After watching president after president age like milk, I’m convinced that it’s not the stress of office alone doing it. Even during normal times, it’s an incredibly demanding position without a lot of room for downtime. Add an attending physician to the mix and you’re good to go, packed to the gills with uppers, downers, antibiotics, blood thinners, beta-blockers, anti-parasitics, testosterone, you name it. While you’re able to keep the schedule of a 30-year-old this way, you’re also burning the candle at both ends and in the middle. It’s little wonder that such a person can more or less shake off a bad diet at 80+.

Placing every last presidential decision on a coin flip would have yielded better results.

Thank you for your service.

Make no mistake, the oligarchs see the personal computer as a 40-year-old experiment that has failed, or needs to fail. They want their mainframes and CPU/hr billing back. Server hosting for enterprise uses has already gone this way for the most part. Small consumers are next.

As far as I recall, that’s how it went.

I have a lot of thoughts on this because this is a complicated topic.

TL;DR: it’s breakthrough tech, made possible by GPUs left over from the crypto hype, but TechBros and Billionaires are dead set on ruining it for everyone.

It’s clearly overhyped as a solution in a lot of contexts. I object to the mass scraping of data to train it, the lack of transparency around what data exactly went into it, and the inability to request one’s art from being excused from any/all models.

Neural nets as a technology have a lot of legitimate uses for connecting disparate elements in large datasets, finding patterns where people struggle, and more. There is ample room for legitimately curated (vegan? we’re talking consent after all) training data, getting results that matter, and not pissing anyone off. Sadly, this has been obscured by everything else encircling the technology.

At the same time, AI is flawed in practice as it’s single greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. “Hallucinations” are really all this thing does. We just call obviously wrong output that because that’s in the eye of the beholder. In the end, these things don’t really think, so it’s not capable of producing right or wrong answers. It just compiles stuff out of its dataset by playing the odds on what tokens come next. It’s very fancy autocomplete.

To put the above into focus, it’s possible to use a trained model to implement lossy text compression. You ship a model of a boatload of text, prose, and poetry, ahead of time. Then you can send compressed payloads as a prompt. The receiver uses the prompt to “decompress” your message by running it through the model, and they get a facsimile of what you wrote. It wont’ be a 1:1 copy, but the gist will be in there. It works even better if its trained on the sender’s written work.

The hype surrounding AI is both a product of securing investment, and the staggeringly huge levels of investment that generated. I think it’s all caught up in a self-sustaining hype cycle now that will eventually run out of energy. We may as well be talking about Stanley Cups or limited edition Crocs… the actual product doesn’t even matter at this point.

The resource impact brought on by record investment is nothing short of tragic. Considering the steep competition in the AI space, I wager we have somewhere between 3-8x the amount of AI-capable hardware deployed than we could ever possibly use at the current level of demand. While I’m sure everyone is projecting for future use, and “building a market” (see hype above), I think the flaws and limitations in the tech will temper those numbers substantially. As much as I’d love some second-hand AI datacenter tech after this all pops, something tells me that’s not going to be possible.

Meanwhile, the resource drain on other tangent tech markets have punched down even harder on anyone that might compete, let alone just use their own hardware; I can’t help but feel that’s by design.

Sweet tap-dancing christ, this whole thread. If there’s anything I’ve learned today, it’s that some teachers are the most petty dictators that cannot tolerate being proven in the wrong, nor can handle having their decision making skills challenged. They’re out there doing real lasting damage to people and their ability to think critically.

It’s almost enough to make me want to go into education, just to displace one of these tyrants.

Sincerely, I’m sorry all of you had to go through any of this. Here’s hoping you have support and find closure.

I was gonna say this is at least Digg 3.0.

Oooh, rocking an HP? I too like to live dangerously.

But seriously, that’s good to know. Those are probably easier to come by out in the wild. It really looks like Thinkpads go from office deployments straight to refurb companies these days. I never see them at thrift stores, and I’m not brave enough to dumpster-dive at e-waste.

Sometimes, old machines are survivors. Beware of confirmation bias when trash/thrift-picking cheap systems though. IMO, Thinkpads can be tough as a coffin nail. Including work systems, I’m on number 8 at this point with no hardware failures in sight.

That said, I have a very lightweight Acer that’s about a decade old with the worst keyboard and trackpad ever manufactured. It also performs like a slug, even with Linux on it. Still, it refuses to break so I can get rid of it.

Yesterday we made quesadillas with gluten-free tortillas, kimchi, thinly sliced fried spam, and smoked cheese. All stuff we happened to have in our pantry. This was better than it had any right to be.

I can also make vegitarian maki (sushi), spam musubi, or korean gimbap with a bit more prep work. We also always have Korean sides (pickled radish, cucumber, and more) on hand to throw together healthy meals fast.

If push comes to shove, I can just thaw some ground beef out, season it up, and throw it on rice.

If I’m feeling really lazy: peanut butter straight out of the jar. Don’t @ me.

Disclaimer: I can’t eat wheat, so my whole diet got up and (mostly) moved to Southeast Asia to compensate.

This essay is brought to you by Raid: Shadow Legends.

My boss had Narcissistic Personality Disorder, complete with face-melting off-the-record disapproval of my behavior, followed by “love-bombs” affirming my positive contribution to the workplace, mere days after. This resulted in not so much a rage-quit as taking my first opportunity to exit as fast as possible. And the cherry on top? An open invitation to come back mere weeks afterwards. The pattern was so textbook, that all I had to do was look up NPD romantic advice and search+replace “partner” for “boss” in most cases.

That said, I was pretty mad about how a great opportunity was ruined like this, let alone not as advertised. We’ve all heard “this meeting could have been an email”, well there’s also “this tirade could have been a counseling session.”

NGL, I kind of love this. It evokes the USSR, but in a really goofy and innocent way.

Please keep posting whatever else your brain cooks up.

Great idea. Where are you signing up? Please share links and other resources so others may join.

Eh, he didn’t make a law. Just a loud complaint. Totally free speech. I agree that he should get fucked though.

I really wish some court would rule that “political statements from office carry outsized consequences for the electorate by way of latitude within their authority, and so carry a similar weight as law thereby violating the 1st”. I really want this legal equivalence because this kind of grandstanding has got to stop. But with the SCOTUS we have right now, I may as well be petitioning from the surface of Mars. One day, perhaps.

So… is the fact that politicians are saying “stop or else” an indication that it’s workring, or that it’s just an irritating challenge to authority and this clown is crying about it? Because I’m okay with the latter - needs to be done 100% of the time anyway - but the former would be fantastic.

Thank you for saying this. I’ve come to the same conclusion and try to spread the word here and elsewhere.

A few things to keep in mind here:

• They have body armor
• Not all states have Castle Doctrine - most do not, obligating you to attempt to flee instead of making a stand
• They have numbers and firepower you do not
• First-floor windows render strong doors moot

I am not a lawyer.

I think the key word here is “civil”. Right now they’re violating Federal law, which would involve higher courts, FBI, etc. A civil case would put all this awfulness in the hands of the State where the (Federal) law was broken.