#how to store data

[sophiebaybey]

Not to preach to the choir but I wonder if people generally realize that AI models like ChatGPT aren't, like, sifting through documented information when you ask it particular questions. If you ask it a question, it's not sifting through relevant documentation to find your answer, it is using an intensely inefficient method of guesswork that has just gone through so many repeated cycles that it usually, sometimes, can say the right thing when prompted. It is effectively a program that simulates monkeys on a typewriter at a mass scale until it finds sets of words that the user says "yes, that's right" to enough times. I feel like if it was explained in this less flattering way to investors it wouldn't be nearly as funded as it is lmao. It is objectively an extremely impressive technology given what it has managed to accomplish with such a roundabout and brain-dead method of getting there, but it's also a roundabout, brain-dead method of getting there. It is inefficient, pure and simple.

[ibelongtotheclassics]

Sharing some of my childhood + present anime & studio ghibli OTPs

*uwu* they’re so precious for meee 💖🎬🇯🇵

< PART 4 / on-going list >

[peuldoongie]

YEJUN ♔ 2024 MAMA AWARDS

[sysig]

If anyone knows anything about Wordpad file recovery - my diary for the last two years is only displaying NULLs when I open it, both in Wordpad and Notepad++, but in the preview when I search for it I can see the first couple lines, and it's shows up in a search for a keyword I know I don't have in any other file

Is there a temp file I can get into? I don't care about formatting, I just don't want to lose two years of ideas and thoughts...

[toastysol]

Endlessly fascinated by how often the mysterious "beyond the blackwall" is talked about as though it was discovered by humans rather than made. Like some foreign jungle filled with venomous snakes and bugs and big cats etc. Instead of like a massive server. That is another question I have. How is the old net (beyond the blackwall) structured? I assumed it must have been a lot like our internet today, where every website is hosted on different servers, but the way it's talked about is strange if that were the case. Almost like the whole thing was hosted on one large server and everyone else's servers merely tapped into it. Communed with it.

It is a wilderness, the space between stars, some incomprehensible depth filled with man-created minds. It's like it's some extra plane of existence, like the hells of faerûn where devils and demons find portals into our world. But in reality it's like. Some server somewhere. Right? But if it were, wouldn't NetWatch just track down the server(s) and shut it down, effectively destroying any dangerous rogue AIs caught inside? Idk maybe I don't know anything about how the internet works but everytime anyone in the game says anything about it, it always raises so many more questions than answers.

[creating-by-starlight]

Love having to explain in detail to profs why they can't just trust everything Chat spits out. My favorite thing.

[kn-1013]

i know i've been on my anti-modern AU propaganda lately and it's just because i've been delving deeper into the sally face ao3 tags and i just keep finding them over and over. it's frustrating because there are a lot of really interesting concepts out there that would fit really well and make for a genuinely really interesting story in the 90s, but they get thrown off because the author doesn't know enough about the 90s to write for that time period, so they make it into a modern au instead. there's nothing inherently wrong with that, and i think there's room for modern aus to be done well here, i even have my own half-serious modern au, but i do think you often lose part of what makes sally face special when you turn the story into any other kind of contemporary love story/horror story/etc where all the characters just have ~iphones~ and use ~snapchat~ and all these things.

like, the 90s was not some kind of alien planet, and a vast number of the problems that you're solving with smartphones can be worked around very easily with just a bit of research or thought. long distance walkie-talkies, pagers, and PDAs were all (though sometimes expensive) perfectly capable contemporary technologies for talking to people when you are not physically with them. in fact, a lot of the abbreviations and slang we use over text right now was developed by young people in the 90s using pagers to talk to their friends. PDAs were a bit more out there in the 90s than they were in the aughts, but it's still completely plausible for henry in particular to have one, considering he already owns a home computer, which was not at all ubiquitous in the 90s. considering the apparent financial limitations that he and sal live under (it's never stated explicitly, but i mean, they live at addison's, they can't be in a great financial situation) and how insanely expensive computers were back then, it's more than likely that henry's job requires a home computer of some sort, meaning that a PDA would probably be incredibly useful to him if he were away from it, because there's no way in hell he's getting himself a luggable or another kind of early laptop to bring with him, that would've been too expensive.

and that's ignoring the fact that so many situations where two characters are apart form each other but need to communicate could just be fixed by rewriting the plot so that they can meet in person. i know that's not what people wanna hear because rewriting sucks, but you can find a lot of reasons for characters to meet each other randomly or to have reasons to meet up later if you give it a bit of problem-solving. part of what makes the pre-smartphone era interesting to write for and so optimized for horror, and probably a big reason that gabry chose this time period for the story in the first place, is the level of disconnection between each character in the story BECAUSE they don't have things like smartphones. having to work around this technological limitation is part of the fun, because you get a very enjoyable push and pull of closeness vs. disconnection between each character.

this is great for alienating ash, the only one who doesn't live in the apartments (except for neil), and causing her internal conflict about her relationships with the rest of her friends, especially as the story progresses and they start discovering more shit about the cult, and her instincts are to call the cops because she's a lot more normal than her friends are. or, it's good for alienating travis, who also doesn't live there and is far more isolated than everyone else (more on that next), or for creating an unhealthy and codependent relationship between sal and larry, who, with the walkies, are the only two in the friend group who DO have semi-instant access to each other all the time--all of which are plot points i put into my writing.

