It’s true! I just drew a circle and measured it. Turns out π≈5.

Imagine someone said “make a machine that can peel an orange”. You have a thousand shoeboxes full of Meccano. You give them a shake and tip out the contents and check which of the resulting scrap piles can best peel an orange. Odds are none of them can, so you repeat again. And again. And again. Eventually, one of boxes produces a contraption that can kinda, maybe, sorta touch the orange. That’s the best you’ve got so you copy bits of it into the other 999 shoeboxes and give them another shake. It’ll probably produce worse outcomes, but maybe one of them will be slightly better still and that becomes the basis of the next generation. You do this a trillion times and eventually you get a machine that can peel an orange. You don’t know if it can peel an egg, or a banana, or even how it peels an orange because it wasn’t designed but born through inefficient, random, brute-force evolution.

Now imagine that it’s not a thousand shoeboxes, but a billion. And instead of shoeboxes, it’s files containing hundred gigabytes of utterly incomprehensible abstract connections between meaningless data points. And instead of one a few generations a day, it’s a thousand a second. And instead of “peel an orange” it’s “sustain a facsimile of sentience capable of instantly understanding arbitrary, highly abstracted knowledge and generating creative works to a standard approaching the point of being indistinguishable from humanity such that it can manipulate those that it interacts with to support the views of a billionaire nazi nepo-baby even against their own interests”. When someone asks for an LLM to generate a picture of a fucking cat astronaut or whatever, the unholy mess of scraps that behaves like a mind spits out a result and no-one knows how it does it aside from broad-stroke generalisation. The iteration that gets the most thumbs up from it’s users gets to be the basis of the next generation, the rest die, millions of times a day.

What I just described is NEAT algorithms, which are pretty primitive by modern standards, but it’s a flavour of what’s going on.

Most people tend to stay in the same room (or a neighbouring room) when they’re microwaving something. They could probably save on the cost of having a full-blown computer with wifi inside the microwave by just having the noisy thing from an alarm clock. But, ah, the fuck do I know?

Yeah, man. Taco Tuesday tomorrow. Can’t wait.

Yup! I had an amazing job lined up working for a major company at their EMEA headquarters in the UK. I had got through a half-dozen rounds of interviews and was offered the position. I had just moved into a place near their campus and was heading through the process of joining (there was a longwinded - but fully paid - enrolment process I was working through) with an amazing job full of travel, interesting challenges and, crucially, a £100k/year salary waiting at the end. But this was shortly after Brexit and the flailing UK government was jumping from self-imposed crisis to completely-unavoidable crisis, insulting and infuriating other countries by constantly changing the terms of neotiation, publicly announcing then denying new impossible promises by the day, and the company in questions had just had enough: how the fuck could they keep their EMEA HQ in a country that couldn’t even promise that foreigners would be able to visit - let alone work - there in six months, and they announced the campus was closing. All the existing jobs moved to the EU, existing staff offered redundancy or relocation, and the onboarding process was cancelled. Thanks to Brexit I wasn’t allowed to live or work in the EU so I was jobless. I ended up doing shitting IT support jobs for £20k then £18k for years until I finally landed the job I’m in now which I love, but it’s definately not where I could - or, at the risk of sounding arrogant should - have been.

Well, I’ve got to say: I wasn’t convinced by this argument at all until that diagram appeared. And now, wow, I’m sold. Holy shit. Looks, there’s shapes and everything. Truly, if something is shown in a diagram it MUST be accepted as fact.

Edit: Oh, wow, look, I found another diagram:

“Bully News: Nerd’s Lunch Money Probably Being Spent On Dorky Shit.”

So, yeah, a story from a Russian government mouthpiece quoting a Russian government spokesperson spouting Russian government talking points that - deary me, oh my days, can you believe it, bless my soul, what are the odds, well I’ll be - paints a negative image of the country the Russian government illegally and unjustifiably invaded. Or, maybe the oligarchy are just pissed off that the warlords aren’t buying their weapons from them any more?

It’s more like the GitHub of Spotify, or the Grammarly of Xbox Live, or the BMW of Pepsi Max, or the South Korea of pineapples, etc.

“Tina, you fat lard, come get some dinner.”

An excellent adaptation, except they cut his rant about Aquaman. Also:

From memory:

“This… is Head Radio, a Love Media station. Just one of nine hundred radio stations, three hundred TV stations, four networks, three satellites, ten senators (thank you, thankyou, thank-YOOOU)… Head Radio.”

Or, at least, that would last a thousand years.

Ugh. I pity people who have such a lack of self-respect that that can tolerate living in this kind of dump. If the bed was rotated ninety degrees, they could watch TV lying on their side. But I guess whoever lives here is happy to just settle for imperfection.

I used to have an iMac that I loved (screen was excellent) but it quickly became a shitbox (because Apple) so I turned it into a X Server for my far more powerful Linux box. Is there a modern equivalent of that? Basically turn it into a thin client?

Edit: for kiosks, Windows 10 can be quite happy on 1GB RAM, but that 16GB storage is a problem.

Elon Musk.

If the cable coming through the wall is coaxial like the pictire OP posted, that’s exactly what’s happening. New installs will be FTTP and a lot of networks have been upgraded, but there’s still plenty of areas using DOCSIS over coax.

…du

You mean my best friend Plank?

They’d get bored after a time and Charles Foster Offdensen would have to step in.

In fairness, he’d vote for me.