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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Well it isn’t 6.

    From Wikipedia:

    In 2002, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes crested macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon, England from May 1 to June 22, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website. Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages largely consisting of the letter “S”,the lead male began striking the keyboard with a stone, and other monkeys followed by urinating and defecating on the machine

    Mike Phillips, director of the university’s Institute of Digital Arts and Technology (i-DAT), said that the artist-funded project was primarily performance art, and they had learned “an awful lot” from it. He concluded that monkeys "are not random generators. They’re more complex than that


  • forced into an echo chamber.

    Yes, it does that.

    Using YouTube on a new account or through one of the alternatives will result in a wildly different feed. I was recently shocked by seeing the default non-curated feed on YouTube.

    Absolutely none of the content was interesting to me; most of it was directly anger inducing political crap or just plain brainrot. I would definitely not visit that shit page ever again if the default feed was my first impression. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be a right wing breeding ground by now, but it sure isn’t as balanced as I would have expected.

    My regular YT feed is obviously much more interesting to me, and I can use it to find new content, but since I don’t want to wait for the ads, I now only watch my own subscriptions on a different frontend, which of course will create an even smaller echo chamber.

    I get how a curated feed can benefit the user, but YouTube is just not making it possible. It will only show (rage) engaging content and without the dislike function, you can only decide not to watch the crap or get shown more crap until you do like it.








  • It was all pretty straight forward. The kit was made to be assembled with a bolt on neck all predrilled, so it was basically just shaping the body and headstock and then paint and varnish.

    I did look up some painting techniques, but I really just wanted to stain the wood, so I did that with a brush and then 2 coats of varnish. I had to sand the wood first to make it more open for staining instead of paint. If you want to paint or spray paint you should probably keep or make a base coat to avoid the wood absorbing the paint.

    It was a cheap stratocaster-like kit, so I wasn’t too concerned with making mistakes, but I’ll admit that putting the saw into a guitar was a little daunting at first.

    I used a multi-cutter for most of it to make very precise cuts. And lots and lots of sandpaper by hand with different grit sizes.

    It only took a few evenings to do, so it is not difficult at all, but I guess it depends on how much you want to customize it.


  • Yes absolutely, I enjoyed it and might do it again sometime with a different kit.

    I do have a lot of tools already so that wasn’t costly, only good practice, but it did take somewhat longer than I expected.

    I wouldn’t attempt to make the neck and fretboard from scratch, so a kit with a good neck is a good starting point.


  • I saw a headline on some guitar magazine “These are the most over priced guitars currently”. Says a lot and it’s true.

    There’s not much point in throwing money at a brand name anymore. Quality control is long gone and they all come straight out of a factory anyway. It’s alright though, because factory quality is decent, and with a little know-how you can easily make them play good.

    My best guitar is a $100 kit-build. Acknowledging that I’d need to do a full setup on any guitar I figured I might as well paint and assemble it myself, because I’m not going to pay several hundreds just for a paint job and a logo.


  • I doubt that’s deliberate (it’s probably depending on some other task or shit that you don’t even intend to use), but it’s exactly the kind of bloat that turns people away from Windows.

    Windows seems to work alright for my work pc, where I’m constantly logged into their cloud, newer switch users, logged in long enough daily to get all the updates and have IT to roll out stuff, so I hardly ever have issues there.

    My personal computer is a different thing. I have several users, use it about once weekly, making it basically unbootable. As soon as I open the lid, Microsoft starts bugging me to do a shit load of things and download gigabytes of crap that Microsoft, and not I, needs me to do before I can even use it. More often than not I simply close the lid again.

    It’s not unusual to meet people who don’t even have a pc these days. Most people can solve their daily stuff on any cell phone browser. I find it kinda amusing that Microsoft is pushing people that way.



  • It’s always a resistor. Planned obsolescence is basically putting a too small resistor somewhere. The parts they make for repair shops are usually better, so if you do take the time to swap a print, you will have a better appliance afterwards for a fraction of the cost of a new shitty machine.

    Soldering the specific resistor can be done too, but for anyone who doesn’t have a stock of resistors and soldering tools/skill it’s usually a easier and just as cheap to get new print if they’re available.