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mindbleach

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mindbleach ,

It’s pattern-matching. Like searching *.txt to get all text files. It’s just… more. There’s symbols for matching the start of a string, the end of a string, a set of characters, repetition, etc. Very “etc.” And the syntax blows. The choices of . for match-any-character and * for zero-or-more really fuck with common expectations.

It can also replace substrings that match. Like changing the file extension of all text files. Where it gets properly difficult is in “capture groups.” Like looking for all file extensions, and sticking a tilde after the dot. You can put parentheses around part of the pattern being matched and then reference that in the replacement. Conceptually simple - pain in the ass to use properly - syntax both sucks and blows.

Lookahead is what you do to match “ass” but not “assault.” I refuse to elaborate further.

Why isn't everyone talking about AI generated audiobooks?

I just listened to this AI generated audiobook and if it didn’t say it was AI, I’d have thought it was human-made. It has different voices, dramatization, sound effects… The last I’d heard about this tech was a post saying Stephen Fry’s voice was stolen and replicated by AI. But since then, nothing, even though it’s...

mindbleach ,

“Text was never trustworthy.”

– Abraham Lincoln

mindbleach ,

I’m only shocked that video isn’t better. Diffusion models work like denoising - so you’d figure all the wiggly nonsense between frames would be the first thing to filter out.

mindbleach ,

I expected it to be here six months ago, but its continued absence hasn’t changed my estimate from “any day now, and suddenly.” All of this is so weirdly democratized (and pornography-motivated) that we’re seeing the cool stuff before all the scary disinformation concerns.

And the underlying mechanisms are straight-up “the missile knows where it is, because it knows where it is not.” Stable Diffusion compares the noise estimate with and without a particular term, takes the difference, and then leaps outward along that vector.

mindbleach ,

“Fisheye” generation seems obvious. Give the network a distorted view of an arbitrarily large image, where distant stuff scrunches inward toward a full-resolution point of focus. Predict only a small area - or even a single pixel. This would massively decrease the necessary network size, allowing faster training. (Or more likely, deeper networks). It’d also Hamburger Helper any size dataset by training on arbitrarily many spots within each image instead of swallowing the whole elephant.

Even without that, video only needs a few frames at a time. You want to predict a future frame from several past frames. You want to tween a frame in the middle of past and future frames. That’s… pretty much it. Time-lapse “past frames” by sampling one per second, and you can predict the next second instead of the next frame. Then the stuff between can be tweened.

mindbleach ,

The cost to try it is time. Take a laptop you can afford to wipe, install Linux Mint Cinnamon, and just see how you like it.

But in your specific use-case, I do not expect this is a good idea. You are not going to save money on any scale that matters to a law firm. You can run LibreOffice on Windows just fine, and if it doesn’t work out, you can rent Office 365 (Dollars A Year). You’re not in a profession where FOSS tools like Blender and GIMP might displace obscenely-expensive industry standards.

What free-as-in-speech software might mean to you is control. Windows 10 does some dumb shit. Windows 11 is even worse and getting worse… er. Even more worse? Even dumber. Linux distros and open-source programs are made by the kind of ultranerds who said “absolutely not” and are limited to problems entirely of our own creation.

mindbleach ,

Here’s a darkly hilarious one, because you could do it by accident: give smallpox to the native Americans a few hundred years early. Right around 1000 AD, show up to shake hands and teach metallurgy or whatever, maybe planning to jump-start their resistance to colonization… and their resistance to slaughterhouse-borne diseases, the hard way.

This would of course completely fuck up their population numbers, much the same as would happen in Europe in the 1300s. But by the time Columbus showed up to be the absolute worst person who could possibly discover a new continent, they’d be largely recovered, and they’d get to trade whole new strains with the seasick lemon-sucking weirdos who kept asking where the spices were. The returning ships would offer tomatoes and potatoes and another Black Death. Hopefully preventing Malthus from being such an influential bastard, and causing the first engineered famine in Ireland, whose population did not recover from the potato famine until this century.

New England colonies would presumably still take hold, but wouldn’t steamroll all the way to the west coast. Hopefully they’d be limited and northern enough that slavery is less prevalent, less absolute, and - ironically - still a matter of trade. Because what ended the triangle trade to America was the treatment of African captives as livestock to be bred. The politics of this alternate timeline would be hilariously complex compared to now, and probably result in more and stranger wars than we can imagine, but there would be so many averted times where atrocities happened, effectively unopposed.

mindbleach ,

At the very least, find whichever guy had a stick up his ass about people sticking things up asses, and get that poor schmuck laid.

mindbleach ,

Phonographic recording would be incredible to introduce very early on. Basically as soon as the pottery wheel, you could have recorded and played back audio. They’d have to do some fractions-and-guesswork materials science to get anything properly reusable, let alone the ability to press new copies of a recording. But it would get done. Every ruler would want their voice carried to all corners of the territory. Musicians would be known to people who’d never see them in-person. We’d have so much more evidence of how languages were spoken.

