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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • imagemagick handles almost all image files

    images ) ls
    001.jpg  002.jpg  003.jpg  004.jpg  005.jpg
    images ) convert 001.jpg example.pdf
    

    ffmpeg handles almost all video files

    ex ) ls
    rock.mp4
    ex ) ffmpeg -i rock.mp4 rock.avi
    

    if you use gnome there’s a nice little feature of the file explorer where you can just drag and drop scripts into ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/

    for example

    make a fish script (ignoring error checking for brevity here, my real script had a couple guard rails)

    /#!/usr/bin/env fish
    set file $argv[1]
    convert $file (basename $file .png).pdf
    

    then when you right click on a file in your gnome file explorer you can click the scripts option

    example

    and the script is right there so you can just easily convert with the press of a button

    example

    note, i crossed out some stuff that includes client names

    tldr: there are so many ways to do what you need to do there’s no reason to trust random websites you don’t know. there’s a lot of slimey people out there wanting to take advantage of people. and everybody should strive to be at least a little computer literate. the examples i gave here aren’t complicated. they’re simple commands


  • I think the question already contains a sort of ideological trap: it assumes that a specific company can be uniquely evil, as if morality were some trait that varies between company to company.

    I’m sure everyone’s heard this before:

    There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

    It’s not just a slogan. It gives us insight into the very structure of capitalism. That doesn’t mean every individual act is equally bad, but the system demands a sort of baseline complicity.

    CEOs and executives are legally required to maximize shareholder profits. Not just encouraged— legally obligated. So when Coca-Cola, for example, hires paramilitary death squads to kill labor leaders in Colombia, it’s not because it is uniquely monstrous. Replace Coca-Cola with Pepsi, or Nestle, or Amazon, or Raytheon… whatever. The logic of the system would produce the same result. If I gave the same chess position to 30 different Grandmasters… if there is a best move they will all see it and choose that best move.

    Think of an ant colony. An ant colony doesn’t decide to be cruel; it expands, consumes, protects its territory, destroys threats. Is it evil when some colony wipes out another for resources? A colony committing what we could term ant genocide? No it’s not. The colony is simply acting in its nature. Much like a slime mold would expand in a radius looking for food in a petri dish.

    Large corporations are like ant colonies. Complex emergent behavior resulting from a large number of individual units acting by a set of rules. The intelligence or perspective of the individual does not actually matter for the organism as a whole. As long as the individual units follow a set of rules it creates a sort of “hive-mind” pseudo-intelligence that acts in its own interests and has an almost Darwinist natural selection process.

    So this is all to say that I reject the question. I don’t believe in uniquely evil companies. The horror is precisely that they’re all, in a sense, innocent. They act not out of hatred or sadism or cruelty, but because the system itself has carved out the pathways where the ball inevitably rolls down the hill following the path of least resistance.



  • if you stick to your workouts and train to failure, your muscles will grow.

    however to eliminate fat, you don’t exercise. you eat less. when you are eating below caloric maintenance, your body makes up the difference in fat. you can’t control where the fat comes from. you just have to maintain that for a long time and it’ll go away. everyone stores fat differently. some in legs, some in stomach, etc.

    but you cannot exercise away body fat. it’s like 80/20 diet exercise