Incredible campaign

“How much milage did flush door handles give anyways? Certainly not “I’m gonna die” worthy.” I say from my '05 death trap.

Or in the boot.

I just fake it with a Playlist these days. Add 5-10 albums to a playlist and swap albums out as and when. I do miss the ‘skip album’ button though, press that enough and you knew that CD needed pulling for something else. Now I’m furiously skipping tracks one at a time to get to the next ‘CD’, which encourages me to change that album faster, but is distracting while driving.

My car CD changer (a Deezer playlist I add/remove albums to) currently has

No Hard Feelings - The Beeches, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess - Chappell Roan, The Make it All Show - Skating Polly, Film Noir - Faouzia, Streetwise - Pretty Sick, Woman of Faces - Celeste, Lux - Rosalía, Dummy - Portishead, From the Pyre - The Last Dinner Party

I think I’m gonna swap out Pretty Sick for some Beatles (Helter Skelter came on Flow and reminded me they exist). Probably swap Faouzia for something, I saw Mary Middlefield in New Release, so probably that. Poppy is in New Releases too, isn’t she with Evanescence touring, so I’ll give that a go. I thought about Full Moon Fever - Tom Petty, but I just didn’t love it like I used to. The CD changer is due a refresh.

I found a “Every UK #1 1952-2021” playlist. I might copy it, tidy it up, remove the Xmas singles and have that as a car playlist for a bit.

And they’re all marked wrong discouraging lateral thought

I think most of the trolley collectors are disabled in some way, so their jobs will be subsidised.

A bit beyond the scope of the post. But instead of supermarkets using society to subsidise their labour costs, we could use supermarkets to subsidise society. Tax the wealth and institute a UBI.

If the supermarket starts spending more on labour/lost carts than they were losing with lost business/upfront cost, they may bring them back.

I wonder what the conversation is between supermarkets. They have to know the one spending upfront for these devices is training the local population reducing the other’s running costs.

Absolutely true, it does present a barrier. I had a token attached to my keys for my own sanity.

Now that token perminantly lives in my car after the clippy thing broke. If I’m shopping for enough things to need a trolley, I have my car. My peers all have these things in the cupholder/ashtray of their center console.

The timing worked out, I had the token attached to my keys while I was without a car, and it broke just in time for the arrival of the car.

Some supermarkets here require a token to use. That token is returned on the complete restacking of your trolley

It does well enough at training our population.

I’m gonna make the jump to nixOS eventually. I’m just about comfortable with YAML and only in the context of docker-compose. The leap from that to nix seems too great. I’ll start this year though.

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Von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of von Neumann’s advice. It’s made me a very happy man ever since. - Richard Feynman (The creep)

Mostly that. I accept the world is shit. I try make my little corner of it better. I try not to support what’s making it worse. I accept I’m not an acetic, worse I’m a hedonist, so I will be making it worse. I accept these things.

I do try make it better, I vote left, I donate, I abstain through boycott to a tolerable level of discomfort.

I could be doing better, I eat meat, I still get things from Amazon, I drive cars/motorcycles as a hobby.

Russia are shit heels. The US are shit heels. Thanks for playing. Harrasing aggressors like Russia is good actually. Thanks for playing.

I’m on my anticorp march right now and currently targeting Google. Search is done with searxng. Next is docs. Then email. Then Maps. Then the behemoth that is Amazon.

If genAI is a tool, can you tell me what exactly it is that it does?

“What do you mean you were led to believe I don’t know what it does” - person who asked what it does.

That assumption?

Books: Forever War the homophobia is strange though. I’m not gay so I won’t say it isn’t offensive, but it is strange.

The ender’s saga. Starts off questioning “what is an enemy”, ends questioning “what is life”. Author is a cunt though, acquire through other means than purchase (such as borrowing) if you can. Strange someone so bigoted can write a series so… not bigoted.

