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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2025

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  • That is kind of the UNIX philosophy at work and you’ll find that in a lot of open-source and self-hosted projects. The goal is to do one very specific thing really well in a small and streamlined package that integrates into other processes in a clear, defined and transparent way, not to be one of these super-convenient but bloated “it does everything and the kitchen sink” behemoths. It’s a different style of software development but it’s popular in the open source community for a lot of reasons, for example it’s a lot more maintainable by a single person or small team with limited time. You’ll find most of these large complex open source projects are organized and developed by companies (like Pangolin is), while the smaller UNIX-style projects are often written by individuals or very small teams volunteering their spare time. There are tradeoffs in either direction, but for self-hosting I think following the UNIX philosophy has a lot in common with a typical goal of self-hosting, reducing your dependence on for-profit companies that have a financial incentive to enshittify or otherwise try to squeeze money out of you.




  • Yes, that’s exactly who I voted for. This is what attitudes like yours have wrought. They lost my riding to the Conservatives. Because they’re a fucking disaster of a party right now. Don’t blame me. I didn’t fuck them up. Their lack of credibility comes largely from their own members, organization, and choices. Not from voters nor any other external factors, and if you’re blaming external factors you’re wasting your time. Yeah there are some, but this was mostly self-inflicted and utterly predictable (in fact it was predicted). I’m a Peter Kormos/Charlie Angus style NDP supporter, and there’s a reason the people with actual grassroots support always get sidelined and marginalized. The NDP is a sucky choice too. The people who would represent me very well are out there. Unfortunately, I’m not given an opportunity to vote for them.

    First Past The Post is part of the problem. The NDP is another part of the problem.



  • I have been spending the last few decades bottling up my anger into a very, very large tank. Let me know when you need me, I’m hoping I’ll be able to supply enough for everyone.

    I always knew Carney could potentially turn this way. I was expecting it. I still would have voted for him (if PM was a position we voted for and I was not voting strategically, which my riding lost anyway) but my vote for him was mostly a vote for a pro-Europe alignment, which I still think he’ll deliver, albeit probably not in the size or shape I was hoping for. But with really only two choices, it’s really hard to pretend we’re still able to call this actual democracy. We need electoral reform, and badly, and I’m not sure if we’ll really get another chance. We’re on a bad path and I don’t see any escape routes.




  • A fair government will regulate fairly. A corrupt government will regulate corruptly. Unfortunately it’s not within living memory of any Americans to have a non-corrupt government, so they hate all regulation since all regulation they are familiar with is corrupt pork barrel politics and industry protectionism. They are, of course, missing the target. The corruption is the problem, not the idea of regulation on its own.

    The more innocent bystanders they kill as a consequence of the rampant corruption of their government, the happier they are because they think it means they’re killing the corruption. Meanwhile the corruption is having a great time looting the pockets of the dead and dying.


  • “Foam Creations” is the Canadian design company behind the first version of Crocs, which they made in Mexico and then sold to a bunch of investors who turned it into “Crocs”.

    Does that help you at all? Probably not, but I thought it was interesting. I don’t think they still make them, although they do list “Medical Crocs Sandals” on their website, it’s just a portfolio of past work and they don’t suggest anywhere you can actually buy any of those products.

    Today I think most Crocs are made in Vietnam, and Crocs the company that owns the design and IP is American (boo), so much for that. But they’re originally Canadian.



  • CPU thermal protection is pretty solid nowadays. I’m also old, and I too remember Athlons you could actually cook on, but in my general experience I’ve found they did learn from that and the thermal protections are not exactly a complex system. It’s basically math, as far as calculating how much power is going in to how quickly it can heat up to where the thermal sensor is placed, and they simply shut it down before it’s mathematically possible for the heat to reach a damaging level. It’s very hard now to actually destroy a CPU due to internal overheating, at least any of the ones I’ve had various “incidents” with. They aggressively throttle down and shut down and are perfectly fine once properly cooled.


  • It is old, and yes AIs are continuously getting updated, but the principles still stand. Of course images of completely full wine glasses can and do exist (and if they didn’t it would only take a few moments to create some), and upon realizing this limitation, people (not the AIs themselves) are going to learn from this mistake and train the AIs better, give the existing or created images the necessary weighting to make sure that particular flaw is fixed and make their AI seem even more intelligent.

    But it doesn’t address the fundamental philosophical limitation and it doesn’t make them intelligent. It only fixes wine glasses in particular. and of course in the process they also fix the millions of other things they’re constantly training these AI to do. What it does NOT fix is the literally infinite number of other ideas that an AI simply can’t conceive. I’m sure we’ll add them as quickly as we come across them, but that’s still human ingenuity at work, not AI.


  • The reason AI’s results look so convincing is because it’s a plagiarism machine (and sometimes not a very good one). It cannot operate without our work which has been stolen and used without compensation because the courts have decided this is a “fair use”. Fair to whom?

    I saw a great video on Youtube illustrating this by attempting to convince it to make a wine glass full to the brim (which it simply can’t), and going into the deeper philosophy of ideas to explain why it normally appears to be able to create “completely new” concepts when really it’s just mashing two existing concepts together, but cannot actually correctly combine the separate ideas of “completely full” or “almost empty” with a “wine glass” properly. Because nobody ever does this and we use a different definition of “full” for a wine glass, there is no useful source material for it, and the AI has no idea how to do it either, while of course always being convinced it has correctly understood what a completely full wine glass looks like. It doesn’t have novel ideas, it doesn’t have an imagination, it is not intelligence. It is just plagiarism. It is using its nearly limitless database of the work of thousands of years of human creativity to appear as if it too is creative. It’s not.