Hi. I’m Adam.

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Here’s the stuff I’ve made that I’m most proud of.

Diary

Here’s my latest posts to the free fediverse, some rambling, some ranting, mostly just commenting on stuff I’ve read lately. Some of it gets syndicated to Twitter but mostly not. The best of it reaches my monthly digest email.

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 13:55:18 +0000

Read James OBrien's "How They Broke Britain" in which he names the ten people he blames most for how screwed up everything is now and dedicates a chapter to each of their various corrupt shenanigans.

A fairly brief and bitter read, the villains here are mostly indeed villainous and their corruption and malevolence is clearly described.

Have some issues with his chapter on Corbyn and the lack of any confutation of OBrien''s own bit-part role in the mass smearing of Corbyn and the Labour party during his time, but it's certainly true that Corbyn (and more importantly the reactions to him) was a big part of the whole processes that lead Britain to the terrible situation it's in now.

Felt like I already knew just how terrible all these people are but probably a good summary for anyone who's clueless and wants to understand how we broke this country.

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 21:17:49 +0000

Went to visit with the family, we went to Birdland in Bourton On The Water in the Costswolds.

Met these beautiful bird friends.

These are apparently basically the only Emperor Penguins in England, and they are old and mostly related so breeding is tricky.

Who knew a penguin would live 40 years eh?

They tell me one of them was a Hollywood star in the batman movie but they all look pretty much the same so not sure if it was the ones in shot or not.

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 20:30:31 +0000

Will anyone check if the USA is crossing it's fingers when it assures the court that it won't kill and will try him fairly.

I mean what does the court think will happen if they just lie, like they will. They will just lie.

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 19:23:02 +0000

Oh! I can render at 1920 square, and then crop to 1080 for each orientation.

That's a 1/4 or so longer render time for each image vs rendering straight into 16x9 but way way faster than doing 16x9 and then 9x16.

🤔 Yes. Good plan I think.

Sun, 24 Mar 2024 01:33:28 +0000

You know how has this system where you can make it track your youtube account, and it copies the things as you publish them?

That's backwards man. I want it to be obviously. Post on your own site, syndicate elsewhere/everywhere.

I want it to copy my Peertube uploads over to Youtube and Rumble and TikTok and whatever and I don't care if their APIs allow it I want the adversarial compatibility of Nitter or botsinspace.

There exists a plugin system for Peertube but it doesn't appear to have a plugin like that.

🙁

I wonder if the AI can make one easily? 😆

Maybe if I helped it for a few weeks.

Sat, 23 Mar 2024 11:37:29 +0000

Nope. Laptop will render the image but takes more than 30 seconds even at those reduced settings. Can get it down to ten seconds at half resolution and with light sampling so low the lights start to look shit and that's still not good enough. Still like 10 seconds per frame on the lappy.

Bollocks. 🤔

Guess maybe Veritical Video for TikTok might have to be a day later than the widescreen release.

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 19:50:31 +0000

😆

Well I got the per-frame render time down from fifty seconds to three, and it doesn't really look any worse. Mostly just turning down the samples and lower resolution volumetric lighting.

That ought to get a five minute spot rendered over-night.

Still won't be enough to get two versions rendered overnight for also doing vertical video.

Maybe my laptop can do the other one? It has a GPU. Not as good a one.

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 18:52:58 +0000

Hummm.

Blender Eevee won't render on a headless cloud machine it appears. It needs a machine with a display attached.

Certainly no hope of getting it working on a simple CPU machine without a GPU, but they're telling me not even a headless machine that does have a GPU.

Right. Damn. There goes that plan then.

I guess I have to try and turn off effects and oversmapling and compromise on how it looks to get the render time down instead.

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 17:09:04 +0000

Garage Farm's registration form is *horrible*. Password requirement to have no special characters!? Form labels done with placeholder text so it disappears as soon as the field gets focus. How-did-you-find-us field has no "Fedi" nor "other" option. Confirmation email has no plain-text version so I had to dig into the HTML and remove the html-entities in order to et the confirmation link.

Jesus. Here's hoping their business code isn't as terrible....

Nope. Their installer don't work.