and if that's not enough, think about the implications for travis's character in particular. his father is a preacher, and a huge talking point of christian extremists in the 90s was that things like television were evil and demonic in some way. they campaigned against these things heavily. with the kind of person that we know kenneth phelps to be and the way many technologies we take for granted today, including TVs, were still being adopted by older generations, it's not out of the question at all that travis doesn't own something like a TV or a VCR, putting him even more out of the loop with what other people his age are doing than he already would be, having approximately 0 friends. he doesn't know what DND is, and he doesn't know how to look it up because he's not familiar with computers or the internet, he just knows his dad thinks it's demonic, so he steers clear of it.

the intention of cult leaders like kenneth is to keep their victims as isolated as possible, and not owning a TV, VCR, home computer, etc, is a great way to keep travis and his sisters isolated and disconnected from their peers, and therefore more connected to the cult, and it's a lot easier to justify not owning these things in the 90s, where the story already takes place, than it is if you're writing a modern au. a modern au for this situation would require all kinds of technological workarounds to make sure that travis owned a phone but couldn't do anything his father didn't want him doing on it. he's the kind of father who would go through and monitor his kid's texts, he wouldn't just let travis have snapchat or whatever, but i digress.

i know i'm just doing my petty bitching and people can do whatever they want however they want to, but i really do feel like there's a huge piece of the story that is lost in turning the sally face story as it is into some kind of modern au, and it's pretty unfortunate to me that people seem to think that the 90s was such a primitive alien world of incomprehensible technology that they don't want to write for that time period at all. it's really not as terrifying as it seems, genuinely. a surface level understanding of the era's technologies would be straightforward enough for anyone who wasn't there to write something perfectly coherent, if lacking in specific cultural/technological details that nobody but me cares about because i have autism.

if you're a sally face fan reading this and you struggle with writing for the american 90s because you weren't there, go look up pagers (also called beepers) and PDAs (which are basically early pocket computers) and how they work. ask older family members if or how they used them. go look at the different kinds of home computers of the era from companies like packard-bell and IBM. learn what a pentium III is/was, or what it means to be X86 compatible. look at the history of the CD-ROM, and how when it was invented, it could contain so much data that consumers had absolutely no idea what to do with them until people started putting video games on them. go watch cathode ray dude, LGR or techmoan on youtube.

go learn things about this era, it's good for you and you will have a lot of fun, even if you're not like me, i promise, and your fanfiction will be better for it. please learn about this era. take my hand. we can go to beautiful places together.

[unluckyxse7en]

Somehow my itunes program has glitched and wiped out every single playlist I've ever had on there. I think I'm going to lay in one spot until I waste away and am carried off on the wind as a withered husk.

[juney-blues]

if i hear another person talk about a retro game, system, or computer having a specific "soundfont" i think i'm gonna lose all will to live and spontaneously drop dead in front of them

[tokitooth]

i always bring up spotify’s lack of lossless streaming as a reason to stop using it and people always respond by saying that most people can’t hear the difference and it always frustrates me because like. i’m not gonna deny that i’m probably more attuned to hearing the difference between lossless and lossy because i took audio engineering classes but it feels like woefully missing the point. it’s not about the streaming quality by itself (barring the fact that while most people can’t hear the difference switching from lossy to lossless, they can hear it switching back from lossless to lossy), it’s about the fact that spotify could be offering an objectively superior product but are simply choosing not to. it’s about the fact that streaming services that have lossless audio are either the same price (deezer) or cheaper (apple music, tidal) than spotify, giving spotify absolutely no excuse to not offer lossless audio. it’s about how the streaming quality setting in spotify is set to low by default and lots of people don’t even know that’s a setting you can change. when you say “people can’t tell the difference anyway” you’re kind of doing spotify’s dirty work for them, which is deliberately not giving your customer base a better product operating on the assumption that the customer doesn’t know there’s better out there. i think it’s shitty as a business practice and also entirely disrespectful to music as an art form

[nightmarefuele]

just watched a video called "my teeth" which is exactly how it sounds & a comment read "this is a sign for you to give resident evil a break"

hush. don't tell them

[pancakeke]

a couple weeks back dev made a big update to one table. it really pissed me off because it's used by almost everything I write, and I have to filter it by excluding what I know I don't need rather than including what I do since everyone has permissions on our site to silently add rows to this thing.

one guy in dev made a comment about my complaints saying that if their update was such a big problem then maybe I should be writing more robust queries. but then also he said all I needed to do to exclude the new data was to filter by one column. which did not exist before this update. so how could I have future-proofed anything dude.

I think he was implying that I was filtering by names rather than IDs, which I wasn't cause that's nuts. but also our forecast tables show component inventory locations as names only. no mention of location IDs. these aren't views too, they're actual tables. knowing the inventory location is critical and needs to join to other tables to make anything of value. don't talk down to me if that's how your dept is setting things up.

[i3utterflyeffect]

i think that's all the important stuff backed up? i'm sure i have much more stuff to dig up and save but i've got the stuff i was most concerned about saved!

[bulletbilltime]

Oh y'all are sharing Spotify Wrappeds? Oh sure here's mine. I'm still waiting on my actual year-end list though. Yeah I'm making a homebrew year-end chart. Yeah it won't be ready for another 24 days. Yeah I use homegrown weekly data points harvested from local scrobble aggregators. Wait where did everyone go

[lbhslefttiddie]

I haven’t seen you around much here lately, so I just wanted to say I hope you’re doing well ^^ . If you have any life challenges going on right now, I believe in you to conquer them!!!

thank you!!! the life challenges is my phone and computer both had a stroke and died within a month of each other 😔 it was super cursed but im cool im being very brave about it

[end-orfino]

i know this is very insignificant in comparison to bigger issues, but i lost my favorite cardigan today, & it was one of my favorite clothes in general...It does linger. It does suck