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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: April 3rd, 2024

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  • Like every time there’s an AI bubble. And like every time changes are that in a few years public interest will wane and current generative AI will fade into the background as a technology that everyone uses but nobody cares about, just like machine translation, speech recognition, fuzzy logic, expert systems…

    Even when these technologies get better with time (and machine translation certainly got a lot better since the sixties) they fail to recapture their previous levels of excitement and funding.

    We currently overcome what popped the last AI bubbles by throwing an absurd amount of resources at the problem. But at some point we’ll have to admit that doubling the USA’s energy consumption for a year to train the next generation of LLMs in hopes of actually turning a profit this time isn’t sustainable.



  • Honestly, it’s still the F310 for me. I have mine since the early 2010s and it’s still working perfectly. Those things are built like tanks and between XInput and DirectInput are compatible with just about any PC game of the last forty years, no extra software required. Also, they’re dirt cheap.

    Honorable mention to the F710, the wireless version. While Windows 10’s USB stack unfortunately broke compatibility with it (causing randomly dropped inputs), Linux does not have that problem.









  • NTFS feels rock solid if you use only Windows and extremely janky if you dual-boot. Linux currently can’t really fix NTFS volumes and thus won’t mount them if they’re inconsistent.

    As it happens, they’re inconsistent all the time. I’ve had an NTFS volume become dirty after booting into Windows and then shutting down. Not a problem for Windows but Linux wouldn’t touch the volume until I’d booted into Windows at least once.

    I finally decided to use a storage upgrade to move most drives to Btrfs save for the Windows system volume and a shared data partition that’s now on ExFAT because it’s good enough for it.





  • Useful stereotypes can help a person avoid danger.

    Unknown mushrooms don’t have to be poisonous but being careless with them can lead to a grisly death. Drivers don’t have to be unaware of me but it takes just one who is to put me in mortal danger if I’m not careful. A man following a lone woman at night where nobody else is around doesn’t have to have ill intent but she’s still better off being prepared for the case that he does.

    Does this discriminate against mushrooms, drivers, and men? Yes, but that’s the point. It’s essentially an informal safety guideline and it deliberately overreaches just like real safety guidelines. The 999 times someone doesn’t need that handrail don’t outweigh the one time they do; not in OSHA’s eyes. Because someone might die if the handrail fails that one time.

    This whole thing becomes problematic when it gets over-applied. Avoiding canned mushrooms in the supermarket won’t protect me from poisoning. Assuming that all drivers are blind and irresponsible will not improve my behavior on the road. Being afraid of all men in all situations will not make that woman’s life better.

    Like always, Paracelsus is right: The dose makes the poison. (And like with poison, some stereotypes are so toxic that any dose of then is bad for you.)


    • “You can’t pass through here. We’re waiting for the inquisition.” - “We are the inquisition.” sets fire to the stakes and immediately moves on (No, they weren’t the inquisition.)
    • “What is this summoning circle supposed to be? It’s all smudged! Did you tip over that candle and just put it up again without fixing the circle? Did you reuse this circle? Is that a lump of unsecured unmetal over there on the table? Have you idiots ever heard anything of elementary workplace safety?!” (Said after a demon summoning by the demon the PCs summoned. For reference, unmetal has the bad habit of going nuclear if exposed to too much magic.)
    • “You haven’t lived until you’ve done a jumping puzzle in a non-Euclidean space.”
    • “What is your opinion on trees?” - “Trees… are.”
    • “Talk to the hand.” (A demonologist trying to banish one of the most powerful entities in the setting with a low-end banishment spell and a pentagram scrawled into his palm.)

    That’s all I can think of right now because also tired. But yeah, that campaign was wild.