Random Dent

I think the collapse will ultimately be more like a correction. I think AI does have its uses if deployed properly, but right now it’s being way overblown.

That COVID essentially gave everyone PTSD or brain damage or both, and has probably fucked us for at least a generation, maybe more.

NB: As a side note, this is just a hunch but I suspect that the next generation coming up (IE people who were infants/very young kids at the time COVID started) is going to be a real weird one. They missed out on crucial social development milestones because of the lockdowns, probably most of them got COVID because we rushed everyone back to school and who knows what that does to very young brains, and they’ll spend the rest of their formative years in this sort of jibbering fascist aftermath that we seem to be currently living in. I have no idea what effect this will have on society, but I’ll go out on a limb and say “probably not good.”

I used to work in a store that was on a busy intersection, and there was a homeless guy who used to stand there all day with a sign. He was harmless and everyone kind of knew him. One day he got hit by a car on the intersection (by accident), so I called 911. I started telling them and they were like “Oh yeah we already had about 10 calls about him, don’t worry.” Then an ambulance came and got him and he was fine, he was back there like a week later.

Yeah BioWare has felt like a kind of zombie studio to me for a while. They managed to coast along on Mass Effect/Dragon Age momentum for like a decade or so, but I can’t remember the last time they had a big hit game.

Plus those type of games are the ones that take quite a lot of time and resources to do well, so I can’t see that fitting in well with EA’s new “generate endless AI slop until we pay off our debts” business model.

I was at a barbecue on a Saturday night once when my boss called in an emergency because he thought we were being hacked. The reason being, because he was in Starbucks trying to look at our website on his phone and it wasn’t loading properly. I had to explain that:

1. It’s Saturday night and I’m not on-call for IT.
2. I’m also in the art department and IT is in no way part of my job description.
3. Because of 2, if we are being hacked I don’t know what to do about it.
4. It’s probably just that Starbucks wifi is shitty?

That was a stressful job lol.

I used to have a not well known webcomic and would get death threats/“kill yourself” messages pretty regularly, so yeah for drawing a cartoon would be mine I guess! They never used to bother me especially though, I thought they were funny. I used to have a page up where I’d post the dumbest ones lol.

And possibly more crucially, broadcast to whoever the US is fighting across the globe that leadership will be absent and probably quite busy at a very specific time…

This meeting would also correspond to the government shutdown (October 1 if a funding bill is not approved). Most likely just a coincidence but I’ll put it out there just in case.

As someone who lives in Canada, where they have also threatened to invade, is a bit concerning.

Knowing the current administration, it’s probably so then can start selling sugar pills that ‘reverse Tylenol autism’ for $2K/pill and use them to loot the healthcare system.

I was saying the other day that the only value I can see in RFK is for study, but as the subject. He’s like one of those 19th century rail workers that accidentally blasts a metal rod through his head with dynamite and keeps living somehow. As far as I can tell he can’t be operating on more than 20% of a functional human brain, but how?

I’d assume Charisma maybe? Like, I don’t find any of them charismatic in the slightest, but Trump especially seems to have this weird ability to make people follow him unquestioningly while he simultaneously fucks them over right to their face.

Reminder that in March 2016 Trump insulted Ted Cruz’s wife, and by October Cruz was answering phones for the Trump campaign because he’s a spineless piece of shit who would stick his head all the way up the FCC chairman’s asshole tomorrow if Trump so much as frowned at him.

Joe Biden returning with his hair dyed black like Creed in that one episode of The Office.

I always find that with GNOME it seems like super basic features that should be included are made as extensions instead, which wouldn’t be a huge deal except that the extensions update completely independently of GNOME and each other, with no regard for cohesiveness or compatibility. Every time I’ve run a machine with GNOME it feels like there’s always at least one extension broken at any given moment meaning there’s always something vaguely irritating going on.

Canada here. Maybe if the US didn’t threaten to invade us, then later call us terrorists and say they were disappointed we weren’t coming to visit on the same day then the tourism numbers would be up?

They also likely won’t be threatened by it - they’ll either wreck it from outside or weasel their way into it and enshittify it from the inside, as with all things.

For just text LLMs, they seem to run on surprisingly modest hardware. My laptop only has 8GB RAM and integrated graphics and it can run one. It’s a little slow and it runs the CPU kind of hot, but it works.

It’d be neat if data centers could also be desalination plants. IE, you extract the seawater, desalinate it, use it for cooling, then add the fresh water into the general water supply when it’s done with. I’m sure there are probably many reasons why that wouldn’t work though.

I dunno how people here feel about Banksy but I’ve always quite liked this quote:

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.