Khrux

I do agree entirely. If I could use the internet of 2015 I would, but I can’t do so in a practical way that isn’t much more tedious than asking an LLM.

My options are the least rancid butter of the rancid butter restaurants or I churn my own. I’d love to churn my own and daydream of it, but I am busy, and can barely manage to die on every other hill I’ve chosen.

Compared to crypto and NFTs, there is at least something in this mix, not that I could identify it.

I’ve become increasingly comfortable with LLM usage, to the point that myself from last year would hate me. Compared to projects I used to do with where I’d be deep into Google Reddit and Wikipedia, ChatGPT gives me pretty good answers much more quickly, and far more tailored to my needs.

I’m getting into home labs, and currently everything I have runs on ass old laptops and phones, but I do daydream if the day where I can run an ethically and sustainably trained, LLM myself that compares to current GPT-5 because as much as I hate to say it, it’s really useful to my life to have a sometimes incorrect but overalls knowledgeable voice that’s perpetually ready to support me.

The irony is that I’ll never build a server that can run a local LLM due to the price hikes caused by the technology in the first place.

I heard a theory (that I don’t believe, but still) that Deepseek is only competitive to lock the USA into a false AI race.

As much as I don’t disagree, I think the “Apple is closest to Nazism” comment touches on something different. Other massive American companies have awful practices but they don’t care particularly how their way of making money looks. Apple wields a specific aesthetic power that generally dictates a hegemonic uniformity, that strays the line of being to their detriment at times. I don’t think any other big tech company would care in the same way if not for their desire to copy Apple.

Blurry photos is fine to make an stylistic choice. The 2019 movie The Lighthouse stylistically looked like a 1920s film, before modern music intentionally used bitcrushing, it used vinyl cracks, boomer shooters made in this decade intentionally look like 1990s Doom clones.

When a medium’s shortcoming is patched by technology, it ultimately becomes an artifact of the era where it was accidental. Once a few years have passed, it becomes more synonymous with the era than the mistake.

It’s not necessarily nostalgia, Gen Alpha and the younger half of Gen Z never grew up without smartphones, so they don’t miss the era of poor film photography. Although every generation does this simulation of forgotten mistakes, it’s particularly poignant now, where the high quality, perfectly lit, professional feeling photos convey something artificial, i.e. smartphone software emulating camera hardware, faces tuned with filters or outright AI generated content. Even if it’s false imperfection, the alternative is false perfection.

Art using deliberate imperfections that were unavoidable in the past is romanticising something perceived as before commercialism, and that’s admirable.

I cannot believe character.ai was valued at over a billion.

^bubble

I was always under the impression that this is what the episode was referencing.

I’m trying to make my own smart watch as a hobby experiment at the moment, and one of my most important features is NFC payments. It’s a nightmare, although I understand why. Currently my plan is to buy another smart watch or smart ring and take the NFC chip from it, which is maddening, but more or less my only option due to contactless payment security.

To do contactless payments, your bank must effectively permit the specific device, otherwise go through GPay or Apple Pay, who in turn just do the permitting themselves. Anything outside of the standard ecosystem just gets overlooked.

The best workaround while avoiding these companies is to find a smart watch or ring that has compatibility with a proxy card, such as Curve. But beyond halving the price of the accessory, this is pretty much an arbitrary decision.

I was trying to look up a quote I thought was from parody CEO Hand Scorpio from the Simpsons, but it’s from Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec.

“Metaphors? I hate metaphors! That’s why my favorite book is Moby Dick; no froo froo symbolism, just a good simple tale about a man who hates an animal”.

Either way, it’s a great parody of artistic illiteracy of business bros, even without the A.I summary, they would have said the same shit. Most the time they’re reading non-fiction guru-self-help with a bro friendly veneer anyway.

As an entirely different tangent, I’m someone who is qualified in the arts and pretty bad at the sciences, but I’m always amazed how naturally people in the sciences pick up the art. I’m talking mathematicians and electrical engineers. I have no idea if it’s that they know how to learn from a background where it’s necessary, or if their brains have just developed connections in a transferable place. Maybe it’s even just a coincidence and just random correlation I’ve seen. Either way, I’d worry art was deceptively easy if not for the fact that armchair pseudo-intellectual business bros are absolutely awful at making and understanding it.

And sometimes just super plain ones. I remember getting my favourite Skyrim potion texture mod from there specifically.

Microsoft has absolutely been preparing for the end of traditional consoles more or less since the flop of the Xbox One. Their entire push a few years back to make “Everything Xbox” was a bit mistimed and disloyal to their console war cultists but they’re right that it’s the natural end point.

I think we’ll probably see streaming games from their servers reoccur in popularity pretty soon, as much as I’m not a fan of it, because it’s the total end point for non tech savvy consumers, they just pay a subscription, get a controller which can connect to the TV or phone and download an app, no hardware required. Meanwhile every consumer who is resisting the death of tech literacy (everyone else), is going in this direction. The physical console will reduce in popularity year by year as it fills a niche that nobody needs anymore.

