The current US economy is completely dependent on two things. One: low unemployment and steady growth in available jobs. Two: AI getting a return on investment by replacing millions of jobs with computers.
And somehow we are still going about our business like this is totally normal and won’t blow up any second now.
Yes playing Silksong for sure. However at some parts of the game I wonder if I accidentally switched over to Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy.
They aren’t thinking about that, they are thinking of themselves. They are duped into thinking the stock will continue to go up indefinitely. Sure it has dipped a bit, but over the course of 1 year, it’s still up 50%. We’ve been hearing about the stock tanking all year, but in reality it’s only down 8% and will probably go up again. Over the course of 5 years it’s up over 175%. This makes it a very tempting stock to invest in, it’s big gains in a short amount of time. All you need to know is exactly when to buy and when to sell.
At least until the ceiling is hit and the floor falls out, then the stock implodes and all the money is gone. Everyone with a brain looking at the actual company Tesla and all the idiotic stuff Musk has been doing has expected this to happen. But for various reasons this hasn’t happened yet.
And remember a lot of things Musk has done aren’t legal at all. Blatant market manipulation, total disregard to any rules and laws. Plus all the shit he’s pulling with Twitter and xAI folding into Tesla and SpaceX. SpaceX only being held afloat by massive government investments and investments into Starlink. SpaceX is making a lot of money launching Starlink all the time. With the way they’ve designed it, those units de-orbit within a few years, being so low to be well inside the atmosphere. So they need to keep on launching to keep the network going all the time. Investors are paying for this, in the hopes Starlink ends up making enough money to pay for it. Nobody has ever gotten any similar satellite networks to be profitable, but who knows, they might make it work.
I recently read a cool book and wanted to know what other people thought about it. I had no idea how to find out, probably obscure forums or something. But with search engines being shit these days, I could only find one line reviews. I was looking for something a little more in depth.
So I thought hey let’s try some kind of LLM based solution, this is something it should be able to do right? So I told Chatgpt hey I read this book and I liked it, what are some common praises and criticisms of that book? And the “AI” faithfully did as told. A pretty good summery of pros and cons, with everything being explained properly without becoming too verbose. Some of the points I agreed with, others less so. Wow, that’s pretty neat.
But then alarm bells started ringing in my head. Time for a sanity check. So in a new chat I posed the exact same question, word for word. However I replaced the name of the book and the name of the author with something completely made up. Real sounding for the context, not obviously fake, but weird enough a human would give pause. And of course, not similar to anything that actually exists. The damn thing proceeded to give a very similar result as before. Different points, but the same format and gist. In depth points about pacing and predictability of a book I made the fuck up just seconds earlier.
I almost fell into the trap thinking LLMs could be useful in some cases. But in fact they are bullshit generators that just happen to be right some of the time.
Your mom’s so fat, she pushes the barycenter of the solar system outside of the diameter of the Sun
My keyboard these days is much much stronger than the keyboard I had in the 90s. In the 80s the back was full metal and some had the case be metal as well. Then in the 90s it went all plastic and super fragile. For the past 15 years or so I’ve had a keyboard with a thick metal frame. I’ve smashed it lots of times and it doesn’t care at all. If you’d pick it up and smash the monitor with it, it would totally destroy the monitor. My desk is a metal frame with solid wood, but the average IKEA desk probably wouldn’t stand a chance.
Tell me Legolas, what do your elven eyes see?
Fucking pixels Aragorn, it makes me want to puke. And what the fuck is up with these compression artifacts? What tier of Netflix do you have?
Sorry Legolas, could we just enjoy the movie?
Maybe if the dwarf stops stinking up the place. And don’t think I didn’t see him take that last chicken wing, fucking dwarves.
