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Cake day: January 16th, 2024

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  • That first picture is great. That’s essentially generative AI, right? You cast out a problem and have it solved multiple times asynchronously, then find the (mean/median/mode) value.

    I do wonder how many of those ladies (weird how “computer” was a largely female profession, and then IT quickly became a largely male profession. Not making any commentary here, just kind of a showerthought observation) got laid off because of the computer. I wonder what they did after their jobs were replaced by it, and if that in turn was a net positive for them/their families.

    I guess this was right around the peak of the babyboom, so I think I know what they did. And for a while there, it was feasible for a typical family to do well on a single income.

    That’d be nice. Maybe next time around we can get it so that families can do well on a single part-time income. Or more gender-equality for who stays home and who works. Hell, I think a lot of families would be happy to be able to do well on two full-time incomes now. But this is getting into the devaluation of human labor now, instead of the evolution of technology.


  • On the one hand, I get it. I really do. It takes an absurd amount of resources for what it does.

    On the other hand, I wonder if people said the same of early generation comptuers. UNIVAC used tubes of mercury for RAM and consumed 125KW of electricity to process a whopping 2k operations per second.

    Probably not. Most people weren’t aware of it, nor did they have a care for power consumption, water consumption, etc. We were in peak-American Exceptionalism in the post-war era.

    But, had they, and computers kinda just…died. Right there, in the 1950s. Would we have gone to the moon? Would we have HDTV? iPhones? Social Media? A treacherous imbecile in charge of the most powerful military the world has ever seen?

    Probably not.

    So…I do worry about the consumption, and the ecological and environmental impact. But, what if that is a necessary evil for the continued evolution of technology, and with it, society? And, if it is, do we want that?

    And, to go a step further, could AI potentially aid in finding realistic ways to undo the harms that it had caused? Or those of anthropogenic climate change? Or uncover new unforseen dangers?

    Did the inventors of UNIVAC ponder if its descendants would one day aid in curing terminal illness, or predicting intense weather, or realize how much it would evolve in the coming decades? Moore wouldn’t have even coined his iconic law for another 14 years.

    What I don’t like…what I really don’t like…is that this phase of technological evolution is coinciding with rampant pro-capital/anti-social rhetoric and governance. I like that it’s forcing conversations around modernizing copyright law, licenses, etc…but I don’t like who is involved in those conversations.





  • Actually saying it out loud it kinda sounds like a BFE, Minnesota accent. Or maybe more Canadian. However my idea of Minnesota accent is based on the mom from Bobby’s World and Uncle Joey’s beaver.

    I’m realizing again a few minutes later that 00s+ kids may not get either of those references. And Dave Coullier is Canadian and I think his beaver is too.

    Edit again, I realize that the 00s+ kids that don’t get the references would probably be more confused by me referencing two mens beavers.

    Dave Coullier (sp?) was the actor who played the character Uncle Joey (Gladstone) in Full House, where he pretended to be the uncle to three little girls and lived in their house, with their dad Bob Sagat (of “the aristocrats” and “Rolling with Sagat”), after the mom died of mysterious circumstances. As the girls got older Uncle Joey started making videos where he stuck his hand into a beaver and used it as a puppet. Part of this gag usually revolved around various jokes about “wood”. Eventually this got him to become a bit of a local celebrity, in the morning news and as a radio host.

    Partly related fact, Alanis Morissette’s album (and now Broadway Musical), Jagged Little Pill, was inspired by a bad breakup with Dave Coullier







  • I lived in Rhode Island when The Station fire happened, and I was working in a restaurant.

    I guess one upside is that the fire Marshalls actually took their jobs seriously and the business owners actually listened to them. My boss had to get rid of a conveyor from the basement to the “back” exit, install new fire suppression systems, a larger hood over the grill, a new hood over the stove, and removed a pile of storage from in front of a door that I didn’t even know was there…it was the fire exit from the kitchen where I was working.

    A few years later when I was looking for an apartment in RI, I noticed how many had retrofitted sprinkler systems that definitely went in after the station.

    Of course, memories are short.




  • Exactly. It’s not so much that they even have to rewrite history, just bury it good enough. Make the real stories difficult to find and suck the desire to learn out of kids so they grow up ignorant and easy to control.

    Guaranteed there are tons of AI autobiographies being written by “slaves” who miss their mastuh and want to go back to the good life on the plantations, where everything was provided for them. As one example. And definitely tons more in the erotic category.



  • I always thought Winston’s job, of literally rewriting history, would be an impossible task.

    Nowadays? I’m not so sure. When we look at where most of the news comes from in America and follow the money up, you’ve got like 90% of it coming from about a couple dozen people.

    Some of those people control LLMs along the way. They control our social media and search engine and what posts and answers and advertisers we see. They control the servers through which most of the internet routes their traffic. They control the certificate authorities that all of our web browsers intrinsically trust. And most of them are friends with each other…or at least keep it cordial.

    And they’re patient. They play a long game. Half of them aren’t even middle-aged and are in peak physical health.

    Shit even that sounded like a crazy conspiracy theory like 15 years ago, and while I’m being hyperbolic…I’m really not being that hyperbolic.


  • Trump’s a litigious piece of shit. If he can prove libel, he’ll prove libel. BBC (and all news networks, really) need to tread lightly and keep him happy or they will get kneecapped with legal actions. Which, even if they win, and have every reason to win…it’s still an expensive and time consuming process, and they still have to tread lightly.

    Meanwhile, advertisers and shareholders get very nervous. Granted, this doesn’t apply so much to BBC.

    This is what civil justice has come down to. What’s “right” is decided by who can pay lawyers long enough to prove it. Stab each other with plastic forks and see who leaks to death first.