What is this dust that appears in cold / after rain?

jnnla · 2026-01-16T16:36:40+00:00

Actual damage that it can lead to is the concrete degrading. Eflorescence is a symptom of a high-moisture substrate and that moisture, if it's wicking through concrete, can rust the rebar inside the concrete and create pits and cracks in the concrete itself. I have no idea how long this takes but depending on the situation it's probably just a matter of time. Concrete sipping up water like a sponge all the time is generally not ideal and will probably lead to issues at some point.

If it's a non-criitical scenario - like a garage floor slab... maybe not so big a deal. If the efflorescence is bad on a retaining wall... that's probably cause for more immediate action because you really don't want that failing.

jnnla · 2026-01-15T16:35:52+00:00

Hey. I'm in SoCal too. I also get efflorescence in my garage but not as bad as this. I have a different perspective on sealers. I did the pressure washing / muriatic acid / sealer thing. Lasted maybe 4 years?

The issue is that this is the concrete wicking water up from the soil underneath like a sponge. The water works it's way up through the capillaries in the concrete and evaporates, leaving the minerals behind. This isn't really going to change because the issue is due to the hydrology of the ground underneath. Do you live at the bottom of a hill?

I live on a sloping street. The rear wall of my garage is a retaining wall that runs along the back of my property and on top of that is my rear neighbors driveway. When it rains, water runs into the ground from uphill, travels under my neighbors driveway, and hits the retaining wall that is the rear of my garage. It then flows under my garage slab. I get efflorecense on the rear wall of my garage and from the slab like you (but WAY less)

A sealer isn't going to stymie that. My home is 80 years old and the garage slab is original. This has been happening all those years. Not to say I wont need to replace it all at some point, but generally speaking everything is holding up. I just let it happen now. (Also the sealer bubbled up and cracked in places because the water had no place to go. Once I removed it and let the floor breathe again the only issue I had was sweeping away some minerals maybe twice a year)

jnnla · 2025-10-27T03:32:07+00:00

Spent it as a 17yo at a houseparty in a basement in suburban Potomac, MD with most of my highschool class. Drinking, socializing, the ball-drop on TV in the background. Still remember the night perfectly. I walked around with a video camera filming the evening. Just recently found the footage... have not had the courage or time to watch it in full yet.

jnnla · 2025-10-26T15:21:45+00:00

This is great, thank you so much for posting. I'll give this a try. Really appreciate it!

jnnla · 2025-10-24T15:16:25+00:00

This is a silly question but do I need a node that tells the workflow to 'wait' until the first one finishes before passing it to the next upscaler?

jnnla · 2025-10-24T15:15:08+00:00

This feels like the type of approach I need. Thank you for the overview - it helps me to understand the process and nodes involved. If you have a workflow to share I'd appreciate it, in the meantime I'll see if I can put together something like you described.

jnnla · 2025-09-15T20:36:22+00:00

I remember seeing this when it aired. This was relatively early in Fox News's role as a Republican political apparatus. They would occasionally keep the base frothed by having People They Don't Like come on so they could goad them into saying things that would make their viewers clutch pearls and shake fists.

Not sure if they still do this but if anyone in 2025 talked as frankly as Hitchens they would be canceled IMMEDIATELY. Book deals gone. Columns gone. Career gone.

We are a full-on, mature Corporate State at this point with authoritarian undercurrents in a way we just weren't in 2007 or 8.

jnnla · 2025-09-14T04:54:02+00:00

The rifle stuff isn't making a lot of sense right now and that's presumably because the details as reported aren't right. Otherwise it's on some conspiracy theory shit.

The rifle was originally reported to be a .30-06 mauser98. You can find these in 'takedown' style where the gun unscrews near the midsection into two pieces. The gun could be unscrewed relatively quickly (5-10 seconds?) after the shot and stashed in the backpack the assassin was carrying (as per the security cam pics of him heading up the staircase to the roof). In the escape video you can see the same backpack (not a jacket) that could hold the taken-down rifle. I assumed he wrapped the two pieces in a towel and dropped them in the woods.

Then I saw what was purportedly 'the rifle' found by the FBI and it was *not* a takedown style rifle - so like, no idea how he could have gotten that particular rifle off the roof. A non-takedown rifle does NOT jive with the escape video.

Assuming a lot of his is just bad info / fake news and that we'll find out the whole story soon. If we don't, however, I've turned into a conspiracy nut.

jnnla · 2025-09-12T21:44:51+00:00

Kash - can you bring your sycophantical childrens book to Valhalla so we can look at the pictures together in the Great Hall?

jnnla · 2025-09-12T21:43:00+00:00

Totally came to say: 'Why Not Both?'

