MudMan

We do “my dick sweats”, for the same thing, which I now realize sounds super gross.

I rip enough physical media to tell you that post-compression 14GB is not far from average for a 4K movie. I guarantee that Netflix isn’t storing those any bigger than that. Hard drives don’t grow on trees, you know?

It’s still good to know where the top end of optical storage is, even at an academic level, even if these end up not being widely used or being used for specific applications at smaller capacities. We’ll see where or if they resurface next, but I’m pretty sure we’re not gonna get femtosecond lasers built into our laptops anytime soon.

Honestly? The real feeling I get from this is being scared for the future. I do know that there are powerful forces seeing a business opportunity in that status quo that can be exported. And you can see the impetus towards eroding the safety nets here following marching orders from the far right, anarchocapitalist mothership all throughout the world. In some of the countries I’ve lived in there is already a push towards this model, just moderated by the existence of some sort of universal health care. Sure, even the bare minimum of public service care takes a TON of the edge off. Those ER bills are what some of my friends in those places paid for, say, having major surgery or good care while having a baby… but it’s a slippery slope.

Hi, yes, I’m here. The user. Of both, in fact.

Both Bluesky and Mastodon have their quirks and their different cultures. The feature sets of their protocols may also be different, but they sure aren’t relevant to the experience at all, because federation is not a user-facing feature for the vast majority of the social media experience.

Stop cheerleading for social networks. Social networks are not your friends, including Mastodon or the rest of the “fediverse”.

I don’t really know what this conversation was meant to be about at this point, and after re-reading the thread in order a few times I think you don’t either.

I was ready to be mad at you for making me google it, but it turned out to be the same iusnaturalist bullcrap that was already centuries out of date when I studied that stuff and had memory holed, so… meh.

Fond memories of my college years, though. Feeling young and smart and so, so intellectually superior by pointing and laughing at those guys because back then we all thought things were mostly going to get better looking forward. Good times.

Right, but that’s my point, compute is compute is compute. There are tensor acceleration cores in commercially available hardware dating back five years. They capped things above a specific performance threshold, is my understanding, but that just means you need more of the less powerful hardware, so all you’ve done is make things more expensive/less energy-efficient, but not block any specific application. Not in cheap, portable chips, not in huge industrial data center processors.

So not particularly useful to stop cyberwarfare, not particularly useful to stop military applications. The only use I see is making commercial applications less competitive. Specifically on the training side of things.

None of that makes any sense. “Western chips” all come from Taiwan in the first place. “Western designed chips” are also in laptops and mobile phones, including tons of Chinese devices, and that’s assuming you mean to include South Korea as “Western”, which is a bit of a stretch. Those are fundamentally interchangeable with military hardware. Nobody is putting 4090s and A100s in ICBMs.

Make it make sense. What specific hardware is this stopping from getting to China and for what application?

I am very confused about this ongoing thing regarding “stifling China’s access to AI models”. Does the US government think GPUs are magic? All you need to make a ML model is some tensor math and a web crawler, maybe some human processing on the later bits. You’re not gonna stop China from making them. You’re not gonna stop college kids with gaming rigs making them.

I’m guessing the endgame here is to make it slightly more expensive to do this in China to get American companies to have slightly better versions in the market and prevent a TikTok situation, rather than any legitimate strategic goal. Right? I mean, besides commercial protectionism I don’t see how this type of language makes sense.

You haven’t changed my mind, but now I’m mildly concerned about you and I’m here if you need help.

If the risk is that I’ll have an upset stomach for two days like a toddler coming down from a sugar rush and my knees will also hurt for some reason, then yes, the WHO is right.

I mean… alcohol? You can already buy it easily prepared in all sorts of delicious ways.

Am I not in the spirit of the thing?

Quit drinking if you haven’t. The cost/benefit analysis on that one probably broke a few years ago and you just hadn’t noticed.

Otherwise, meh, do your own thing.

“Unknown” goes from 3 to 6% in the same time period, so I think technically it’s the year of the Unknown desktop. Sounds catchier, if you ask me.

I keep a FB account I no longer use because in some professional circles in some countries the expectation is you’ll get contact details by sharing that.

And I keep a Whatsapp account because where I am that’s the default messaging service for everything and everybody on all phone platforms. Businesses and institutions will reach out to you over it. School will send homework to kids over it, doctors will set appointments over it, nobody will question whether you have it, just look up your phone number on it.

