My first thought was to set up a bunch of long-term investments, since you can reasonably assume that you’ll live a long life. But then also, being rich might increase the odds of you being kidnapped or killed, so it might just tank whatever you choose to invest in.

Maybe you could somehow get a job testing roller coasters. Once you’re in there you have no power to decide anything, so perhaps the universe will make the builders construct the safest possible roller coaster. OR, you could be a food taster for someone rich and powerful. The universe wouldn’t let you eat anything that’s poisoned, or it would just ensure that no food gets poisoned in the first place!

Here in Canada, the general sentiment among people I’ve talked to is definitely that the US has fucked up it’s relationship with us in a very long-term way, if not permanently. Even if the tariffs went away tomorrow, there’s still the issue that Trump threatened Canada’s sovereignty, which people here are not taking lightly at all.

I’ve heard people say that even if Trump went away, there’s no guarantee some other dickhead won’t take over and start the same nonsense, or we’ll just be back here again in 4 years. Even the new Prime Minister said that the relationship we used to have with the US is over now.

I have to admit I’m a bit guilty of this, but from both sides. I bike more than I drive, and when I’m driving all cyclists are a menace and are in the way, but when I bike all drivers are reckless idiots who are trying to kill me.

Oh yeah same here, I’ve been using Linux in some form or another since maybe 2006 or so, and I still have a folder in Obsidian that’s just notes about Linux lol. Usually if I customize something or fix something or learn something new, I’ll chuck it in the notes along with the link to where I found it so I don’t have to retrace my steps looking for it again.

I really feel for Zelenskyy, it’s such a terrible position to be in.

On the one hand, it must be galling to have to play nice with Trump. You know his word is worthless and he’s going to betray Ukraine the first chance he gets, which will probably cost a lot of Ukrainian lives.

On the other hand, if you hard-ball Trump and tell him to fuck off, the war continues and Ukraine probably loses, which also costs a lot of Ukrainian lives.

I really don’t see any way this doesn’t end badly, unless Europe can somehow step up and get Russia to back down. I don’t really see that happening though. I think Ukraine’s fate was sealed when Trump won the election TBH.

I recently had a spare machine sitting around doing nothing and was feeling a bit masochistic, so I decided to install Windows 11 on it just to see what it was like. I’ve used Windows 10 a tiny bit but essentially haven’t touched Windows in years. A couple of the fun things I noticed:

• After installing, I was going to set a new wallpaper. I double-clicked on a jpeg file and instead of opening it, it popped up with a window asking me what I wanted to do with this apparently unknown file type. I literally said out loud, “what do you mean, it’s a fucking jpeg.” Then it did the same thing for a .zip.

• I also made a restore point once I had all the basics installed, so I could roll back when Windows inevitably fucked up doing an update. I then did the first big update and it fucked it up. “No worries” I thought, “I made a restore point!” I went to restore it, and discovered that for some unknown reason Windows only saves one restore point. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except that Windows had decided to fuck itself up, and then automatically overwrite the manual save point with it’s own save point from immediately after it fucked itself up, leaving that as the only thing to restore to.

I then quite sensibly formatted the drive and went back to using Linux.

Maybe not… nutrition and general health care are a lot better these days, as is education and general access to information so if you took say, a 40-year old from 1875 and introduced them to a 40-year old from 2025, they might see someone who’s bigger than them, has perfect teeth, looks half their age, and has a pretty broad general knowledge about all sorts of things they’d know nothing about.

A bit like if a 40-year old from today met someone from the year 2175 who looked about 20, was insanely fit and a foot taller than them and could casually describe how the cure for cancer, AGI, quantum computers and fusion power worked. Could be pretty intimidating!

I had a teacher who claimed that dinosaurs weren’t real. She said that people just naturally love patterns so when we find random bones we arrange them into shapes we like. Someone in the class said what about skulls that are just one bone and she ignored it lol.

That was many years ago and it’s still stuck in my memory as one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.

Seems like a pretty solid update! The only downside for me was that it broke Klassy (apparently because 6.3 uses KDecoration3 instead of KDecoration2), but that’s not their fault and I’m sure it’ll sort itself out eventually.

In a sense, everything can fly. Just sometimes not for very long.

Art jobs are like this! Especially if management are also art people, then every day is utter chaos lol.

Two things an art job is great for:

• Developing a thick skin. Make art every day, send it off, receive a detailed list of everything that sucks about it, re-do it, repeat this about 30 times until it finally goes out, then receive death threats from the audience.

• Learning to function under chaos. A regular Tuesday at Art Job is roughly equivalent to the worst day in company history and a normal office job.

Two things an art job is not good for:

• Keeping the desire to make art for fun in your spare time.

• Being a regular functioning human.

I think it’s fine if used in moderation. I use mine for doing the mindless day-to-day stuff like writing cover letters or business-type emails. I don’t use it for anything creative though, just to free myself up to do that stuff.

I also suck at coding so I use it to write little scripts and stuff. Or at least to do the framework and then I finish them off.

I think sort of, although it won’t be as cut-and-dry and the first two. I think it’ll be somewhere between a traditional ‘hot’ war and a cold war, where the larger players (ie: China, the US, Russia, the EU) will engage in propaganda wars, attempts to destabilize each other, cyber attacks, trade wars etc. while in areas outside of those groups (eg: Ukraine currently) there will be physical wars fought by proxy between the bigger groups.

I think we’re seeing the start of it now, and IMO the US is probably doing the least well so far of the major groups. Russia is doing the destabilization thing, which is working quite well in Europe and spectacularly well in the US, China seems to be leading in trade and tech (both cyber attacking and just undermining the US tech sector with things like DeepSeek) and I think Europe’s strategy seems to be to just bunker down and see what happens.

I think the main advantage the US traditionally has always had is its military - it’s geared up very well for a big physical war, but I don’t think this is that kind of conflict. And with the Trump administration’s obsession with tariffs and the general disregard for education and soft power, I think the country is really heading in the wrong direction for what may be coming.

A Culture Mind. Because I want to live in the Culture and if you have one mind, it can make others.

I’ve been kind of liking Brave Search lately, even though I’m not really a fan of the browser.

For the Wikipedia part, it’s surprisingly simple. I just used Kiwix and grabbed a copy, it’s only about 100gb or so. You can also use it to get offline copies of other stuff, like Project Gutenberg.

Yeah same here, my current uptime is 3.5 hours lol

It stopped working for me recently. It’ll play the first 5 seconds or so of the video and then just freeze up.

I think that the AI industry is particularly harmful to writers, journalists, actors, artists, and others. This is not because AI produces better pieces of work, but rather due to misanthropic viewpoints of particularly toxic and powerful individuals at the top of the tech industry hierarchy pushing AI as the next big thing due to their general misunderstanding or outright dislike of the general public.

I’m a writer and my work is increasingly making me use AI to do things. I’m 98% sure I’m just training this thing to replace me at this point, and am planning accordingly.

This is why we should never go full Tory.

Also I’m pretty sure this is just the newspapers being sneaky. It was sold off in 2013 under the Conservatives, and now it’s being resold to someone else and the media is trying to make it look like Labour are the ones who privatised it.