Posts by Grunchy 1052 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2015
There wasn’t any actual purpose for going to the moon anyway, it makes no difference. It’s like going to climb a mountain, people are always laying down their Utilitarian trip on you: what for the climb?
True climbers never have any actual purpose, so long ago they learned to respond: “because it’s there, daddy-o”
This is a phoney story, how do we know? Well, the EV lobby group recently proved that gas cars are 600x more likely to catch on fire than any EV. As a matter of fact, they also proved there have only ever been 52 EV fires, ever.
I’m confident this fake journalism will soon be debunked!
https://www.topgear.com/car-news/mythbusting-evs/mythbusting-world-evs-are-electric-cars-susceptible-catching-fire
“He knew he was smarter.”
WE ALL think we are smarter. Ayn Rand invented this crazy notion that it was possible to think from a purely objective standpoint, she called it Objectivism. It was always hogwash, nevertheless, we all secretly believe in it.
The day we can honestly admit that our viewpoint is always partially Subjective, that we are subject to countless biases and preconceived notions and prejudices, is the day we awaken to our own flawed and mistaken tendencies.
Some mistakes have very big consequences!
The computer is constantly having a seizure, it’s dealing with interrupts. I think the C64 regularly had a micro-seizure about 60 times a second. No matter what it was doing, it would have to set aside its current “thought” then do some minor things like scan the keyboard, flash the cursor, interact with a device, etc, then set that aside and return to the main program. The trouble occurred if the interrupt got stuck, then the computer could get jammed waiting for some status indicator, and might miss a few (thousand) keyboard scans while it struggles with conniption.
Meanwhile, it’s dragging a mannequin child over a cliff…
1.nVidia Tesla A800 80GB $41,019 Cdn
2.nVidia Tesla A100 80GB $37,394 Cdn
3.ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 32GB $9,199 Cdn
…
14.Lenovo Tesla V100 Graphic Card - 32 GB HBM2 $6,880 Cdn
…
40.MSI Suprim GeForce RTX 3090 24GB GDDR6X $3,523 Cdn
…
61.ASUS ProArt GeForce RTX 4080 16GB OC $2,999 Cdn
AND…
62.PowerColor Hellhound Spectral White Radeon RX 7900 XTX $2,999 Cdn
So is AMD that far behind in performance, or just the pricing??
I know how Microsoft can infect any Windows app: the maximize/minimize button cluster on the top corner can easily be “modernized” to include an AI surveillance interface. The purpose will be to monitor your activity, log everything you type into the window + everything the window reports to you, and figure out what you’re really up to, and also how it can exert influence toward buying something.
Just like Google YouTube commercials it’s going to start slow and progressively add pressure and eventually figure out just how far it can push you before you reach a breaking point.
Artificial Intelligence is being dumped on everybody not because it adds any useful functionality. It’s to harvest your information to figure out what you might buy, so that Microsoft (or Apple, or Samsung, or whoever) can facilitate the sale and claim a commission. Or at least tell you about some product or service and claim ad revenue.
It’s quite nefarious.
When the Amiga came out I had upgraded from c64 to c128, which I regretted, because I could never afford the 80-col monitor and therefore could never get out of c64 compatibility mode.
Also could not afford Amiga, which all my friends had upgraded to.
One friend got an XT clone so he could join FidoNet. It was cool but I was just flat broke all through until 1993. I spent that entire time considering each Atari ST variant that came available, but I could never afford anything.
Then in 1993 I was gifted an old Toshiba T1200 in perfect shape, and I enjoyed that one immensely.
When 1995 came and I had a little bit of scratch, you know what I got?
I got Sony PlayStation!
Then at work we had Win95 and AutoCAD R13, and that was all I needed.
Eventually internet became available with Windows XP, and I finally splurged on a home computer again.
I never got to monkey with Amiga or Lemmings, but lemme tell you, Doom on PlayStation, with a controller, was WAY better than on the 486 mega machines of the era.
The real enabler for consumers has proven to be M.2 NVME drives.
Meanwhile, businesses are hell bent on putting A.I. everywhere because what they really are, are surveillance spies.
There’s no saying (or proving) precisely what they know or how they learned it, but once Google A.I. reads everyone’s emails, it will be able to tell Google execs the future.
“Hey Google, who’s getting murdered tomorrow?”
“Here is a list of 485 people who are going to be murdered across USA this month, would you like me to sort it based on specific criteria?”
