Scythes require more specific wind and moisture conditions compared to sickles (as do combines), but they do save a ton of work. My favorite scythe fact is that there is an even faster but more dangerous version called the Flemish Scythe, that is one-handed. From “The Scythe Book”:

…John Gerard, in his seven- teenth-century Herball, recorded an accident wherein the mower:

made a wound to the bones, and withall very large and wide, and also with great effusion of blood; the poore man crept upon this herbe (Clownes Wound wort or All-heale), which he bruised with his hands, and tied a great quantity of it unto the wound with a piece of his shirt, which presently stanched the bleeding, and ceased the paine, insomuch that the poore man presently went to his dayes work againe, and so did from day to day, without resting one day until he was perfectly whole, which was accomplished in a few dayes.

Fucking hardcore.

Hic tamen vivit.

They are, if you scroll to the bottom of the github repo that OP posted there are some examples of what works and doesn’t work to break it.

Watermark data like this is stored in the least significant bits of the pixels themselves, or in the case of OPs example, they do a frequency decomposition on the image then store the watermark data in the coefficients. Basically you have to trash the pixel data at least a little bit to defeat it. So cropping or flipping the image won’t do it, but resizing or rotating with some kind of filtering will.

I have no idea how the machine-learning technique listed there is working, and their documentation link is broken :(

Also Dr Who. Our school had a kid who wore a big Tom Baker scarf and hat everyday. I hope he’s doing well.

I’ve tried, it sucks. Each broker has their own process, often several steps, and often a step is broken (like server errors, can’t get past a captcha, “try again later”, etc). You end up not just having to do the process, but also follow up with many of the ones that are ambiguous or returned server errors or whatnot. I did the top 8 or so brokers and then stopped.

Not from this year specifically (but I only saw it this year): The Polish hackers who uncovered the train manufacturer’s repair shenanigans.

• Part 1: Breaking “DRM” in Polish trains – Reverse engineering a train to analyze a suspicious malfunction (2023)
• Part 2: We’ve not been trained for this: life after the Newag DRM disclosure (2024)

I was listening to a best-selling author’s recent audiobook, and the professional voice actress messed this one up. So you’re in good company. Really, who can we blame but the Greeks?

Mastodon.art has a small but nice community. AI art isn’t allowed. Someone could always lie, I guess, but the community is small enough that engagement bait isn’t really a thing, there’s much larger mastodon instances those people would probably use. They also aggressively defederate fascists.

YouTube offers random A/B testing of titles and thumbnails now, and unfortunately the clickbait/red circle/soy face stuff absolutely does work. Everyone seems to agree that the “metric has ceased to be a good measure” when it comes to the algorithm, but it’s so opaque and omnipotent that people who can’t afford for their videos to be buried have no choice.

YouTube doesn’t just reward you for doing it, you are actively punished for not doing it. The same way one “underperforming” video can have cascading negative effects on your entire channel.

I can’t imagine relying on it for my family’s income. Google basically has hundreds of thousands of people doing spec work for them.

Same as Rhipsalis_baccifera.

I live in the middle of nowhere in Eastern North America. Saw some growing all by itself in the middle of the lane. It never came back in that spot and I’ve never seen any other plants. The seed pods are really spiky and light, they must hitch a ride on stuff.

I decided not to try it after reading a few “trip reports”.

Something I’ve noticed is when untraveled people in the USA try to contextualize themselves with other countries they pick the worst examples they can think of. Favelas in Brazil or slums in South Africa for example. We do this to the point where our entire conception of countries (or in the case of Africa, continents) is the worst imagery we can think of. I think they genuinely don’t believe that, for all their troubles India, Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, etc also have smartphones and big buildings and libraries and universities and laboratories, and educated people living decent lives.

They also can’t see how the overcrowded jails full of pretrial prisoners, the barefoot children carrying buckets for water in Appalachia, the rundown schools full of illiterate kids, the impunity of rich private interests, the corrupt sheriffs and judges, and on and on, puts us in the company of the “third world countries”. Yes we have nice places too, but SO DO THEY. A broken society in the 21st century isn’t people living in mud huts, it’s children shitting in the street next to a glass skyscraper with LEED Platinum certification.

Firewatch. I liked the visual style but everyone raved about the writing specifically and I thought it wasn’t great. I don’t want to shit on them too hard because they did try, and you can’t control how other people hype your work, but I found the characters really flat.

I think it’s possible that Robert Trump, Donald Trump’s younger brother, was an early victim of COVID. He died suddenly and was “very ill” but no specific cause was ever mentioned AFAIK. I think this was covered up because it was politically inconvenient for his brother.

I have nothing to really base it on except the timing and reaction was suspect.

Every town around me have installed these fucking things, covering every major route. In order to get out of my local area without being tracked I have to drive on some serious hillbilly roads. It’s exhausting.

The first Underworld from 2003 is like this, but it’s painfully early 2000s. It’s from that era when every action movie was ripping of The Matrix as hard as possible.

One time I worked on something where a character threw a spear. For some reason they didn’t have a spear on set and asked the actor to just pretend. Then our instructions from the director were to make the actor twirl the spear before he threw it. Just because it looks super cool to twirl stuff, I guess.

Not only did the actor not pretend to twirl it, the shot was about 30 frames long (one second is 24 frames). So we had like 15 frames to make him twirl this giant spear, which the actor didn’t do. It was either make it look like dog shit or make a full, hero digital double and completely re-do the shot as 100% CGI, which there wasn’t time or budget for.

Yeah, it looked like dog shit. The whole project did.

I’m not a huge traveler, but I’ve been to the UK and parts of Europe. The Czech Republic was my favorite place, of the places I’ve been. Ironically never been to Canada, despite having some extended family there. I would love to go, and I love being in foreign places, but I hate getting there. Travel is awful, especially now.

I’ve lived in both urban and rural areas, and the fear is constant everywhere among people who have never traveled. Urban people are afraid that everyone in the country is a Deliverance KKK member, and rural people think the cities are a gang-infested war zone. What’s wild is that, unlike visiting other countries, they could just hop in the car and visit the city or countryside for a weekend. They are consuming lazy media tropes and taking them as fact.

Traveling, even just regional travel, would benefit a lot of people in the USA. We have way more in common with each other than with the oligarchs.

Watching videos has been broken for a few weeks. On the 24th of Sep they mentioned that they’d identified a potential cause, but since then there haven’t been any updates. They typically aren’t super communicative and tend to lock down posts because of the huge surge of duplicate bug reports and unhelpful comments they get whenever this happens. So the silence is not that unusual, but it has been slightly longer than usual for an update.

Thanks, this helped. Although I keep yt-dlp installed with pip so for me instead of github it’s just a pip3 install yt-dlp -U.