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2319
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1 yr. ago

as alive as you need me to be

  • Oh look, a public figure!

    Say hello to Mr. Flowers, everyone!

    https://www.banderatx.gov/directory-listing/jeff-flowers

    https://directory.tml.org/profile/individual/109994

    Looks like he was basically dubiously appointed as a Concil Member, in an unusually short amount of time!

    https://www.banderabulletin.com/article/2555,council-appoints-jankoski-flowers-to-edc

    But don't worry, he's very enthusiastic about his opportunity to serve the city:

    “I am excited to do my part. I know that they have had a struggle finding applicants,” Flowers said. “So, I just felt it was my duty to step in and serve and do what I can to get through their agenda items and some of the things we need for Bandera moving forward. Hard to do without a quorum.”

    Here's how that's going lately ->

    https://www.banderabulletin.com/article/3117,flowers-proposes-banning-phones-cameras

    Bandera City Council member Jeff Flowers released a public statement May 13 defending the city’s Flock Safety camera program and proposing new agenda items that would ban smartphones, security cameras and other technology following public opposition to the license plate reader system.

    ...

    The Bandera Declaration of Digital Independence To the Citizens of Bandera: “For months, I have listened to the outcry regarding License Plate Recognition (LPR) technology. I have seen the eyerolls, and I’ve even been met with 'Nazi rhetoric', the dangerous claim that believing in accountability and community safety is somehow equivalent to totalitarianism. Comparing a neighbor’s desire for a safe street to a dark chapter of history is a classic case of comparing apples to oranges; it is a distraction used to avoid the reality of the threats our town faces today.

    “I’ve also read the social media comments suggesting that if I want a camera, I should 'put one on my own house.'

    “Funny thing is, I did. And that camera caught a gang of criminals from San Antonio who drove into our town in a stolen car to break into mine. My private camera caught them after the crime was done. But if we had LPR readers at our city limits, that stolen car would have been flagged the moment it entered Bandera, likely before those criminals ever reached my driveway, or yours.

    “I now understand your concerns and I secede. Your outcry is just too logical to ignore. Since the Council has decided we are the 'Free State of Bandera', a place where the 'rights' of a car thief or human trafficker to remain anonymous apparently outweigh the right of a resident to protect their property and the safety of their family, then we must go all the way.

    “To ensure our historic County Seat becomes the most 'traditional' sanctuary in Texas, I have requested the following for the next City Council agenda:

    • A Modest Proposal for Digital Device Prohibition: A total ban on all cellular and GPS-capable devices for all operations within city limits. If we are to be truly 'private,' we must leave our smartphones at the city line.

    • A Modest Proposal for Total Surveillance Abolition (Residential & Commercial): A total ban on all outward-facing cameras, including residential doorbells and all commercial CCTV or security camera technology. If municipal safety cameras are 'invasive,' then no business or homeowner should be allowed to 'monitor' the public. We will remove every lens in town.

    • A Modest Proposal for Total Municipal and Commercial Decommissioning: A total termination of all internet services and electronic record-keeping. We are going back to 1880, paper ledgers and cash only. “The Fiscal Reality of 'Freedom': This decision didn't just cost us our safety; it cost us our wallets. By canceling this project, the Council didn't just throw away a state grant (free money); they spent $15,000 of your local tax dollars out of pocket to back out of the deal. Bragging about fiscal responsibility while paying $15,000 for nothing is a very bad deal for Bandera.

    “A History Lesson: In the 1880s, privacy in this County Seat was non-existent. When a stranger rode into Bandera, the Marshal gave them an interview, not 'space.' The livery stable registered their horse’s brand, and the merchants watched their every move. Anonymity was for outlaws; accountability was for citizens.

    “I even reached out to the Trump camp regarding our 'Free State' logic and the way we're treating our Marshal's office and the safety of our community. The response was classic: 'Our police are being treated very, very unfairly. It’s a total disaster. We give them the tools, we get them the grants—and I love grants, we have the best grants, nobody gets grants like we do—and then these 'eye-rollers' say no? It’s unbelievable. They want the criminals to have the best technology, the newest technology, but they want our great police to have nothing. They want a 'Free State' for the bad guys. It’s very sad.'

    “Let’s take Bandera back to 1880 properly. No double standards, no hypocrisy. If LPRs are 'unconstitutional' and invade our right to 'public' privacy, we need to be courageous enough to go all the way. I look forward to the 'Privacy First' crowd showing up to support these bans….just remember to leave your phones at home.

    Jeff Flowers Bandera, TX”

    Oh-hohoo... this sassy little corpo bitch is gonna be very famous soon, in all the wrong kinds of ways.

    I mean, that's what he'd want, right?

    What a fucking manchild.

  • I really don't think any car ever has been as rock solid of indicator of 'I am a mentally impaired douchebag with far more money than sense'.

    Like... sure, pick your class of car that's just wildly unnecessary, pick your brand of car that's actually notorious for incredible maintenance costs, pick your model of car that's just plauged by recalls...

    Cybertruck trumps everything as the ultimate poser douchebag vehicle.

  • They're also literally death traps.

    If the battery pops, starts burning?

    You now have to scramble to find the extremely awkward hidden emergency manual door release.

    Because the main door handles, both internal and external, are fucking fly by wire, they rely on the electronics, they're not directly mechanical.