Etc.
https://ca.yahoo.com/news/ultimate-bait-switch-trump-tariffs-173500431.html
If you’ve ever watched a game of three-card monte, you’ve noticed that the dealer talks nonstop. The chatter serves two functions. First, it distracts the victims. Second, and maybe more important, the dealer is deceiving his victims about what’s befalling them. The spiel invites them to imagine they’re playing a game in which they stand a fair chance. In reality, they are being swindled.
The Trump White House’s press releases about its so-called trade agreements and negotiations—first with the United Kingdom, now with China—are just so much dealer patter.
The tariff numbers go up. Up and up and up. Ooh, now they come down. Up! Down! And all the while, everybody involved is telling contradictory stories about what’s being done and why...
Uh, what? Musk never invented an electric car, nor a rocket, nor a tunnel. Not even a PayPal. Oh, you must have believed him when he called himself an engineer. Yeah, to confirm: Musk is no engineer.
Perhaps he’s a good whip-cracker, but that’s all.
You maybe don’t realize who you’re talking about. This is a guy who exercised hostile takeover of Tesla, claimed all the credit, and when it looked like the true inventor of the technology might win in court, Musk took Tesla Roadster #1 and launched it into space. So that the rightful owner would never get his paws on his own property again.
Oh I get it, you never realized Musk is nothing but a miserable vindictive prick.
To quote your hero, “G.F.Y. Is that clear? I really hope so!”
“That's a simple one. You draw the line by saying transphobia is NOT and is NEVER a 'legitimate view'.”
See, and there are individuals who take a more enlightened viewpoint that there exists an entire rainbow of legitimate viewpoints, a complete spectrum of allowable opinions.
Personally I don’t see the point of suppressing any speech, even people I disagree with. If they’re as wrong as I think they are, it will be readily evident to the majority. If it isn’t as readily evident as I thought, holy cow, maybe I’m the one who’s wrong?!
I genuinely consider the possibility! Often!
I'd participated on many a greenwash "CO2 sequester" tech call, and absolutely nobody was prepared to acknowledge that CO2 is 2/3 atomic oxygen (and almost 3/4 mass-proportion oxygen).
It's energy-intensive to isolate CO2 and then pump purified gas underground in huge quantities and "stay put!", doesn't want to obey.
To fix the artificial imbalance we gotta un-burn CO2 back into constituents, and isolate and sequester atmospheric carbon to reduce atmospheric CO2.
The plant kingdom draws in enormous quantities of CO2 but the moment any plant dies, all the CO2 returns to the air. It's a carbon cycle!
There was a brief period in Carboniferous era in which trees and plants were immune to decay, and whole forests became buried by geologic forces as coal.
Of course decay microbes have evolved and the world doesn't work that way any more.
Oh wait, there is one form of carbon that seems immune to decay, they call it plastic. Or graphite/graphene, coke, or diamonds, etc.
Just need a way to capture plant biomass prior to decay, transmute some proportion of the carbon into a durable form, and sequester that form.
(If we transmuted into 100s of billions of tons of diamond bricks, sure I'll use up some for a diamond brick veneer on the house. No probs!)
(That's Artificial General Intelligence)
https://youtu.be/-wzOetb-D3w
Some guys looked at Claude 3.5 Haiku by Anthropic and did "circuit analysis".
They figure they have proven that not only are LLMs "not conscious", they never will be.
All it does is match letters, number patterns, and eventually pick a plausible next word to utter.
Even if you ask it "explain your reasoning," it comes up with a plausible reasoning, but it never did that reasoning. If it says that's how it figured out the answer, well the LLM is lying again.
Yeah its all here,
https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html
Whatsa Stonetoss, is that somebody? I never heard of the person.
(I resisted twitter for YEARS because it's a bunch of "twits", then set up an account so I could communicate with these nice folks who used to own an iPhone that they left in a e-recycling bin, and left their twitter details on the phone, and HOUNDED them online until they "released the iPhone", and then the account stagnated for a couple more years, and then Musk threatened to buy the twitter and I was like "THAT's ball game!" and I've been outta there since like, before or whenever.)
I still have the iPhone, it's grand! I think it was all worth it. Good experience.
You can get a coffee at Starbucks but the cost is sky-high and they don't do refills.
It used to be you could just go to a deli or a cafe and sit and guzzle all the coffee you want, but those seem to be gone also.
