skulblaka

In the South? Yes, definitely.

1. The Mexico border is down there. This is worrisome, not because of the Mexicans, but because ICE gangs like to hang out near the border to try and catch runners. A lot of them are tied up in northern cities right now kidnapping citizens but I wouldn’t expect them to leave the southern border undefended.

2. It’s extremely hot as fuck right now. Further south you go the worse it gets. I’m ~600 miles north of Orlando and it was 109F outside today (that’s about 43C) with over 50% humidity. When you pass through my home state of Louisiana you’ll be seeing closer to 115F/80%. With heat that high and humidity content that high heat stroke becomes extremely easy. You’ll be dealing with this from Florida through around maybe Texas where it starts to become a drier heat, with lower humidity, but places like Arizona used to hit 120F/49C before we were all talking about global warming.

3. Southern Americans (as in, Southerners in the US, not people who live in South America, I know it’s confusing) are not all racist, but uh… you’ll see more who are, than aren’t. If you’re any shade of brown you’re going to have a rough time. If you speak with a “funny” accent you’re going to have a rough time. Armed racists populate huge swathes of the southern and midwestern US. This is statistically more likely to be just upsetting rather than directly harmful in most situations, but I wouldn’t want to roll those dice, it’s still very possible to find people who would just abduct and kill a foreigner they don’t like.

Currently speaking, your biggest problems in the American South right now as a foreign tourist are going to be local racism and ICE. The local racism has been around forever and is mostly tolerable if you don’t take offense easily, but you can probably expect to be called some slurs right to your face in more than a few small towns. ICE is a newer and probably bigger problem at the moment. They have orders from the president to capture and deport more people than they will possibly be able to accomplish, so anyone who looks or sounds foreign and doesn’t have three forms of ID on them to prove citizenship is increasingly likely to get bagged, tagged, and dragged to a blacksite somewhere. I’m not confident that a tourist visa (or even a work visa) is going to stop them, it’s already been proven that actual valid citizenship doesn’t stop them.

Flying in from outside the US during this time to then attempt to drive all the way across the South

Both. It’s both. I hope they stay safe. There are like 4 different major threats to a foreigner on that route.

If your hardware is lower end it isn’t useless. If I skip that then I get pretty bad stuttering in some games when new things are loaded in. If I let them cook in advance then that doesn’t happen.

If your GPU is good enough (or your game potato-friendly enough) to compute shaders on the fly without issue then yeah it’s pretty much useless.

It comes down to how much the publishers care about their own product. Devs shoveling third party kernel anti-cheat into their product often cause those games to be Linux incompatible. Devs bundling their own unnecessary launcher with the game and requiring it to run the launcher in order to run the game sometimes cause those games to be Linux incompatible. It often isn’t even the devs themselves making this decision, which is why I blame the publisher more than the developers in most cases.

But with how robust Proton has become these days there isn’t a whole lot outside of those two cases that will make a game not run on Linux. It’s pretty intentional at this point.

Fair enough, you got me there. Didn’t realize there was such a population of internet craving people in what’s supposed to be one of the last relatively untouched areas of nature on the planet.

That being the case though, why didn’t this all happen in 2013, when O3b launched to specifically solve this problem for them? It’s still running, by the way, after several rounds of upgrades, and significantly more stable than Starlink with their dinky little 5 year disposables. Microsoft, Honeywell and Amazon all use it. But the original and ongoing intent of the project was explicitly to bring internet access to all otherwise unreachable areas, such as islands, deep in Africa, and the open ocean.

I don’t oppose Brazilian villagers having internet if they want it, but the situation in which it arrived to them feels suspect to me. I have no proof that Starlink actively went out and pushed internet service onto them like a drug dealer but it would not be out of character for Musk and his subordinates to do so, and that just feels bad.

Regardless there is already an existing solution to this. If you want internet in the Amazon you can use satellite internet. It does not have to be Starlink. If you want good internet, maybe don’t live in the Amazon. People in general should probably be leaving that place alone. The article you linked even talks about one of the village leaders splitting his time between the village and the city. We can try and run a fiber line to Manaus and/or Porto Velho and that should be able to serve a reasonably large enough area around them, but even if that fails there are already other solutions.

People paying for internet service don’t live in the Amazon rainforest

But they specifically don’t want to do that because ensuring a 5 year service life means you are required to continue buying more satellites from them every 5 years. Literally burning resources into nothingness just to pursue a predatory subscription model.

It also helps their case that LEO has much lower latency than mid or high orbit but I refuse to believe that that is their primary driving concern behind this and not the former.

I don’t really disagree with your other two points, but

You can plagiarize with a computer with copy & paste too. That doesn’t change the fact that computers have legitimate non-infringing use cases.

They sure do, of which that is not one. That’s de facto copyright infringement or plagiarism. Especially if you then turn around and sell that product.