    Oh and the 'bullet proof glass' that makes up the windows... well its not very bullet proof, but it is significantly harder for a human to break than normal car glass.

    Like this guy is unironically lucky he did not drown and also burn to death at the same time.

  • Fast. Cheap. Good.

    At best, pick 2.

    This applies to code and coders as well, despite management's inability to comprehend reality.

  • It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

    Upton Sinclair, ~1935

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump
  • Insanity Wolf -> Microwave acts upon LiON battery.

  • Oh shit you're talking about the cartouche!

    Ok yeah that should... those are drawn around names of very important people or gods... so the one we have here would be uh...

    Ok yeah, that is the cartouche name for Tutankhamen... they've kinda stylized the third (second? lol) symbol into 3 perfect squares though.

    Usually its closer to 3 strokes than rectangles or squares... I think this is just Z2 by Gardiner's classification.

    So there then! That's not gibberish!

    A modern repro of his name done by presumably actually qualified people, shown as part of an exhibit:

    https://thaddeusnowak.com/2014/05/21/pharaoh-tutankhamun-union-station/

    I think, in this context, the circle above the scarab is meant to be the sun literally, which is then figuratively Ra, which then even more figuartively basically means 'Divine'.

    Many cartouche encapsulated pharoah names start with this kind of circular/sun figure as the first element.

  • I am again not 100% sure, but i think that... if we are going with bottom to top, then left to right...

    Well best case scenario we end up with a bunch of determined symbols that have hopefully unicode equivalents (yes many hieroglyphs are in unicode), or could follow another standard of conversion to latin style characters...

    Butthenwewouldendupwithasentencelikethisinancientegyptian.

    So if you don't know the language at all, you'd have no idea where to break apart chunks into words.

    So... maybe, you could feed that into some kind of a text to text translator.

    Tesseract OCR is opensource, but doesn't appear to support hieroglyphs.

    I couldn't find any online image to text converters that supported hieroglyphs either.

    So yeah I tried to do it manually, got frustrated lol.

    I guess its worth noting that, as far as i know, egyptian does allow for compound characters that represent combinations of phonemes... and/or convey an entire concept, not as phonemes.

    So sometimes, when a glyph element is present or not present, it still means something, just a different something.

    But there are a lot of glyphs.

  • ... ok so...

    www.omniglot.com/writing/egyptian.htm

    the glyphs on the thrift store version do appear to be real hierogylphs.

    but... the bird glyphs in particular are causing me consternation, as they seem to mirror flip their orientation occasionally, for no apparent reason, and are also... done in such a style where i cannot make heads of tails of which specific actual avian hieroglyph is being represented by which 'modern repro' hieroglyph.

    Or perhaps the mirroring is an element of egyptian grammar/language i am unaware of?

    For example, the left most column, i think is ->

    htm-(idm/sdm)?-t

    (w)?

    r

    t

    where i am not sure whether it is idm or sdm... and i am assuming the bird is w.


    second column ->

    im

    dz-j-ti

    n


    bottom half of third column ->

    nb

    (w)?

    (tym/m)?


    Now I do not actually know ancient egyptian at all so I have no idea how to attempt to translate the characters into words that have meaning.

    ...and it could be the case that whoever created this is trying to use determinatives, in which case this is even more complicated... the glyph i have as (w)? could actually indicate (small-bad-weak).

    But it seems at least seems possible that this could be non total gibberish.

    ???

    ... any on call egyptologists potentially present?

  • Yep, that's even better.

  • Microsoft tech support:

    Ackshually... what you've identified is not a problem, because my boss has a greater ability to rationalize the existence of problems, than solve them.

    Therefore you are an idiot, stop harassing me.

  • I'm sorry, is your coworker Jerry from Rick and Morty?

  • Discover!: Paramax HimBO Mounts the Warner Brothers

  • Unfortunately I am crippled, but if anyone does want to do this, please for the love of god scrub your exif data, use a burner everything in every step of that process.

  • Alright, crush his testicles, rip off his arms, put out his eyes.

    'That's life.'

    No really, we need to bring back drawing and quartering.

  • Oh you're right!

    It's worse!

    Art nerds on Twitter are as easily gaslit as LLMs, and relish in mocking things they do not repsect, yes, interesting.

    Not exactly groundbreaking but ok then.

  • Ok, now, lets get further into topology.

    I want to see an illustration of a gourdian knot.

  • Oh, so a bunch of art nerds discovered that Monet is also a thing that you can gaslight an LLM about.

    You can gaslight an LLM about literally anything.

    Monet paintings are included in 'literally anything'.

    Sure yeah this is a social experiment, in the sense of we get to see how art nerds relish in mockery of things they don't have respect for.

    Its a fancy auto complete algorithm, that has read the entire internet.

    You lied to it, and told it to tell you why something was bad. It believed your premise and then did as you asked.

    If you did the reverse, it would do that too.

    ... Its like picking on a toddler, we've known you can gaslight LLMs for years now... did... Twitter art nerds just now figure this out?

  • Almost made me do a spit take, damn you lol!

  • Nope.

    I'm legitimately having a blast right now, 100% affirmed by reality, which I spent the last roughly 15 years of trying to tell people, very labriously, with very detailed reasoning, why what is now obvious was then and basically always has been the case.

    Your discomfort is my schadenfreude.