Have been playing with this inside Illustrator all day. Still a little glitchy. A couple years from now, though, not sure anyone will need commodity stock icons or images.

However, those able to design and build a consistent look and feel across apps/web/video/physical will still be needed, and likely worth even more.

Most of my extended family (including the retirees voting by mail) have all voted for Harris. The rest are doing the same, but in-person. My wife is sending postcards and I’ll be making GOTV calls over the next few weekends. We’re not in a swing state, but we’re doing what we can, and donating to both top and down-ballot elections as much as we can afford.

Forget the polls. They don’t matter at this point.

All hands on-deck. LFG.

Membership in the local art museum.

Can go any time and just sit, absorb, and clear the head.

Going from a Candybar phone to an iPhone.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/253755/gross-revenue-from-gaming-and-gambling-in-macao/

Macau, along with Hong Kong, is one of two Special Administrative Regions in China. Gambling in Macau, which was legalized in the 1850s, makes up a large portion of the region’s economy. Revenue from gaming and gambling there exceeded 29 billion U.S. dollars in 2019. To put this into perspective, gambling revenue in one of the most famous gaming centers in the world, Las Vegas, generally reaches around eight billion U.S. dollars annually. The majority of gambling revenue in Macau is generated from games of fortune, including poker, baccarat and roulette, among others.

Had no idea… Great article.

0 out of 5 stars. Came here to find how to get rid of sewer gases backing up into my bunker and all I got was something about “window managers.”

WHO PUTS WINDOWS IN BUNKERS?

FWIW, it’s this guy: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/cybertruck-owner-crushes-finger-door-19438158.php

Not just ANY calculator. But something that will literally save your life when the electrics on the plane are blown and you need to get to that little airport via dead reckoning.

👆🏼Plung.

Doesn’t the Noah’s Ark story involve some sort of bad weather?

Years ago, Electric utility badly mangled a friend’s last name. That’s what was on his bill. He never corrected it. It’s pronounced like “plug” but with an “n.”

Feels like it should be in the dictionary, under some sort of insult.

Quick search. Yeah, the naked nuns rollerskating down a half-pipe is real.

And no, will not be posting links, you pervs.

Plung.

It’s amazing what CGI makeup can do nowadays.

Got a ride in one coming back from a school event. The Mom driving it was so apologetic about having one. Musk is burning down a lot of goodwill with his customers.

He was likely headed toward the presidency and opening up access to the world, except he was assassinated with a bomb hidden inside a video camera (tin-foil hats on tight) the DAY BEFORE 9/11:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Shah_Massoud#Assassination

S3 started as a place on the cloud to store and retrieve files. But it’s evolved a lot over the years:

• You can directly stream music and videos from it.
• Along with a separate Content Distribution Network (CloudFront), you can have copies geographically replicated to be closer to end-users.
• There’s a separate service (Transfer), you can have multiple locations securely upload files to it. Examples are schools, retail outlets, enterprise divisions, news media, etc.
• It has a built-in event system, so whenever a file is uploaded, it can trigger a function to process the content automatically. This makes it handy for applications where users upload content (like videos) that need to be automatically converted, then copied to another S3 ‘bucket’ for streaming or download.
• You can make a ‘bucket’ (think of it as a directory of files) become a webserver, accessible via HTTP. This makes it dead-easy to build web front-ends using React/Vue, etc. and deploy them there.
• Also handy to host static HTML content, for things like blogs, portfolios, or galleries. A lot of static content generators like Hugo and Jekyll have direct upload to S3 built in.
• If looking to archive or backup, you can designate files to be put into deep freeze on Glacier. This means they are stored, but you will likely not have to access them that often. Storage and access costs are lots cheaper.
• There’s a whole audit log/access control backend for regulated industries like finance, law, or healthcare.
• You can set alarms so you are notified when there is a problem, and rules to prevent things like massive file uploads or DDOS downloads.
• You can create what’s called a ‘pre-signed URL’ so someone using it can securely access a file for a limited amount of time. Those without can’t access it.
• There’s a command line tool, as well as programming toolkits in lots of languages that let your websites and apps directly integrate with it.
• Cost-wise, it’s pay-as-you-go with no monthly fee. So you can store a bunch of files up there and the bill at the end of the month is like, $0.23.
• However, there is a fee for ‘egress’ traffic to the cloud, so if you want to put some content somewhere public and a lot of people access it, it can get expensive.
• A bunch of third-party services have sprung up to offer basic S3-like access with zero egress fees, but they trade that fee for a basic monthly one (Backblaze B2, CloudFlare R2, Wasabi). Generally, they’ll cost less, but you lose some of the above features.
• There are tools that mount S3 buckets as local filesystems, so you can add/list/delete files as if they’re local.

There’s more, but that’s the crux of it.

The common benchmark ‘replacement’ ratio of birth to death is 2.1.

Once a country falls below that, they’re on a slow multi-generational train ride to extinction. There will be multiple stops along the way, where small towns get hollowed out (youngsters move to the cities), and the social safety net for the elderly goes away (not enough money coming in from fewer young, money-earning people).

Next stop is where there aren’t enough caregivers for the growing elderly population. After that, you start going down the dark alleys of Senecide, where the elderly are left out in the forest or ignored to die.

None of this is new. Japan and South Korea have been dealing with it for the past 20 years.

Only solution is immigration from high-baby to low-baby regions. But if the culture is closed and xenophobic, they’ll put barriers up to slow the flow. Second class citizen status. Sectioned-off neighborhoods. Laws to prohibit inter-racial marriage. That sort of thing. After a few years, those immigrants will trend somewhere safe and financially viable where they will get proper respect.

There will be partial stops, of course, where local nationalists will make angry noises about purity and poisoning bloods of the country, etc and win local elections (👋🏽 USA, Germany, Italy, France, and Netherlands!)

But the hard, long-term reality is: a safe, peaceful life is expensive and the cultural norms putting women down just don’t fly any more. The kids are just not making enough babies, and taking away reproductive rights just makes people angry and less likely to reproduce.

This is true for more than 50% of the countries in the world, including UK, US, and Canada. And the trendlines are pointing down.

I spent 1.5 years working on this stuff in my last job. There are tons of reports out there from WHO, IMF, and the UN, all backing all this using fun terms like ‘Demographic Time Bomb.’

tldr: We’re screwed if we don’t find a way to assimilate and encourage immigration, and reduce the cost of raising kids.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Edit: Current government of Spain gets it: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/09/pedro-sanchez-unveils-plans-to-make-it-easier-for-migrants-to-settle-in-spain