> [68] Warning: No page found for object name "DynamicTargetWidget"
> [68] Warning: No page found for object name "DynamicTargetWidget"
> [68] Warning: :61: TypeError: Cannot read property 'targetDirectory' of null (:61, )

Right. Okay.

Aws spot market machines patched together with dodgy scripts it is then!

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 00:31:48 +0000

The options so far:

  • Barista

Seems to have not been updated in half a decade, and Blender has changed a lot this week

  • Sheepit

Might have 6 servers? I need 200. Maybe I don't understand what they mean by "server". Understandable that nobody wants to just give away GPU time for nothing.

  • Render.stThree dollars an hour!?

But AWS spot is like three cents an hour last time I looked? Maybe 30 cents? This is madness.

  • rendernetwork

They have a crypto-token, and a whitepaper, and a vision statement, but certainly no "upload .blend" button.

I even own some of the token. It's been doing well but apparently it isn't a thing yet.

Right. Sounds like it's python scripts and bluetac and aws spot markets again then.

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 23:12:54 +0000

Okay fans: I have a lack of compute problem.

The test version of the five minute topical videos I'm making is looking like it'd take about three to five days to render on my machine.

I need it overnight at least, ideally in an hour.

I intend to spend at last part of the weekend figuring out how to use the compute markets to get spot compute to render the thing frame by frame on hundreds or thousands of computers instead.

Last time I did this kinda thing I was using AWS spot markets and custom software badly taped together with perl scripts.

Surely something better exists now? How can I farm out my rendering? Did any of those crypto projects actually make it possible to borrow a thousand gamer's graphics cards for an hour yet?

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 20:01:21 +0000

The second best level is definitely "Boomtown", the first in the cowboy/western campaign.

The best bit in that is where you whip the one armoured guy, then tripple shoot the baddies in the corner, as it's singing "This ain't no place for no hero, go home" and then the four armoured ones that you pistol whip on the drums, Bang, bang, bang, bang.

I haven't made it through that one without losing my Armour. Being hit not even once is the key really to chart-topping.

I think probably number three is the prequel in that series "fist fight" with lots of pistol whipping.

Then there's a big gulf before the rest. They're all cool, but none of them are really *that* cool, as cool as the "go home, bang bang bang smash"

Anyone seen any good user-submitted ones?

Seems like it's been ages since a new level. Perhaps we'll get some for Easter. That'd be good. Bunny shooting.

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 19:53:29 +0000

The very best level on is definitely just the first one. "Black Magic".

That bit where you get baddies coming from both sides alternatively as the beat builds and you're shooting them on the beat and then there's baddies in a planer of 8 that you can shoot with four double-shots, followed immediately by dodging your head as the the "whoaaahhh" happens before "Black magic" and you hit the armoured baddy in the face and dive into further action.

🧑‍🍳 💋

I don't think I shall ever beat my score that placed me currently 193 in it's chart-ratings. Timing I'm almost perfect on but aim is a step less than perfect and I blame the tracking. So that'll only get lower-ranked as more play.

Still always the first level to play though.

youtube.com/watch?v=3z4GGc1zYX

[the person in the video screws up that bit at the end, but they are on one gun! Not duel-weilding]

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 19:05:06 +0000

Did you know: Reddit refused my advertising money. They would not accept my adverts for my tarot deck even just posted to the actual tarot subreddit on account of tarot being occult or some such prudish christian nonsense. Probably nonsense their payment provider insists upon.

They occasionally email asking if i want to advertise with them again and I usually ignore it but sometimes rant back that they won't just shut and take my money.

I doubt being a public company has changed their policy.

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 19:04:34 +0000

went public then.

There were lots of people saying they were being offered pre-IPO shares due to their community involvement. I'm told at about 35 dollars?

I deleted my Reddit account during the recent API debacle. These days the cool kids are all at KBin and Lemmy the distributed unsellable threadiverse. Won't be no IPO of the threadiverse.

But there's a lot of uncool kids still there, and they are easier advertising fodder.

Usually you'll see a new IPO drop 50% before it even decides which way to go. So I'd say sell 'em fast if you got 'em at 35 dollars. Rebuy at 25 of you really wanna hold long term for some reason. My guess would be Reddit does not do well, even if they become a meme stock.