But specifically - in the spirit of the question - I’d do this by taking back a crank-operated player and a whole stack of bagpipe albums. Just completely fuck up what ancient peoples think music is supposed to be. Accordions would also work, but I’m not sure I could construct one for demonstration purposes. I could build a hurdy-gurdy, at best. And nobody has a shelf full of vinyl for insufferable droning hurdy-gurdy music.

mindbleach ,

NYT: Adolf Hitler somehow killed by gorilla, onlookers horrified but supportive.

mindbleach ,

The temptation would be to play “Raining Blood” and get extremely excommunicated. “South of Heaven” you could argue is a musical Hieronymus Bosch painting. “Disciple,” less so. For apostasy that cheeky locals could reproduce on a lute, do “The God That Failed.”

Probably the least riot-inducing song that’d still leave the aristocracy struggling to deal with the experience is Anamanaguchi’s “Endless Fantasy.” To people intimately familiar with wind and string instruments, and for a song that Jackson Parodi managed to decently reproduce on a goddamn accordion, it’s juuust enough to leave everyone wondering how the hell humans made those noises. It’s also obscenely energetic. Nevermind concert halls, play this at cafe that’s just imported tobacco and watch some men in hosiery get off their asses. All of that goes double for “Prom Night.” None of these people have ever heard a square wave.

Somewhere in-between, I’d suggest any Flaming Lips album. At War With The Mystics might go over quite well, at first.

mindbleach ,

Likud.

mindbleach ,

“Why does btrfs get a huge perf hit with background IO work?”

mindbleach ,

I blame explanatory headlines. If you searched “why does [blank] happen?” you’d get articles like “why [blank] happens.” ESL speakers (and under-educated native speakers) bungle the difference. (They’re already trying to solve some technical crap. Their [blank] stopped working.) As this spreads, reddit and Stack Overflow start displacing tech-support blogs, and suddenly the headlines themselves are wrong.

mindbleach ,

Our littoral combat ships are that, plus a helping of cyber truck.

Possibly the only boat with a dump truck ass.

mindbleach ,

Like TNG, the pilot episode is a solid intro, but the first season is rrrough. Y’know “Code of Honor?” The same writer submitted the same script as “Emancipation.”

Decent formula episodes: Cor-Ai (s1e16), A Matter Of Time (s2e16), The Other Side (s4e2), Scorched Earth (s4e9), The Fifth Man (s5e4), Revisions (s7e5).

… and honestly the episode everyone goes on about is not a bad introduction. Window Of Opportunity (s4e6) stands alone.

mindbleach ,

as though they knew him from his brief period as a vorlon or whatever.

You are really crossing the streams on this one. But fuck, it was a missed opportunity not to have John de Lancie as a cameo in that diner.

Oh, and I really hope Jellico is visiting the station.

“O’Neill - you punched an admiral?”

“I mistook him for someone else. A real sonofabitch.”

“Who’s he a mirror of in your timeline?”

“The vice president.”

mindbleach ,

They’d presumably talk us into favoring zats (and those red stun rounds that only showed up in a few episodes) over lethal force that’s only equally effective.

We’d make exceptions for replicators. They’d understand. They fight the Borg on the regular.

mindbleach ,

They don’t even need to fly nose-forward. The Enterprise could exit warp at any damn orientation it wanted. Blasting across the alpha quadrant nacelles-first, like Powdered Toast Man.

mindbleach ,

You don’t trust… a company that licenses an ISA?

When your current alternative is a duopoly spearheaded by Intel?

mindbleach ,

And computing might be hard if Godzilla eats all the power stations.

mindbleach ,

That’s worse!

edit: Actually it’s also incorrect, since Nvidia is making ARM chips, not x86.

mindbleach ,

Classic video game franchise. Realistically it’s not going to adapt any particular game. They’ll sample as they please from any previous works and build up their own version of the story.

That’s how legends work.

mindbleach ,

who the heck torrents porn?

People with very specific tastes, apparently.

mindbleach ,

It’s social media made by the ultranerds who warned you about social media. You can sign up on any site and use every site. Mostly. Pick a site that’s not run by assholes and you won’t have to worry.

mindbleach ,

Mask and spray paint, maybe?

Rubber molding is probably the least-bullshit way to get it exactly right. Press or roll a bunch of little divots into some reasonably firm material you’ve made damn sure is level, pour in dark latex, get a thin sheet of flexible material with a bunch of bumps. Try to dip that bumps-down into a very shallow pan of metallic paint. Any goofs can be touched-up by hand.