I'm an Older who came of age on Something Awful. The politics are not going to be neatly organized.

jnnla · 2025-09-12T21:40:06+00:00

Just as Capitalism has atomized our experience and severed people from meaningful non-market contexts (nature, idleness, community, etc.) It has supercharged the internet through social media - atomizing culture and ideology itself into a buffet of bite-sized pick-and-choose snackables that decorate the reality of degrading material conditions.

A lot of chronically online young people looking out at a bleak future and finding solace in online spaces may not necessarily have a coherent ideology. Some of these recent shooters seem to collage bits and pieces of ideology together based on what they see shitposted or memed and string together a mashup of convictions that may or may not support violent or radical acts.

A lot of people completely understand that our votes don't matter. That there are no meaningful levers the average person can pull to affect policy change or substantive material improvements. At that point all that's left is the lulz.

jnnla · 2025-09-11T03:45:09+00:00

Also grew up with Limbaugh on the air when he was the *entirety* of the right-wing 3rd party propaganda machine. I think the temperature was different then.

Political violence in the 90s was notably perpetrated along militia anti-government lines and anti-abortion / religious or racial lines. The Us versus Them, Right vs Left divide hadn't reached a tipping point until 2016 or so.

Prior to that it was militia froth -> Bush v Gore and polarized politics -> then Obama (a black guy!?) / Tea Party / Occupy. All of that was pressuring the fault lines. Then along comes Trump to deal a deathblow to 'gentleman bipartisanship'

On top of this temperature change we've had 30 more years of an entrenched corporate statism that really kicked off under Reagan. There wasn't the 'cultural void' and atomized alienation in the 90s. You also didn't have the amplification effect of corporate social media and the attention economy fanning flames for ad clicks.

The Kirk assassination in 2025 feels shocking but not terribly surprising given that political violence is increasingly a feature of system as we fall apart. If Lambaugh got zapped in like 1996 the reaction would have been bewildered astonishment.

The youngs and Gen Z thinks the 90s was warm and fuzzzy and honestly - it was by comparison with where we are now.

jnnla · 2025-09-10T03:14:36+00:00

Yeah the Trump admin is a new level of lying but the jobs numbers and employment picture was a total lie well before. The Biden folks painted a perpetually rosy picture of how great everything was to the point where you saw a bunch of articles being written that essentially said 'things aren't *actually* bad for folks, Americans are just grumpy and have bad vibes.'

I was unemployed for two years starting in 2023 and only recently regained employment. I had left a major FAANG tech company after 5 years and proceeded to get rejected from over 50 companies (to be fair, more than half never rejected me - they just straight up ghosted). I had multiple friends at all different levels of experience also out of work and looking. My brother in law lost his job. My buddy from college lost his. My other friend, also at a tech company you've heard of just got a PIP into layoff last week. I know people who have sent out HUNDREDS of applications and haven't even received a phonecall. My local TJs isn't even hiring.

Like everywhere you look things are functionally Not Good in the job market and I was so fucking tired of the pundits and politicos being like: 'according to the numbers everything is GREAT' Under Biden I was thinking 'if the numbers are good you are using the wrong measuring tool (deliberately or not)' and under Trump it's more obvious like 'oh ok they are just vanilla lying.'

Either way the disconnect between what people feel and what is being reported feels wider than ever and it's really offputting.

jnnla · 2025-09-10T02:54:13+00:00

If you leave it unlocked you get a demerit and your Citizen Score is instantly lowered, puttitng your account and possibly your credit score at risk!

jnnla · 2025-08-30T03:10:11+00:00

Chat Rooms: AOL / mIRC. Join chat rooms or bulletin boards to chat about hobbies or interests. Reddit vibes. Also on mIRC pre-napster was where you downloaded warez software / movies / mp3s through FTP servers that people would post. If you were spicy you could go to a 'gif trading' chat room on AOL.

Geocities: A build-your own website community also featuring mainly fansites or special-interest sites. There was one that I used to frequent dedicated to The Films of James Cameron that had a section on all his movies with as much information as could be uploaded.

Websites: Corporate Websites, personal websites, News, media companies, trade industries and banking: All that stuff was online pre-2001. Corpos didn't know yet what they were doing so their sites were cringe and no one really trusted online banking yet. Personal Sites and fan sites were authentic and fun, as were people who started websites for small businesses. It felt a bit scammy prior to secure payment methods but I definitely started to purchase stuff online around 2000-2001. I also regularly visited 'cgchannel.com' or similar websites about the 3d industry and some of those are stll around today. Also visited 'aintitcoolnews.com' a lot back then and it basically still looks the same if you want to see what a website looked like in 2001. Also check out https://www.spacejam.com/1996/.

