“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” – Frank Herbert

"Right now there is an explosive growth of the number of computers and things they can do. Not only are their numbers increasing at a dazzling rate, but the storage of information in giant data banks is growing in the same explosive way.

We have no way to control this now and none in sight. In fact, the very nature of this growth says that all controls will lag far behind computer developments. Any attempt to ban them will only drive com- puters underground. Never lose sight of the fact that computers “crunch time.” The speed at which computers can operate tells us that laws cannot keep up with them. The person with a computer can dance rings around you while you react as though you were embedded in molasses.

What can you do?

Get your own computer. Learn how to use it. We are here to help you make that first step: how to find the one that fits your needs and your pocketbook, where to put it, how to program it-all of the essentials. If you don’t do this, the Bill of Rights is dead and your individual liberties will go the way of the dodo." – also Frank Herbert

I hate how much we seem to be slowly careening towards Frank Herbert’s vision like the worse case of collective target fixation.

The last time I saw this meme, someone commented that these bags are made and used so that the mouse can be euthanized after an experiment. Supposedly this holds the mouse in place so that it can be “cleanly” decapitated.

So it weighs as much as a rhino, for small values of “a rhino’s weight”!

A side-effect of the li/unix ecosystem overall moving to wayland is that conky is no longer really an option for spicing up your desktop.

Without conky, it’s much less trivial to do “interesting” things beyond window tiling, window decorations, and/or color theming.

Thanks for sharing that link, I thought the watchy had been more-or-less abandoned by the community.

For what it’s worth, GitHub says that chronos firmware had it’s 1.0 release just 5 days ago, so I’m not surprised the other commenter didn’t know about it.

What exactly is meant by “smart features” ? The watch is an esp32 microcontroller driving an ePaper screen and a gyroscope (I forget if there are any other peripherals). It’s already much smarter than a “regular” wristwatch, and being open source you can make it as smart as you want (in theory and within the performance allowed by it’s specs, of course). The stock “os” will fetch the weather and adjust to daylight savings via internet.

Do you mean stuff like there’s no smartphone app available for it? It doesn’t pair with a smartphone out-of-the-box to do things like show SMS, email, calendar events, etc?

It’s a very clever follow-up to their previous project, the fediverse schema observatory (also mentioned in the Last Week in Fediverse published October 30th of last year).

Ah, a man of science!

I have no firm convictions towards or against theism, but learning this in school really made me go “I can’t believe God was this lazy”.

Syntax highlighting for code blocks is the reason I prefer discord over slack for collaborating and just chatting with friends who know how to code. I imagine some irc clients exist that so the same, but at least with discord I know my recipient is guaranteed to see what I see.

Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos (and it’s expansion, The Frozen Throne).

The level of storytelling for a strategy game’s campaign completely blew me away at the time. The “good”-coded guys are haughty and rigid, the “bad”-coded guys are (mostly) just trying to get by in a world that rejects them at every turn, not to mention you play as the lovable young protégé and prodigy that slowly casts aside his humanity until he becomes a “big bad” for everyone else. The campaign has world-altering events take place, and you actually get to see the world altered after the fact.

You ever seen a tumbleweed run for it’s life?

Sounds like either federation working as intended, or some client app trying to cache info about your instance. Might be https://fedidb.com/ or https://fediverse.observer/ or some other service.

I would love to troll them with some videos on people that are literally white as snow, either some kind of stop-motion or other animation approach. Then report all the Nazi shit as “this is peach/pink people, not white”.

Not that it would do much good, but just maybe they would get frustrated enough to take the insurance down — or at the very least explicit that they use the unambiguously racist meaning of “White”.

From my understanding of word embeddings (as used by LLMs), you could skip the LLM and directly compare the similarity of what the STT outputs to each task or phrase in a list you have prepared. You’d need to test it out a few times to see what threshold works, but even testing against dozens of phrases should be much faster than spinning up an LLM - and it should be fully deterministic.

Beyond all Reason also does this amazing thing where, once all players have joined the map in-game, you get up to a minute to plan out you build order before the game’s clock actually starts.

Supreme Commander, especially with the Forged Alliance extension is a super-tight, supe-polished game! My biggest complaint is that the devs bet on CPU single core speed continuing to increase over the years instead of trying to make their game more fully multi-threaded; even on my 5950X it can stutter in the late game.

I’ve been getting into Beyond all Reason recently, it’s coming along nicely but (to me) is more focused on emulating the Total Annihilation experience than the SupCom one:

• 2 playable factions, the Armada and the Core (roughly map onto SupCom’s UEF and Cybran, albeit with less flavor and no lore)
• T1 power generation in SupCom is via power generators (spammable) and geothermal plants (only on certain map squares). BaR has windmills, tidal generators, basic and advanced solar panels that are all spammable as well as geothermal on certain map squares
• SupCom has land/air/sea factories, BaR has bots/vehicles/planes/hovercraft/seaplanes/amphibious/naval factories.
• SupCom has 3 unit tiers that each have their own factory, plus a fourth “experimental” whose units are so big they are built as buildings from T3 builders. BaR has like tier 1 and 1.5 units that can be built from T1 factories, tier 2 and 2.5 units that can be built from T2 “advanced” factories, and T3 and experimentals are built from “Experimental” factories — and no T3 builders (!)
• much less diverse experimental units; Armada has a big walker mech and a fat lightning tank equipped with tactical emp missiles, and Core has and even bigger walker mech and a tank so slow you’d think it was immobile (albeit equipped with a commander’s d-gun).
• commanders can’t upgrade at all, and can’t even build every T1 building

The dev team is currently working on a third faction (the Legion) that seems to be somewhat inspired by SupCom’s Aeon and Seraphim.

Time for some more word of mouth (potentially): have you tried Beyond all Reason? It’s more or less a modern open source remake of Total Annihilation. Runs like a dream even with tens of AI players and tens of thousands of units in-game.

Compared to SupCom I would say there is more unit diversity but less wacky experimentals, and the commander unit cannot be upgraded. There are currently only 2 factions, that basically map to UEF and Cybran from SupCom (or rather SupCom derived those two from the 2 in Total Annihilation). The dev team is currently working on a third faction that, from the previews, seems to me to be a mashup of the Aeon and Seraphim from SupCom: Forged Alliance.

Empathy and intelligence are not the same. As evidenced by some highly intelligent people displaying a shocking lack of empathy, and some highly empathetic people not displaying the greatest intelligence.

Personally, I’d rather talk about knowledge and behavior. Intelligence and empathy are hard to quantize.

Leaning into natural selection, proposing we need to let it “run it’s course”, in a way, to “weed out the weak traits” is eugenics. So is thinking that some traits are “good” and others “bad” without qualifying “for the current social/environmental context”. Stupidity might be a good defense against existential depression.

Why do you yourself call the thought “scary” if you don’t think it’s eugenics? What exactly is scary about letting “weak traits perish” if not that it’s inviting a certain form of eugenics to decide who gets to reproduce and/or be born?

You’ll note I didn’t claim you advocate for it directly, just that your arguments are eugenics-flavored.

Wealth inequality is returning to pre-WW1 levels and climate change’s effects are becoming visible to the average person, making people desperate for a way out. Education budgets in the US have been steadily slashed, far-right agit-prop by people like Steve Bannon has flooded the internet while the political class that could oppose it are pacified by corporate donors.

No need for social darwinism or sketchy eugenics-flavored arguments to explain this.