All Your Base is the granddaddy of Internet memes and yet I can’t help feeling that its specific subgenre was sublimated a bit later on, with this, the legend, the joyful, the unforgettable: Yatta!

Moroccanoil, the ESC sponsor, is despite what its name suggests an Israeli company. So the overall incentive structure there might be a tad skewed.

There are a few, yeah. Whether it’s enough to balance the massive weight of all the externalities, I have no idea. Currently leaning no. Could be wrong about that, who knows.

Basically: we now have the tech to make sense of language and language semantics, and use language as a universal interface. You and I are fine clicking buttons in programs, sure, but you and I are also having this discussion on an obscure federated social media platform the general public has never heard about. Interacting usefully with a computer system through language alone becomes possible in a way that it wasn’t before. I’m not quite sure how valuable this is going to be in the long term, but then, I’m also a tech nerd who is used to clicking buttons and writing command lines.

We can now process large amounts of text fast for data extraction, which is a deceptively hard problem. You can do things like importing itemized PDF bills into an accounting database with no prior knowledge of how those bills are formatted. This extends beyond text. We can now generate a textual description of arbitrary images and videos. That too is a very hard problem. It can now be done on a regular desktop computer using a small local LLM.

It’s an even harder problem when the text is computer code and the data being looked for is the cause for a specific behavior. The process of debugging an obscure issue can now be massively accelerated.

Given a reliable corpus of knowledge, that corpus can be queried more or less instantly using natural language. That’s also something we could not do before.

LLMs suck at designing software but can produce code to spec faster than a human, which means they can be used to increase throughput where a skilled human does the design and is limited only by the speed of implementing it. Given the prevalence of software in the economy, the impact of that alone will be significant.

All of these come with major drawbacks and sometimes intractable problems. Language is squishy and ambiguous. LLMs don’t THINK, they extrude statistically probable continuation tokens. AI content sucks, be it writing, images, videos, because the probable tokens there are the median of the training corpus, and median is a cognate of mediocre for a reason. I hope AI slop goes away. But I don’t think it will. The ability to generate custom porn on demand alone will likely sustain a market.

And I didn’t think we can go back to the world of before. But personally, I wish we could. Because the externalities here are, and remain, enormous.

Successful rolls are mostly not necessary to progress the game. Your guy is many things, including a bit of a loser who just hit rock bottom, but your success as a player of the game is only loosely connected to his success as a character attempting things.

If it gets too much, remember that the arthropods are in silent and meaningless awe of you.

10 kg mylar bags of rice.

Refucktoring.

That’s an incredible bake for a cheap oven, whoa. Well done!

Dang, it’s gorgeous. What kind of oven do you use?

Neat! Thanks for the explanation. :)

CapyReader (synced to FreshRSS)

Oooh, what does that look like in practice?

I mean, that’d be a major GDPR breach, be hard to extract any signal from because queries will usually be coming from a relay or from behind a NAT so you can’t tell who the query even originates from, and DNS is cached heavily too so you only get a small fraction of the queries anyway. I’m not seeing a way the calculus work in favor, basically.

OTOH the question of why they’d even run a public DNS is interesting, yeah. Running a public DNS is cheap and helps the Internet work better, and they make more money when the Internet works better since that adds up to more page views. Less charitably, though, it’s possibly just a thing from back when they were an engineering company first and foremost and did that kind of stuff, and now they can’t turn it off without breaking a lot of things and causing a lot of costly anger.

Floral, herbal, incredibly rich. There’s nothing quite like it. Definitely one of my fav liquors. Green moreso than yellow and VEP moreso than either.

I’ll admit I’m not sure what the threat model is with 8.8.8.8.

And incredible direction. It’s the first time in decades, since perhaps The Matrix, that I saw this many new direction ideas in a single flick.

I remain baffled that someone read the script and apparently said, a kung fu comedy sci fi thriller family drama with infinite timelines and jump cuts across dimensions occurring up to multiple times per second? Yeah, sounds good, this will definitely work, let’s fund this.

I don’t know how the Daniels did it, but whew, I’m glad they did.

I’m mildly offended that I can consistently be reduced to a blubbering mess by a show with literal fart-based plot points.

This is abhorrent, yet I’m intrigued.

Among other things: the global perception of the US sunk to unprecedented lows, below even China. The US’s most steadfast allies have all rejected requests for support. This is a different world now and it’s uncertain whether the US can regain its prior standing.

Yeah, that’s a 100% valid point, and thanks for taking the time to build it on top of my mostly-a-shitpost quip. :) But yes. I do agree. Let’s say that Star Trek is the destination, and Andor the necessary starting point on the long journey. For those of us who won’t live to see the destination, it’s good to be reminded what it looks like.

Unless Andor. Andor is the Star Trek of Star Wars.