Sure you can physically move the gate. The intergalactic gate bridge proves that in spades. But there’s more to it than just the gate. It’s also all the supporting hardware. Without a DHD you need so much hardware to make it work. Then there’s all the security issues. Being inside a mountain is a huge plus when it comes to safety. Not just from a foothold situation, but also when being connected to a black hole for example. And having a failsafe device is also something easier done inside a mountain. You can destroy the entire base without basically setting off a nuke without warning in the mainland US. Possibly even destroy the base without anybody on the outside knowing about it, or with the option to say it’s an accidental collapse. Then there’s moving all the personnel, who are all stationed at that base. With other programs like NORAD being stationed there, it’s easy to hide what you are doing. This is much harder on other sites, especially to cover up the huge energy hookup needed to establish the wormhole before it can draw power from the other side.
Bottom line it would cost probably a billion dollars or even more. That’s if a good enough site already exists, otherwise it would cost way more. And in the end be worse off in every possible way. Yeah no, you are right, that sounds exactly like a Trump move.
We only live in this world to serve our cat overlords.
Yeah, it would be a pretty big task to move the Stargate and the entire Stargate project to another state. It makes zero sense to have Space Command be that far away from our primary access to space.
digging through a shoebox of game carts. For someone who wasn’t alive for that era of gaming (not even close, honestly), it’s a neat little glimpse of what it was like.
As someone who was alive for gaming in the 80s and 90s, it was nothing like that at all. Unless you were very rich, most people would have less than 10 games for the one console they had. It would be a small stack by the side of the console, next to the controllers. Games were usually around $70 depending on the game, which is like $160 in today’s money. NES games were cheaper, especially once the SNES was released. So people did wind up collecting NES games (2nd hand) once the SNES released. The NES moved to the oldest kid bedroom, with the SNES taking the place of the one console in the living room. They might have a shoebox of older games at some point.
We did play a lot of games tho, often we would borrow games from other kids in the neighbourhood. Although everyone had the same 5 super popular games, the other games people had varied. Downside was, the easiest ones to borrow were often the ones that weren’t any good. We all know that one kid that had the Star Wars SNES game and hated it, but you’d only very sparingly get a new game, so you were stuck with it.
Another thing we did was rent a lot of games, you would go to the rental place and they would have so many games, it would blow your mind. They’d have posters up, often large set pieces for some games and movies. It was like kid heaven. Then you’d have about 10 mins to figure out which game to rent, otherwise your dad would get annoyed and tell you to get a move on. People even rented the SNES when it was just released for a weekend, so they would know if it was any good before buying it for the family. It was a big purchase, so you’d better make it worth it.
Can’t go to prison for raping kids if you are dead - taps head
Talk about a low bar
Looked up the invoice for you (rounded the numbers for simplicity):
Panels (8x) including micro inverters, all of the mounting hardware, cables etc. - $2500 Hardware for upgrading the electrical panel - $400 Labour, various items, delivery costs - $600
IIRC it was 3 dudes for about half a day. Two dudes for the panels and an electrician that checked what the panel dudes did on the roof and upgraded my electrical panel.
I felt like it was a pretty good deal. Panels could have been cheaper, but I wanted the full black ones. And a single inverter would have been cheaper than micro inverters, but the panels are partly shaded a lot of the time due to a tree. Calculations I did showed the extra price of the micro inverters would be worth it to get the most out of the panels.
Well yes and no. It’s a giant piece of silicon, but it’s also exposed to high energy rays all the time. Panels can suffer from water ingress and then crack when it freezes. They are exposed to all sorts of animals, both big and small that can cause damage. Have their top surfaces get more opaque due to normal erosion. Experience huge swings in temperature every day. Those things can either outright break the panel, or slowly make it less efficient. UV rays alone cause a degradation of around 1% every year. However modern more efficient compact panels suffer more from this than the older kind. So old panels might still be going strong, but give a modern panel the same amount of ageing and it might do a lot worse.
$21K for 6KW? Holy shit…
I had a 3KW system installed in 2022, total costs were around $3.5K (including some changes to my electrical setup to fit it in). Looking up current pricing around here, the same setup would be cheaper still.
6KW is obviously bigger and your situation may be more complex, but anything above $10K seems like a ripoff for me.
I keep a very sharp scalpel next to my printer. It’s super thin and a bit flexible, but still has a sturdy handle to hold on to. With it I can get in between the glass and the PETG no matter how stuck it is. Once I cut a little bit, usually the whole print lifts right away.