Random Dent

I have a 2TB external drive that I got for under $200 a couple of years ago, and the other day I saw the exact same drive in Staples for $650. It’s fucking wild out there.

I actually find it pretty helpful for tech support stuff. It doesn’t always get it right, but it’s usually at least in the right general area and TBH it beats going through endless forums where the answer is buried among 8 pages of people bickering about nothing, or those ones where someone has your exact problem and then replies “nm I fixed it” and doesn’t say what they did.

I tried out a game/demo thing that was a tester for AI NPC dialogue. I asked an NPC to tell me about himself and he replied that he could not connect to server lol

Architecture is the other one that vaguely worries me. I don’t like the idea of unknowingly walking around in a building that was designed by AI. I work with AI and it can’t even be trusted to write a blog post correctly, let alone design a building that’s safe. And I know if I’m thinking of that now, it means someone else has already thought of and attempted it at least 6 months ago.

As someone with a degree in the arts, I’m pretty sure that almost all art as a career is under threat from AI. Sure, AI can’t match the human experience and expressiveness needed for really great art, but that’s not what most artists do to earn a living. And the vast majority of the people who traditionally pay for artists to make stuff for them really don’t care at all. Now they can get Grok to fart out a logo or a poster in 15 seconds and not have to talk to an artist, they’re all set.

No so much quitting, but I got booted because my cat killed my whole team.

It was back when I was playing Call of Duty, and it was in hardcore mode where it allowed friendly fire, but within limits. If you accidentally shot a team-mate you’d usually be okay (although they’d have some choice words for you on the team chat), but if you went around massacring your team-mates you’d get auto-booted. Anyway, we were in a situation where the whole team was hiding behind a wall, getting ready to take on someone who was hiding and being particularly troublesome. I was about to throw a grenade at them so my finger was hovering over the button, and my cat happened to walk past and rub himself on my hand because he wanted pets. He head-butted my finger, which made me throw a grenade right at my own feet, followed by an explosion and the game ending, at least for me.

I didn’t get a chance to explain myself, so I wonder what everyone else thought I was up to lol.

If we’re lucky, maybe there’s a sweet spot where new production for RAM ramps up just as the AI companies run out of money and cancel their orders, and then there’s suddenly a huge surplus of RAM that they need to unload in a hurry lol.

The extinction of the Neanderthals, or any of the other extinct human-like species. It’d be so fascinating to live in a world where there was another species that was close to us in intelligence but also so different. We’d be awful to them though.

There’s a book called The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson that kind of explores this idea. It’s an alternate history book where the black death kills 99% of the European population instead of about a third, and the world progresses essentially without any European people. It’s really good!

I ended up settling on Betterbird. It’s… fine lol

My desktop won’t run Windows 11 according to Windows 11. But if I make a VM with fake TPM on it, it will run perfectly well inside a VM on a machine that won’t run it lol

I’m trying to think of the last time I heard news about something to do with the internet getting better instead of worse, and I’m genuinely coming up blank.

I wish there was a better way than the “be a horrible piece of shit for the first half of your life until you get your bag, then do nice stuff to rehab your image” path a lot of of them seem to take, but at least we get something out of some of them that way I suppose.

I came here to do a Doctor Who one too, can I tack it onto yours?

It’s also revealed that the Master just hacked the Matrix to mess with the Doctor’s head, and the Timeless Child was just some bullshit he made up.

Yeah that was my main thought about this and the Steam Machine as well. If it’s a nice cheap way to get a kind-of-mid gaming PC I can see it doing well, but if it’s the same price as a regular PC I don’t really see the point of it.

I’ll bite!

https://xkcd.com/2347/

I think you could make an argument that being compensated for your labour, but way under the value your labour produces and also under the constant threat of homelessness and starvation if you don’t do it is still an unethical system.

As a European person I don’t want to drive an exploding car built by a nazi, so this company has nothing to offer me.

Yeah I like Strawberry too. It’s not flashy looking but it does everything I need.

Yeah you don’t have to go full prepper but some of it just comes under common sense emergency stuff I think. Like where we live we have a reasonably sized garden so we grow stuff to eat, and have a big rain barrel to collect water. Normally that’s just used to water the plants but you could presumably boil it up and make it potable if you really needed to. Between that and just having a reasonable amount of dry food in the pantry it’s probably enough to see us through for at least a week or two if anything serious happened.