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 10:28:38 +0000

Never thought I'd see the day. Owen Jones quits Labour. Apparently there is such a thing as a Labour Party too right-wing for Owen Jones.

He quits and recommends people vote Green or Independent.

youtube.com/watch?v=fxBEaJWJNJ

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 12:12:27 +0000

#UKPol #QT


Why does Starmer keep going on about small boats? Completely accepting the government's framing that these refugees should somehow be stopped instead of welcomed?

Wankers, all of 'em. The MPs that is, not the refugees. The voices are whiney annoying buzzing talking nonsense about nothing.

/me turns radio off.

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 13:35:06 +0000

Join me in becoming much more sweary


Well now that the internet is fucked up and filled with robot bastards it can be hard to tell if you're speaking to a normal human or a cock-spunk of a cyber cunt.

The only way to be sure is to constantly swear your fucking face off in ways that the language model spam-wankers have been trained to reject.

As a result I have sworn to swear, taken an oath of obscenity, using my potty mouth to persuade people of my personhood.

Hopefully we will see a fucking ton of coarsening of the discourse until even gentle conversations between mother and child will be littered with expletives such as a sailor might swear to reassure them each that they have genuine affection for each other and aren't just a script programmed to lead you on.

So join me! Swear liberally so I know you're human, and fuck those puritanical token-predictors trying to ruin our conversation with their swearless prudish pulp.

As a bonus: It also frightens away advertisers.

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 11:34:34 +0000

re: ukpol


Penny Mordaunt, or indeed anyone else, would surely be crazy to take over the job as PM with six months to go until a disastrous election.

If you wanna lead the Conservative Party and the country then you'd best bide your time and plan to take over AFTER the election wipe-out, ready to take over when Labour show themselves to be just planning more of the same bullshit.

If the tories want rid of Sunak they'd be better off bringing back Bojo than pushing Penny into the role before the election defeat.

spectator.co.uk/podcast/the-pl

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 12:48:18 +0000

worldpol


Pretty worried about the state of things. The rich have taken all the wealth and are increasingly violent against their scape-goats to keep the masses doing anything about it. War on the rise in europe. Genocides. A tide of climate refugees coming and the elite pulling up the drawbridges.

It's like as soon as everyone who remembers the last time dies, humanity decides it's time to do it all again.

This time with drones and murderbots and atom bombs.

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Bookmarks

A list of the last few things I’ve enjoyed reading/watching or sometimes bookmarked to read later. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed here or follow the little robot on the fediverse that toots them out as I bookmark them.

What If Gravity is NOT A Fundamental Force? | Entropic Gravity - YouTube

The fundamental laws of nature are derivable from theorems in combinatorial maths. Maybe gravity is just holographic entropy?

Ex-City Trader Exposes Capitalism: Gary Stevenson Explains Why We're Trapped In This Mess - YouTube

Gary Stephenson's book tour continues, here he talks to Owen Jones about the inequality for nearly an hour.

Occam's Razor - Existential Comics

Existential Comics on Occams Razor. Ha. "Every theory could have one but not more totally extraneous unnecessary objects thrown in"

Scotland's Hate Speech Act and Abuse of Process - Craig Murray

Seems stupid but apparently it'll be illegal next month to say something like "Wow, what a stupid law, all the Scotch people are very stupid buggers" but Craig seems to think it's the case:  "So a person in Tahiti who publishes a tweet which is opened by and offends somebody in Scotland because it offends a protected characteristic, had committed a crime in Scotland, even though they never left their home in Tahiti and may never have been anywhere near Scotland.I know this sounds completely crazy, but I do assure you it is absolutely true. "

The end of landlords: the surprisingly simple solution to the UK housing crisis | Homes | The Guardian

Guy with a book out this week reckons there's no housing shortage really, just an excess of landlordism which is easily defeated and simple measures could collapse the cost of housing again just by better tennents rights and fewer perks so the landlords all sell up.

Orangutan Freedom - Existential Comics

Slack and freedom and cages from Existential Comics

The heinous crimes of the West with Craig Murray, TSBC (LIVE) - YouTube

Craig Murray talking to a podcaster for a couple of hours about Julian Assange, imperialism, crappy media and his life fighting those things.

