recall on the battery involves some remote monitoring that, so even tho I don’t subscribe I still don’t feel entirely safe from being surveilled.

I’ve thought a bunch about seeing if I can just pull a fuse and kill connectivity without killing anything else, but the battery recall thing is reason enough to avoid that for the time being. Besides, Flock (and other) surveillance cameras popping up everywhere are such a bigger problem anyways that it kinda kills my motivation to bother

I’m not saying I trust Porsche at ALL with my data. Far from it. In fact I at least trust Google to have better software engineering standards, even if their software is inherently surveillance evil bullshit.

But I haven’t been able to confirm that Porsche actually DOES log and exfiltrate location or navigation data. Certainly not in my Lexis Nexus report, and there’s been nothing I’ve seen reported about them when a bunch of other automakers have been called out for selling surveillance access.

What I do know is that Google is confirmed to be doing so. Unless I’ve missed some reporting or leak, I can’t confirm that Porsche is collecting, exfiltrating from my car without an active data plan, and selling GPS and nav routing data from it.

keeping the navigation database up to date is one. no way to update maps in my Taycan without paying $27 a month for Porsche Connect, which I have never paid.

and I dislike relying on Android Auto given the surveillance inherent in enabling it. it’d be nice to not have fucking subscription navigation maintenance

Steam Deck. Hands down.

do you seriously expect anyone who might be plotting to take up arms against the US government to talk about it publicly??

I managed to get my immediate family all on Signal, so that’s my vote!

Bearded vultures swallow bones, often shattered after they drop them onto rocks from great heights, but sometimes whole. They are so badass.

Do you even know what a buzzard actually is though? Go look up a photo of a buzzard and make sure you aren’t mistaking buzzards with vultures.

Both are vital parts of theor ecosystems though, I’d hate to see either vanish.

My pick might very well be humans for how fucked up we are and how much we destroy and cause suffering for all the other animals

After playing a few musical instruments for a few decades but never having satisfying experiences playing with friends, I joined an adult band program at a nearby music school. It’s been great! Three performances so far this year, and it got me in a separate cover band cuz one of the guitarists was in the same program, and we did an open mic night a month or two ago that was short but awesome, and we have a real gig coming up in a week.

Before 2025 I never performed music for anyone other than maybe a few friends who were already visiting me and thus had no polite choice to not listen!

The music school I do this with is a local “School of Rock” franchise but some other music schools have similar programs. Highly recommend!

I feel like some amount of desensitization to and more frequent depictions of torture in mainstream entertainment is somewhere in the mix.

I’m talking about how the original song was made and how complicated the sound was, through a frame of recreating it, in a post about cover songs.

I was talking about the original. Unless you’re somehow aware of some recording of me performing a song I have no memory of having ever covered, which would certainly be interesting

I’m learning Running Up That Hill right now to perform, and “bland” has to be as close to “objectively” incorrect as anything musical can be. The sound is so novel and unique.

The amount of time and effort and research and diving into deep synth menus to recreate that sound is kinda insane.

Start with a cello sample. Set the pitch envelope to start with a lower pitch, then quickly slide up to the actual note. Cut off the amp envelope fairly quickly. Make both of those happen slower when lower keys are played. Then delay in some super specific way I still don’t quite understand, and reverb too.

Not to mention the structure of the song is difficult as hell (for me at least) to memorize, it’s not quite typical verse chorus back and forth

I can understand not liking it, but calling it bland is pretty wild to me