So to maintain AI supremacy the US will now phase out all climate targets and begin the great AI vs Climate Collapse race.

People around the world will be on tenterhooks as they see AI get out to an early lead as politicians fire anyone who can call out the ever so subtle “Unprecedented Events”.

Gaze in wonder as climate strikes back by disrupting society with apocalyptic weather events to attempt supply chain disruption.

Watch in rapt disgust as the AI instructs the puppet like mouth pieces to pay lip service to citizens while doubling down on supply and logistic support while restricting the publics access to the same.

AI vs Climate Collapse: No matter who wins we lose

Anyone using a Version Control system to do 3d design work, if I was smart I would be using this for the stuff I design to 3d print. But I’m not so I just have directories full of STL and 3MF files with occasionally somewhat descriptive names. Oh or 3d artists working on games, videos etc. People who are doing architectural design? Just people with other random interests? I suck at staying organised but I gave Forgejo a go and as long as you follow the getting started guide and keep it on an internal network its pretty straightforward to get started, complexity goes up if you are wanting to use it externally or in more co.plicated scenarios I believe.

Wow thanks for your contribution scammer.

Wow does your offer include Premium Netflix and Amazon Prime? Because the other scammers who are offering me IPTV are bundling Netflix and prime thanks to their exclusive relationships and I wouldn’t want to blindly hand my credit card details over to someone who can’t build exclusive (and implausible) relationships!

Throw away email! Are you going something illegal online that you would want to bypass the government and big techs absolute right to spy on everything you do! That’s it people will henceforth only get one single email address assigned at birth that they will be forced to use for all online interactions henceforth. I hope you feel ashamed of yourself with all the children you put at risk with your thoughtless selfish behaviour. Now upload an image of your face certified by a government official and a copy of your birth certificate just to be sure that terrorists, uh criminals, uh child abusers don’t win.

*Please tell me this is the most superfluous /s of all time. *

I knew what that was going to be before I checked the link. I see you are a cultured individual.

Sorry to come in a week later with a hot take.

But something I think would be awesome, probably for GOG, would be for them to offer a backup service where they will put your GOG library onto M-Disc Blurays in 100Gb increments for a nominal fee, say $40 plus postage.

For people who game preservation matters to it would be a solid statement. I doubt many of us can afford a salt mine to store the disks in but they are still about as long lived as you are going to get in a format that’s accessible for a home user (let’s be honest those disks will likely outlast the drives to read them with).

For GOG the costs would be fairly minimal and since M-Disc is a pretty valid backup media they would gain that capability from a business perspective.

Just something that sprang to mind while I was reading this thread.

See I also think that there is something to be said about how there’s people still out there making new music, performing it, recording. But business has captured the market and is drowning out the smaller players. The signal to noise ratio gets so skewed that even if the best song you never heard is only a web search away you may never listen to it because your streaming service will never play it. But the soulless corporate remix of a remix of a cover of a song from the 80s, you hear that 4 times a day because they have a marketing budget and algorithmic influence.

Maybe I am misreading your comment here, but I am going to take it on face value, I have never written a song. In an interesting note I believe cutting pages out of a bunch of books and sticking them together in a new binding wouldn’t make a compelling read, I also have never written a novel.

I seriously respect people who can write songs, I would imagine they have or had passion for the art. I seriously doubt any song writer is out there thinking "Holy fuck this song is amazing, I really hope some shithead producer crops the chorus and mashes it together with a bunch of other tracks to make it completely meaningless. That would make it perfect.’

Ahh down votes in lieu of a substantive argument. Love it. If there wasn’t a thread to pull on in all that word salad that would unravel the tapestry do you think maybe there’s something to my take on this matter?

Anyway, don’t care, this isn’t Reddit so a downvote doesn’t mean shit, and you at least read some of my post. To quote a somewhat famous Doctor “Don’t you think she looks tired?”

I got stuck today in a part of my workplace where they have one of the local shitty radio stations playing, couldn’t have my headphones in as people kept coming up and talking to me, and a shitty pop music mashup plays and it struck me, this is AI.

To clarify there is some shitty artist who gets the credit, but its just a selection of clips crossfaded and slightly processed into each other to make a new “song” out of a dozen pop songs. No actual creativity, no new material, just a quasi algorithmic blending of songs so that some soulless talentless grifter can claim they are an artist.

It gets deeper though, as mixed in there are songs that couldn’t actually be performed live and acoustic due to the amount of sound engineering and vocal processing that went into the original versions of these songs.

The whole thing is turning into an Ouroboros, they have worked out how to make perfectly bland, meaningless music and now the snake is eating its tail as the industry consumes that slop to manufacture more slop.