That being said, the popularity of the switch and steam deck interests me, because it’s a third direction away from traditional consoles that I’d not have predicted.

I 90% agree, I swapped to wireless earbuds about a decade ago when my aux port on whatever phone I had then broke, and I immediately preferred it. I went from buying £10 wired earphones from a supermarket what sounded shit and broke every month to £25 wireless earphones that sounded shit and broke every 6 months, so for me it was am improvement. I was also a chronic “catch headphone cable on every handle” victim, to the point that I immediately preferred the wireless solution. Another thing is when my wireless headphones break, they fucking break; I go with one earbud for about a month then inevitably buy a new pair. When my wired headphones started to degrade, I always fought it, ending up in a losing battle of finding that perfect way to hold them to make them still work. The only downside I have nowadays is when I’m listening to music or a video and realise I’ve misplaced my phone, which isn’t really an issue, just that it was impossible when it was tethered to my ears.

But I’m probably part of a very small minority when it comes to my preference. I carry a compact camera any day I leave the house intending to take photos, so my ideal phone would have one rear camera that prioritises efficiency over quality. I’d have no headphone port, and to be honest, I could live with no ports and wireless charging and data transfer. I’ve had two smartphones in the last that had their USB-C ports fail as chargers (both galaxy S8s), and I could go years without needing to use the port for anything else. My dream phone would have no ports, one rear camera without a bump, no front camera, minimal tactile side buttons, be pretty slim, have a swappable battery and run a FOSS OS and mostly FOSS apps.

I respect the voices that want a smartphone equivalent to a ThinkPad a lot, but I don’t really think it’s anywhere near as necessary as a ThinkPad would be, because for most tasks that need something like that, I’d just use that.

That being said, there’s two reasons I don’t 100% agree. The first is to do with the fairphone specifically. More battery space and better waterproofing don’t really apply to a phone where I can swap the battery and it comes apart so much that it’s not really competitively waterproof. The second is larger, which is that I can just not use a headphone jack if I prefer wireless, while people who prefer wired are having increasingly few options available on the market.

In the countryside, we fucken too

I agree, knowing other people have sex is absolutely fine, in fact I assume it as default for basically any adult in a relationship. Not using protection may be unwise in almost all cases, but trying for a baby with a partner is the main exception, and it’s never been gross.

I understand that a lot of people have been raised with shame, and I feel a certain pity for them, but I’m not a fan of treating this shame as righteous.

Also worth addressing that people are using large language models exactly because the ad driven web was enshitified enough that people clambered for this new option.

There will be at least one LLM that’s good for web searching and doesn’t give in to advertising, and in the meantime, we’ll just need to keep jumping ship whenever one becomes awful, as we did with the old web.

I have a surprisingly forgiving opinion on AI. There are many cases that I think it’s purpose is stupid or defeats the point but it has the potential to cause such a large break to employability and capitalism in general that it has it’s upsides.

People are right to take issue with the fact that it is causing people to lose their jobs or be unemployable by no fault of their own, but underlying that issue is the fact that society shouldn’t function on the employment being necessary (which I am aware is an opinion).

Even in its absurd energy and water usage, this is largely an issue with how we currently get our energy and water. Having our technocrats suddenly more invested in new and better forms of energy, even just for powering AI has the potential to be a path to better clean energy options.

AI is fundamentally a neutral tool, but as much as it may be sued for evil, it may accelerate flawed economic and environmental systems to a breaking point where a redesign of those structures will be required, which could be the greatest opportunity to implement better structures that we’ve had since the industrial revolution.

It it to wait 30 mins then do it every 10, and pop it in startup, those were the days.

The other was Free_Cupholder.EXE. I miss disk drives for this reason more than for actual use.

This is definitely a selfish opinion but people who block adverts or torrent being a small percentage of users can be a good thing.

If they lose even 5% of their userbase to Firefox over this decision, they’ll find a way to make grand modifications to Google search and YouTube in a manner that stops you blocking ads from alternative browsers, and while I’m happy swapping to an alternative search engine, it’ll definitely becometedious to sidestep Google’s gaze.

But if it’s 0.1% of people who swap due to this, and Google already don’t care about the small percentage they lose to Firefox then I would rather sit under the radar and not be cracked down on.

Microsoft will definitely have the power to bulldoze all other things named copilot, like Facebook did to meta. I’m still not over AI being a lame word now. I miss the time when it felt sci-fi and not like a corporate buzzword.

I actually doubt it. 30% of all of Hasbro’s revenue comes from WotC (I’ve heard higher than 50% before, but a quick Google says 30%). Of that I’ve heard people say as high as 90% of WotC’s income comes from Magic: The Gathering.

Artists are paid a set rate, not commission for their art, but thousands of cards are purchased at very little cost to WotC. It’s a golden goose that is literally keeping Hasbro afloat, they’d be fools to touch the operations of MtG with a 10ft pole, nevermind replace it’s core with AI.