Random Dent

I mean they already live in a giant, self-sustaining ecosystem that’s able to withstand quite a lot of fuck-ups and they’ve still managed to fuck that up. No way they’ll last for long in a tiny, fragile one that they build themselves lol.

I said this in another thread, but I saw a diagram of one of those bunkers once and it was basically like a few storeys of luxury condos, a common area and then a huge armory in the basement. It made me laugh imagining sealing up a few dozen of the worlds biggest sociopaths and egomaniacs in there with nothing to do and a massive pile of guns. I genuinely would rather take my chances on the outside of that thing lol.

But yes, 100% let them have it. Also if anyone finds one don’t forget to check the condition of the hatch. It’d be an awful shame if a big rock were to roll on top of it so nobody could get out. Awful shame.

It reminds me of when Obamacare passed in the US, and the Republicans tried to repeal it over 70 times in the first seven years.

I genuinely think there needs to be a rule that when something fails to pass (or be repealed), there needs to be a decent ‘cooling off’ period before it can be attempted again. Passing wildly unpopular legislation by just spamming it over and over again until everyone gets tired of fighting it is no basis for a system of laws IMO.

Hospitals this morning:

DNA is one that concerns me quite a lot. I can see some arguments in favour or retaining DNA on file for a longer term in certain cases - persistent sex criminals comes to mind - but I really think there should be tighter controls about just indiscriminately gathering DNA, and if you’re not found guilty of anything that info should be expunged and this should be independently audited IMO.

Also facial recognition for similar reasons. This feels like it should be the sort of thing to me that needs a warrant to be used, like searching a person’s home. Governments shouldn’t be allowed to just endlessly trawl through the faces of everybody who’s out in public for whatever reason they like. And using it to just sweep protests to (presumably) make a database of protestors should be a big no-no.

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.

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.

Ah okay. Well if you grab either of those programs I linked to it’s pretty straightforward, you pretty much just choose your model from a list and away you go. You can run them even if you don’t have a great GPU, but they’ll be slower.

Oh sorry, I phrased that kind of badly. I don’t run ChatGPT locally, I just meant I run an LLM locally. Usually either Mistral or Qwen. I was using GPT4All until recently, but lately I’ve been trying out Jan too.

TBH I don’t really believe anything NASA says when it comes to stuff like this. It’s basically been ~5 years away from going back to the moon and ~20 years from going to Mars for my entire life, and I’m not a young person.

That’s essentially what I do, I don’t have any accounts with ChatGPT or anything, I just run it locally off my laptop. IDK if you get better results with ChatGPT (I’d assume probably) but my local one seems fine for everything I need it for. It’s a little slow too, but who cares?

My take on it is that it’s just a tool, and as with most tools you can use it in a sensible way that’s positive, although many people choose not to. So as an example, I work in a creative field and I see a lot of people relying on it to do their creative work for them, which I don’t really agree with. What I use it for is kind of like an assistant to handle all the admin crap that usually gets in the way of doing creative stuff. So sometimes you have to write form letters, grant things etc. - basically formal stuff that wouldn’t require any creative thinking if you did it by yourself anyway, but still eats up time and brain power. I just give that stuff to the AI, make sure it sounds vaguely presentable, and send it off. I could also see a use case for it in areas where I’m weaker like marketing my stuff, maybe for at least coming up with an outline strategy of some sort, although I haven’t really tried that out yet.

Essentially, AI will do your creative stuff for you if you let it, or you can just use it to handle the day-to-day piddly crap to free yourself up to do the creative stuff yourself. It’s up to you really.

There is also a Calibre plugin that’s supposed to deal with .ascm files. I’ve never managed to get it to work personally but maybe someone else will have more luck.

I actually didn’t know you could nest Virtual Desktops within activities, so that was nice. Now I can make my setup even more absurdly complicated for anyone who’s not me to use lol.

As a Brit who has seen the UK government’s ill thought through and unworkable attempts at police state bullshit go through the process a few times now, I’m going to predict: VPN use goes up massively, the government starts talking about banning VPNs without considering that this would break half the internet, then some wealthy business donor has a quiet word to them because businesses need VPNs to function, but they can’t publicly back down because they already called everyone who opposed it a pedo. So they pick one or two VPN companies (whichever ones have the most foreign-sounding names), have the tabloids run a propaganda campaign about how evil they are, then ban them even though they aren’t based in the UK and it makes no difference to anything, then they’ll claim they won and the laws will stay on the books forever but nobody will bother to enforce them and everything will carry on as before.

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I have a long-running theory that we’re the US’s testing ground for authoritarian nonsense. If they roll it out here and it doesn’t get too much resistance, it’ll show up in the US in the next 3-5 years.

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The usual tech support search:

• First hit is a thread describing your exact problem, marked as [SOLVED]. Clicking it goes to a 404.

• Second hit is a thread describing your exact problem that goes to an actual thread, but the message has been edited to just say “Solved” with no record of what was done.

• Third hit is a thread describing almost your exact problem, with the first response calling the poster a noob for asking and then 15 pages of arguments.

• Fourth hit is a thread describing something in the same general area as your problem, which you try anyway and makes the thing you’re trying to fix break in a different way, but it’s progress at least.

• Actual solution is somewhere between the 5th and 8th hit, or you give up and come back to it in about a week and solve it instantly without trying for some fucking reason.

So to answer the question, I can usually tell I’m getting close to the solution when I say “Oh for fuck’s sake” as I’m closing tabs lol.

Smashing Pumpkins 1996-05-15 at Brixton Academy, London

It starts off kind of low-energy and then for whatever reason about halfway through they just start blasting it.

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