Yet deeper, why does this beige bullshit get air time… Why its our old friend capitalist market forces, no one passionate about music wants to make this shit, its the people who want the fame and money and view music as the means to that end.

We know that AI makes people dumber, we know that it leads to the atrophy of skill and talent, and we know the only motivation for its use is capitalist. AI is pop music.

For what its worth I used italics on AI as I categorically refuse to believe this garbage is actually artificial intelligence. I am reasonably certain that actual artificial intelligence is the next fusion power, it’s going to be “only a few years away” from being viable until well after I die, but its just too good a marketing term to leave it alone while we make do with these stunted chinese rooms.

Wow that rant blew up.

And give up on making you explicitly hand over your identity… Sir/Ma’am/Other I believe you have misjudged the ever beneficent Google. This will simply be to augment the other fingerprinting methods they already use regardless of what they might say.

I keep seeing this suggested and while I think that would be amazing I really don’t think its likely. These incumbents are set up to make things difficult for new entrants to their market. With political will and engagement it would be possible, but in the current world political environment these payment processors would simply buy the right politicians & court officials to ensure that any legislative challenges would be killed in the nest.

In the world we are in right now we need to instead focus on making the payment processors bend to the will of the majority not a vocal minority.

We also need to start finding strategies to fight back against paedophilia as an accepted permission slip to let the worst people in the world get away with whatever they want. If its not a disqualifying status for the office of president of the US, then why does the existence of paedophiles mean we (vast majority not paedophiles I hope) have to sacrifice our rights, our privacy, and our free speech?

Well yea, but also no. I think a lot of their ability to operate is the veneer of legitimacy they have, my suggestion above, while funny, was mainly facetious, however if we could figure out a way of stripping that legitimacy away they might see more pushback from the next company they try to convince they represent a statistically large chunk of the population.

In this exact situation if Visa had just said to them: “We will take that under advisement.” Then filed the whole thing with the crayon scrawl “letters” they get from a certain “BLEACH BLONDE BAD BUILT BUTCH BODY” about not letting the Jews buy any more space lasers. Then no one would be getting rights taken away from them.

Posted this elsewhere so just going to copy paste here but with regards to Collective Shout:

I think we need to get this group to weigh in on the content of certain holy books. Surely as a secular organisation they will have no problem demanding that the bible and qur’an be banned (I bet I know which one they actually would like banned).

After all we don’t want kids exposed to books that contain incest, sex, violence, rape, etc. I’m sure there are some parts of Ezekiel they will want editted at the absolute minimum.

I imagine balkanisation would be one way to make them slightly less visible/insufferable, and you know they would love some factional infighting.

Every time they get brought up they should be forced to confront that the people pulling their strings are most likely engaging in all the things they want banned from culture (regardless of culture or intent). Once they are forced to start lobbying Visa and MasterCard to block transactions to religious bodies I will accept they genuinely believe in the drivel they leak. Until then its performative puritanism.

P.s. not a fan of religion of any stripe, but I would feel as violently opposed to censoring them as I am to censoring anything else, I will accept it if its the only responsible solution until then alternative can be found.

I was going to ask how he knew it was Arch, but I feel like that is just setting up the next comment.

“Don’t get too excited. Don’t get too excited. Don’t get too excited. Don’t get too excited. Don’t get too excited. Don’t get too excited.”

Its not working.

I find this amusing, had a conversation with an older relative who asked about AI because I am “the computer guy” he knows. Explained basically how I understand LLMs to operate, that they are pattern matching to guess what the next token should be based on a statistical probability. Explained that they sometimes hallucinate, or go of on wild tangents due to this and that they can be really good at aping and regurgitating things but there is no understanding simply respinning fragments to try to generate a response that pleases the asker.

He observed, “oh we are creating computer religions, just without the practical aspects of having to operate in the mundane world that have to exist before a real religion can get started. That’s good, religions that have become untethered from day to day practical life have never caused problems for anyone.”

Which I found scarily insightful.

Had a big thing written out, didn’t like it when I read it back. So keeping it simple, I equivocated to try to deflect some of the potential rough replies from the cultists who have already drunk the Koolaid.

Hmm, not meaning to get my conspiracy hat on here but do we think this could relate to the fact that Microsoft now has a quantum computing chip that they can hype to their investors to show they have the next big thing in the bag?

AI has served its purpose and is no longer strategically necessary?

Since they are only spending investors money it doesn’t matter if they burn billions on leading the industry down the wrong path and now they can let it rot on the vine and rake in the next round of funding while the competition scrambles to catch up.