palordrolap

A large percentage of the world finds Donald Trump being president of the USA unacceptable.

FOMO and FOOPMO

(Fear of other people missing out (on what they have to say.))

“If I find out you’ve been watching AI slop, there will be consequences. And don’t think hiding it from me will make sure I don’t find out. Watching slop makes people stupid in a very particular way, and you can’t stop yourself from catching stupid from it, so I’ll be able to tell.”

It’s up to you what “consequences” means in this instance. You could even reveal that the consequence was the stupidity they developed along the way, and now they have to live with that.

(By all means, modify this message to be less cold and more kind and loving. I am not good at that sort of thing.)

Non-uniformed police that don’t identify are not police.

As such you can call (uniformed) police on them.

If they say they know that ICE are operating in that area, ask how you can know that the people you’re reporting are actually ICE and not impostors that turned up after the real ICE left.

The plural of “axis” is “axes”, pronounced “AX-ease”.

history | grep -E '(sed|grep|awk|perl)' | wc -l 107

Dang. That’s out of 1000. I need to up my game. Also three of those seds are part of something with a -basedir and don’t count.

So yeah, about 10% of my commands are iterating shell pipe things for poops and giggles, I guess.

… and this got me going down the rabbit hole of writing a filter for my history to pull out the first command on the line. This is non-trivial because of potential preceding variable assignments. Most used commands are currently apt and man and ls. I think apt is a Spiders Georg situation because the system is fairly fresh and I keep finding things that I haven’t installed yet. Also I went through a patch of trying to parse its output.

… oh, er… unga bunga.

If 1) you’re smart or practised enough to be able to generate what you’re asking the AI to do for yourself, 2) you’re able to take what the AI generates and debug, check and correct it using non-AI tools like your own brain, 3) you’re sure this whole AI-inclusive process will save time and money, and 4) you’re sure using AI as a crutch won’t cause you brain-rot in the long term, go nuts.

Caveat: Those last two are tricky traps. You can be sure and wrong.

Otherwise, grab the documentation or a bunch of examples and start hacking and crafting. Leave the AI alone. Maybe ask it a question about something that isn’t clear, but on no account trust it. It might have developed the same confusion that you have for precisely the same reasons.

So anyway, Linus clearly fits 1 and 2, and believes 3 and 4 or else he wouldn’t be using an AI. Let’s just hope he hasn’t fallen into the traps.

As long as it’s not Kekistan.

One of my biggest shocks of recent years was when an Internet acquaintance in Trinidad came out as a Trump supporter.

I was like “You’re brown. He’d hate you.”

Except I didn’t actually say that. I did the internet equivalent of walking backwards slowly and carefully while smiling and quietly blocked them.

I guess my former acquaintance’s sentiments extend to the government there.

I get anxious if I have more than three open per window. How other people don’t is incomprehensible to me.

My phone is an ancient flip-phone, so I can’t be sure how things would go there, but I can’t imagine it would be much different.

An elderly person I know got it in their head that the people coming across the Channel in boats were a serious problem.

“Thirty thousand a year!” they complained. “It’s an invasion!”

So I said “The population of Britain is 70 million people. At 40,000 a year for the next 25 years, ignoring all other increases in population by people already here, do you know what the population would be? 71 million. You don’t need to worry about it. And stop talking about an invasion. If it was an invasion, they’d have guns and we’d shoot them first. Most of them are trying to get away from guns.”

(This is not to say that there isn’t a heavy humanitarian and financial burden involved with dealing with those people, only that it’s not the problem some people think (or want us to believe) it is.)

“But they don’t live like we do.”

“I don’t live like you do. I eat foods you won’t touch and spend all my life on a computer. Where are you going to deport me to?”

Either I’m getting through to them or they know not to bring it up around me any more.

It’s touching a highly sensitive part of your anatomy to part of another being. This proves that you trust them.

The touch is gentle. This proves that you are to be trusted.

Both contracts are those of mutual safety.

There are multiple types of kissing. There’s the kiss, perhaps on the head, that you might give a pet or a young relative.

And there the other sorts of kisses that would be incredibly inappropriate in those instances because it breaks part of the contract of trust.

But if between consenting individuals who trust each other in other ways, then all is well.

You really think there’s anywhere that’s far enough away?

Ah. There it is. The distinction you’re making that wasn’t clear. You don’t take what they say seriously, but you take them seriously otherwise.

Well, let me tell you, when a despot says they’re going to do something despicable, it doesn’t matter whether they’re wearing clown makeup when they do so.

Sounds an awful lot like you’re taking Batman, a person you said was a clown, seriously.

I mean, I get you. Bruce Wayne is a capitalist, but depending on the writers, his philanthropy is incredibly deep and he’s doing the best he can, crazy as he is.

But you (deliberately?) missed the surface level message I was going for. You don’t turn your back on the Joker and you take him seriously.

And even if Bats is also a clown, are you saying you wouldn’t take him seriously if he started causing havoc?

Tell that to Batman.

There is a legit criminal in the White House, clown or otherwise, and we should be taking it as seriously as Bats does the Joker.

Based on the actions of my own government, the correct behaviour is to appease, play nice and hope he uses lube when he ultimately comes to f–k us.

He’s the leader of a “country” that exists in the hearts and minds of every Catholic as well as the Vatican proper. There are bound to be people who love him and those who hate him within that “country” the same way it works with any country and as such, his office has influence.

Is it any more than if he was merely the leader of another city state? I’d say so.

Tell me, without looking it up, who the leader of San Marino, the other Italian city state, is. (And if you can, how many other people, especially outside Italy, could do the same?)

We lived through the Cold War in the '80s. It seemed like a very real threat and eventually even though nothing really changed until the wall came down, everyone kind of got used to it and went on as best we could.

Like we have more recently with Covid. That’s still there and hasn’t gone away. It’s still as serious a threat as it was at the beginning. You know how you’d mostly forgotten about it but not really? Same deal.

If you can’t form or find a community, find distractions.

And if you find out where the first bomb’s going to hit, let me know because I want to be under it.