You'd think it'd be a business opportunity, but wherever you go the landlord is demanding OUTRAGEOUS lease payments.
Ehhh, let it rot. I can still buy Nescafe 475g tub for under $20, there's lots of refills in there.
I DON'T GIMME A CRAP.
I figured this out yesterday with chat gpt, check it out.
You know how living things are giving off infrared radiation, as are all things relative to their temperature? Well, everything in the Universe seems to be “dissolving” into photons (including black holes dissolving via Hawking radiation). In fact there’s a name for the phenomenon, which is the “heat death” of the Universe.
In fact Douglas Adams wrote “The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe” where you could book a table and observe the heat death of the Universe then take a time machine out of there.
Well, once there’s only photons left, that should be the end of time. Since photons travel at the speed of light, they cannot experience time and consequently “arrive” at the same instant they are “emitted”.
Once there’s no more mass there won’t be any more time. Also, no photon will ever arrive anywhere if there’s no more mass to strike.
Because there’s no mass nor time, there won’t be any more numbers. Well, specifically, there won’t be any more “quantity.”
Since there’s no longer anything to count, and no mass anywhere, and time ceases to exist, then numbers and mathematics should cease to exist, too.
Chat GPT agreed, but it also let me manipulate it into claiming “>” is the same as “=“. So I’m not exactly sure that “endorsement” carries any “weight.”
I’ve got a Win10 VM set up in Virt-Manager, but I set it up using the Ghost Spectre ultralight image. I wonder how LTSC compares?
The ghost spectre included an installer for several common apps, maybe not as many as ninite. Again, I wonder how it compares?
(I run Win10 without any updates or internet access or antivirus. If I get hacked, I can just recover the snapshot.)
I keep telling people you can run the “Microsoft Activation Script” (available for free off massgrave.dev which is an internet site that you access from a browser) and it will activate any Windows or Office you’ve downloaded and installed.
It seems to me that these Microsoft products have been free for awhile now?
(Some people may have a hazy recollection that you could dub off a copy of MS-DOS in just a couple minutes simply by invoking “xcopy C:\ D:\ /h /i /c /k /e /r /y”)
Plundering from annas-archive.org!
Yes I blew $365 on a “warehouse deal” kindle scribe. It has 64GB of storage space to stuff full of ill-gotten texts.
Sure I got the Asimov, Bester, Clarke triumvirate. Just the beginning!
(I could easily stick with Gutenberg and archive.org and never run out. With Anna all you need is ISBN# and chances are very good for a decrypted pdf/epub. I could “pay”, but neither does my public library charge: not precisely identical, but from my perspective, close enough.)
I’ve found I pretty much can’t surf to any sites without being instantly hit up to accept tracking cookies. I finally upgraded to Librewolf and set the privacy settings to accept cookies from certain sites ONLY. So I think the way it works is I can tell any website to go ahead and install all the trackers it can think of, but none of them is ever going to work.
(Ahh, Linux Mint. No copilot, no office 365!)
My alumni association abruptly changed to Microsoft 365 to administer the alumni email scheme. The VERY FIRST THING Microsoft did was to eliminate email forwarding, then to eliminate POP3/IMAP access for non-Microsoft clients, then renamed everyone’s old email addresses. MASSIVE cock-up.
Something peculiar happened, though. Whereas Microsoft disabled my original alumni address from receiving emails anymore, because of rampant security bugs I can still login to that address on their webmail facility, and moreover, can send daily mocking insults to the University IT dept that they cannot shut off, respond to, or do anything about.
(I presume I’ve been blacklisted with the auto-rubbish rules, but you know what, maybe not! I will spam them with daily insults until they ditch Microsoft. CAN YOU IMAGINE: a modern University, using Microsoft for any purpose! I find it shocking.)
I found a 2012 MacBook Air in the e-recycle bin down in the basement parkade, helpfully the previous owner attached a sticky note with the Apple password. So I transferred it to my possession, whaddya know, works like a champ.
I am contemplating hitting it up with all the upgrades and keep it for documents and office productivity. What the heck, why not?
(I was gonna reformat it for Linux Mint if the OSX couldn’t work, but it does work. Good enough.)
I created a Proxmox node on the basement server and loaded up that one A.I. thing from China, whatever it was called. And it worked well!
In fact it worked so well I got it busy solving all my A.I. questions , which were zero in quantity. Didn’t take even 5 minutes before I was done.
