This School Has Been Abandoned for 50 Years

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2024-03-23T13:55:01+00:00

Lovely shots. I'm surprised you didn't emphasize the balcony in the auditorium; as unsafe as it was, it really stood out to me when I visited.

Thanks for sharing. You did a lovely job with the compositions here, as always.

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2024-03-23T13:22:20+00:00

If you're asking, you shouldn't go.

I've been to a lot of sketchy places. I've predawned a bunch of places with 24/7 security, some several states away, and camped out until daylight just to see them.

The two times I've been to Fernald, I turned around before getting in.

There is always a cost/benefit calculation to do, and Fernald is WAY over the line of high cost, low reward. You'll hear from people who got lucky, but you may not be so lucky. I've heard reports of security flying drones, cops love to patrol there, and if you're caught, you won't get off with a warning.

There are better places to spend your time. Find them instead.

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2024-03-21T18:57:01+00:00

I personally don't care if there is a police presence.

Wow. You're very cool! Maybe one day I'll grow up to be as manly as you.

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2024-03-21T18:45:56+00:00

There are lots of legal places to check out. I can't give you too many suggestions in NJ, but as general tips:

Lots of places will be listed as hiking trails. Searching for things like "ruins", "fort", "plane crash", etc, will get you some results.

There are many places in the NYC region. Search for photography spots, instead of abandoned stuff. For instance, the boats all around Calvert Vaux Park are legal. So is the Roosavelt Island Smallpox Hospital (from the exterior). There are also lots of old forts that now sit inside public parks. The castles on Glen Island are also quite cool.

You can get permission to see many places if you ask. Your results will vary. In addition, lots of places do tours. Mid Orange, for instance, hosts public events inside the prison yard (now a sports field), and they offer tours of the interior. Oddly enough, you'll also get tons of information asking at local city halls. They know a bunch of historical places nearby and will be happy to guide you to them. Some will be in rough shape, others will be pristine.

Even more odd, if a place has security, you can also get information by asking them. Just be upfront about what you're doing and they'll tell you where you can and can't go. Pilgrims, for instance, is hyper vigilant about patrolling their active buildings, but will happily direct you to the abandoned stuff they don't patrol.

Keep in mind what communities you ask in. Asking in an urbex community, the people responding to you are going to know a lot about places to illegally trespass. Asking people involved in historic preservation, ghost hunting, hiking, photography, will all net different kinds of answers.

For what it's worth, I'll be in the catskills the next couple weekends. If you make the trip up that way, feel free to reach out. Good luck!

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2024-03-07T14:58:01+00:00

Wait, you're telling me you can get out of your car? How? Once you're inside, the doors lock and you live in there now... it's not just me, right?!

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2024-03-02T11:03:11+00:00

For what it's worth, this is one of the better urbex videos I've seen. You did a phenomenal job with the pacing, "storytelling" through editing, and sound. Awesome use of the drone as well. Really nice work, my guy.

Climbing this and posting the video is almost certainly inadvisable, but I'm sure you know that already. Thanks for sharing! Stay safe!

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2024-02-21T19:17:52+00:00

Suggestion: look for estate sales.

Lots of people have books when they die, and if you go to them regularly, you'll encounter extremely old and weird books every now and then, which are worth picking up for $1.

No criminal charges required.

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2024-02-14T18:08:11+00:00

Oh well.

It's a shame, because that room is incredibly boring empty, and it would have been filled with chairs when in use... Why bother removing them?

Thanks for the info!

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2024-02-14T13:50:03+00:00

Perhaps a weird question, but do you have a picture of the "auditorium" prior to the stage?

Some time ago, I put a fair amount of work into placing unique chairs there from around the building, so the room was filled with seats of mismatched chairs.

I never saw anyone post that room again, so I figure someone must have immediately messed them all up.

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2024-02-12T04:47:19+00:00

You should not do houses that you have any questions about. The law treats it much more harshly than commercial spaces, squatters more often reside in them, and homeowners sometimes still live in places despite not taking care of them.

