Rhaedas

The stock market is not the same thing as it was at the start, different players, different motives, and lots of failsafes. That time it was a signal that things were bad, this time we could continue to get worse and you’d never know it looking at the DOW.

Or species.

There’s always been plenty of human-made content that is slop. AI is just another tool to make easy content. Trying to categorize everything done with AI as slop is lazy and shifting blame, ignoring the difficulty in both moderating large volume as well as the lack of a definition of what is and isn’t “good”. Which really ends up coming back to the individual, who has means to shut out places that are regularly a problem to them.

1 in 6000 chance for an American nickel, which has a thicker side than most. Just for others sake. I felt it was far less than just <1% and had to find out.

Whenever I see the 1% or 99% numbers when discussing wealth inequality, this fact is the first thing that comes to mind. We need to use decimal points to get to the real ones in power. 1% contains a lot of people who have money, but are still out of the loop as the rest of us, or as Carlin said, “not in the Club”. They are millionaires, but like they say, the difference between a million and a billion is about a billion.

And that’s US - many Americans are in the 1% in worldwide numbers, with rough income numbers being around half a million income. Again, they may or may not be comfortable depending on their expenses, but having money doesn’t mean you have power. It’s the .1 that is the beginning of that, and the .01 is moving the pieces for everyone.

(The numbers are just estimates, there’s gray areas everywhere, the point is the top people want us to be yelling at the top middle and ignore what they do.)

for what it’s worth, Mbin can see and interact with both Lemmy type communities as well as the Mastodon type of broadcasts. They are still two different parts, but within a single interface. Often I see things on the sidebar from them, usually dropped into “Random” as the algorithm doesn’t know what to put it in, and have the same thoughts as you. That it seems like it’s shouting out into nothingness. But…I could respond to the commentary, and it would bounce back to them. It’s just a different way to communicate, not as “permanent” as a discussion board format.

Have to add another one that I saw sort of recently: A reaction video from a channel normally about craftsman work, but he was watching video of the building of the Empire State Building in 1932. His professional amazement and constant pausing and commenting gives so much more than the original video, which is great in of itself.

Moving History is an interesting channel that recently has been using the latest AI to bring old pictures to life. All of the videos are great with minor nitpicks from the commentary on how smiles, teeth, and other details are a bit too perfect and similar due to limitations of that AI. But this one was probably my favorite, not just from the animation of the oldest photographs we have, but from the existential thoughts given:

Almost all of us are in the same boat of living our brief lives and then after a while being forgotten. We’re not famous enough to be preserved in some history book. These people only had a couple of minutes of their time preserved in a single picture, but only seen by few, until now. Now they’re remembered by thousands or more, anyone who sees the video.

Also been seeing a lot more of vintage footage circa 1900 on Youtube of video of various things, almost lost but recovered, enhanced, and colorized by AI tools. This is a good purpose for that technology.

When Worlds Collide was a fun movie that was a double feature shown with the classic War of the Worlds, and had their ship launch via a ramp. The science for such a thing isn’t great, but it was the 50s and looked cool then. The biggest problem is the atmosphere thickness at lower levels. During rocket launches you can hear them talk about reaching max q, or maximum dynamic pressure, where the combination of velocity and air thickness puts the most stress on the structure. Above that it gets easier to go faster, and in the end you need to go fast to avoid falling back down.

I’ve seen videos of Suburus embarrassing normal 4X4s in climbing stuff, so this is a simple one. I mean an old Civic or Yugo would probably beat a Cybertruck too, so it’s a low bar.

Free will is something where people talk about it as a binary thing, but it can be both the ability to make choices, yet very deterministic at the core. If someone asks you to think of your favorite color, in your mind you visualize what that is, and it’s your preference and choice for whatever reason you like it best. But the deterministic part begins when you wonder when you made that decision. Can you even narrow down the instant when it popped into your mind as the preferred choice, or what occurred before it was made? At some point there was a triggering of thought and memories from the question asked that resulted in you thinking of your color, but when did it go from predictable neuron firings to a choice? There is a gray area there.

For what it’s worth, while I enjoyed some of the later Terminator movies for themselves, the saga ended with T2 in my mind. Where that future led could be just as dark, as someone else could come up with their version of Skynet eventually, like any other technology, but we are left to ponder that on our own. The actual previous future is gone thanks to the efforts made, and we’re allowed to try again.

Also, that picture should be labeled as NSFL. A vehicle profile that only looks good on a sheet of paper in crayon.

The dump would charge for the hazardous waste. And the battery waste.

There are multiple timelines of potential futures. They all end up collapsing into a singular “now”. Many of the futures have very low probability.

I’d disagree with Rogue One as a first intro to Star Wars simply because there’s a lot of assumptions of knowledge of things explained at a minimum in ANH. If anything, ANH first, then Rogue One to cover the stolen plans story that is mentioned all throughout.

The only benefit for seeing Rogue One before ANH is to explain why Vader is so pissed at the princess.

To phrase a Monty Python firing squad skit, “You MISSED???”

Free market. Oh well.

They would certainly have a trifold mirror setup at a minimum, if not a mirror on the other side of the room. Character creation is the most crucial part of playing a role.

At one point years ago my work finally caught up with the 21st century and allowed creation of passwords longer than the fixed 8 characters it had always been. So I said great, made up something that was around 12 or so that I could remember. Until I logged into some terminal legacy programs we were still using and wouldn’t take that length. So yeah, I went back to 8 characters that wouldn’t break things. They eventually migrated away from such old programs and longer passwords became mandatory since they’d work everywhere, but I thought it was funny that briefly I tried to do the right thing but IT hadn’t thought out the whole picture yet.

I always thought it was this event that broke the internet a bit until it was resolved. However it’s hardly the only example of open source dependency on individual programmer projects, as detailed in the Explain XKCD.

It’s another example of not making assumptions in your code, and having any part of the process break gracefully when things don’t work like they should. But of course every programmer writes like that… right? cough