I turned the server off and never got around to activating it again since.
Well, it just has no useful purpose. To me.
I’d described this scenario before, here goes. If your A.I. is sophisticated enough you could invite it to read every gmail letter on the Google database, then query it some interesting questions:
-who in the world is getting murdered today?
-name the top 3 stocks I should buy today that are going up in value the most by next week?
-where are terrorists striking next?
Etc.
I have a feeling that Microsoft Outlook isn’t popular enough to have sufficient information to adequately answer these questions from Bill Gates, so he asked copilot “what minimal information do you need to collect from all Windows users to be able to accurately answer those questions?” and copilot came back with Microsoft Recall.
Oh sure, no human ever looks at your data. Humans aren’t fast enough nor smart enough!
Sabine says some bros proved that not only is generative ai not self-aware in the slightest, it can never be intelligent. It’s just feeling for vibes!
https://youtu.be/-wzOetb-D3w
(Part of Ralph’s superpowers that he got from the little green guys was the ability to “see your vibes,” but he’d have to wear your bra or hair curlers or whatever while he attempted it. This was greatest american hero, true 1980s superhero.)
I worked at an outfit developing autonomous landscaping equipment (just a self-driving lawnmower for golf courses, or whatever). The technology was perhaps 1% as sophisticated as what is needed to pilot a car in the simplest road circumstance, and it could never be improved to better than “woefully inadequate”. Just too much potential for harm, no matter what you do.
Anyway, why I call FSD a fallacy is because no matter how sophisticated the lawnmower code, it will never be worth more than $20 an hour, because that’s what a lawnmower pilot gets paid. Period!
So ask yourself, how much are you willing to pay for a chauffeur? I’ve got news for Tesla, I wouldn’t have a chauffeur even for $0 an hour. I can already drive safely, I’m already pissed off that Registration charges me $50 every 5 years for license renewal. You think I’m going to pay $100 a month for a dangerous robot chauffeur, when I already know how susceptible modern computers are to deadly consequences from something as commonplace as a crash or slowdown or intermittent connection or dropped wi-fi?
“Full self driving” is another miracle technology that is unacceptably deadly dangerous and fundamentally worthless. And barely anyone is capable of the 30 seconds of critical thinking to realize it!
How easy? The west taught Asia to do it for us at lowest possible cost.
It would be foolish to think Asia didn’t take that football and advance it several yards beyond what they were taught: they assuredly improved every aspect of the task.
Whatever improvements Asia has made can definitely be transferred back to the west.
iPhones have only existed since 2007, there is nobody on Earth with more than 18 years experience putting together iPhones: nobody. Also, it is an order of magnitude less effort to replicate something that exists than to create it new from nothing.
“Oh it’s a big job to manufacture electronics,” oh really? More like commodity business, actually.
“Here, write a routine to report a value stored in a data file.”
There’s enough vagueness there to drive an 18-wheel tractor trailer through!
You could probably solve it in 5 minutes flat, but then they start describing the constraints your routine needs to work within. So you accommodate those, then they add another heap of constraints.
Sure, as a manager I can give somebody the run around so hard, I can easily squander a full week of effort while ensuring zero accomplishment. What does that prove, other than hostile management?
Actually that describes my last job. They wanted a little robot device to crawl up a rope and accomplish a particular task. The issue was the junior team developed a hydraulic solution that “should work,” but the farther out it got the heavier its deployed tether became, until it got so heavy the hydraulic drive motor literally stalled. The solution made it out 75% the distance needed.
My task: “invent a better machine that actually works, and also works 2x as fast, but you have to use only the parts already bought, and it can’t cost anything because the entire $50,000 budget is already gone.”
Even despite the onerous constraints there still exist possibilities for creative solutions, but on the other hand, management no longer wants a solution: just a scapegoat. You can never get anywhere if management thwarts your every move. As it so happened, the firing decision came 4 days past the 90 day probationary period, and I took my wrongful dismissal complaint directly to small claims court. I know for a fact that their tardiness cost them a good $25,000 more, both for my settlement plus their expensive legal representation who convinced them that fighting was futile.
The little line crawler bot? Never got delivered. So I’m pretty sure the original fee got refunded in shame…
“I’ve got a slight case of the Bletchley,” she sighed.
