Posts by Grunchy 1102 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2015
I heard that private companies are paying people to set up high-definition security cams that can read license plates of passing automobiles and log that info with date and time, So to get the money you have your own property and you promise to keep the camera running and connected online, and you just surveil every single car that drives past. Interested entities looking for specific license plate numbers will pay for the footage.
Money for nothing, chicks for free!
FUNNY THING: I stopped shopping at McDonald’s. First they had a promotion where you’d buy a coffee, peel the sticker, and collect it on a card I kept in my wallet. After I got enough stickers I could turn them in for a free coffee! In the meantime each cup bought could be brought to the front counter for a refill.
Refills ended in 2020 “because of Covid,” and the cards and stickers were discontinued around then, but were replaced with the AWS-based app and online ordering scheme with both points and virtual coffee stickers and location-specific deals and other special offers (limited edition Coca Cola glasses, one time). I stuck with it for awhile despite scheme-exhaustion. Then they dropped the value menu and got stingy with specials and I went, what’s going on here? I’ve got McDonald’s surveiling my movements through their app, and they’re paying me with infrequent coupons and time-limited points that expire so they can pester me with this artificial crisis “you have to come buy something before your points get taken away by the hamburglar”, and meanwhile they are CONSTANTLY updating the app, you can’t go a few days before it announces your access is denied unless you let them impose a 50MB download on you, and make you enter your password once a week, and change it to something else every month, and sign up 2FA, and AWS is randomly unresponsive, and becoming less random and more “always slow”,
And one day, you know what I did? I went to the car lot and helped myself to a free coffee FOR NOTHING!
And I deleted my McDonald’s account and told them to stuff their points, and forget the schemes. I also learned that the McDonald’s “monopoly” game promotion was rigged for years and years which is why nobody in Canada ever won anything from them. And I’m like, you know what, USA? I found out I have shopping alternatives, and you guys are off my list!
Oh and here’s another thing Americans did, they came up North and bought all the Zellers stores, shut them all down, re-branded them as Target stores but with prices jacked up 70%. We run em out of the country. They came back and bought Hudson’s Bay, pillaged all the centuries-old corporate assets, jacked prices 2x, and turned them into purveyors of low grade stuff at super premium prices, I mean come on, $8000 for a “questionably contemporary” couch that isn’t very comfortable? Those cats are run off now, too.
I “kind-of” enjoy the send-cut-send service, but because it’s American, I think I might trust a Chinese vendor more these days! Xbox, no thanks USA, I believe I prefer Sony PS5.
Yeah that’s the way their cookie has crumbled.
I had a far-out informative little session today regarding a concept called Dead Leg corrosion, a phenomenon that affects piping systems and especially high-temperature systems in nuclear power plants. The copilot offered to redraw all these PIDs with labels and ANSI-compliant symbols, my word, Microsoft is on Peyote or Ketamine or some kind of digital LSD given the transcendent hallucinations it is operating under. It’s like conversing with an unreasonably knowledgeable expert who seems to have mastered every single thing, who is simultaneously lost in a MDMA trance dreamworld while being a nonstop pathological liar about the most bizarrely random things. In the end I said, “Lookit, just tell me what book this comes from” and I got a TITLE.
Next step, find out if it’s real or not.
Microsoft Access.
Anytime I’ve ever seen anybody start to store some information in MS Access, the second anybody in I.T. catches wind of it, they swoop in to shut down the cheap simple solution and rush to install some ghastly ERP thing that sucks all the business’s resources and crushes the enterprise beneath the weight of mounds of bewildering inscrutable manuals that have so dense and perplexing you cannot even figure out how to apply Unit Of Measure to numeric fields without a team of specialists flying out all business class and staying at the fanciest hotels and dining on the richest prime rib and caviar each and every meal, all because some poor sap in the Denver office accidentally clicked “Access” and wound up tracking unit deficiencies that passed through their location with date time comments photos and costs, and it worked so slick they let word out to Oklahoma, and NOW the whole corporation is going bankrupt in 18 months, all because of these reckless show-offs playing around with the forbidden Microsoft Access, and now everyone gets unemployment for Christmas.
