“do it again, I wasn’t looking”

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 25th, 2023

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  • oh aren’t you a treat. For a second I almost had you mistaken for one the few Moskal typewriter monkeys who remembered to bring a joke book, but now I’m beginning to worry that you’re own of my those fellow constituents of ours who’s succumbed to the brain rot.

    At least we won’t have to worry about you voting for a few more years, judging by the way you act kiddo. Or perhaps you are old enough, but the polling place is too sus for your precious intellect.

    Word of advice though, if you’d want any hopes of being employable or perhaps even making IRL friends, ditch whatever this is you think you’re doing with your attitude, it just ain’t working in your favor. While you’re at it, might also help to learn the definition of the word “untenable”-- if you need a visual example, any mirror should do the trick.

    Anyway, maybe put down the smartphone and walk a natural trail or visit the library bud. Based on your comments, you owe it to yourself badly. I mean, if you fancy yourself a socialist then why aren’t you taking advantage of the freely available public recreational services that our tax dollars fund to live a better life? Everyone else is, and it makes dealing with this late stage capitalist hellscape just a bit more tolerable.



  • Elon founded SpaceX in 2002. He said he wanted to build reusable, cost effective space platform where rocket boosters could land themselves and be refurbished with low turn-around times to fly multiple missions.

    People laughed at the idea of a rocket that could land itself upright. And after countless tests that resulted in magnificent fiery failures and flops, a private American company is now responsible for launching crew and cargo to the ISS so we don’t have to rely on Russia or ELA alone, and has more recently gone on to develop the largest rocket ever made.

    In the 22 years since it’s inception, SpaceX has designed it’s own:

    • Rockets
    • Engines
    • Rocket Propellant
    • Satellites and base stations
    • Bespoke robust communications network
    • Ground support structure (including a moving robotic tower named “Mechanical”)
    • Crewed mission vehicle platform
    • The world’s biggest fucking rocket

    Say whatever you want about his beliefs, his opinions, his shit takes-- point me to another company that has done even half of that in that amount of time, or had nearly as monumental of an impact on the global space industry and America’s access to space in the last two decades.

    And if y’all haven’t yet already, do yourselves a favor and look up NASASpaceflight on YouTube, watch their most viewed videos, which should be some of the SpaceX tests. You’ll come to understand why shit blowing up is normal and a good thing with SpaceX: because they prototype and develop iteratively and rapidly, intentionally testing to failure so they know exactly how far from failure their nominal conditions would be. If they did not do this, the platform would not be safe and they would be getting fucked by a camel wearing another camel’s skin for kicks.




  • You’re remembering correctly, every other logic gate can be built from NAND gates, which is the foundation of this sort of minimal-instruction-set exercise. Beyond that, you need to be able to move data and change your program counter (jump, often conditionally). Then, if you want parity with modern instruction sets beyond just being turning complete, you need return and interrupt for control flow.



  • Bookmarking your comment so I can come back to it in a couple hours, if I hopefully remember to.

    But yes, almost. I don’t think the interrupt is necessary and the return isn’t under certain architectures. I have a doc on my computer somewhere where I was investigating what the absolute minimum was to make a turning complete machine and, to my recollection, there was only 4-6 instructions that were absolutely necessary. The ones I remember off the top of my head are NAND, MOV, JUMPIF, and then I believe I included NOP in accordance with some principle. RET and INT were convenience features in this design.






  • Magic

    In all reality, it is a ChatGPTitty "fine"tune on some datasets they hobbled together for VQA and Android app UI driving. They did the initial test finetune, then apparently the CEO or whatever was drooling over it and said “lEt’S mAkE aN iOt DeViCe GuYs!!1!” after their paltry attempt to racketeer an NFT metaverse game.

    Neither this nor Humane do any AI computation on device. It would be a stretch to say there’s even a possibility that the speech recognition could be client-side, as they are always-connected devices that are even more useless without Internet than they already are with.

    Make no mistake: these money-hungry fucks are only selling you food cans labelled as magic beans. You have been warned and if you expect anything less from them then you only have your own dumbass to blame for trusting Silicon Valley.



  • If I were to fully elaborate, I’d be typing for hours, so I’ll sum up:

    • pip - default behavior is to install to system-wide site packages. In a venv, it will try to upgrade/uninstall system packages without notice/consent unless you specify --require-virtualenv. Multiple things can fuck up your ENV to make the python binaries point to system-wide, while your terminal will still show you as in a venv. Also why TF would package metadata files need to be executable? Bad practice, -1/10
    • nix - they acknowledged years ago that they should probably have some kind of package signing and perhaps an SBOM or similar mechanism, but then did nothing to implement it and just said “oh well, guess we’re vulnerable to supply chain attacks, best not to think about it”
    • brew - installing packages parallel to your system packages manager, without containers. My chief complaint here is that brew is a secondary package manager that people might treat as a “set and forget” for some packages, rarely updating them. So what happens when a standard library used by a brew package is vuln? A naive Linux user might update their system packages but totally forget to update brew. And when updating brew, you can easily hit max_open_file_descriptors because kitchen sink

    From there, it’s all extremely nit-picky and paranoid-fueled-- basically, none of the package managers I mentioned are conducive, in my eyes at least, to a secure and intuitive compute environment.

    Unfortunately, there’s not much I can do about it except bang pots and pans and throw maintainers under buses when the issue that has been present for years rears it’s ugly head. Because they are the only ones who can change this, and pressure is the only thing that might motivate them to.



  • Mmmmmm some of the models on CivitAI, with the right workflows, could effectively create the most versatile “deep fakes” possible. You can put someone’s face on a blank canvas and tell a model specifically trained for realistic pornography to paint a whole scene around the face. The only advantage here is that doing that is kinda pointless when you can just generate any random face to match your specifications. So ultimately much less harmful so long as the user isn’t obsessing over representing a distinct living person.

    Also, these are primarily still images. Some animation models exist, but that process is a lot more hit-and-miss. Overall though, I’d argue this whole use case is significantly less damaging than deep fakes due to principals.