southsamurai

Sync

Doing fine via app so far

Alas, my number is so old that you have to dial it in Roman numerals.

I’ve only ever had two real ones that were mine. The old landline for the house is long gone. My first cell phone number was back in the nineties, and I dropped it in maybe 2001? Ish? Just wasn’t using it enough to merit the expense at the time. The number I have now, we got on an old family plan maybe a year or two after that. It’s stayed with me ever since.

Now, I’ve had short term numbers from Google voice, and the usual burner apps, but those have never stayed active long enough that I’ve gotten calls or texts for whoever had them before.

Some day, my number is going to be set free into the world, flapping it’s little wings and it is my plan to quietly sign up for all kinds of weird shit right before that happens, so that the new owner can have fun.

Lmmfao! A typo, but I did value a good soup

An llm is just a set of rules for cobbling together text. In and of itself, the technology is ethically neutral. Mind you, all ethics are both situational and relative, but what llms do really isn’t ethically any different from something like how your game handles enemy actions, except in scale.

What makes them a nightmare is the wonton fuckery involved in how they’re trained. The open sourced ones lack the abusive and nigh maniacal plundering of human effort that the commercial ones do.

So, when it comes to a locally hosted, open source option, there’s no fundamental difference ethically between an llm, your music player, your word processor, whatever.

Even data centers for generative ai could conceivably be run ethically, given some massive assumptions regarding resource allocation and usage. Mainly in that the energy it takes, and the physical resources, are being allocated to those centres rather than something else. But if everyone agrees in the benefits, then using renewable resources carefully would make it no better or worse than any of the non ai data centers already in existence. I mean, most VPNs are renting either space or hardware from some company that has a data center. “The cloud” is just a giant computer owned and operated by some company somewhere, and that’s a data center.

Yeah, generative systems are way more resource intensive, but we can’t pretend that AWS isn’t doing the same basic thing, just with a different use case. Again, there’s the caveat that that details aren’t the same, I’m talking about principles of ethics, nor the specific technology. We’ve decided that building spaces, or filling existing space, for computing is useful enough to be worth the problems it causes. The consensus hasn’t really been reached that generative ai is also worth it, but in ethical terms, the same framework applies.

So, your concerns are absolutely valid. They are, however, partially met by sustainable implementation

Anyone played the truck simulator games? The price is great, but I’m not sure what the gameplay “feels” like, and I’d rather hear from folks here than search YouTube

May be an access issue. Enough distance and running a cable becomes a pain in the ass in a way that can make this more appealing. It’s why I don’t have an Ethernet cable in one room of my house; I’d have to climb either across the attic, or in the crawlspace, and neither are gonna happen voluntarily. So I deal with a crappy wifi dongle for the ancient PC in that room instead.

Should have called it story of o just to fuck with people trying to search for it online

It’s been there since TOS.

It isn’t lazy writing, it’s the necessity of long term writing for a series.

If you take the tos concept of “wagon train in space” as the starting point, if you want to maintain a multiple season show, you have to explore every idea you can come up with. You discard the ones that don’t fit the vibe, or you tear them apart until they do. But you have a deadline, budgets, and an ever-critical audience.

So, you get episodes like the one (s3e8 TOS) being rewatched in that community. A zero stakes illness, some hand wavy tech, and a single episode romance that amounts to a pile of meh. They can’t all be winners, and Voyager had and extra limitation in that it was expected to do a roughly TOS journey, with TNG baggage, and still manage to not retread plots too obviously.

It isn’t lazy, and I’d argue that it isn’t bad writing either, as Voyager usually managed to keep characterization on point and didn’t fuck up with major contradictions often.

In universe, you had people far from home, unsure if they’d ever get back, surrounded by strangers and emitted enemies. So the crew slipped a lot. It fits well enough as a head canon that only the really egregiously bad stuff can’t maintain immersion.

But it’s the nature of series writing. You always run into a “what the fuck do we do this week?” wall. It’s really rare for a show to have a long enough commitment that there’s real planning involved the way Babylon 5 worked out. Where you can tell the big story and fill in little bits in episodes rather than having to shove little bits of big story into one-off episodes.

I’ve done some amateur grade serial writing. If you don’t start off with the big picture in place, every chapter is a wrestling match between the idea you’ve got now and how it fits in the long term. It’s fucking brutal sometimes. I’m struggling with one now that’s likely to end up with the same level of “really? That’s what happens?” just because too much stagnation while trying to get the idea to take shape makes it less likely to. You have to push with what you can make work… I have to push with what I can make work so that it doesn’t die entirely.

Imagine that kind of situation on a budget, a deadline, and whatever exchanges directors and producers throw into the mix. I seriously doubt I could do it. It’s its own skill set.

I only saw the first one in theater, and I was so damn young, all I really remember of the experience is some of the exterior shots. But, considering how young I was, that’s still a telling thing about how well it was done.

I feel you.

Being real though, picking up some motorsickles is hard. I’m always impressed even when big guys do it solo, much less easily. Not entirely because they’re heavy, there’s also the factor that when most people drop their bike, it isn’t casually. There’s a reason it’s down, and that can interfere with getting it back up.

Still, totally with you. The fact it’s a woman doing it solo is no more or less impressive than a man of the same approximate size.

Canada goes fucking hard, yo!

Imagine having to fight moose and Wolverine just to walk two miles in the snow to get to Tim Horton’s! You’d fuck up some nazis too!

Solid rant!