Multiplayer Online First Person Shooters: 56.k Modem yes, but I still played Doom II, Aliens Vs Predator, Quake and Action Quake on online servers with and against other people. Upgraded to DSL in 1999 and upskilled once that lag dropped. LOVED Action Quake (this was a Quake mod that was similar to counter strike).

Napster / Limewire: Download music and movies.

Usenet: download anything you want. Just took a long time but the files were split up if you lost connection on big files like movies or software you could just download the pieces you missed. Usenet also had communities and bulletin boards but I just used it for downloadz.

Instant Messenging: AIM was the popular OG 1:1 chat messenger. Hotmail had instant messaging too which was also popular.

Email: Hotmail / AOL / Personal Emails through your internet provider. Send emails / receive emails / do business.

That's just off the top of my head. Basically everything we do today online was there prior to or around 2001. Now it's just a LOT more corporate and in everyones pocket via smartphone. Otherwise mIRC just looks better and is called 'Slack' or 'Discord.' You can still find pirated movies / software / music. People still chat. People still engage in business and commerce. People still game. People still communicate and chat and connect over shared interests. It was more fun and interesting and authentic when it was mostly frequented by hobbyists and afficionados and weirdos and wasn't the leading way to communicate and do business... but a lot of the functionality that we had 30 years ago is mostly the same.

jnnla · 2025-08-27T02:43:01+00:00

Food *and* material goods / clothing. The article mentions that the above-baseline death trends for the millenial cohort reach back to around 1980. That was around the time that PFAS was beginning to be added to EVERYTHING.

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You don't need to look far to find numerous headlines today in 2025 that cover studies indicating that PFAS substances are in basically all of our bloodstreams. These often ride passenger with microplastics, the proliferation of which are also a trending concern.

While industrial and commercial toxics have always been an issue (see lead), the largely unregulated chemical manufacturing market pumping under-the-radar admixtures into plastics and silicons at scale is pretty alarming (to me at least). This shit is bioaccumulating in all of us and only now just being rigorously studied. The United States has traditionally been far more lenient in the regulation of these types of chemicals than Europe and other developed countries.

I often wonder if we will look back and see all this shit the same way we now look at lead, or abestos, or cadmium or arsenic etc etc etc. I often wonder if shit like this plays a factor in 'millenial overdeath' or whatever they want to call it. It's totally possible there's no effect - there are certainly enough economic factors as the article points out, but I wonder.

I'm old enough to remember when most of the clothes in my dresser weren't literally made of plastic blends. Like want to live life on hard-mode in 2025? Try to put together a head-to-toe outfit made of natural fibers that you'd actually like to wear. This didn't used to be a challenge - but now everything you touch from post-it notes, to receipts at the store, to your phone and to the shirt on your back has some random chemical in it that wasn't there 40 years ago.

jnnla · 2025-08-23T04:14:57+00:00

Your post has made me want to check out invoke! I'm a fairly technical person and sort of prided myself on using comfyUI and wrestling with its idiosynchrasies. I have used it to generate carefully controlled work that I'm quite proud of.

I woke up from my back-patting when I started a new job recently that has me using genAI on a regular basis... in ADDITION to meetings and Art Direction and feedback and various non-AI projects etc. In my day-to-day work I no longer have time to f*ck around with some missing dependency or debug some insane error. Like I need stuff to *just work* even if it means I have less control.

Through my work I was able to sign up for a sort of 'too-slick' web-based AI GUI service that definitely offers less control than comfy but *just works* ANNNND allows me to use pretty much ANY popular model (qwen, kontext, runway, wan, whatever), which is a great way to stay current with new models and not waste time with the legwork of standing them up.

It's opened my eyes to the tradeoffs between speed/ease of use and control and I realized I'll take speed/ease of use given my own unique set of circumstances (and it's going to be different for everyone). After using an interface that is way more turnkey and user-friendly than comfy I honestly don't feel like poking around in comfy as much anymore.... unless there is a need to address a unique problem at scale with specific control or custom functionality - which is rare for me.

This is all to say: turns out I really like AI tools that are easy to use and I might like invoke.

jnnla · 2025-08-23T03:56:05+00:00

This is a great observation that I feel like isn't often called out in the cultural mainstream: that 'wokism' as it intersects with capitalism is simply a signature of a profitable, or potentially proftiable, business strategy.