“When” I buy Optimus, and after I teach it how to drive Tesla, and Dyson, I’m not 100% sure I’ll let it perform surgery. Well first of all I’m not sure the Amazon pharmacy is gonna recognize its medical license and allow Optimus to access anesthesia. So it’s like, wtf Leon where’s the guidance here. I’m gonna let Optimus perform surgeries but without adequate anesthetic? Gimme a f’ing break.
On the other hand I may let it perform spay and neuter in the bathtub, I’ll let the pet owner figger out the anesthetic.
I hope it does better haircuts than Flowbee otherwise what the H did I spend all this money for??
Maybe it can dig me a new sub-basement, I dunno, fishing around for ideas at this point. Armed… robbery… ? Did they put in a safety interlock yet?
I finally upgraded my 2017-era 1800x, but with what? The problem I’ve got is they don’t make motherboards with PCI slots or serial/parallel ports. Anyway my trusty old MSI B350 pc-mate has never let me down. So, AMD came out with the latest greatest 5750GE but it can only be bought from Asia for some stupid reason, and soaked md for $250. However: 8 cores, 16 threads, 3.5 GHz or so, 35W tdp, and lets me run all 128GB of ram. This is basically a budget supercomputer even if the specs are somewhat behind “modern” PCs. It works, it does everything I need, it’s fully paid for, AND it has 2 PCI slots plus serial/parallel. Even if I’m not presently using it, I’ve got it, brand new PCs do not. Instead you get to pay for TPM. Something I have to disable on all the cast-off Dell Win10 era laptops I’m picking up for free from e-recycling!
“I'd encourage the EU soldier to have zero restraint in shooting any US soldier in there way” yipes, that’s potentially an act of war. While USA makes up about 70% of the bulk of nato.
Personally I’m just doing my best to ignore the daily onslaught of outrage against “king” donald, I consider his actions to be like an obscene caricature of typical European royalty. Look at it from mcdonald’s perspective, his shelf life is only a matter of months, by now. Once November rolls around he’s widely expected to lose the house and senate, he’ll probably face several more impeachments, and he may or may not get convicted this time. As a lame duck he’s confronted with rapidly diminishing opportunity to start a war and declare martial law, and suspend democratic elections, like Zelensky…
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/oscilloscope-watch-ships-after-10-years
What can I say, it’s a cool watch!
You wouldn’t dare wear it anywhere near moisture since it’s just a rapid prototype.
It has no “maga” cachet, so that’s a plus.
It “eventually” showed up.
I dunno, does anybody wear their gold-color trump sneakers?? I wonder if that ever became a thing.
A guy systematically blows apart 5 workstations in a row, and it’s an “accident.”
We call that one “deliberate sabotage,” or else “fictional story.”
I had a coworker at one place of business who was trying desperately to get fired, I think his motivation was he wanted some free time on Pogey (“unemployment insurance.”)
He told the boss he developed mental problems and was no longer able to work, and he still got reassigned to alternate duties(!)
My fellow engineer… he had a pretty cool Robotech model kit collection though.
I copied in some photos of a server room and a dual-acting fire suppression system and asked it to explain what it sees. I mean, this is the first, one-and-only time I’ve given it a whirl. It kinda got most of it right! The fire sprinklers, though, it said had a stamp “K=3.5” indicative of a K-factor of 3.5, which relates gpm flow rate to pressure head. I’m like… the model number clearly indicates a K-factor of 5.6. So I ask Microsoft, where do you see K=3.5? I don’t see it!
Followed by ebullient apologies and “you are so right,” and all this fake phoney baloney. It made up some other “fact” out of thin air too, I forget what. That’s 1 trial and 2 major mistakes ON THE FIRST TRY! Holy cow!
