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crispyflagstones

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crispyflagstones ,

They excerpted Trump on the PBS Newshour yesterday at one of his latest campaign rallies. Apparently his stance on this is that Biden should have done the EV tarriff four years ago. Now, four years ago today, Donald Trump was President, but let’s not let that get in the way of a good speech, right?

crispyflagstones ,

Considering how expensive fresh produce is getting, it doesn’t have to change the direction of inflation to be worth it.

crispyflagstones , (edited )

Counterpoint: if you, personally, can save some dollars so you’re mainly spending on the things you can’t grow, that’s hardly a bad thing. Also, working with soil is known to be good for you. Exposes you to soil bacteria that are known to boost mood.

And it sounds corny as fuck and I didn’t really take it seriously until I did it, but homegrown produce can be so incredibly much better than what you get off an industrial farm.

Just let people participate in feeding themselves and be happy, fuck.

EDIT – to make a pedant happy

crispyflagstones ,

Yeah, with sufficient unthoughtfulness, refusing to do research, and with poor enough planning, you can fuck up literally anything? I’m not sure what your point is. I didn’t say it was suitable for everybody, or that it magically cannot fail, or that it will always be worth it in all circumstances (if your soil’s contaminated, yes, you will want to be careful about how you garden and your costs will likely be higher), or that gardening, unlike anything else, is a good fit for everybody’s brain and that every single person can do it effectively.

I just think it’s kinda dumb to go after home gardening as somehow not useful or valuable just because it’s not a complete, viable replacement for industrial agriculture. It’s a completely stupid false dichotomy.

Basically you need to think about how to do it cost-effectively and sanely. Just like anything else you do (you do think about that, right?)

crispyflagstones ,

…That’s why people don’t like the service fees, etc. It’s difficult to know, as a consumer, how much you’re actually being asked to spend. If you’re rich, haha who cares? Everybody else has to do this thing called “budgeting.”

crispyflagstones ,

Apparently, in the very clear minds of Republicans, if you got busted drinking at a college party at any point after Oct 7 2023, that’s sUpPoRtInG hAmAs nOw and you deserve to be deported to Gaza.

…Guess RFK’s not the only politician with brain worms

crispyflagstones , (edited )

The ENIAC drew 174 kilowatts and weighed 30 tons. ENIAC drew this 174 kilowatts to achieve a few hundred-few thousand operations per second, while an iPhone 4 can handle 2 billion operations a second and draws maybe 1.5w under heavy load.

Like, yeah, obviously, the tech is inefficient right now, it’s just getting off the ground.

crispyflagstones , (edited )

Yeah, uh huh, efficiency isn’t really a measure of absolute power use, it’s a measure of how much you get done with the power. Nobody calls you efficient if you do nothing and use no power to do that nothing. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta all together could not get anything done as companies if they all had to split an ENIAC (vastly less powerful than an older model iPhone) between them. This is a completely meaningless comparison.

Absolute power consumption does matter, but global power consumption is approximately 160,000 TWh, so the doubling means all the largest cloud providers all together are now using less than 0.05% of all the energy used across the world. And a chunk of that extra 36 TWh is going to their daily operations, not just their AI stuff.

The more context I add in to the picture, the less I’m worried about AI in particular. The overall growth model of our society is the problem, which is going to need to have political/economic solutions. Fixating on a new technology as the culprit is literally just Luddism all over again, and will have exactly as much impact in the long run.

crispyflagstones ,

There’s an entire resurgence of research into alternative computing architectures right now, being led by some of the biggest names in computing, because of the limits we’ve hit with the von Neumann architecture as regards ML. I don’t see any reason to assume all of that research is guaranteed to fail.

crispyflagstones , (edited )

I don’t like these companies for their cooperation/friendly attitude towards nation-states either, but your comments are insipid. AWS has like 2 million businesses as customers. They have 30% marketshare in the cloud space, of course they provide cloud services to cops and militaries. They’re cheap, and one of the biggest providers, period. I can’t find any numbers showing their state contracts outweigh their business contracts.

And, sure, plenty of those business contracts are for businesses that don’t do anything useful, but what you don’t seem to understand is that telecoms is vital to industry and literally always has been. It’s not like there’s a bunch of virtuous factories over here producing tons of steel and airplanes, and a bunch of computers stealing money over there. Those factories and airlines you laud are owned by businesses, who use computers and services like AWS to organize and streamline their operations. Computers are a key part of why any industry is as productive as it is today.

AI, and I don’t so much mean LLM’s and stable diffusion here, even if they are fun and eye-catching algorithms, will also contribute to streamlining operations of those virtuous steel foundries and airlines you approve so heartily of. They’re not counterposed to each other. Researchers are already making use of ML in the sciences to speed up research. That research will be applied in real-world industry. It’s all connected.

Its not for you to worry about. The decision to rapidly consume cheap energy and potable water is entirely beyond your control. Might as well find a silver lining in the next hurricane.

By the same token, you shouldn’t worry about it either? So insipid.

crispyflagstones ,

I don’t like defending Amazon, but your arguments are shockingly ignorant. Stop making things up on the spot and do a shred of research. The cost of the Wild and Stormy contract is ~half a billion, while AWS’s annual revenues are projected to top $100 billion this year.