The quick way is to run a paint roller over some bubble wrap.

mindbleach ,

Seriously though, if you spray-paint bubble wrap black, then run a sponge of gold paint over top, that’ll just about do. I’d only worry about the spray paint somehow melting the thin plastic… and the inevitable damage to all your shiny bumps.

Do pre-strung sequins come spaced-out? I am unclear how those work. If their orientation can be fixed then you could get a little tool and snip each circle into more of a Pac-Man shape.

Oh - “honeycomb sequin” might do. Gold on black, then delete the bottom of each sequin.

mindbleach ,

“They say you should never hit a man with a closed fist, but it is on occasion hi-larious.”

mindbleach ,

if it’s bad enough to merit a ban, there’s no way the comment stays.

If you can’t be a good example, you can still be a dire warning.

mindbleach ,

Don’t you have it when you have to exist in a context?

mindbleach ,

Apparently the problem with a state putting down a popular protest through overwhelming force and censoring all coverage or discussion of the event is that acknowledging atrocities is wrongthink.

mindbleach ,

All flavors of tribalism are the same. That core conservative zeal to say whatever promotes the ingroup and condemns the outgroup seems innate to the human brain. Reasoned argument is a learned behavior - and so is faking it.

mindbleach ,

Had some single-frame GIF images converted to WebP and presented as video.

mindbleach ,

Christopher Judge also wrote three and a half late-season episodes. The one Amanda Tapping directed was written by Michael Shanks.

mindbleach ,

The worst-case endgame is, you can send the videos, but they’ll never reach my eyeballs. Send those frames to /dev/null and store the video stream where I can watch it as often as I like.

mindbleach ,

Leading to intergalactic war accidentally started by DankPods.

mindbleach ,

To say nothing of his new rival, Scarlet Fire.

mindbleach ,

Turrets also prevent what happened to the Vasa, which was the most powerful sailing ship of its time. Its time being 10th August 1626, from 3:40 pm to four o’clock. The king of Sweden ordered it to be made longer, halfway through building it. This scope creep turned out to have negative implications vis-a-vis keeping the gun ports above the waterline.

mindbleach ,

Maneuverability depends on the spaghetti plot.

mindbleach ,

And technically competent! A detail you take for granted, unless you’ve watched absolute trash made by complete amateurs. The Room took off because it is professional garbage. You can clearly see and hear all of the stupidity.

mindbleach ,

It is unbelievably difficult to make a good bad movie on purpose. About the only clear example is The Lost Skeleton Of Cadavra.

mindbleach ,

Insane Microbudget Fever Dream has at least one success story: Primer.

Arguably also The Blair Witch Project.

mindbleach ,

It’s insane, but it’s enthralling.

mindbleach ,

Not Another Teen Movie is the lone exception.

mindbleach ,

Have it your way.

Hey asshole - don’t split hairs about Gaza versus Palestine, then freely swap between Palestine and Hamas!

For the second and final time: saying you’re gonna do it is not the only thing that counts. Israel’s actions constitute genocide. What they say does not matter. The fact Hamas says it out loud neither absolves Israel nor condemns the rest of Palestine.

If Palestine gets their way, they’ll stop being a densely-populated ghetto amid fresh piles of rubble. Israel will stop using the actions of Hamas to justify killing X*10 number of Palestinians. Children and journalists will stop getting shot near the fuckoff enormous wall keeping them pressed against a sea they’re not really allowed to use.

Human shields did not bomb Israel. Declaring “THEY” keep doing it is collective punishment - also a war crime, by the way. All of this is two sides that fucking hate each other and keep doing obscene violence to each other, and your dumb ass wants to pretend it’s just a poor widdle innocent nuclear power being existentially threatened by people without consistent access to food.

mindbleach ,

In light of the edit overtly declaring bigoted superiority, reported and blocked.

mindbleach ,

They’re conservatives. Hierarchy is the only way they decide what’s real. It’s the same tribalist thinking that produced the Lady Hope hoax - saying Darwin recanted on his deathbed, as if that would cancel out the last 150 years of evolutionary biology. They genuinely do not understand science or philosophy, because they don’t believe arguments can be evaluated, except in terms of interpersonal trust.

So in their minds - if Marx was wrong, about anything, then the whole business might as well be made-up. It is impossible for someone to simply be wrong. They have to be lesser. They must be undeserving of their station, because their station is the only reason they get to decide what is true.

In this worldview, it is your job to make whatever mouth noises justify that mutable truth. I say “your job” because this is all they think you’re doing. This is all they think there is. There is no other force in their moral universe. This is quite possibly the human brain’s default behavior, and it is not fragile.

mindbleach ,

Some time after writing that I realized Ringworld and LOTR are both about dragging an artifact up a mountain to drop it in.

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