Meta won the social media wars ages ago, it’s just that some, especially in the US, didn’t notice.

Heh, drunken rebuttals are so much better when they’re acknowledged as one. It really takes the edge off.

Alright, for one, I am not in the US or a US citizen, so a lot of my shock comes from there. For what it’s worth, I have not engaged with these processes in the US at all and here not professionally, but I did learn them because of life reasons. And like I said last time, it is messed up here too, in that some of the reasonable terms and limits to restricting someone’s autonomy and free movement do get suspended in a very weird grey area when precautionary measures, including for medical reasons, are established. Full judicial review can take years here, too, and cautionary measures can stand in place for that whole period. Just to ground the conversation a little.

However, over here before you get detained indefinitely for any reason, and yes, being suicidal counts, you still need that to get cleared by a judge. You can’t just hold a person for two weeks on the mere suspicion that they may harm themselves and not have a doctor or a court make a decision on whether there is reason for that. So already I am way out of my comfort zone in terms of constitutional guarantees at play here. Once you find somebody dead while that process is happening we’re in “maybe we need this to change right away” territory. When that happens a dozen times you mostly just set it all on fire and start over.

Now, on the specifics, I do have some questions for you, if you’re drunk enough to still pay attention to this thread.

One is that I’m a bit confused about the dfiference between being held pending evaluation and having a checklist of evaluatory criteria. Because it seems to me that if the actual evaluation is taking so long to happen that people are dying in the process then the checklist is the de facto evaluation. What’s the difference between that and letting the cops make the call? Which yeah, terrible idea, but… you know, if you just get there anyway through a loophole that seems like a problem.

For the record on the next thing, when I mean “whoever runs the institution” I mean whoever owns it, not the staff. I have no idea if this is all handled in public institutions (which is what I would expect here) or in private facilities (which is what I’d expect in the US, but maybe that’s my socialdemocracy bias). While we’re on this, I do take issue with the “don’t sue because the system is already underfunded” point. Those are two separate concerns, and if the impact is on the underfunded medical system then that’s a third problem. Asking victims (and this guy is dead, so… yeah, that’s the right word) to not seek compensation because the negligence is the result of more negligence in underfunding the system is not it. Of course these are all entirely hypothetical lawsuits, so who cares, but still.

Honestly, if you ask me what I’d do in that scenario… well, I’d get involved in the politics of it, which is what I’ve done in life when I bumped with that sort of stuff. I mean, the way I’m hearing it the main problem is funding and staffing. The way I see it, this is the still literally richest country on Earth. So yeah, the reaction must start with voting for anybody who will fix that by any amount and continue along a line that ends with locked down airports and food courts, like the French are doing today. Or at least with thousands of marches, like the Germans did a few weeks ago. I get it, half the US thinks that public services are evil (somehow), but holy shit, man, the camel’s back has to snap at some point.

Right?

Anyway, as a PS, you weren’t that hostile. For online forum rants that was maybe a 3/10. I’ve had way worse on accout of far less. If that makes you feel better, you’re a mellow drunken poster.

No, they should buy no car and instead buy a public transportation pass.

And a bycicle.

Again, I refer you to my previous post.

I refer you to my previous post, where I do the going on.

I’d tell someone with a SmartCar to get a monthly bus pass instead. And a bike, maybe. And a sense of self-awareness.

But also, yeah, failing that get a bigger car with a backseat. For sure. Maybe the one Smart make, if that’s what they’re into.

What I’m fascinated about is the “these are not relevant based on my prior ownership” bit, because… I’m not talking to you. I never talked to you. You popped up in here saying that the problem with pickups is they weren’t making small ones, as if that was a systemic issue and then somehow this became about a specific car that you want to have that they don’t make. Like you personally. As if my tangentially related point was an affront to this purchase that you want to make specifically.

I’m not sure that’s a specifically American thing, because people in social media do tend to think everything is explicitly about them in particular, but man, when combined with the pickup thing it does sound… you know, arch.

Cool.

So why are we having this conversation, then? Because that’s great for you, but as a “optimal use case” as opposed to the “maximal use case”, I’d say “seats” tends to rank pretty high the list of car features. For… you know, most people.