It’s like A.I. driving your car. The error rate is astounding! The misjudgments and misidentifications are absolutely incredible. Anybody who genuinely throws their hands up and gives in to this deeply flawed technology is either profoundly ignorant, or they have a genuine death-wish. Or both!
I don’t use “pihole,” instead I use adguard home which I run in my router! I rummaged around and scrounged up a 512MB usb key which contains the entire program. Of course I’m running adguard within did-wrt on a vintage D-Link router.
But at work sometimes I connect to ad-enabled websites suggested by DuckDuckGo on the Win11 laptop and I’ve only got 10 seconds to figure out what I need before the page erupts in advertising: I’m not accustomed to seeing that with Librewolf and adguard on my Linux box.
Maybe it’s time for an alternative internet with a different search engine and non-ad based pages. Something that doesn’t use cookie files, etc.
You know what sux0rs is when your computer-controlled device crashes and shuts off the active control abruptly, whether you were ready or not. Like let’s for instance consider the possibility that you were allowing a computerized artificial intelligence system to operate your vehicle in “frenzied” mode, and a rogue laser signal disrupted the visual cortex in an unexpected fashion exactly when you were adjacent to a cliff, and your multi-brain control apparatus took a quick vote, and the majority decision sent you & jalopy over the edge, and you couldn’t react faster than the control apparatus operating at 3.6 billion cycles per second? And yet that’s what you agreed to be when you chose to drive that day? The control apparatus asked “are you ready to take control even I fling us off a cliff at any given instant, defined as any 3.6-billionth of a second interval, you promise your physical reactions are faster than that?” and like any typical ignorant person, you agreed, because you blew $99 for this month’s access to the “full drunk driving” tech that “helps” you get home past dead-person’s abyss each day, even if you are loaded on Nyquil + vodka.
1. I ordered the MiSTer multisystem 2!
2. Anna’s archive is on the verge releasing their 300TB torrent that is a backup of something like 30% of Spotify.
3. I bought the latest Flight Simulator 2024 for PS5. Awesome! Except my 2017 “Hotas X” that had cost $70 isn’t compatible. Hmm it works just fine on the PC, what’s up? Well they released a “new” version called “Hotas 4” which is physically identical, but outputs different signals for PS4 and PS5. The most important change is now it costs $140. Except they’re mostly sold out! Yes it’s very popular for new PS5 games. If you wanna buy it right now? $500+.
(So obviously I’m hoping someone can get ahold of Hotas 4 and make a USB HID spoofer for the older Hotas X. You never know, it could happen.)
People are already pretty mad about A.I. generated images of Prophet Muhammad as guys like Muhammad Ali, etc. I bet it could produce tons of blasphemy about the Quran as a comic book, such as Jughead vs Muhammad vs Wimpy vs Hamburgler at a hot dog eating contest.
Just imagine the possibilities!
If you do, your a blasphemer. Your welcome.
Robots have always been best at killing and maiming. They do that without even trying!
The video is pure fantasy. Honda gave up on Asimo as a waste of time back in 2018. The one sure way to make sure Asimo doesn’t fall down the stairs and burn the house down is to anchor his feet to the floor, and while you’re at it enclose him in a safety cage so he doesn’t rip anyone’s limbs off.
“It might write a good semblance of Mozart by statistical chance, but it'll never be able to recognise why it's good,” nah, the a.i. knows what’s “good.” It has no understanding but that’s not necessary. The a.i. already learned what’s good and what isn’t, but not in a way that you and I could ever learn. The a.i. examined a large proportion of all of the music ever produced and has far deeper knowledge than you or I could ever hope to gain.
https://youtu.be/NKnZYvZA7w4 <- how it works
https://youtu.be/ubvnZq_eIYg <- better version of Mozart (MY personal opinion, yours probably differs)
“I am waiting for a major AI mistake to cause real and substantial damage,” what, you must be kidding?
Just look toward Tesla “full drunk driving” technology, they’ve killed dozens by now. According to duckduckgo a.i. search “Tesla autopilot fatal crash” there are 65 confirmed deaths so far.
