1. Fuck AI

2. People used to navigate BADLY using tbe stars. Travel used to be an incredibly dangerous endeavor. The whole "Bermuda Triangle" myth existed in large part due to poor navigation, and has pretty much disappeared due to GPS.

This is kind of like the people who say "our ancestors went thousands of years withoit vaccines" who want to conveniently forget about how plagues killed off huge swathes of the population.

Why would I bother studying a widely debunked pseudoscience? Might as well study homeopathy and chiropractice while you're at it.

Kruggsmash. He's mostly (maybe entirely?) A Dwarf Fortress creator. I first found him just looking for basic tutorials of how to play the game, but soon started watching his series where he uses the game as a platform for storytelling. He takes the procedurally generated stuff and fleshes it out. He voiced characters and made incredibly charming drawings for important scenes.

Camelworks. Rest in peace- the channel is dead because he passed away earlier this year. Mostly did content dicing into Elder Scrolls games, occasionally Fallout and other games.

Is It a Good Idea to Microwave This? - classic old school YouTube, from the days when it waa just high school and college students fucking around. Just 3 dudes with a camera, an extra microwave, and someone's parents cool enough to let them do dumb stuff. They eventually stopped as life caused the 3 of them to grow apart.

I've seen predictions of Firefox's downfall for decades. Still waiting for it to happen.

It's really easy to see the headlines saying things like "Firefox is tracking it's users and violating their privacy!!!" And panic. But digging into the latest "scandal" (the PPA), it seems like Firefox is behaving pretty reasonably.

One of the main criticisms is that it's opt-out instead of opt-in. Which... I kind of agree with Mozilla on. 99% of users aren't going to know or care about this, and the 1% that do are the kind of people who probably would have extensions to disable it or just use some obscure ultra-private browser instead.

I don't fault NOYB for bringing it up either. It's good to have organizations like that keeping an eye out for everyone.

But I also get worried that sometimes communies attack their closest allies for being imperfect harder than enemies actively working against their interests.

I'm probably going to get downvoted for this, but the Biden administration has really exceeded my expectations.

"No touchscreen" is a really great selling point imo

“The whole thing is screwed up,” said John Painter, a three-time Trump voter who runs an organic dairy farm in Westfield. “We need people to do the jobs Americans are too spoiled to do.”

What wages are you offering? Perhaps you are the one who has been spoiled by cheap labor.

“We moved to H-2A out of necessity,” added Sarah Zost, an orchard grower in Gardners, Pennsylvania. “No one wants to use the program. It’s a paperwork nightmare.”

So it's fine to require these immigrants to jump through all sorts of hoops and navigate the beauracracy, but for these poor American farmers running businesses it's simply too much to ask.

The cognitive dissonance with these fools is astounding.

Here's his voting record in the Senate.

Seems like he's the politician I thought he'd be on like 99% of the issues. But if we want to book down an entire politician's record to just one issue, sure.

For decades, weed’s deleterious health effects were exaggerated, experts said, leading to excessive criminalization

This line fron the article is exactly why I'm skeptical. I had to sit through tons of middle school and high school programs that lied to me about the physiological effects of marijuana. This article itself opens with an anecdote about one individual, but fails to identify any academic study suggesting physiological addiction because... There is none.

Psychological addiction is real. There's a reason that in most places any gambling advertisements have to include a warning and a hotline. The problem is that these sensationalist articles never make the distinction between psychological and physiological addiction. This article mentions when the case study first tried marijuana, but fails to detail the circumstances of her life, her personality, and other factors that can contribute to psychological addiction.

Add in that the medical marijuana industry is trying to replace the very physiological addictive (and profitable) pain medications... Add that to the years of lies in schools and media... Forgive me for not trusting this BS at all.

I got a lot of downvotes on Reddit for pointing out that there's no scientific evidence supporting porn addiction. It's just the latest version of religious indoctrination. ISIS was using that as part of their recruitment process: men who are sexually repressed are easier for them to manipulate.

For those who don't want to read several pages of unnecessary text telling you what you probably already know:

The math, while pretty involved, may tell a straightforward story (if you’re interested in the details of our analysis, see the Appendix). OpenAI has contracted 900K memory wafers per month from Samsung and SK Hynix. Partner commentary seems to indicate that’s a monthly number, so that represents 10.8 million wafers over 12 months. In terms of demand, a fully built-out 10GW Stargate cluster would require ~3 million GB200 Bianca Boards. Each board requires ~50% of a memory wafer in total; split between the HBM3e stacks embedded into its two B200 GPU (~30%) and its 480 GB of LPDDR5X system memory (~20%). That puts total wafer demand for the entire cluster at ~3 million wafers.

