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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • I don’t understand all the details (I assume Legal Eagle is already working on a video… that might even be on Nebula already. I should check) but there were specific legal clauses regarding what can and can’t be redacted.

    So (massive grain of salt), I would assume we wait for the deadline on why things were still redacted to pass (probably a few weeks), then a formal complaint is made (a few weeks after that), and then that times out.

    So… probably come March we see if people remember if they care about kids getting raped?

    In parallel: it looks like mostly it was just (mostly dead?) celebrities and Democrats who weren’t redacted. Actual Democrats give zero shits about protecting clinton but the DNC does, so I am sure there are internal discussions on how to handle that which will end with Hakeem et al bopping their heads to Hamilton in a tiktok video.

    (The estates of) said celebrities may actually care though and start going scorched earth. And I am sure at least a few of the redacted photos of child victims in adult male bodies and suits have public versions that will show up with a reverse image search.

    And then you just have to wonder about the True Believer alt-right lunatics who are already breaking from trump because they genuinely just want to kill some pedophiles. And considering that the trump admin has very much been a who’s who of deranged vloggers with no understanding of data handling…


  • Was actually wondering about this the other night.

    Are there any pictures of the current state of it? I kind of assume they just half tore down the east wing and then wandered off.

    But, regardless: This was always a scam. Even if they build something, expect trump and his cronies to pocket the vast majority of the money that was supposed to be dedicated to it. Wouldn’t be shocked if it just collapsed the first time a hurricane reached DC.


  • How did they spend a million dollars on overtime with 1000 agents redacting the files, and they STILL haven’t redacted Trump’s name out of them?

    The vast majority of these documents are digital. And have been backed up at many levels. And reproduced at even more.

    So maybe they already redacted all the PDFs in the folder. But they then learned that there are already like twenty different backups and many slightly edited versions that different attorneys had made notes on and…

    Or… knowing this administration, they might have literally printed out copies and hand redacted a single printout of every document.


    But the good news is that there are a ridiculous number of copies in the wild and a very bipartisan (and even non-partisan) selection of people have read them and likely have their own copies. So, if any people actually care (big if…), expect basically constant mud slinging and screams of “fake news” tomorrow as everyone spite releases documents because their team wasn’t redacted or because they just want to watch rapists squirm.


  • Skimmed the abstract and couldn’t see how they define “salt water”. Did not see it.

    Theoretically, this has utility for shipping. So let’s say you have a pallet of water bottles. The bottles themselves will likely stay more traditional plastics. The plastic wrapping the 32 pack’s cardboard could potentially be this. The plastic wrap around the entire pallet of a bunch of stacks of those 32 packs? I… would probably still go traditional plastic, honestly.

    Because a LOT of beverages are shockingly salty when you look at them (because salt is good and helps us retain water). If that is enough to even come close to triggering degradation then you lose the ability to store those bottles “indefinitely” and you drastically increase the risk that someone’s bottle breaks in their hand while they are leaving the 7-11. Which… defeats the purpose of WHY we use plastic for all this. And… it is a lot cheaper to have “one” bottle factory rather than one for each type of beverage.

    As for that outermost layer? I would honestly just be terrified of a loading dock in the winter. Salt the ever loving hell out of that to minimize ice growth. And then suddenly you have pallets falling apart because of “quick” degradation.



  • With stuff like this, you do a relatively short ban as a “warning”. In theory that is telling the company being penalized to get their shit together. In practice, it is when you silently document all the ways they are working around the ban. Then you effectively take it back to the courts, say “nothing changed”, and ramp up massively. And now you know what loopholes to REALLY rake them over the coals on.

    In theory, this is effective. In practice, this is why so many of those EU protections are a complete joke to international companies since it is easier to do damage mitigation than actual compliance.



  • This definitely reeks of intentional stupidity and bernard and styro are both part of the group of maker youtubers who are openly doing whatever it takes for views.

    That said, this one is at least somewhat plausible. Someone cleans a part with a small amount and a scrub and figures that they’ll just burn it off because they are lazy and don’t care about residue ruining the weld. Whether that will be enough to be meaningfully harmful is an open question

    But I can’t think of any situation where you would need enough solvent to remove the rust AND not wipe a part down because it has been soaking for an hour before you took the wire brush to it. At which point this is mostly in the same realm of “only weld in well ventilated places and consider a respirator under that mask” which everyone should do but nobody does.