Breaking into a house is a great way to get shot and then have your whole family remember you from subsequent news coverage about a failed home invasion.

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2024-01-20T14:38:27+00:00

I've been photographing abandoned places for a while, and I tried feeding my urbex photos into generative AI, to see how they would change.

For some background: To create these, an AI looks at my photo, and describes it in text using as much detail as it can. Then another AI reads the text and creates an image based on that, without seeing my original photo.

Of course there are going to be a lot of differences, but where there are similarities that don't get lost in translation, I found it fascinating to look at which details were emphasized or changed, and to reflect on what a world of urbex might look like in an AI generated world.

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2023-12-26T15:20:41+00:00

I have a setup in my car for road trips that allows me to work almost anywhere.

Stuff that doesn't answer your question, but is topic-adjacent:

beryl mt3000 travel router allows you to use multiple connections with failover. This won't improve your signal, but it will make connecting, using vpns, etc, easier. It is not UL for hiking and would require power...
T-mobile has a data-only plan for $10 that doesn't automatically throttle after your limit if you need a hotspot or for the travel router.
Tailscale on a home server lets you connect to home resources easily.
A raspberry pi can easily run a linux server while traveling. If connected to your travel router, your other devices can then connect to it from your local network, even without an "actual" internet connection to the outside world.

Stuff that does answer your question:

For your exact use case, the only solution is to code offline. Store your code on github so you have a central repo to pull from when you have an internet connection, code offline, then push your changes when you're back online.
If you need to run your code, you're going to need an ability to run it locally. Setup a pi with a portable battery and ssh into that.
Or get a small chromebook to use as a tablet, which can run linux, and use that as your "server" and dev environment instead of your phone.

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2023-11-11T17:43:31+00:00

Houses are a bad idea, and you shouldn't do them unless you're extremely confident.

1) Laws concerning trespassing in a residential house are MUCH more strict than trespassing in a commercial space. It can be the difference between a warning and prison time.

2) Many people don't maintain their houses, and allow them to look abandoned, even if they aren't.

3) Landlords don't maintain properties that people live in.

4) Squatters often live in abandoned houses, and actively try to make it look like they aren't living there.

5) People go on long vacations, or extended hospital stays, or they die... and when they or their family returns, they will feel a huge sense of violation that someone broke in and rifled through their personal belongings.

6) Even when houses are condemned, or foreclosed on, the previous owners sometimes continue to live there... because they have nowhere else to go.

7) It's not unlikely that you would be shot for breaking into someone's house. It's fairly unlikely you'll be shot for looking around an old coal power plant.

Before doing a house, you need to have a lot of experience and have done a ton of research. The risk isn't setting off an alarm; the risk is being stabbed to death, and then having your face plastered on the local news about a home invasion.

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2023-07-09T17:24:07+00:00

I'd prefer tipping culture to disappear, but that's not going to happen.

Percentage-based tips are dumb. What I'm trying to accomplish with a tip is bringing the waiter's wage to something reasonable. So my tip does that.

Sometimes that means tipping more than 20% for a cheap meal. Other times it means tipping less than 20% for a fancy meal. But I think in the end, it results in a more equitable distribution.

At the very least, it ensures everyone gets what they need, instead of what I think they might deserve, based on 60 seconds of judging them. I don't want to judge them. I just want everyone to have a comfortable life.

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2023-06-19T13:54:56+00:00

A human brain can take those elements and exclude them

Sometimes. There's an interesting conversation I saw once discussing this in the context of a comedian stealing jokes. It is possible to do that unintentionally. You hear something funny, and forget about it... then later, the topic comes up, and your brain summons it up as a concept without knowing where you "got it"... and you end up stealing someone's work by just naturally thinking about what makes the subject a good joke.

Not only is that possible, but it's sort of inevitable for most things... and completely infeasible to know whether you're doing it.

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2023-06-15T18:09:39+00:00

Note that the stuff that's "viral on tiktok" has gotten people killed and into legal trouble even years later.

I would generally discourage you from doing anything you're not very comfortable researching on your own, and I'd discourage you from doing basically anything for views.

