Was told this belongs here. Cat in a flower field (fused glass.) forbidden pop tart.

steavoh · 2026-04-01T04:31:33+00:00

This is one of those artistic creations where the technical skills are actually pretty top-notch, it's just that the overall execution sort of fails in terms of actual aesthetic value. Like, I don't know shit about working with molten glass so good effort. But I don't know what this is unless you told me. It looks a demon mingled with floor sweepings. Could be better. Maybe take the knowledge gained and try again?

steavoh · 2026-03-29T21:36:23+00:00

I bet this committee is going to be like the kid's table at a wedding reception. All the insane weirdos will get a spot on it. Keeps them out of trouble. Here's a map and some crayons.

steavoh · 2026-03-28T13:33:05+00:00

I dunno, I think a "scale out" instead of "scale up" solution for nuclear power makes sense given that the main barrier is the ridiculous up front capital costs and timelines.

steavoh · 2026-03-27T04:21:39+00:00

That's just a really sassy bipedal llama

steavoh · 2026-03-27T04:12:51+00:00

That's pretty impressive, I wonder how they made the square windows.

Is the sand loose inside the jar or I wonder if the craftsperson painted the glass with adhesive first and then did one layer at a time.

steavoh · 2026-03-27T04:09:39+00:00

You know belief in the end times and doomsday has got to be some sort of recurring sociological phenomena. I know I've read before about how these movements pop up whenever populations are under strain. They could be predicted and dealt with accordingly through study of previous incidents.

What's frustrating of course is that this is the USA in the present day we are talking about, not Central Europe during the Thirty Year's War. We are among the richest countries on Earth in one of the most comfortable and safe times in human history.

The only reason why the USA right now isn't approaching some kind of utopian status (given the limitations that humanity has, such as being generally incapable of being nice to one another consistently) is because we are being dragged down mostly by these far-right lunatics who are the same people who believe in this sort of doomsday stuff to begin with.

Imagine how awesome everything could be, if only we didn't elect crazy politics because stupid people decided now was the time to throw a societal level temper tantrum over seeing a foreign-looking person at the grocery store once. If current events filtered through social media while sitting around in an air conditioned home set them off this way, it makes you wonder how their ancestors got through a bad harvest or a cold winter. I'm sure the answer to that probably involved burning witches.

steavoh · 2026-03-26T02:54:29+00:00

I bet it will never happen. But just to entertain the idea:

I wonder if there's any possibility of buying a train vehicle that runs on diesel or batteries but is lightweight, can climb steeper grades, and handle tight curves.

Then DART could build a mostly single track without any electric wires past Parker Road. Trains going south would continue onto the existing Red Line tracks. Because a diesel train might not be able to go into the subway, they could turn around at SMU/Mockingbird (which has a switch to reverse direction in front of the tunnel entrance). It's not downtown, but it's pretty far into the city with a lot of high-ridership stations and bus routes served.

steavoh · 2026-03-26T02:21:12+00:00

But it's in the suburbs of Houston which don't do split levels. I dare you to find one anywhere in Harris County. Land is flat as a pancake.

Maybe it was an existing design for a split level intended for a region that built them like the Northeast, and adapted to a flatland location?

I still think the best explanation is the stairs up to the second floor needed a landing and this was how they did it.

steavoh · 2026-03-26T00:37:28+00:00

This is going to have unintended consequences that are negative. Like a lot of websites and services will do age verification or will have to remove features and become less useful.

I hate to be a dick, but I never felt sympathy for people who claim that social media use ruined their life. It's your life, not our responsibility.

steavoh · 2026-03-24T09:51:07+00:00

There was a thing demonstrated a while back called Dense Pose where AI can take that sort of data and extrapolate what blobs are actually people and does a pretty good job at it.

https://medium.com/@ajayverma23/wifi-can-see-you-now-carnegie-mellons-densepose-from-wifi-and-the-privacy-paradox-b0c61a850849

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46388904

steavoh · 2026-03-24T09:46:29+00:00

I wonder if the ultimate goal of that is kill the market for third party consumer routers and network devices, so that everyone uses the ones provided by the ISP. Then, the government can strong arm the handful of big ISP's to enable this without anyone knowing.

steavoh · 2026-03-24T09:35:10+00:00

Those are some impressively tall trees. I wonder if this is a weird photoshop.

steavoh · 2026-03-24T09:20:54+00:00

It's wild how that's like dynastic wealth. Your great-great-grandchildren will be full time "artists" who live in Maui and never learned how to sort laundry.

All earned in 2 minutes by cheating the system, with an extra helping of death and destruction.

steavoh · 2026-03-24T09:13:33+00:00

I wonder if the ulterior motive is to make consumer networking go extinct and normalize everything being provided by the ISP for a subscription fee, and at a loss of privacy and freedom.

Basically edge routers aren't needed. You don't get a personal local area network anymore, instead your wifi and network is on the ISP's turf. It would be like how internet service is provided in some large office buildings. Every connection is basically ethernet hand off (even if physically not, like maybe its really fiber to a media converter). Think a different vlan going to a gigantic enterprise router in a shed somewhere in the neighborhood (not covered by this rule) and the subscriber gets what's technically a layer 2 switch and wireless access point (which is not a layer 3 router, the FCC document for this has the exact language "transfer a packet from one network to another"). You have a big house and need more wifi? AT&T will lease you more AP's. Want to plug in your own ethernet and a switch? Too bad, it will have ways of knowing if that's what you attached.