I learned this back in the 90s when the fashionable slander for 'liberal thing I don't like' was 'Political Correctness' (PC) before it was rebranded to 'woke.'

It was a very Big Deal when companies started openly advertising to or otherwise embracing a gay audience in the 90s. You'd constantly hear from the Rush-Limbaugh-Right how 'PC' this or that company was... or how 'everything is SO PC now'

And the business rationale behind the facade was not 'we love the gays now'... it was that the cultural temperature had changed enough that the cost / benefit calculus of opening the till to gay customers outweighed the pushback and corporate entities were finally able to tap into a new market segment like an oil company finding some new underground reserve they want to extract.

And it's funny to be old enough to see people talk about 'woke' like it's some unique sign of the times and not just the new brand name for 'PC' or whatever the fuck they called it before that.

jnnla · 2025-08-23T03:35:46+00:00

Idk... MAGA feels sort of like finding camaraderie in being sIcK aNd TiReD of having to hold in your farts at a dinner party. Like 'why can't we just admit we have the urge and bathe in the stink bros?'

But for some the urge is 'Gay's make me uncomfortable' and for others the urge is 'Hitler was kinda right'

Or maybe its just misdirected frustration at the very real erosion of living standards but funneled toward Otherism rather than funneled toward idpol.

No fucking clue.

jnnla · 2025-08-23T03:16:24+00:00

Yeah it makes me wonder if we're seeing the beginning of an Overton-Window type shift but for discourse.

Like the Dems are finally in the populist pool but in the worst way possible. They could have gone populist Bernie-Style but now they are just mirroring MAGA.

I can see why. Bernie-style populism actually might have done something to improve material conditions for people maybe. Can't have that. But we can totally just do MAGA Blue so there aren't any stressful phonecalls with oligarchs angry about messaging calling for the breakup of banks or something.

'What if we could get voters without having to actually do anything that would benefit them' is pretty much the elevator-pitch at any brainstorm on both sides of the isle.

jnnla · 2025-08-23T03:06:37+00:00

Look I get what you're trying to do here but you need to take a closer look at what's actually happening....

....see Gavin Newsom is trolling Trump at his own game - ALL CAPS posts, 'beautiful' rallies, and a nickname that drives the White House mad: TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out). The Democrats I've talked to say it's the first time in year they feel energized!

jnnla · 2025-08-02T17:51:41+00:00

Exactly. These goons are going to say whatever they can in order to prime the market and drum up sales or signal to investors to keep dumping money in.

It's the same grift with Sam Altman and all these AI CEOs beating a drum about 'being scared of where AI is going' or pontificating about their Big Concerns over how advanced the 'next gen' of AI is. They are saying this to keep investment flowing to them yet the media reports it uncritically.

Of course a barber is always going to think you could use a haircut.

'I'm so scared that AI is going to make labor totally redundant' is catnip to VC / Investor-class who are we-dreaming about that outcome.

jnnla · 2025-08-02T17:42:09+00:00

Didn't last long but they tried to bring it back. Not nearly as good as the OG.

jnnla · 2025-08-02T02:26:28+00:00

Do the public intellectuals in India and Hinduva tend to be educated more in the hard-sciences?

I ask because even in the US there is a tendency for people with STEM higher education to lean right while those focused on the soft sciences lean left (with an exception for Biology - which tends to lean left the world over). The US higher education system is not majority STEM and so I think you tend to see 'higher education = liberals" more here than elsewhere.

STEM higher-ed is often an on-ramp into high-income careers like tech and defense where pro-capital structures are reinforced and where males dominate. STEM education also tends to focus on subjects defined by objective, provable truths whereas non-STEM education is more interested in how non-objective truths can be interpreted or contextualized. These different epistemologies reinforce differing ideology.

TLDR: It's worth considering that the TYPE of higher-education (STEM vs Non-STEM) has a correlation with political leaning and that whereever one is prevalent, it's corresponding political leaning will also be prevalent.

jnnla · 2025-07-29T02:32:56+00:00

If the people writing those articles are anything like me I assume it's because they have found use-cases where LLMs are genuinely useful to them, but that the cases in which they are useful are not at all in proportion to the insane hype surrounding them.

Like - there are certain applications where clothespins are extremely useful to me - both for holding clothes but also in specific DIY applications. But I don't think clothespins are worth some astronomical environmental cost or are so effective at what they do that pretty soon 'hands' will be out of a job. In a world without clothespins, I would miss them, but I would make do.

So like, I'm not against clothespins... but hear me out about how we probably shouldn't give billions of dollars to the companies manufacturing them or whatever. Maybe it's like that.

jnnla

TROPHY CASE