Therefore, according to our best estimates, OpenAI likely needs less than 30% of the 10.8 million wafers it's planning to buy

So this is just putting some numbers to what a lot of people already guessed. The AI companies are not just buying a ton of RAM to build out their data centers. They aren't buying enough other components to even use that RAM. They're buying it so that no one else can.

For further context, the US population is estimated to be around 340 million.

They are advocating for deporting nearly 1/3rd of the country. Absolutely insane.

That is basically why the Standard Deduction exists.

people put off buying homes and other big purchases because they know it will be cheaper later

What absolute drivel. This myth was obviously formulated by some wealthy economist who had only ever worries about purchasing vacation homes.

People put off buying homes UNTIL THEY CAN AFFORD IT. How many people does the author think are currently in the streets or renting for years just so they can save a bit on their mortgage? Completely garbage.

Innocent?

If they are innocent, how would releasing the document destroy them?

Kind of gross how this article seems to be trying at every turn to say, "no ai is actually good! It helped us catch the bad businessmen that happen to be in the AI industry!" By focusing on a tiny trading period on November 20th.

Because I remember casually watching Hank Green talk about this same thing more than a month earlier.

Hank Green isn't a finance bro or an AI guy or even really a tech guy. He's just a guy reacting to things that are trending, and I remember I had seen the main graphic he was talking about floating around the internet for a while before I watched the video. People have been calling AI a "bubble" for much longer.

I am old enough to remember the report that 95% of generative AI companies failed to see returns from using it. That was back in August.

I don't like giving credit to "trading algorithms" for things that humans figured out a long time ago.

Despite its name, TST is not affiliated with the Church of Satan

I find it really funny that they need to call this out given the thousands of different Christian churches that all have varying degrees of affiliation or animosity with each other and often nearly indistinguishable names.

I have a desktop I built in 2019 with no TPM running. Windows 10.

Starting a couple of months ago, occasionally when it boots it will automatically open a full-screen ad for Windows 11.

It's extremely disruptive because of my setup. I use my monitors and keyboard for my work laptop and have a KVM to switch between the two, and since I use that space for work I don't like to spend much time there for recreation. So I often turn my desktop on and run it headless whenever I'm done with work, and don't see the ad, which then messes up my attempts at streaming. So I need to walk back upstairs to switch the KVM and close out of it manually.

No matter how many different "permanent" solutions I can find on the internet it keeps finding a way to do it again every couple of weeks. I've moved to Linux on most of the rest of my personal machines, but this desktop has all my old music production software that needs Windows. I'm getting pretty close to just investing in a different music production platform that works with Mint though.

This may be controversial, but I think the way to combat dog whistles like this is to overuse them and muddy the waters. Make it so the Nazi's aren sure whether the "pattern noticer" they are interacting with are antisemitic or not.

ISIS went from being an Egyptian goddess and a great band to a poorly translated acronym for a terrorist organization because everyone let the terrorists win on that one. The swastika has been a neat and simple symbol used by a variety of cultures with a variety of meanings ranging from positive to neutral until it was taken by the Nazi's. 88 is a really neat looking number that's done nothing wrong.

Society keeps on ceding cultural ground to assholes and the rest of us have to tiptoe through every piece of communication in fear of being associated with them.

What's next? How long until some fascists start to use the "cool s" that we all doodled in our notebooks in school? Are we going to have to stop using any numbers with less than 3 digits? Will Allah, Jupiter, and Thor join Isis as symbols of fear?

This article is using every trick in the dystopian playbook to try to emotionally appeal to people. Protecting women, especially the young girls!

"I think we have to develop solutions that put the responsibility back into other places like public authorities, owners of spaces, police forces," she says.

But she still comes out and says what she really wants: more power vested into private, wealthy owners of spaces, to the state, and to the police.

Surely nothing can go wrong. Surely this is about equality for everyone and it definitely won't disproportionately impact men of color. Surely this won't run afoul of any tricky edge cases like trans people. Surely this won't be used to deliscriminate against the poors while still allowing anyone in an expensive suit to do whatever the fuck they want.