Idk. I feel bad for my grandparents spending a lot of time sitting around at home drinking tea, doing sudoku, and watching the BBC in the evenings. They have friends in the village so aren't hugely isolated, but living with such a low level of information flow feels like it would drive me insane (of course, Being Online is hardly a good thing for sanity either).
I can't help but wonder if that's a result of one-time c20th cultural change, or if I'll be just as relatively isolated in my old age.
So much of my life experience comes from being Extremely Online: dumb memes, weird communities that fit into too narrow a niche to ever self-assemble offline in a single location, a faith in my ability to access almost all human knowledge from the device in my pocket. It's genuinely fucking weird to spend time with a guy who sees all that shit as inscrutably alien, but who can talk about the time a V1 flew over his head while he was cycling home and took out the row of houses opposite.
Spent today hanging with relatives, and ended up going to a German beer festival with my 93yo grandfather. I honestly find it hard to deal with the idea of how old he is: he's healthy (if a very slow walker), pretty sharp mentally, and full of stories like going to French Algeria before shit got wild or wandering around a stable, unified Yugoslavia. I really enjoy talking to him, but there's such a gulf between our life experiences that it can feel like hard work to find common ground
@dulcet @sampo @Demo318 not absolute surrender, but without the plausible threat of violence noone is going to take your ideas seriously enough to open a discussion. It's no coincidence that workplace rights and conditions in the West began to collapse the moment it became clear that Eastern bloc socialism was on its way out, and there was no longer a realistic threat of violent revolution.
@realmattseymour hey! As a former on-campus dweller: assuming you're aware of the terabytes flowing through the student DC++ filesharing network, do you a) ignore it, b) try to shut it down, or c) look for someone to set you up with an account?
(bonus option: d), you're the one running it)
@Demo318 @dulcet @sampo People have different material interests. Sometimes those interests are diametrically opposed.
In my case, interests like "being able to retire one day" and "having a livable climate in the future" are opposed by powerful individuals. If those individuals aren't willing to step aside and surrender, I'm not really sure how violence can be avoided.
@sampo has this ever not been the case? Dehumanisation and political violence against the underclasses is a staple of every democracy I can think of. Rhetoric calling for violence against those with the ability to object is certainly increasing, but calling for violence against opponents is hardly new.
@Liberty4Masses mate, you're trying to make a point by drawing a Venn diagram from two concentric circles
Seems like my #VerticalGardening is working... spinach, cabbages, lettuce and 2 tomatoes (just to experiment). The fertility is replenish by #composting kitchen scraps from an increasing amount of neighbors, which I plan to repay in food.
That's just a test, if it works properly I expect my yard walls to be covered by fall =D
@Liberty4Masses please tell me more about these mythical poor people who have any level of control over bourgeois governance
@drewfer I'd guess so, but which advances in particular? I'd guess it's most likely to be linked to onboard data storage and processing, but have no real evidence to support that
@Tsunachi well, I'd say it's probably non-trivial to put a nuclear reactor-driven high power radar setup into space. SAR seems to do the same job more efficiently, so I'd be interested to know why RORSAT didn't use a similar setup. I assume it was impossible at the time, but why is that so?
@squid tusky's not too bad tbh
@pkok ah, I think I might actually have heard of that! Right now I'm still very much focused on data collection + processing. Image recognition would be cool once I've started to stack processed TIFFs up.
I'm going to be away from my (shitty, struggling) computer this weekend, but I might have a few python Qs for you next week. My experience so far has all been in data analysis, and the whole http/API/file management sphere is completely new to me
@pkok opencv? Not at all. What is it?
And I may well do that! Is your experience in imagery, SAR, python in general, SNAPPy in particular?..
PhD student working with visible-light photoswitches, supramolecular chemistry, NMR spectroscopy. Musician. Some politics.