Bill the galactic hero. “It’s always bowb your buddy week”. A bit immature, maybe the jokes are dated now.

Films: Jarhead

Platoon

Full metal jacket

No write ups, I think the films are well enough known.

My own thoughts on war are defensive wars are to be supported. Ukraine, Palestine, Venezuela, all to be defended from their aggressors. Rogue states are to be handled in other ways up until war. Which, to criticise my own position, is to say it was fine while Hitler was only killing Germans.

If genAI is a tool, can you tell me what exactly it is that it does?

Just to be clear, you just learned that GenAI can be used as a tool to help someone interpret text? Well at least you learned something.

This is what I mean by hyperbole being "AI-bad"s own undoing. You know AI as tool can do things. You try use what it can do as insult, but sadly all you do is errode your own credibility. It is funny though.

I suppose it’s better you’re here. You could have been out there repeating history

The point of learning long division is so you understand it. Once you understand it, THEN you can use the calculator.

That wasn’t my experience of learning long division. Not a lot of time was spent on understanding the process. A lot of time was spent on repetition, repetition, repetion until it was wrote. The division button on the calculator was faster, does offload my thinking, but it’s easier and gave more accurate results. Using my calculator in long division class would have been considered cheating though, offloading my thinking like that.

But counter to that, I also spent a lot of time in Dreamweaver chasing the dotcom bubble that popped before I entered the job market. Even with the pop we see websites everywhere for everything.

No. The corollary of my luddite argument is that tools are tools. Attacking the tools don’t work to solve systemic problems.

If genAI is a tool, can you tell me what exactly it is that it does?

See my first comment for one example of students using it as a tool.

See, the “AI bad” people are funny. In a reply to comment about how people are actually using GenAI as a tool to achieve their goals “If genAI is a tool, can you tell me what exactly it does”? I must say, admitting to not not having a clue what genAI even does is a massive hit to your credibility on this topic. But to answer your question about what it is that generative AI does as a tool: it generates things. Pictures, videos, text, music, it generates things.

It is a shame the airways a late clogged with this nonsense instead of how the wealthy are using tools, any tools, to concentrate wealth.

Look, GenAI is a tool, use it for what you think it’s useful for (even if you think that’s nothing). Let others use it for what they think it’s useful for. But for the love of god, attack the system not the tools.

Someone just told me that Ecco the Dolphin, by virtue of not having AI, is saving the planet. There really should be a comm devoted to the things AntiAI peeps say.

I do 3x10 and it’s awesome. I used to be on a 3 on, 4 off pattern which was ideal but I’m on 1 on, 2 off, 2 on, 2 off now. It’s still good. Couldn’t reccomend it enough.

I didn’t really say AI bad,

Implying GenAi gives wrong answers isn’t saying AI bad?

If you ask AI the same question twice you get 2 answers, different AIs give different responses, different prompts, different people, different geography.

That’s true of people too, and we trust them to do all sorts of things. Ask 20 people what happens after you die, how many answers are you getting? Not just that ask any technical question, ask 4 beekeepers the best way to do a thing and you’ll get 5 answers.

GenAI is a tool, if you try use it to hammer in nails you’re gonna have a bad time. Don’t try use it to hammer in nails.

It turns out wrote answers to wrote questions is something it does fairly well, and it’s still getting better. That’s good, as a society we’ve moved past wrote answers to wrote questions. We should now prepre kids for the society they are going to grow up in, one with GenAI. Critical thinking is something it does fairly poorly, critical thinking is something we do fairly poorly, let’s teach that.

Beyond academics, shitty throwaway art is something it can also do fairly well. Just want an image use GenAi, want a master piece get a human. You already do this, how many of your clothes are handmade? Used a milliner recently? The Luddites taught us a lesson, attacking looms don’t work.

I hope I was the last generation to spend hours on long division with quotes of “you won’t always have access to a calculator”. Those that go into fields where long division may be useful should learn it, the rest of us have calculators.