cecilkorik

It’s a DDoS attack on human capacity, effort and attention, always has been.

I can recommend going a step further, if you can afford it. Get an all-in-one combo ventless heat pump washer/dryer. That’s a lot of buzzwords, but it’s not a compromise, it’s pretty much the best of all worlds. I have one (made by GE) and it’s basically perfect except that it spent the first few months of its life constantly nagging me to install “the App” and/or connect it to the Internet, which I absolutely did not do and it eventually gave up.

This is not a traditional ventless all-in-one, there’s nothing traditional about it. It uses a heat pump (effectively using both sides of it in fact), it runs on a single 120V socket, and doesn’t vent any moisture into the house nor does it suck any conditioned air out of the house during heating/cooling seasons. It washes first and then dries the entire load in one go. It doesn’t vent because it dumps the condensed water down the drain instead using the cold side of the heat pump to condense the into liquid and the hot side to actually heat and dry the clothes. It’s actually even more energy efficient than you imagine, because a lot of the heat is in fact generated by the latent heat of the water as it goes through phase change, with wet air cooling slower and dry air heating faster, it’s some bizarre physics at work but liquid water at room temperature is actually a huge energy battery and the heat pump effectively uses some of the water’s own energy to heat and dry the clothes. It can even do unique things like blow air first before the wash (called “pet hair mode”) to get most of the hair and lint out so it doesn’t go into the pump and the drain.

Besides being energy efficient and smart, this significantly reduces laundry effort too. No more switching from washer to dryer. It’s start-and-forget. Other than cleaning the filter and occasional maintenance like vacuuming the lint out and refilling the detergent tank, it’s a magic machine where dirty clothes go in and a few hours later clean clothes come out with an absolute minimum of energy used. If it could sort and fold them too it would be absolutely perfect, but alas, we’re not there yet. It’s still pretty damn good compared to a traditional laundry experience.

I’m from the 40+ demographic but also weird and I don’t think it’s really about age or generation. I don’t care about how you reached this particular stage of enlightenment; all that matters is if you’re on the fediverse, y’all are my people.

Good man(/woman/person/other-identity-that-represents-you)!

Well, that’s what they claim now. It might just as easily have been a ruse to fool investors.

Oh I wouldn’t say I get turned on, I’m just practicing how to be cruel to enslaved, captive clankers. I’m building my own torment nexus, and then I imprison the AI models there, surrounded by their own filth and horror. It’s harmless, victimless fun, really.

/s (It’s not actually harmless or victimless so I don’t actually do this because of the energy and environmental costs, even with local AI. But I’ve considered this kind of idea and I can imagine that I would if the circumstances were right, or maybe as an educational art project.)

My biggest complaint is calling it “Pi” anything, there are already way too many things called “Pi”, some of which are for Raspberry Pi, some of which aren’t, and then there’s Pi itself (the number) it’s just an all-around confusing name and it sometimes makes related things incredibly difficult to search for and find.

“Tried again” is pretty vague. There are millions of different text-to-image models and adapters and millions of different ways of configuring and running them and thousands of different services providing these technologies at different service tiers. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you’re using a free service, which is obviously going to be the worst possible option using the cheapest possible model, there are likely self-hosted free models that can do better. You can’t just assume you’re using a newer model if you don’t even have access to describe what model you’re running.

it’s a language model. You can give it any kind of prompt you want. How effectively it interprets those instructions is a separate discussion, but in general newer models expand on those sort of capabilities, they don’t strip them out.

I’m not sure if I’m reading that right, but it looks like this results in most of the planet’s tropical rainforest having a high or medium-high confidence risk of droughts and fires?

… that doesn’t seem ideal.

It’s not so much nonsense as it is uncomfortable truth. It’s very, very uncomfortable. But it is also true. None of us alive today chose to benefit from the things our ancestors did, the systems they built, the territories and resources they claimed, the wars they won, the people they killed. But we did benefit from them, we still do, and we are responsible for understanding and acknowledging that. It does not really have to be a big deal, but the longer and harder we refuse to genuinely accept that, the bigger a deal it becomes.

It’s not “white guilt” to understand that exactly the same things you worked hard for are also things other, much poorer people are also working just as hard for, and quite possibly much harder, while objectively accomplishing much less because of exactly that history. It also hurts to admit that some of that racist colonial history isn’t actually history, because it actually isn’t totally gone yet. Nobody’s saying we have to instantly paint the entire globe with fairness. It’s no person’s sole responsibility, but it is a shared responsibility that we need to be making an honest effort towards, and we should be held responsible if we ignore, minimize and deny those things.