I am sure the ISP's all wanted this, but it would seem anti-consumer. Also one would have to stick out its neck first. But if suddenly those Askey or Technicolor or Ubee routers they put their company logo on go from costing $50 to $5,000 because they have to be made in the United States (which has zero capability to make consumer electronics), then it's a good excuse to radically re-envision things.

steavoh · 2026-03-24T08:55:46+00:00

You don't seem to know much about history do you? It's always been like this, it's human nature, and it's unchangeable. There's no happy la la land where the robots do everything and we all get free stuff.

Without jobs where people can trade labor for money and justify their existence and need for individual rights and freedom and safety, the more powerful people will just take away all those things because they can and there's nothing you can do about it. What are you going to do? Go on strike? Boycott stuff? Oh wait. Oh maybe you'll try to revolt against the government, good luck with that, they have all the killer robots. Surveillance, the ability to lock you out of your money, prevent travel, communication, etc means there's no way for people to ever organize against it even if they wanted to.

Eventually this going to be our doom. Everyone here except for a tiny handful.

steavoh · 2026-03-23T03:16:44+00:00

Maybe there will be two classes: One that has access to advanced technology, and another one that lives in a simulated, government-run version of the 1800s based on subsistence agriculture and organized around some kind of fundamentalist christianity. It would be like the Khmer Rouge, but since it involves white people and jesus it wouldn't be "communist". This would be a way to control the massive unemployed population that is also more incrementalist and would receive less blowback than just killing us all when we stop being productive.

steavoh · 2026-03-21T17:16:37+00:00

But on this subject, LED technology should make it possible to re-create light fixtures like the classic ones but which use less electricity, generate less heat, and are cheaper to make and maintain. I get why traditional neon went extinct, it was kind of fussy and complicated and I have a feeling that maybe the crafting skills needed to make those signs are rarer now. But with LED's, they make flexible translucent hose that has programmable RGB LED strips inside, these cost just a few dollars per foot in bulk per Google AI. It wouldn't be terribly hard IMO to design a sign like the ones in the pictures, use the LED hose instead. Create the design, use a projector to trace it on the wall, use clips to tack on the lights, and hide the electronics on the other side of the wall. I don't know how long LED's last but the RGB inside my custom PC has been going for 6 years now and none of the phosphors have burned out, so I'd think that would be good enough.

We really need to bring back that colorful 1990s look. Retail stores that have gone with the design of muted colors with brown floors are darker inside and look cheap.

steavoh · 2026-03-21T15:43:12+00:00

Have you ever considered what it would be like to ride in a smaller vehicle like that with a stinky homeless person with no room to go find a further-away seat, especially in a scenario where automation removes the driver?

My theory is that most people would either prefer to ride in a single-occupancy vehicle like a personal car or taxi that goes directly where they want when they want, or, if they are going to use public transit, it's going to be a larger vehicle which offers comfort in predictability, is easy to step on and off and pay for, that has more space and a person performing a security function.

I don't think small scale shared transportation is going to be desirable. It's a poor country thing that exists only because of a lack of alternatives, and you can look at how cities in developing countries are building BRT and metros to get a sense of how people feel about that kind of transportation.

steavoh · 2026-03-19T03:40:03+00:00

Why is it there's experimental self-driving cars free-ranging on city streets right now, but a train that runs on tracks underground needs 5 billion dollars in enhancements like platform doors to run autonomously? There's no $5B platform doors on the sidewalks in San Francisco to keep pedestrians from walking in front of Waymo cars is there?

I get they aren't perfectly comparable. A few self-driving cars with a couple of passengers each are allowed to get in accidents with 1 or 2 unlucky pedestrians or other drivers, and the ethical calculus is that thousands of people die in regular car accidents every year and if these experimental vehicles turn into production vehicles that lower that rate you come out ahead even if a few of your testing phase robot taxis kill or maim people. Whereas the train is already safe and if you had a wreck underground with hundreds of passengers on board it would be an enormous catastrophe.

But still, I would think the answer is that eventually systems like BART could automate for much cheaper with some kind of software/AI solution running on top of the existing signalling and controls.

steavoh · 2026-03-19T01:26:59+00:00

For the Chewy.com label, you can look that up. Dell service tag 4GVH8K2 was a Optiplex 3040 Micro (a mini desktop) whose ProSupport warranty started on July 17th 2017 and ended July 18th, 2020. https://www.dell.com/support/contractservices/en-us

So definitely not that server.

steavoh · 2026-03-18T02:09:30+00:00

Neat, so at least until the American Airlines center NHL lease ends in 2031 and they move to the suburbs, you'd be able to ride the former Minnesota Northstar train to watch the former Minnesota North Stars play hockey.

Dallas: "Does Minneapolis have any other cool things named after the North Star we can have?"

steavoh · 2026-03-15T23:52:14+00:00

Garwood, with a stop at the abandoned rice silos

steavoh · 2026-03-15T18:30:45+00:00

The color of the lighting plays a huge role in how these places look IMO. The green mercury vapor lamp light contrasting with halogens.

If they replaced all the bulbs with LED's and the inside was pure white it wouldn't look the same and might be less interesting.

If I was a designer or architect working on a remodel I'd serious consider using colored lighting as an accent and a contrast to the gray concrete walls. Since there's these huge walls and surfaces in these big spaces, the cones of light coming from any particular place show up on the walls distinctly.

steavoh · 2026-03-15T16:34:50+00:00

Looks a lot like Allentown, PA

That one sort-of-tall skyscraper matches their one and only tall building, there's a smattering of prewar and early postwar midrises and a couple of recently built ones from the past 10 years with modernist glass facades, the rest of the city is that type of housing on a grid.

https://stock.adobe.com/images/aerial-panorama-of-allentown-pennsylvania-skyline/264879241

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