Yeah we’re kind of remote and we once went for I think 9 days without power after a big weather event. Having a radio and a little gas camping stove were lifesavers. Also get lots of candles and books, one of my main memories of that time is how boring it was lol.
Next thing I want to do is get solar-ed up so we can just flip that on for an hour or two if needed. The previous power cut was years ago when a solar setup wasn’t really feasible.
If only the Prime Minister who used to be a fucking human rights lawyer was able to explain why jailing people without a jury trial is a bad thing.
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.
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:
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.
Also, the word doublespeak isn’t from Orwell. In Nineteen Eighty-Four he used the term Newspeak, meaning a sort of clipped form of language designed to limit expression of thought, and doublethink, the practice of holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time and believing both to be true, but he never used the word doublespeak.
Interestingly though, it actually predates Nineteen Eighty-Four, but nobody really knows who coined it exactly.
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.
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.
I’ve not really used a wide variety of LLMs, but I’ve found that the one that comes up when you use Brave search is actually pretty good at giving solutions to tech support problems. It’s not perfect, but if you give it an error code it sort of collates all the solutions it finds into a list and gives sources for each one, and I’d say probably 8/10 times it’s at least in the right general area. If nothing else, it’s saving me a ton of wasted time searching through forums and finding those threads where someone has the exact problem you’re looking for and then just posts “nm I fixed it” without explaining what they did.
Smashing Pumpkins - Thru The Eyes Of Ruby, Bristol Academy 1996 is the ‘proper’ version of the song in my head now, the album version sounds weird lol
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.
This is great news for us! If you ever get pulled up for pirating things, just say you’re using them to train an LLM and it’s legal!
(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This definitely will not work unless it does. But it probably won’t.)
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Poetry is hard to
Comrades, there is no true social revolution without the liberation of women. May my eyes never see and my feet never take me to a society where half the people are held in silence. I hear the roar of women’s silence. I sense the rumble of their storm and feel the fury of their revolt.
I agree that there must be other stuff living out there, but I don’t think they’re here. My belief that I can’t prove is that the Fermi paradox has a simple but quite depressing solution: that space and time are just too big and there’s no special undiscovered way of getting around it. I’m sure there are some staggeringly unlikely situations out there somewhere where two species have evolved independently at the same time to a similar level of intelligence at a distance close enough to reach each other, but for the vast majority of intelligent life the odds are so vanishingly small that they might as well be alone.
If we’re a typical example of an intelligent species, for example, we’ve been capable of space flight for less that a century and we just about got as far as the moon, and with all the inventions that came along with becoming capable of space flight we’ve almost destroyed ourselves countless times. It’s kind of a wonder we’re still here at all, and with climate change who knows how much longer we’ll last? TBH I think the best we can hope for is to maybe get a radio signal from some ancient place that’s probably long gone, and send one back knowing we’ll probably be long gone by the time it gets there.
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.