Or, you can be, Abserd!

http://historyonfirepodcast.com/episodes/tag/Aztec

You will not be disappointed.

See: Clarence Thomas

Considering the insanely high domestic abuse rate among police officers, I wouldn’t be so sure about that.

I think my “peak American” was that time many years ago when I went driving down the I35 interstate in rural Kansas…eating a plate of chicken fettuccine alfredo.

It’s OK. The statute of limitations has long passed.

Although, now that I think of it, this might be my peak Italian moment, though I’m not of Italian ancestry…

Anyway, it was delicious Fazoli’s.

Yeah, mutual aid works on the local level or in insular communities like long-term discord groups with a tight group of regular members. With community mutual aid, I’m generally in favor of just taking people at their word. If they say they need help, give them help. No need to interrogate them like the food stamp office will. You prevent people from abusing the system by simply not granting endless requests from the same person. Or if someone needs severe aid, at that point you can start actually verifying their story, helping them access government benefits, helping them find employment, etc.

But that kind of open approach works for in-person aid. It doesn’t work for anonymous online aid, where someone can use bots to spin up hundreds of convincing profiles each begging for money.

I just don’t think mutual aid works well in an online context. The only online context it works in is among communities like small discord groups where people know each other for years. But on a lemmy or mastadon-type service? Mutual aid is impractical. Any people asking for aid should be directed to local groups that can help them in person.

Let’s bring more chaos to this process! At some random time during the month, the power grid will just automatically turn off. No warning. Just instant lights out.

Its duration will be determined by a log-normal distribution or similar. So the average duration will be 24 hours with a long thin tail going towards longer durations. There will be a very small chance power is out for the whole month. There will be an even smaller chance power will be out for a whole year. Also, the duration will not be announced at the start of the outage. You’ll just have to sit there in the dark for who knows how long.

All home power generators will also have to be hooked up to this control system. Any home with active power during a deliberate grid blackout will be bombed by automatic drone.

KFC Little Bucket Parfait…

I use a butter knife attached to a 2x4. Then I just clamp the can in a bench vise and there we go!

How do you open a jar? Oh, I just use my hand meat.

Uh. I would never use my raw handmeat to open a jar. I use the power of my mind!

Jars are at less than ambient pressure. There is a constant external net atmospheric force pushing the seal down. I find it most convenient to simply remove that force. I first don a pressure suit. Then, I take the jar and walk into a large walk-in hypobaric chamber I’ve built right off my kitchen. I enter the chamber, and then wait approximately 20 minutes for the vacuum cycle to bring the chamber to a partial vacuum. The air pressure in the chamber now matches the air pressure in the can. Once the cycle is complete, I effortlessly remove the lid with a gentle twist. Then I wait 20 minutes for the repressurization sequence. I doff the pressure suit and I then continue my cooking.

Fuck it. I use a rotary can opener. The one with the sharp edges!

Our society would rather put people in prison for far more than the cost of just housing them.

I just send my stuff to Jim sometime in February or March, and he takes care of it.

Happy Day of Thor to you this fine afternoon!

Are you trying to anger the gods? Below the fixed stars, there are seven great gods and their lights in the Heavens. And each has its appropriate day. Which two gods shall you so tempt their wrath by denying their day?

I want a smart phone built into a shoe. Get Smart style.

LLMs as tools,

Yes, in the same way that buying a CD from the store, ripping to your hard drive, and returning the CD is a tool.

It’s not about hampering proliferation, it’s about breaking the hype bubble. Some of the western AI companies have been pitching to have hundreds of billions in federal dollars devoted to investing in new giant AI models and the gigawatts of power needed to run them. They’ve been pitching a Manhattan Project scale infrastructure build out to facilitate AI, all in the name of national security.

You can only justify that kind of federal intervention if it’s clear there’s no other way. And this story here shows that the existing AI models aren’t operating anywhere near where they could be in terms of efficiency. Before we pour hundreds of billions into giant data center and energy generation, it would behoove us to first extract all the gains we can from increased model efficiency. The big players like OpenAI haven’t even been pushing efficiency hard. They’ve just been vacuuming up ever greater amounts of money to solve the problem the big and stupid way - just build really huge data centers running big inefficient models.

There’s nothing wrong with the fundamentals of the technology, just the applications that Westoids doggedly insist it be used for.

Westoids? Are you the type of guy I feel like I need to take a shower after talking to?

I love the fact that the same executives who obsess over return to office because WFH ruins their socialization and sexual harassment opportunities think think they’re going to be able to replace all their employees with AI. My brother in Christ. You have already made it clear that you care more about work being your own social club than you do actual output or profitability. You are NOT going to embrace AI. You can’t force an AI to have sex with you in exchange for keeping its job, and that’s the only trick you know!