southsamurai (he/him/pronoun agnostic)

  • 14 Posts
  • 4.19K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I’ll take the hitla.

    Not because of political bullshit, but because damn near any other maker is going to be a better choice. Telsa is run like shit, has tons of reliability problems, and I don’t see anything else being worse.

    That being said, if more information about the hitla brand’s reliability and quality were available, it might change the answer.

    For fucking real, at this point in my life, idgaf about anything in a car but it being there, ready to go, when I have a fucking appointment. That means minimum fucking bullshit with sourcing parts, minimum bullshit with being able to put them in myself, and hopefully that they’re also affordable parts. It could be named Hitler, and made by the mustache fascist himself and I would not fucking care as long as I could go a fucking year without something fucking up.

    My car was like that for the first fifteen years or so. Basic maintenance unless I did something stupid, and I’m spoiled on that. Even now, with it being almost twenty years on the road, having had three tree limbs fall on it, having had two cars run into it (front and back, plus one from the side, but that was barely a bump), and my dad driving it like an idiot, it’s still relatively reliable. Shit, the only reason I’m thinking of replacing it is needing something I can get a wheelchair in and out of easily. It’s a two door hatchback, and the hatch is high enough that lifting a chair into it just ain’t happening regularly.

    So yeah, gimme a Hitler if it gets anywhere close to that level of reliability.





  • Legit, it’s the way to go. Even with the memory fuckery ongoing, you can pick up decent used ThinkPads all day long for way less than anything else. They won’t be great gaming platforms, but you can do some gaming on them.

    Pick any of the most recommended “distros” you want to try, make thumb drives that can boot them, and you don’t even have to install any until after you’ve seen that they can handle your needs.

    Me? I’m a mint guy. Next to zero chance of it not working on anything I want it to, easy to use and a good package repository. PopOs is good, Ubuntu is okay. And there’s a good handful of other solid, noob friendly ones out there.









  • Damn! That may be the most unpopular opinion I’ve seen on this community!

    However, you aren’t entirely alone. I’ve known a few people that are right with you. Not many, but enough that I’ve tried some things cold but fresh, as in putting it in a fridge until it’s fully cooled.

    Gotta say, I do not share the opinion for the vast majority of foods, and I found that some things are even worse cold than warm (things I didn’t like already).

    That being said, some soups are nice cold, and some varieties of pizza are as good, though the crust becomes untenable.

    THAT being said, you rock on with yo sef. Ain’t enough room in the world to be a food snob. You like what you like, and screw what anyone else thinks (just don’t do it to them lol)





  • Define sucks a little more precisely?

    See, I would assume you mean that their musicianship is lacking live. Which is entirely possible, I’m not quibbling on that as I’m not into the band enough to have watched a ton it their live stuff to form a useful opinion at all.

    But the way you described how they suck is about one member not being up front and visible. Again, I’ve never seen them live in person, nor watched a ton.

    But I’m not sure that the lack of stage presence = suck. It sure can contribute to sucking live, but it isn’t what I’d say is the determining factor.

    It’s like when someone big name in pop does a complicated and intense dance routine that’s impossible to sing through. Is that a good live performance or a sucky one? I err on the side of it being a good show if it isn’t all they do. The inverse is also true, that if all they do is sit on a stool and absolutely nail the music, it’s a good show.

    It puts me in mind of Iron Maiden too. Even when they’re having a rough go of it musically, they can make up for it with giant Eddie and awesome lights and pyro and you still walk out happy enough even though Bruce was almost croaking (fear of the dark tour was exactly like that when I went lol). But when they’re on point and the flashy stuff is there, it’s a fucking spiritual experience.

    My impression of tool is that they err on the side of musicianship first, and anything else is secondary. Was that maybe what you experienced?




  • An llm is just a set of rules for cobbling together text. In and of itself, the technology is ethically neutral. Mind you, all ethics are both situational and relative, but what llms do really isn’t ethically any different from something like how your game handles enemy actions, except in scale.

    What makes them a nightmare is the wonton fuckery involved in how they’re trained. The open sourced ones lack the abusive and nigh maniacal plundering of human effort that the commercial ones do.

    So, when it comes to a locally hosted, open source option, there’s no fundamental difference ethically between an llm, your music player, your word processor, whatever.

    Even data centers for generative ai could conceivably be run ethically, given some massive assumptions regarding resource allocation and usage. Mainly in that the energy it takes, and the physical resources, are being allocated to those centres rather than something else. But if everyone agrees in the benefits, then using renewable resources carefully would make it no better or worse than any of the non ai data centers already in existence. I mean, most VPNs are renting either space or hardware from some company that has a data center. “The cloud” is just a giant computer owned and operated by some company somewhere, and that’s a data center.

    Yeah, generative systems are way more resource intensive, but we can’t pretend that AWS isn’t doing the same basic thing, just with a different use case. Again, there’s the caveat that that details aren’t the same, I’m talking about principles of ethics, nor the specific technology. We’ve decided that building spaces, or filling existing space, for computing is useful enough to be worth the problems it causes. The consensus hasn’t really been reached that generative ai is also worth it, but in ethical terms, the same framework applies.

    So, your concerns are absolutely valid. They are, however, partially met by sustainable implementation