“Whazzat, you’ve come down wit mutinous bowel, ‘ave ye?” he muttered, eyebrows squozzled together peculiarly. “Explosive or treacherous?”
“Aye, it’s a wee bit treacherous, I fear. Can’t leave the house for a fortnight, probably.”
“Gosh that’s ghastly news madam,” said the knave, nostrils a-squozzle.
The USA is in a full-blown cyber war with China and Russia. I got issued a corporate Dell laptop and the security clampdown is unbelievable! Even linked via iPhone 2FA it’s still barely adequate. Now that the tariff war is on in earnest, expect China and Russia to ramp up the cyber warfare intensity even higher.
From a corporate security standpoint this thin client probably has the best chance of being unhackable.
SAD because this probably marks the end of free corporate castaway hardware I’d been enjoying for many years now. (Unhackable thin client is truly worthless if you can’t control the server.)
(The USA put tariffs on the entire world so that there is No Way for China to bypass import restrictions. China put retaliatory tariffs on USA because it’s got nothing else to fight with!)
You know what makes much more sense, and has been discussed for decades: set up an A.I. reactor adjacent to Alberta oil sands, and use the waste heat to get the tar flowing.
Don’t renew coal, that’s stupid! The waste nuclear heat will displace enormous emissions for the current natural gas solution.
Also known as “plastic building,” the idea is you buy a bunch of hollow Lego blocks and assemble all your walls over the morning, making sure to insert rebar reinforcement both horizontally and vertically. Take a lunch break, then assist the cement truck to fill up all the cavities. (You need to operate a vibration machine to shake out all the air pockets). Once that’s done, let it cure a couple days then come back and install the roof. Good ones are made of insulating material and also include chase cavities for plumbing, electrical, Cat-6, blah blah. Let the fenestration team slap in the doors and windows, put in ceilings and floorings, and 1 week later move into your hurricane-proof fortress! No robots needed, or even wanted.
(Some guys once stacked all the hollow bricks using quadcopters, but that’s just silly.)
"There still isn't anything better than XP, just bigger, more bloated, and using more resources."
Yeah, that's the point. There's this upgrade cycle that consists of faster and more powerful hardware, but nobody needs it, because Windoze runs good enough on current hardware. So they break the operating system & do it again only worse.
I'm completely out of the "new computer" market, 100%, because I switched to Mint and it truly does not need "new hardware".
I've been rummaging around the e-scrap bin down in the parkade for the last couple few weeks and have so far resuscitated 6 discarded laptops, all of which run Mint like a son of a belch.
"Pay" for a computer? That concept is obsolete!
The 2003 Cray Asci-Q had 4,096 Alpha 21264 processors at 1.25 GHz and reached 7.7 TFlops, and was #2 on the Top 100 in 2003. (About 1.9 GFlop per die).
My 2013 salvage e5-2697v2 runs at up to 2.7GHz delivering 28.5 GFlops (two each in my salvage servers).
A 2020 PlayStation 5 GPU runs at up to 2.2 GHz and delivers up to 10.2 TFlops at FP32 (or 643 GFlops at FP64).
Of these the PS5 sees the most use, why? Because it has the most interesting use case: Wreckfest 2!
I don’t find Gimp that useful. It’s like blender, large learning curve and obscure working philosophy. If I edit images, I get better utility from Pinta (variation on “Paint”). One function none of them seem to do is very straightforward: I just want to turn White into Transparent. Every time this comes up, I wind up using some free web-based utility that I don’t much enjoy.
I think I dummied this out once using gimp, but it’s such a pain it just isn’t worth the effort.
Also: I don’t care for flatpak appimage whatever. If it can’t be installed as a system library, I lose interest.
If Russia takes back Ukraine all they’ve done is go back to 1992. Meanwhile, they dump their entire military arsenal down their shirt front destroying city after city and wiping out their youth generation (in the midst of a demography crisis). It is worthwhile for the West to take advantage of the opportunity to modernize its military and hand over its obsolete inventory to Ukraine to help out their endeavour.
Interestingly, China proposes to do the same thing to itself over Taiwan, with the identical demographic crisis).
Tribalism is another word for culture, which is fundamentally a control mechanism. “Cultural norms” are the (unwritten, written) rules (laws) by which your behaviour is controlled. A big one is attire, you are expected to show your status accordingly, and this is why Zelensky can get mocked in the white house for not conforming per the rules. And penalties can be quite severe. Your car is part of your attire, for example.
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