You think it might be??

Bro say that shit with some confidence.

Venture capital does not contribute beneficially to society.

That’s just it, they’re an easy target, and communications infrastructure is one of the first things you want to control or eliminate if you’re taking hostile territory.

Many years ago my grandfather was involved in an air force test of aerial defense platforms that used balloons.

The idea was you could station these things all around the country and at the first sign of an attack you could have missiles launched from 10k feet to anywhere from anywhere.

The test encountered two problems that caused them to abandon the idea.

These balloons were incredibly easy to shoot down. Which would, presumably, rain volatile rocket fuel and munitions down on whatever was beneath them.

And if a missile launched, but failed to separate completely from it’s housing, it would carry that balloon on a wild, unpredictable trajectory, until it collided with something or it decided it had reached it’s detonation time.

They already charge a ridiculous monthly fee just to use the bike.

And sure, it’s a nicer exercise bike, but you can get a similar experience with a much cheaper bike and a tablet.

Few natural born enemies exist, fewer still as deep and natural as the animosity between machinery and maintenance.

sad machinist noises

YouTube could fall off the face of the earth and I would probably see my quality of life improve slightly.

I don’t give a shit about Google. Perspective here is important when you threaten to leave the platform all together, as if they would care. If you’re one of the users they gain no ad revenue or subscription revenue from, they’re probably happy to see you go.

Could they be doing more to try to turn Adblock users in to paid subscribers? Sure. I’m not here to defend their methods. I’m just saying that if you’re not paying, and you can’t be served ads, they really don’t care if you continue to use the service or not.

YouTube advertising is more than 10% of Google services total profits.

That’s not a bonus, that’s a dependant revenue stream.

I’m not sure what point you think you’re making.

YouTube doesn’t want you visiting if they can’t either put ads in front of you or get you to subscribe to premium. I appreciate wanting to access YouTube without ads, but from where they’re sitting, if they scare you off with server side ads all the better.

I mean, if you’re not paying for it, and they can’t advertise to you, what do they need you for?

It’s the Fox model, which is what killed Firefly.

What are you talking about, he revolutionized the walking simulator. Now you can jump real high too. And instead of traveling places you just loading screen everywhere.

Light mode:
Cons: blinds you when it’s dark, is grating on the eyes, looks terrible
Pros: can be used as a flashlight in a pinch

Dark mode:
Pros: looks cool, doesn’t blind you, doesn’t hurt your eyes, easy to read.
Cons: cannot be used as a flashlight

So the trades have been unknowingly fucking with AI for decades, because of the time honored tradition of fucking with apprentices.

A lot of forums are filled with absolutely unhinged advice, and sprinkled in there is some good advice. If you know what you’re doing, you can spot the bullshit.

But if you don’t know anything about it, the advice seems perfectly reasonable. There’s a skill in giving unhinged advice. Literally you can’t get your master cert without convincing at least one apprentice to ask where the board stretcher is.

Do I actually have a dedicated vise for Vaseline when I run a tap cycle or is that old timer bullshit? HOW WOULD YOU POSSIBLY KNOW??

Nonsense. Plenty of American businesses still rely on them too.

I still use floppy disks from time to time. There are several USB floppy drives in my shop at work for when the network has issues and we have problems posting G Code to our mills.

If it were actually AI I might have some faith.

This isn’t a neural net processor, not a learning computer. It’s a fucking mechanical Turk. A bad one.

What he’s talking about isn’t capable of deriving new ideas. It’s just going to spit out shit it’s seen already.

The library of Babel is just as likely to give us the answers he’s talking about. More likely maybe because it’s at least already written down.

Bacon and ice cream go great together and I refuse to pretend they don’t.

I still miss midnight snack ice cream. Potato chips covered in chocolate. Delicious

I love how this image is a pun

I want to see someone try.

Not because it’s practical, or because it makes sense. But because it sounds like it makes sense but I’m practice would be so impractical and hard that the solution would be absolutely hilarious.

You’re driving along the freeway at 70 miles an hour, and a jet powered super drone rockets along side the car carrying a 2000 pound brick of lithium and drops it on top of you like a fucking dump truck. The shock crushes the cheap Chinese car like a can of soda and the sudden change in weight sends the drone careening off in to the air at a reasonable percentage of mach 1. The last thing you see on this earth as your brain matter is squeezed out of your eye sockets like toothpaste is a wide eyed driver in the car next to you.

The resulting pile up kills 4 people immediately, and several more later as they get caught in an expanding wave of lithium battery fires that either burn them to death or suck all of the oxygen out of the air.

Cixin Liu imagines exactly that towards the end of the Three Body series. Among other things, which make the series worth absolutely slogging through at points.