Sure, let's not try to help them and just fuck them instead.

How society collectively decided to design the Millennial experience lol.

No joke. We went from getting yelled at by old people for problems they caused, to being called old and getting shoved aside by the generation ahead of us, really freaking fast.

I feel like we've already been forgotten after we were robbed of opportunity and respect at every turn.

I try to focus my energy towards the good ones. There's still good people out there. I've met many kids that would put the majority of adults to shame with their level of intelligence, maturity, and respect. The odds are so against them though.

How complex is making a roll-your-own NAS?

It really depends on what you want out of it. I personally installed ProxMox on an old gaming machine (DDR3 RAM old lol) and have an Open Media Vault virtual machine running on it with access to my ZFS mirrored pair of storage drives.

Enabling Samba support in Open Media Vault gives you a nice little NAS. I believe it's okay to install bare metal if you really want to also.

It also has a nice Docker interface, so although I should probably not bundle services together so tightly, it runs things like Jellyfin for media, Paperless NGX for document storage, and NextCloud AIO for a convenient (if slightly resource-hungry) interface.

ProxMox lets me do fun things though, like back up the VMs, spin up virtual machines for PiHole ad blocking and Klipper for controlling my 3D printer.

My most important data gets synced to a subscription to a service called iDrive as my offsite. Pretty affordable for 5TB and my own encryption keys. :)

I want to stress that I'm not an IT professional or anything either. If you're reasonably comfortable with Linux and understand some basic networking, I'd say at least getting Proxmox and/or Open Media Vault up and running so you can access it on your home network isn't too hard.

Outside of that, and if you want HTTPS and stuff? There's lots of guides but I would recommend using TailScale instead of opening any ports to the web.

Sorry if this post was meandering but hope it gave you a little bit to go on! :)

Maybe the murder/crime rate has technically gone down, but the prospect of getting thrown in a literal dungeon without trial for having a tattoo, being mistaken for someone else, or doing some thing the government decided they didn't like that week, doesn't sound safe, even if statistically so.

By that definition, the DPRK is "safe" because you're unlikely to get randomly mugged or something while you're there. But God have mercy on a tourist who tries to bring home a piece of paper from a hotel room.

Exactly. The man saw horrors we pray the world would never see again, and still somehow, he came home and finished one of the greatest legends ever told about the indomitable power of fellowship, hope, goodness, and love, against the machinations of ever-hungrier evil and darkness.

He faced the abyss and found light where others would have emerged only with cynical disillusionment and despair.

He fought for a belief that there was still good in people. He wrote the story about those who wanted to turn back and lose hope only they didn't.

Those are the stories that really stick with us.

I'm with you. People can be... Yeah, I can't really top:

willfully ignorant assholes sometimes

...But we can be the light even they can't ignore.

Actually no, not the guy who tries to name everything (and everyone) "X", but one of his fellow Mordor-mentality'd ilk, an entirely unoriginal and stupidly rich aristocrat spawned from the same pits, Peter Thiel .

Most famously, founder of, I kid you not, "Palantir", a big-data information analytics and surveillance company...with military contracts and ethics that mainly revolve around "How much line go up tho?"

Would certainly get Saruman's approval, but I have no freaking idea how he got the Tolkiens'!

Here's a quick article just listing how profoundly the guy misses the point with his LOTR inspired blatantly plagiarized naming scheme, over and over again, wrecking the good name of a fictional world we hold dear as a contrast to this ridiculously stupid timeline.

(Don't care much about the article, it just lists the companies and their primary functions in one spot.)

https://qz.com/1346926/the-hidden-logic-of-peter-thiels-lord-of-the-rings-inspired-company-names

And of course, he's a major player for the Republican machine, because why not? (He's apparently got a husband too, which is even more LeopardsAteMyFace.)

Dude really, actually, got super into Lord of the Rings, made his whole life about pursuing neverending wealth and power, contributes to the military industrial complex, starts ventures about unnaturally extending life, likely contributes massively to climate change, and decided to make the world look more like the one Frodo saw in Galadriel's mirror in Lothlórien.

If you asked him, I'm sure he's the Good Guy(TM) in his story.

Freaking LOL. It's all too stupid to make up.

What artifact do we gotta throw into the fires of the NYSE to implode all this nonsense and save Middle Earth?

Oh 110% agreed. Big time.

I can even understand if it were a bit of debate, for the very worst offenses or something. (Not that I'd agree, but I can understand people debating it.)

I think I was more aghast at how people were frivolously suggesting gulag camps without the slightest moral ponderance over....

(Flips pages)

....Keying off some car paint...

Suburbanites can be a special kind of evil.

Its so ridiculous that one of the worlds villains uses LOTR as his naming scheme.

100%. This deliberate villain-for-lulz flaunting of his lack of self-awareness is one of the most irksome annoyances of our era.