So, less than half a percent of AWS’s annual revenues. Stop just making shit up off the cuff.

crispyflagstones ,

And I don’t know that by comparing it to ENIAC I intended to suggest the exponential gains would be identical, but we are currently in a period of exponential gains in AI and it’s not exactly slowing down. It just seems unthoughtful and not very critical to measure the overall efficiency of a technology by its very earliest iterations, when the field it’s based on is moving as fast as AI is.

crispyflagstones , (edited )

If you do the numbers out on that, the volume doubles to 1% of gross revenues over that time period. Not really bolstering the point you were trying to make here, but you did catch me merely skimming the article because of how dull and bad this conversation is. This conversation is pointless because at the end of the day, AI is literally just a potentially very useful tool, which is why everybody’s freaking out about it. Being against AI as such just because bad people are also using it is kind of pointless.

crispyflagstones , (edited )

Yeah, you were trying to argue AWS is basically for the NSA and cops. That hilariously false claim is what I’ve been consistently rebutting this entire time. You’re moving the goalposts and continuously have this entire conversation, which is why this is a dull and bad conversation. You didn’t start out arguing that 1% is “substantial.” You made a rather different argument. I never disputed that a contract amounting to 1% of a company’s annual revenues is significant, I disputed that that 1% means AWS is just a cop shop. Because that’s not how anything works.

You were wrong, and you were making shit up, and you’re moving the goalposts to avoid having to admit being wrong.

crispyflagstones ,

I usually do, when the other person in the conversation doesn’t seem like an insincere ass and I’m not looking up an open and shut factual question I already know the answer to, like “is the majority of AWS’s business from cops and the NSA?”

And I was off by like half a percent because I skimmed, and that half a percent doesn’t actually make your point for you. We’re not arguing because you have no arguments

crispyflagstones , (edited )

Sorta. The stade was based on the pous which varied. But not that much, and in ways that are often consistently documented. Around the time Eratosthenes was alive, give or take a couple hundred years, it was documented that 1 Roman mile = 8 stades, which gives us something to go of off. While there are other possible definitions, we do have one that we know is probably closest to whatever Eratosthenes used.

EDIT - the numbers regarding the error range in this source is likely inaccurate, but goes into the units issue

maa.org/…/eratosthenes-and-the-mystery-of-the-sta…

crispyflagstones ,

15% commenter here. My number came from the source I used, I’m not enough of a Greek history fan to know one way or the other, thanks for clarifying

crispyflagstones ,

I didn’t realize the market was so fragile and needed conservatives to control it so closely. You learn something new every day!

crispyflagstones ,

At first I was like “hahaha” but then I looked it up and yes: www.floridabeef.org/…/cattle-in-florida

crispyflagstones , (edited )

The Lifeline program is still available. The way they explain it is confusing, but the “discount” covers the complete cost of service for most Lifeline providers, so it works out to free. You just need to be receiving any federal public assistance – Medicaid, food stamps, TANF, anything.

ACP was more of a broadband program with phone service attached, Lifeline is more of a phone program with some data attached. If you happen to have an unlocked phone, many lifeline carriers support bringing your own device to some extent.

www.fcc.gov/lifeline-consumers

crispyflagstones , (edited )

Bet a killer feature for this would be pluggable recommendation algorithms.

EDIT; Clarity

crispyflagstones ,

They’re probably going to find themselves having to explain what it means that a social media platform is itself engaged in speech, instead of functioning as a platform for others to speak. TikTok users, whose voices are allegedly curtailed by the ban, aren’t exactly prevented from going to another platform.

If they say that it’s Tiktok’s speech that’s curtailed, they’re going to have to explain carefully how they’re not a foreign influence operation.

The language of the first amendment is pretty stark, but the courts have always understood it has various limits.

crispyflagstones ,

It never went away.

crispyflagstones , (edited )

Fun fact: tons of wheat and corn farmers had shit yields last year in my area. It’s not even that the temperature was higher, the weather was just all over the place and it fucked the plants.

Of course, it’s government policy to overproduce so much wheat and corn we can feed a substantial chunk of the world, so it’ll take longer before the basic staples start getting hit, but just you wait.

crispyflagstones ,

A dwarf planet is a type of planet, right?

crispyflagstones ,

:'(

crispyflagstones ,

Somebody’s gonna make a federated TikTok, aren’t they? We’re gonna have TikTokers flooding the Fediverse. We’re so fucked.

Windows 11 Start menu ads are now rolling out to everyone (www.theverge.com)

Microsoft is starting to enable ads inside the Start menu on Windows 11 for all users. After testing these briefly with Windows Insiders earlier this month, Microsoft has started to distribute update KB5036980 to Windows 11 users this week, which includes “recommendations” for apps from the Microsoft Store in the Start menu....

crispyflagstones ,

When your business model revolves around indefinitely maintaining backwards compatibility with every weird bug and quirk your enterprise customers baked into their workflows back in 1983 while also trying to be on the cutting-edge and constantly overhauling your products, it’s hard to develop and maintain a modern operating system that isn’t a completely horrible shitshow.

crispyflagstones , (edited )

Yeah, they do the compatibility mode thing for older apps, but it seems like a lot of work to maintain separate shims for each older version that still have compatibility problems when you could just refactor everything with a reasonable amount of legacy support, and push all the users of really old software to start using VM instances of their old OS’s. Surely these enormous financial institutions running bespoke financial apps using a custom COBOL interpreter that only works correctly in Windows 95, have the wherewithal to load up a VM.

crispyflagstones , (edited )

What gets me is how controversial things like this are in the US. Non-competes are antisocial, because they blunt one of the few mechanisms capitalism has to keep employers in check – labor market mobility. One of the things that’s supposed to make capitalism kind of okay is the fact that “if you don’t like it, you can go elsewhere.” Well, if you’re not allowed to start a business or get another job in your line of work for like years after you leave, how the hell are you supposed to actually do that? How does the labor market route around bad employers when workers are literally trapped?

Way I see it, a non-compete is just an employer’s way of telling you they’d keep you trapped in a box in your off-hours if they could.

crispyflagstones ,

Before long they’re going to start floating some modern version of an indenture contract for service workers and arguing for the reinstatement of serfdom.

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