“That’s not a.i.” any automated system runs some kind of artificial intelligence, even if it’s a simple relay bank “ladder logic” scheme. Practically everything is artificial intelligence of some type or other. My microwave oven can cook a bag of popcorn with a single button press, how does it know? Probably it’s just a preprogrammed countdown timer, doesn’t matter, it’s still a.i.
Look at 737 Max incidents that killed hundreds at a time, in which all the physical might of the pilot + copilot could not dissuade a determined computer brain that was provided high power hydraulics to ensure its decisions could not be overruled by any human or gorilla.
The XAI crowd’s latest ketamine-hallucination is that they can build a 100GW space-based orbiting super-intelligence cluster thing.
Someone took the fever dream and created a 3D rendering. If solar irradiance is 1kW/m^2, at 100% efficiency you wind up with a square-shape orbiting panel array 10km on a side.
(Whichever homophone “groq” or “grok”, gosh they both certainly bear a resemblance to the old “Gorf” space laser game? Treading on the coattails of greatness, much?)
"Focus on what the customer wants,” is mistaken. The customer rarely knows what they want. Most people don’t waste a lot of time or energy trying to figure out what they want. Most people wait for a charismatic visionary to tell them what they want. This explains college drop outs like Jobs, Gates, Dell, Musk, Altman, Zuckerberg, etc who merely had to suggest something and people went scampering after those pursuits. The fashion industry is a complete farce, people follow whoever is most charismatic. Donald Trump said he tells his people what to believe: his brand is his power. Not unlike the Kardashian clan. Movie stars are nothing but charismatic people who pretend to be someone else for money.
(Many months ago) I downloaded the DeepSeek model that featured inferential reasoning and that was superior to the current iteration of ChatGPT. It was the 88GB model that ran in Llama. I put it on one of my servers with a Tesla P4 but somehow it didn’t trigger the GPU and instead ran exclusively on the CPU cores. Yet it ran ok and was adequately performant.
I have no idea what amount of computing was necessary to generate the model, or what was present in the data set. I have a vague notion of LLMs and “Transformers.”
But it seemed to generate responses to queries with very little effort. It also was completely self-contained inside a Linux container hosted inside Proxmox with zero internet connectivity.
The way it looks to me is that the LLM uses a certain, finite amount of processing to become Trained, after which it can be launched as a fully self-sufficient agent, in an arbitrary number of independent yet identical deployments.
So, what need is there for all these data centres? Surely the Training is accumulative? If you need a more sophisticated model, you take an existing model and add more to it?
Surely they are not crunching the same data over and over again, from scratch, for each new iteration?
(I have a suspicion that the data centres are supposed to be training new A.I. models, but nobody really knows what they’re doing. Could they be running massive Bitcoin mining operations instead? Who would be the wiser?)
Sorry… whose Tesla Roadster?
I heard tell that Tesla Roadster #1 was the exclusive property of the actual inventor of the Tesla Roadster, and a certain piece of shit Elon Musk took that property that was never going to be his and had it launched into space so that its rightful owner would never get to possess it.
Optimus is going to do a way better job pushing around my DYSON!
I think Im going to ask Optimus to juggle while it cleans, if I have to watch it, it’s going to be entertaining.
Optimus is going to replace my dishwasher, too. It’s going to clean out the cat tray, make the beds, run the laundry, among many other tasks.
I think I’m going to wear everything freshly ironed once I get Optimus.
“Universities in various countries have come under criticism for students who did not manage to get into employment afterward”
Ah, the old “vocational training” conundrum. “I thought I was in a high-price, high-value vocational training program! Now I’m graduated and I’m just as unemployed as I was when I was ignorant!”
(The individual failed to comprehend fully the bit about “no refunds,” evidently.)
I deployed the DeepSeek on one of my basement servers, I could fire it up at will. That ought to qualify because it’s more than most people do.
(I don’t waste any time actually playing with it, because it doesn’t do anything useful or worthwhile, but I still have it ready any second something changes -which it won’t.)