  • So I’m not ready to burn it all to the ground just yet. Mostly because chromium is still so much worse but also because, at least so far, I can disable that and I understand that “ai is money” for fundraising.

    But… anyone have any thoughts on the various forks like waterfox and the other one? I don’t mind grabbing the extensions I need on a new install but I DO need a way to be able to send tabs between devices. In theory that is something I can selfhost but I am not aware of a good solution.


  • Vote fixing is not that easy.

    Massive landslide victories will be far too obvious. I am not sure if there is a “Your honor, this is clearly bullshit” clause for recounts but it will trigger them.

    As for the closer stuff? Yes, electronic voting is deeply stupid and dangerous. But it is also worth understanding that many systems are still built around a paper ballot that you feed into it. And those will show massive discrepancies. ESPECIALLY in the “blue states” where these wins would most matter.

    For a presidential election? I could see a world where very targeted election fraud could MAYBE be pulled off, but I stand by: can you imagine the chuds and musk NOT bragging about outright fraud?

    But for midterms and anything down ballot? The places that matter most are the ones where republicans don’t control the state government in its entirety. And when the recount is like 20% different than the reported vote?

    Nah. Election fraud is the distraction. They’ll just perform, ANOTHER, violent insurrection and take the government by force.


  • People are deeply stupid.

    The Left will inevitably start getting pissy that their candidates didn’t win primaries and sit out the generals. And the conservatives will get brainwashed into thinking all the problems were a time bomb left by Barack HUSSEIN Obama.

    And… it is increasingly looking like there might be good odds that trump is dead by then and president vance (and now I threw up in my mouth a bit) is sacrificed as “undoing all the good trump did and why you need to vote for hegseth in 2028”



  • found that with just 250 carefully-crafted poison pills, they could compromise the output of any size LLM

    That is a very key point.

    if you know what you are doing? Yes, you can destroy a model. In large part because so many people are using unlabeled training data.

    As a bit of context/baby’s first model training:

    • Training on unlabeled data is effectively searching the data for patterns and, optimally, identifying what those patterns are. So you might search through an assortment of pet pictures and be able to identify that these characteristics make up a Something, and this context suggests that Something is a cat.
    • Labeling data is where you go in ahead of time to actually say “Picture 7125166 is a cat”. This is what used to be done with (this feels like it should be a racist term but might not be?) Mechanical Turks or even modern day captcha checks.

    Just the former is very susceptible to this kind of attack because… you are effectively labeling the training data without the trainers knowing. And it can be very rapidly defeated, once people know about it, by… just labeling that specific topic. So if your Is Hotdog? app is flagging a bunch of dicks? You can go in and flag maybe 10 dicks and 10 hot dogs and ten bratwurst and you’ll be good to go.

    All of which gets back to: The “good” LLMs? Those are the ones companies are paying for to use for very specific use cases and training data is very heavily labeled as part of that.

    For the cheap “build up word of mouth” LLMs? They don’t give a fuck and they are invariably going to be poisoned by misinformation. Just like humanity is. Hey, what can’t jet fuel melt again?


  • Television and Radio are 75% advertisement.

    They always have been

    Most of my favorite youtubers from 2010s are gone replaced with nonstop politics, drama, reaction, and streaming content farming.

    Find better youtubers? But also understand that people are going to talk about what matters to them and most people aren’t privileged enough to ignore the political hellscape (or are so privileged they think they can benefit from it…). Same with the “drama” since so much of that is intrinsically tied to how the platforms they rely on for their livelihood function.

    I feel it in my heart that short form content is damaging everyones attention spans especially my tablet ridden younger family members.

    I very much agree. But this has been going on for decades. TV led to a decline in movies (“I only have time to maybe watch five episodes of a show. Not a full movie”) and “book reading” has been on a decline for about as long.

    When I go into the search bar on YouTube I see stuff literally called “brain break” and “brain rot”.

    Okay? I mean, everyone always made jokes about how TV would rot our brains. It is nothing new

    I switch on the news and its 90% pure political propagandano matter the station.