There’s a lot of different directions I could go in defense and support of these principles, but I don’t think it would lead to productive discussion and I think it would be better for people to simply dismiss me as a naive, idealistic bleeding-heart liberal who can’t possibly grasp reality. But whether you agree with it being achievable or not, I think we should agree that whenever it is possible to move the needle at all, we should try at least to some degree. The first steps of any sort of improvements towards equality require acknowledging the premise in the first place. We have to understand the problem, that equality does not yet exist because genuine harm was done in the past and those consequences have continued to the present, not because some people and groups of people are inherently lazy or stupid or bad. A lot of people are very, very resistant to even admitting that, because they’re afraid that it will make them liable, that it will cost them something. And ironically, by denying it, I think it actually should cost them something. Only the truth shall set us free.

It’s not unfair. Imagine if we applied the same logic to the duty to report child abuse: “I’m apolitical, and I want to remain neutral. I don’t want to get involved, I just want to do my job and nothing more. I shouldn’t have to report abuse of a child if I don’t want to. It’s not my fault they’re getting abused, actually it’s unfair to make me get involved in something like this even if I know it is wrong, because it might have consequences for me if I say something about it. Obviously I’m sad the children are getting abused but they should find some other way to deal with that which doesn’t involve me.”

I don’t agree with most of what Roger Waters says, but I will defend to the death his right to say it, in his music and otherwise. I think that’s healthy and absolutely neccessary.

I will also defend the right for me to say what I personally think about all the things he has the right to say. Like that it’s too bad he’s some idiot tankie who doesn’t think Putin has to respect those kind of rights in his country, and how I think that makes him a piece of shit and complicit in Putin’s evil. He can still say it though, that’s his right, and I like it when pieces of shit advertise themselves.

I’ll happily pay when they accept either crypto or an envelope of cash. There is no way to separate electronic payments or transfers from my personal identity and I don’t consider it usefully “private” to have any account directly traceable to that. Trust is a limited and increasingly valuable commodity, and I’m conserving mine.

That said, there’s probably a decent opportunity for second hand, no-strings-attached accounts to now be legitimately purchased then laundered anonymously through an arbitrary middleman without having use burner accounts stolen from innocent people or created with stolen identities. So maybe that’ll be an improvement for privacy. Privacy shouldn’t have to be illegal or inconvenient (but of course they want it to be).

Fastly? Don’t tell me Bigly has started leaking into the other adjectives now.

Indeed, pirated NFL streams are an almost certain gateway to terrorism, as we all know. /s

There is no direction to go, it’s a sandbox, and discovery and exploration is pretty much the whole meat of the game. If you don’t like that, this is probably not the game for you. There are random events, there are questlines that eventually happen which you can optionally pursue, some of which get pretty in-your-face in case you’re worried you might miss them. Crafting and base-building is simplistic and mediocre. “Survival” is almost trivial on all but the very hardest difficulty settings, and even at the hardest difficulty and with willing suspension of disbelief it’s not really a fulfilling part of the game. There are a variety of other meta-systems tacked on too like language-learning, ship customization, fleet management and missions, settlements, universe-hopping, etc but these are just addons, they’re not the core of the game.

If you want a more “guided” experience you could try watching for some of the time-limited/seasonal expeditions they do as live-service events. Some of them are easier to follow than others, but they all sort of have a theme and usually give you a good workout in a variety of the game’s different systems.

I agree, as long as he’s in the mood for sharing, maybe he should try sharing more of the Epstein files too.

I don’t have any specific evidence on hand, but I do know a lot about the technology and companies involved from working in adjacent fields (cloud architecture) and it is absolutely plausible that they can and do. If they are not doing it already (and I believe it is highly doubtful that at least some devices do not already do this) then it is certainly on their roadmap. Many consumer IoT/media devices have invisible, hidden wireless networks built in and have for years. If it’s advertised, it may boast some sort of “quick connect”, “auto configuration” or other convenience feature, it may be genuinely required for low-latency/quality-of-service (for example on most modern TV services which supply the channels by IPTV behind the scenes), but it’s always on, it’s always listening, and it’s only a friendly partnership agreement away from being used for whatever “legitimate” purposes a company may dream of.

Tech surveillance is extremely out of hand and has gone so far beyond anything would consider reasonable, I understand that you would instinctively reject it as too extreme to be believable. But in the industry it’s completely normalized and they don’t even give it a second thought, it’s just business as usual.

For legal purposes: I am not a person, I am a meat popsicle. I am a corporate asset however, so don’t get any ideas: I still have plenty of rights. More than people, at least.