Joke's been done to death but if I knew someone would be looking I'd love to put my homework in 8 nested folders of "PRIVATE FOLDER." "KEEP OUT." "NOT PORN."

...Actual_English_Assignment.odt

What's up with "Mom's Attic"?

"Magician's Brick!"

https://youtu.be/XvAyPBuqGFU

That "Donald Duck Butt" posture puts so much unnecessary compression on one's spine. 💀💀💀

I got a good laugh. Username also confirms based status. You may pass with an updoot, n'wah. :p

Narrator: From the brilliant minds that mildly regret they brought you "The Emoji Movie."

"Guys wait, it's not me!" (Gets spaced and the rest of the cast grimaces and goes "OOOooo...😬")

(Awkward pause)

"...I'm okay!"

Narrator: "Comes an adventure..."

"Guys I think Randy's kinda sus."

"Why's that?"

(Randy farts)

Randy: "Wasn't me...? Hehe?"

Narrator: "...about knowing who you can trust..."

"One of us is an imposter , if we don't find out who it is we're all doomed!"

"What are we supposed to do we don't even have hands!"

Narrator: "...and who's kinda sus..."

(Body found)

Narrator: "Starring...Chris Pratt..."

"Ewww....who knew we had like...one bone?"

Narrator: "...Wanda Sykes..."

"Gary! Are you for real right now?!"

"I STRESS EAT FOR SELF-CARE WHEN I'M HUNGRY OKAY?!"

Narrator: "...Dwayne The Rock Johnson..."

"Guys...heh...come on..(smile twinkle)."

Narrator: "Danny DeVito..."

"It could be any one of us, but DEFINITELY not me I was doing the beep boop thingy with the doodad right over here...IT WAS DEFINITELY MEGAN."

Narrator: "...And John Cena..."

"You didn't see me do anything...you didn't see nothin!"

"...Does that work better with hands?"

"...yeah..."

NARRATOR: " ...As "Probably not the Imposter"...this summer...."

AMOOGOOS

🌈✨⭐

These are the insightful observations I keep coming back to Lemmy for.

Absolutely timeless wisdom.

I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

FRODO: I can’t do this, Sam.

SAM: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?

But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.

Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.

FRODO: What are we holding on to, Sam?

SAM: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.

My first thought EXACTLY LOL.

The idea is exactly the same

Correct. So what makes the difference?

There's a hard truth known amongst people who do things:

Ideas by themselves are worthless without effort taken to communicate them. Few ideas are actually unique, and if they're made real at all, the difference between a "good idea" or "bad idea" is in execution and no small bit of luck.

That execution lives or dies on fundamental understanding and process, but "great ideas" folks are primarily only concerned with the glorious end result and nothing in between.

If that idea is to be worth anything at all, they need to put in the work to make it real, just like anything else.

Even philosophers, whose entire field centers around ideas, need to understand how to communicate that philosophy in a way others will understand.

Have you seen storyboards for award-winning films or videogames or comics? Seemingly simple scribbles made by people who put in the work to understand the fundamental process, used to communicate to others who put in the work to understand different parts of that process. This is how these ideas are tested and refined to eventually become art.

This is why none of those "aspiring game designers" who "have no skills but great ideas" have ever become actual game developers without getting their own hands dirty and learning at least part of how games are actually made. Making worthwhile things takes action, and action takes effort.

Nothing worthwhile in life comes without some kind of effort, and failure is how we learn and improve, despite what commercial interests will loudly and repeatedly sell you.

Ai gen is tempting because it seems to remove all the personal growth and introspection and effort requirements to communicating these supposed "great ideas" for someone who's "just too busy" to learn anymore.

But why should we care about a "great idea" that someone is only willing to put a bare minimum of effort into sharing with us? We're busy learning and collaborating on our own work to make it into art.

Ideas without meaningful action and understanding are simply an act of mental masturbation. It's fun, even healthy in moderation, but not worthwhile to anybody but the thinker.

We scorn Ai images as "not art" because it's a single step away from mental masturbation.

It's a siren's call appealing to "ideas people" who think they can finally avoid the scary process of improving themselves or trying something new, and everyone will be cheering them on as "artists" because they patiently shuffled words around and hit "make it for me" a few hundred times.

It's a fun tech toy at best, and so, so many bad things at worst.

If you read this far, thank you! Sorry it was a lot. I put probably half an hour or more into exercising my perspective and particular abilities to make sure I conveyed my points effectively.

I imagine you certainly wouldn't bother if it were just GPT'd, but I put effort into this comment. Merely thinking it and having a machine spit it out would likely be of very little use, and possibly even insulting, to you.

Don't be afraid to learn and grow if you want to express yourself. That is the joy of being human! I'd like to quote the legendary Bruce Lee here:

Do not fear failure. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.

Have a good one.

ABRUPT_RECORD_SCRATCH.wav

"Space. It seems to go on and on forever... But then you get to the end and then a giant gorilla starts throwing barrels at you."

--Fry, "Futurama"