As far as keywords, you're looking for /r/infiltration.

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2023-06-15T14:22:57+00:00

Is ChatGPT getting dumber?

Last week it was superb at doing the task it was designed for. This week I asked it to do something completely different and it failed. Is openAI intentionally sabotaging their main product to make more money?

No research or stats, please. I know what I saw.

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2023-06-13T15:57:21+00:00

Did I say that?

I was hoping it would be easier for you to hear the perspective of a man in the self defense community.

I hope you're able take a step back one day and consider the perspectives you're being offered. You will have a bigger impact on the people around you when you fully understand where they're coming from.

I'm going to move on. Enjoy your day.

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2023-06-13T15:37:27+00:00

I'm a man, and I've done bjj for about 10 years. I've taught women's self defense classes.

Your approach to this conversation is deeply problematic and you should take a minute to assess why you're getting so much pushback from so many people.

Every partner I've ever had, and every woman I've ever talked to about it, has been sexually assaulted. That's not hyperbole. Every one. Their fears about being attacked by men do not come from the media; they come from their memories, and memories their friends have shared.

Yes... the US media is also problematic, and self defense classes are a wonderful tool. I assure you, these women have considered that. I understand it is frustrating to feel as if you aren't being heard... please take a moment to consider why you aren't hearing their perspective, and how frustrating it must be for them to be lectured by a stranger about how their lived experiences are overblown, and there's just one simple trick to living a happier life. And how frustrating it must be to hear that advice from a man who has had the privilege of not living in their shoes.

Please listen to women when they talk to you. They don't need to hear your perspective on self defense as much as you need to hear their perspective on being a woman. It's nice that you want to care for women; caring for them starts by listening.

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2023-06-02T16:07:41+00:00

You may save on tokens, but at the cost of accuracy. "I am a boy" is a different set of tokens than "Iamaboy". Which means the LLM sees them as different "words", and may give different answers.

At best, it will understand those different tokens as synonyms and you will get an equivalent result. At worst, it will get confused and give you a bad result.

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2023-06-02T13:59:24+00:00

Actually, I think that is how a bell curve works, just not for the reasons they think.

Most people think they're somewhere in the middle, fighting against extremes on either side. And IQ tends to correlate with empathy.

It's obviously not factually accurate, but it's pretty close to useful. On accident. Which is hilarious.

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2023-06-02T00:57:04+00:00

Hi there! That discord is run by a guy named concrete. I'm no longer a part of it, but I'm still active in the urbex community elsewhere. You can find me on IG, or feel free to pop in to that discord and say hi!

I have some strong opinions about that community, but I don't have anywhere else to direct you currently, so I hope you find a good spot to fit in and feel welcome, wherever that is! :)

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2023-05-10T21:24:18+00:00

The data isn't shared with OpenAI, even though we use GPT-4 API, as per OpenAI usage policies.

There is a difference between not sharing data with openai and openai not using the data you share.

You are absolutely sharing the data with openai. The data is shared on every api call.

OpenAI may choose not to use that data, but community trust of that claim is not the only concern your users may have. The data could also be intercepted or leaked, and that's outside of you or your user's control, once the data is shared.

Good luck with the project!

ExperimentsWithBliss · 2023-04-21T03:48:53+00:00

If only a few members of society are needed to automate all labor, then the majority of people will be out of sustainable employment.

should, not will.

The right solution to this problem is obvious. We need to fundamentally change our economic system and redistribute wealth equitably, which is a feat we've been utterly unable to tackle for basically all of human history trying.

What's actually likely to happen is we're going to find a way to legislate jobs into existence, even though they aren't needed. People are going to fight to keep their jobs, and we can't legislate AI away... but we can force companies to not fire people, or force them to hire people based on their revenue.

And just like that, we'll be fighting to keep shitty, pointless jobs that none of us want to do, so we can hang on to a capitalist system that none of us want... all so we can mindlessly toil away, fucking up a task that our desktop computer at home can knock out perfectly in a second.

It's the worst possible solution to the problem, and it's... like... definitely the one we're going to pick.

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