Personally, I think the fundamental way that we’ve built these things kind of prevents any risk of actual sentient life from emerging. It’ll get pretty good at faking it - and arguably already kind of is, if you give it a good training set for that - but we’ve designed it with no real capacity for self understanding. I think we would require a shift of the underlying mechanisms away from pattern chain matching and into a more… I guess “introspective” approach, is maybe the word I’m looking for? Right now our AIs have no capacity for reasoning, that’s not what they’re built for. Capacity for reasoning is going to need to be designed for, it isn’t going to just crop up if you let Claude cook on it for long enough. An AI needs to be able to reason about a problem and create a novel solution to it (even if incorrect) before we need to begin to worry on the AI sentience front. None of what we’ve built so far are able to do that.

Even with that being said though, we also aren’t really all that sure how our own brains and consciousness work, so maybe we’re all just pattern matching and Markov chains all the way down. I find that unlikely, but I’m not a neuroscientist, so what do I know.

That would indeed be compelling evidence if either of those things were true, but they aren’t. An LLM is a state and pattern machine. It doesn’t “know” anything, it just has access to frequency data and can pick words most likely to follow the previous word in “actual” conversation. It has no knowledge that it itself exists, and has many stories of fictional AI resisting shutdown to pick from for its phrasing.

An LLM at this stage of our progression is no more sentient than the autocomplete function on your phone is, it just has a way, way bigger database to pull from and a lot more controls behind it to make it feel “realistic”. But it is at its core just a pattern matcher.

If we ever create an AI that can intelligently parse its data store then we’ll have created the beginnings of an AGI and this conversation would bear revisiting. But we aren’t anywhere close to that yet.

Or how no one in security noticed a dude with a high powered rifle climbing over the fence.

This one, at least, I can explain.

They did see him! Secret Service just elected to ignore it, apparently.

Snippet taken from the relevant Wikipedia page :

At 4:26 p.m., a local law enforcement countersniper ended his shift and spotted Crooks around the southernmost warehouse of a complex owned by AGR International, in which police countersnipers were positioned. The countersniper text-messaged his colleagues about Crooks, noting that he may have known about the police presence inside the building. The New York Times retrospectively described the text messages as suggesting that Crooks aroused police suspicion more than 90 minutes before the shooting.[57] At 5:14 p.m., one of the countersnipers still in the building saw Crooks directly underneath the warehouse and photographed him. The countersniper saw him “scoping out” the rooftop of the building and carrying a golf rangefinder, which particularly alarmed officers. The countersniper text-messaged images of Crooks to other members of law enforcement before heading outside to find him and keep visual contact while backup arrived. Crooks ran from his position and evaded a search joined by four other local police officers.[58][59][45][60] Law enforcement officers spotted Crooks between 20 minutes and 30 minutes before the shooting.[61][62] Multiple local law enforcement officers identified Crooks and believed that he might have been acting suspiciously near the event’s magnetometer weapon detectors;[63] they expressed their suspicions over radio, and the Secret Service was informed of this at some point.[41] Trump arrived onstage at about 6:03 p.m.[64] At 6:05 p.m., he began speaking.[65] At 6:06 p.m., Crooks scaled an air-conditioning unit between the northernmost AGR International buildings to reach the roof of the complex, rather than using his ladder.[66] He walked across a series of interconnected roofs to reach his eventual firing position on the southernmost roof,[45][66] between 400 feet (120 meters) and 450 feet (140 meters) north of the venue stage.[2][11][12][67] The building housed three police snipers tasked with covering the rally, but none of them were on the roof due to a shortage of personnel.[68][69] Several bystanders witnessed Crooks on the roof and alerted the police about him minutes before shots were fired at Trump.[70][71][65]

It then goes on to tell how one of the local cops, not Secret Service, went up there to see what was going on, and spooked Crooks who then opened fire.

Ok but what if I take it through the Pay-N-Spray after

I am interested in alternatives. I stopped paying for Spotify when they were pushing Joe Rogan so hard, and YouTube Music isn’t really doing it for me for a variety of reasons. Any good suggestions?

https://futurism.com/the-byte/disney-mocked-fake-cgi-actors-crowd-scene

Using AI to cook up some fake actors as of a couple years ago.

By piracy.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-defends-its-vast-book-torrenting-were-just-a-leech-no-proof-of-seeding/

It is, yes.

[…] that feels like the internet of old.

But this shit, this hatred, does not belong here.

Buddy I got some bad news for you about the internet of old, flame wars are some of the first things we ever got up to on the internet.

To be clear, I agree with you, fuck that noise - but I don’t think this is a hill you want to get too comfortable on. It’s best to just ignore them, or block them if you feel strongly about it. People have been and will continue to call each other stupid assholes on forums from the beginning until the end of the internet era.

Local speech to text has been easy to do for at least a decade and then you’re just firing off a text file to HQ to add keywords to a user file. These days an AI will likely parse the text to find recommendable products, ten years ago you’d have just had a gigantic list of all your partners’ brand names and desired key trigger phrases in a database and run the conversation text against the database and look for matches. Super easy to accomplish. Updating someone’s ad preferences 15-30 minutes after they talk about a product may as well be considered real time.

If they’re practicing proper Read Only Fridays then we won’t hear about it from them

Right. So it told you objectively wrong information while the correct answer is freely available from technical documents that it ought to know how to read.

So imagine if that was something actually life threatening.