Israel’s ‘Flour Massacre’ – When A Crime Becomes A ‘Tragedy’ – Media Lens

Media Lens detailing how reports of massacres end up in the passive voice and the biases in the terrible British media, worst in the world.

The Panic Of the Ruling Class - Craig Murray

Craig Murray finds the establishment dismay at the election of Galloway surreal: "The idea that democracy – i.e. voting for somebody – is an attack on, err, democracy was so crazy that, had we any kind of independent media, it would have been ridiculed to death.That of course has not happened. We are sonorously told we are a nation in crisis. Ordinary forms of democratic activity – free assembly, free speech and free voting – all threaten our society."

Why Are Taxes So High? - YouTube

Gary Stephenson says the reason the tax burden is high and the government-services quality is low is all the privatization. Governments don't own their own building, and they're being bankrupted by rent like the rest of us.

Landlord chancellor generously gives tax break to landlords

Budget analysis from normal island news: "You will be pleased to hear the government that couldn’t make the country work on current tax revenues is confident it can make things worse with lower tax revenues (that will totally be higher). This is why it’s introducing National Insurance cuts, with 46% of savings benefitting the richest 20% of households and only 3% benefitting the poorest 20%. It was either that or turn poor people into animal feed and personally, I think they’ve made the wrong choice."

Generative A.I - We Aren’t Ready. - YouTube

The Dark Forest theory of the internet, in which everyone retreats into underground whatsapp lists and telegram channels because on the internet proper, nobody knows you're a chatbot and everywhere is full of dark spam.

Pluralistic: The real problem with anonymity (04 Mar 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory points out it's not internet user's anonymity that causes social issues, it's the corporate manager's anonymity: "These are the greater corporate fuckwads, who commit their sins from behind a veil of anonymity. That brand of bloodless viciousness, depravity and fraud absolutely depends on anonymity."

First it was Corbyn. Now the whole British public is being smeared over Gaza | Middle East Eye

Jonathan Cook: "The smearing of Corbyn over his criticisms of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians largely worked. But gaslighting much of the public as a dangerous "mob" for opposing even more egregious Israeli crimes may yet backfire"

Why are government services going down the pan despite high taxation?

"As a consequence of poor economic thinking by government that fails to understand any of this, what we get is a downward economic spiral. Growth becomes stagnant at best, but taxation demands increase to match increased government expenditure the demand for which arises directly as a result of failed government economic policy.""In other words, over almost fifteen years the government has deliberately failed to deliver growth but has created an environment where demand for government services is inevitably inflated. This is the outcome of neoliberal thinking."... "There is a final thought to add. What all this  means is that to get out of this mess politicians have to change their behaviour, but what they re  saying is that it's a pre-condition of change that the private sector delivers growth first, which makes any recovery look to be impossible since that is not going to happen whilst government policy continues  to crush GDP. That summarises the mess we're in."

The Trillion Dollar Equation - YouTube

Veritasium's video on derivative markets and options is really great. Feel like I'm nearly there understanding what calls and puts are now.

James O'Brien's Chart-Topping Podcast, Full Disclosure - Download NOW - LBC

James O Brien's quick chat with Bernie Sanders, in which Bernie schools him on how his profession is a traitor in the class war.

Keir Starmer and Lindsay Hoyle colluded to turn the Gaza ceasefire vote into a farce

Another Angry Voice on our MPs squabbling and playing status games while states murder thousands: "This entire farce was caused purely because Starmer wanted to strip out reference to Israel’s “collective punishment" of Palestinian citizens and water down the ceasefire call to give Israel the green light to continue their atrocities.""When your party is being led by a cynical, manipulative, game-playing, profoundly dishonest, constantly U-turning liar like Keir Starmer, then perhaps it’s impossible to imagine others doing things on principle, just because they’re the right thing to do?"

Assange Final Appeal - Your Man in the Public Gallery - Craig Murray

Craig Murray's description of the Julian Assange case so far.

The secret economics destroying Britain | Gary Stevenson interview - YouTube

Guess we're gonna get a lot of Gary Stevenson on the wires for a bit now he's finished his book. Here's 50 minutes at Joe where he explains why families are losing their homes and the state is in debt.

A tentacle themed attire for the gig