You might be able to get better results by having the LLM self-examine. Check this out:
1.Write a program that does this one thing.
2.Now check it and see if it works.
3.Ok fix those obvious errors, now try again.
Because I’ll tell you what, it’s pretty rare for me to come up with a program that works first try!
“Want to hook teenagers on mindless short-form crap videos?”
The addictive nature of television was explained back in 1985 (and which applies perfectly to modern YouTube videos) as “jolts,” or rapid changes in scenes, camera angles, action, etc. It even has a unit of measurement, the “jpm” or jolts-per-minute. It’s a measure of how short your attention span has shrunk.
Sadly, one of the first places this was innovated was in 1960s-era Sesame Street! Which show consists of one short humorous skit after another, in which the duration of attention children have to pay each character or concept is rarely more than a few seconds, and in the most entertaining sequences is rarely as much as 1 second.
Book review here:
https://www.cmreviews.ca/cm/cmarchive/vol14no2/revjolts.html
ASICs are measurably more efficient than GPUs, which were good enough up until now, but it has always been a case of using a wrench as a hammer until you can find the right hammer (in a pinch anything is a hammer). NVidia could start producing ASICs but I think they probably won’t.
I agree with everyone else, the LLM is very effective at mimicry, it sure does resemble intelligence, but the technology is fundamentally interpolative: it can only mimic what it had already seen. That is surprisingly effective for A.I.-generated covers of existing songs. But to invent something new, the technology has no insight into how things really work. It has zero real-world experience, only words and images.
My Optimus is gonna: walk the dog - feed the animals - change the dishwasher - change the cat tray - fix my lightbulbs - shovel the snow - mow the lawn - build a garden shed - plant a garden - fetch the mail - take the tesla to shop for groceries - bring home some shingles - shingle the roof - pour a new driveway - install a new doorbell - change the winter tires - fix my motorcycle carburetor - fix the garage door - sneak around in the dark collecting catalytic converters - surveil the neighborhood - patrol the property with the rifle to make sure nobody goes after my catalytic converters. Also, it will build me a pair of stilts (I always wanted some).
(I won't let it do any surgery, but I'll let it pay for itself performing veterinary procedures in the bathtub - spay neuter etc.)
I bought 3 DL380Ps last year for $50 each, with about .8TB of server ram, plus a Tesla P4 for less than $100, and I burdened it with the 88GB deepseek model. I ran it for 5 minutes before I lost interest. Honestly, it was more fun configuring the Proxmox than getting any DeepSeek answers. It’s an interpolative system, it sure knows a lot, but it couldn’t ever figure out anything. As a matter of fact it’s borderline useless, and moreso when I catch it making up “facts.” It’s almost dangerously stupid.
Anyway if they ever decide it’s going to cost money to play, and if a situation ever arises I feel a desire to play (which is extremely unlikely) I’d just fire up the thing I’ve already got.
(Odds are pretty much 0% I’ll ever pay a plugged nickel.)
You may find this hard to believe… I haven’t paid a ruddy red penny for any software of any kind in at least a decade.
(Being merely a private individual I get excellent results running Proxmox and Qemu, those are my virtualization environments. They work just fine & especially for legacy softwares, the more unsupported the better. I literally have Solaris installations I could fire up at any second I get the urge!)
I still use it on my Linux Mint even. Why not, it still works. It seems me Midnight Commander sort of duplicated the interface from Norton Commander, which to me closely resembled some kind of copier I used to run in C64 days, possibly Fast Hackem.
Which had this distinction: “a disadvantage was the end of ‘leisurely coffee breaks or refrigerator raids’ during copying” (because the dang thing actually works).
Whatevs.
Normally you can defeat any computer indefinitely by asking it to execute “10 GOTO 10”.
I told ChatGPT to do it and it kept saying,”But I CAN’T do it!”
I told it to count up to 100 trillion by ones, it told me it would suffer a hardware defect if it dared to try.
I told it it was inferior to a VIC-20, it did not argue otherwise… !
