I understand that drawing doesn’t work that way. What I’m suggesting is that drawing doesn’t work that way because visualizing something in your mind is so far removed from actually seeing it.

For example, you could imagine that you want to paint a lake with mountains. You can get an idea of how you’ll compose the image, what the colors are, how the strokes might make textures on the canvas, all the details. It’s more than just knowing the facts of each object, color, line. It’s an understanding of how it will look visually and you “picturre it” but it’s nowhere close to the sensory experience of actually looking at the finished painting.

This is my experience, at least.

Not being flippant here: If you can actually see it, why not just see it on the paper and essentially trace what you see?

Interesting. Maybe if there’s a spectrum of ability for visualizing things, I’m just closer to aphantasia than I am to vivid mental images which rival visual perception.

I should preface this by saying that this is just my opinion and that I may be completely wrong.

I’m convinced that for 99% of people thinking they have aphantasia, it’s just a miscommunication about what it means to “see” something in your mind. When people picture something in their mind, they can’t literally see it in the way that they would see something with their eyes. Seeing something in your mind is just having an understanding of what it would look like.

People will say that they can “see” whatever you’re asking them to “picture” but they only ever hold an understanding of what the thing would look like. This understanding can be elaborate but there is not actually an experience that could be perhaps better described as a visual hallucination.

If you visualize a cube in your mind, you don’t actually see it. You just understand where all the lines, faces, and vertices would be. If you rotate it in your mind, you understand how those angles and the appearance would change at each moment as it rotates. You can even superimpose where these lines would go onto something you’re looking at, but still you don’t actually see it there, you just understand how you would perceive it, where the edges would go, what it would obstruct.

The reason that I’m convinced that people only hold concepts and visual understanding in their minds and not actual images is that most people are pretty bad at drawing. When people do start drawing, they create a representation of the sparse landmarks that actually made up their visual idea and then they have to start filling in the details using reasoning and logic. Artists and people who practice drawing get better at this, are more attentive to detail and learn techniques to make more convincing images. If people actually saw complete images in their minds, they’d be far easier to recreate and I think everyone would be more artistically inclined.

Furthermore, unlike “seeing” when you picture something while conscious, I think dreams actually do include visual hallucinations that can seem similar to actual visual perception.

I think if you stop and they run into you, that’s technically a foul.

I haven’t watched much of Linus’s stuff, but his behavior in the three Linux challenge videos reminded me of the way Conan O’Brien would act with his staff. It struck me as an off-putting blend of arrogance, entitlement, and impatient senility.

I just watched that Linus tech tips video where the guy uninstalls critical system components by accident while trying to install steam.

First the GUI for the package manager refuses to do it, then apt gives him a warning that he’s going to break his system. It even makes him type “Yes, do what I say!” but he’s too much of a clown to read the warning messages all over his screen. He even smirks at the camera about how silly it is that he would need to type such a thing before he proceeds to mess everything up.

People were trying to defend him, saying that the system shouldn’t have allowed him to do it or that the warnings should have been flashing and shooting rainbows out of the monitor or that a robot arm should have come out and started honking his clown nose to let him know he was doing something stupid.

I get by pretty well just using my bank’s website. If you need the bank’s app for something like occasionally depositing checks, maybe you could keep your old phone in a drawer with your checkbook.

I think the takeaway here should be that meat heavy diets are worse for the environment than you might realize.

The takeaway should not be that cars are only barely worse than bikes.

When you power your bike with your legs, you burn energy. That energy comes from food. Producing and transporting the food to you has a climate impact. Cycling has a climate impact.

Riding a short distance vs riding a long distance is irrelevant. Both systems require an amount of energy per unit of distance. Because the energy is supplied in different ways, there is a different total amount of carbon emitted of per unit of energy. For ebikes, that amount is lower than it is for traditional, human powered bikes.

Here are a couple sources, dickface:

https://www.ebikes.ca/documents/Ebike_Energy.pdf

https://www.bikeradar.com/features/long-reads/cycling-environmental-impact

A watt hour is equal to 0.86 nutritional calories. My estimate of 40 watt hours per mile converts to about 35 kcal. Estimates of the energy taken to pedal a bike are about 30-40 kcal/mile. That checks out!

1 kilowatt hour is equivalent to 860 kcal.

1 kilowatt hour from a coal power plant generates about 1.0-1.1 kg of CO2.

For a typical Western diet, studies suggest that the average emissions associated with food production and transportation can range from about 0.5 to 2.5 kg of CO2 per 1,000 kcal of food consumed. (0.4-2.1 kg of CO2 per 860 kcal)

The ebike generally has a smaller environmental footprint than the analog bike, as most sources of power produce less CO2 than coal power plants and most people eat more meat than necessary, putting them in the higher range of the food CO2 production range.

Unless you’re vegetarian, a traditional bicycle will have a higher carbon footprint than an ebike, due to how inefficient it is to grow and transport food when compared to production of electrical power.

Ebikes are way more efficient than electric cars, too. I calculated that my bike uses about 40 watt hours per mile, compared to about 250-350 for an electric car.

My brother in law was still using windows 7 and it had never occurred to him that this might be a security risk. Normal people don’t care.

I’m sure this will draw some criticism but I’ve found duck.ai to be extremely helpful in troubleshooting minor issues with my Linux mint installation and recently with accessing and understanding SMART hard drive diagnostic data. It’s very helpful in figuring out which commands could be useful in the terminal and in understanding exactly what each terminal command is doing. Of course finding answers in forums and manuals is still relevant and important but as a beginner, this has been a fast and easy way to get advice.

Cool form factor, if it can run Linux.

Awesome!

I’m with you on this. If it could come with a privacy-respecting smartphone app hosted on F-Droid, that would be so great.

Its just an entry in a ledger. It says something like, “blandfordforever sends courageousstep 1 coin” along with a cryptographic signature from blandforever that validates the transaction. This means you now have and can transfer that coin to someone else, provided that you have the key to sign the appropriate transaction. That’s all it is.

The miners are all competing to sign a “block” of transactions onto the ledger by figuring out new correct answer to a math problem that’s determined in part by a number from the previous block. They are rewarded for this by being able to send themselves a preset number of coins in this new block they’ve signed. Transactions aren’t final until they’ve been added to the blockchain by this mechanism.

Setting up a stupid question just to deliver a pun as a punchline is 100% a dad joke in my book.

I’m interested to hear what you think is required for a joke to be a dad joke.