    … the news is discussing politics? Gasp, shock, and amazement?

    Even the memes suck now, say what you want about caption memes and dancing babies and troll face, Pepe, me gusta but that shit was at least comprehensible in humor. go on 67 Wikipedia and it literally says “It has no fixed meaning.”

    “I’m Rick James, bitch”. “Whatchu talkin’ bout Willis”. “Can you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth”.

    Kids are fucking stupid. At least this crop aren’t racist? Yet…

    Even the steam store just feels different now. Its full of gooner porn bait visual novels and mundane activity sims and 1 season relevant fps shooters.

    Don’t expect stores to curate themselves for you. Find others who like what you like and let them trawl through the steam slop. It is no different than being a PC gamer who wanted to buy KOTOR back when every store would shove WoW and Halo down your throat the second you entered.

    All the stuff I enjoyed is gone,

    No, it’s not. Retention of media is at an all time high and you can very much sit down to watch or play the things you live

    and everything they make now seems so empty and pessimistic now.

    Again, curate better.

    Is this just me getting old yelling at clouds, or is something wrong?

    What’s wrong is that you think the world must revolve around you. It doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean people out there aren’t making content you would love to consume. You just have to put a bit of effort in. Because The Algorithm was never about giving everyone exactly what they want. It was about matching people up to personas and feeding content along those lines.


  • Woo. Chud souls.

    Also figures the only way they could get on the keighelys was to pay for it.


    To elaborate a bit. Even ignoring the chud anti-transphobe shit the studio actively courted in the hopes of making asmongold-senpai love them (it failed?), it is just a really bad Souls game.

    The concept of the lantern to shift dimensions is REALLY cool. In practice? it just means that you go as far as you can in one realm, shift, and go as far as you can in the next. There is no real sense of inter-connectivity or navigability because the coherence between the shifted realms is so poor. You just get a new bonfire right before the boss.

    The idea of tying item descriptions to ability scores SEEMS interesting… except that it mostly means you can’t plan ahead because you genuinely have no idea what a skill does without going to the wiki. So… it defeats the purpose entirely and just penalizes those who try to actually play the game.

    And the combat balance is also real questionable. If you pick a “meta” weapon, you shred. Otherwise you are doing constant chip damage. Which, ironically, is a problem Lords of the Fallen 1 had… on new game plus. Not new game.

    All this game had going for it was that they wanted to glaze the chuds.


  • A wok? The raised sides of the wok are not supposed to get too warm. That is actually the “secret” of the pan. You have very centralized heat in the middle and you move things to the edges to just keep them warm while you cook the new ingredients through in the center/bottom.

    How much of a gradient does indeed depend on your heat source. The propane tornado of horror in my backyard makes the center ridiculously hot but the edges are no slouch. A campfire is going to be a lesser and more controlled version of that. A smaller gas burner or an induction burner is mostly going to just heat up the center a lot.

    But that is also why you let the wok come to temperature, same as any pan. ALL heat sources have hot spots. Some bits of wood burn hotter than other. The actual flame jets from your gas stove are hotter than the ceramic bit on top. Even the flamenado has hot and less hot spots. Hence why you always agitate food. Or, in the case of going for a sear and not understanding why restaraunt chefs insist you only flip once, you rotate/move the pan itself.


  • Your mileage may vary, obviously

    But a friend has one of the bigass battery models (the expensive fancy one because he was impressing his inlaws). Cooked a full friendsgiving dinner with the only problem being his burners being tiny (which we all knew but didn’t want to say…).

    Which, conceptually, makes sense. I basically only have my induction at full power when I am rapidly bringing something to a boil so I can then add the noodles and back off. So maybe a minute every 30-60 minutes during a big cooking day? And the rest of the time it is at between 40-70% on 1-2 of the 4 burners.

    So if we assume the stoves are properly rated to power all four burners at 100% on a 240V circuit? That should actually be pretty within reason for a 120V circuit to handle with the battery pack being for bursting beyond that.

    I would still be incredibly wary of buying one since the batteries do have a limited number of cycles. But if you are spending that much for a new stove? You probably are planning to do that again within the next decade?