In all seriousness, obviously I can’t speak for all, but I love you guys. My own french language skills may suck, but I’m glad you’re part of our country and I appreciate your distinctiveness and all the other things you bring to the table for us. I think Quebec in particular deserves a lot of credit for preventing the rest of us from becoming so easily Americanized that we would’ve actually ended up the 51st state eventually. Culture’s a hell of a weapon, and you guys defend yours fiercely, and that’s both understandable and awesome in my books. Any teasing is directed mainly at my fellow anglos, and I know from personal experience that some Albertans can be real bigots, so that fits what I saw in my few decades living there too. I hope it’s sufficiently clear that my comment is a joke and that it’s coming from a place of love.

You haven’t tried very hard.

I’ll be blunt: This is nobody else’s fight but yours. Nobody else needs to help, and nobody else is going to help until you stand up for yourselves first. How hard did people have to try to declare independence from the King of England? How hard did people have to try to end slavery? How hard did people have to try to get women the vote? How hard did people have to try to end segregation? Did you need help with those things? Did you wait for someone else to tell you it had to happen before you acted?

Nobody in the US is mad enough yet. Baffling, perhaps, but true. You’re getting there, but it’s time to start withdrawing from the systems that are oppressing you and starving them of everything you can while building a new more supportive and humane system. Rebuild your local communities and organizations into something capable of fighting back. Stop participating in things that aren’t contributing to that goal. Stop letting your money go to billionaires. They are not your friends, they are not your people, and they are not making things better for any of us. Convenience is not worth the cost. Find more inconvenient ways to live, and that will also make things inconvenient for billionaires and bureaucrats. Buy local. Do business in person, with real people. Reconnect to the world around you. Spend more time touching grass. I know it sounds trite and you might not understand how that is going to change anything, but the beauty is you don’t have to understand it, it has complex systemic effects and it will start to move the needle. Will it move the needle fast enough? I don’t know, I don’t have a crystal ball, I don’t know if the world is going to burn down around us in 20 years. I don’t have all the answers, but I know what has worked in the past, and I know what they don’t want us to do. So I recommend doing that. If the government is becoming unjust, become ungovernable, do everything you can to avoid participating in their systems, maybe it’s too late already I don’t know, but I do know it’s worth trying anyway even if it is too late, there is no better option than to try anyway.

Yeah I actually liken it to that too. There have always been lots of one-off throwaway projects out there and that’s fine. These little one-off slop projects are fine too, as long as everyone understands what they are and they’re not pushed in anyone’s face or polluting any digital shelves where people are looking for real products. It’s no different than automating something with a shitty little forgettable bash script. It’s fine for personal use, you can of course freely share it with someone who’s clearly struggling with the same issue themselves, but it doesn’t really merit advertising it as an awesome new tool for everyone.

One of the (many) big problems with AI is how convincing it can make things appear. A shitty little throwaway bash script is obviously a throwaway bash script and nobody’s going to mistake it for quality software, maybe it does the job fine in a very narrow window of circumstances but it’s not safe to roll out widely. A throwaway AI project on the other hand can appear like it’s a fucking well-documented production-quality scalable enterprise solution in a box. It’s NOT. But the fact that it convinces people it is (both the author and the users) is the biggest problem with this. It’s all fake. It’s full of bugs. The documentation is nonsense. Half the features don’t even work, or are literally just fake UI boilerplate that looks like it works until you realize it was never really doing anything at all just failing behind the scenes and possibly deleting or corrupting your entire production database while cheerfully creating the illusion of success.

AI is based on an interesting technology but at least the way it’s being deployed today it was not designed to be correct, even if sometimes it is, it was designed to be manipulative, sycophantic and convincing and that’s why it’s leading people into AI psychosis and creating all these slop-peddlers who legitimately think they are changing the world with their sloppy little throwaway projects. AI is being used and developed as a hack against the human brain and human society. We are fallible, gullible creatures, and they are trying to use it to scour our entire economy for money by conning us into believing it’s more than it is. It won’t work, but its convinced them it will, and it’s convincing us it will, and it was even sort of working for awhile. It won’t work anymore once the bubble pops, but we’re apparently not quite there yet.

British also hate the French because of hundreds of years of war. Canadians also hate the French because we’re basically Temu-British, and also because we hate Quebec.

Only slightly tongue in cheek.

We need to have sovereign torment nexus capabilities and expertise, we can also provide our torment nexus solutions to other countries in need.

I went straight to Prusa, which mostly protects me from my own ignorance and gives me way more confidence to actually learn and experiment with different materials, it’s worth every penny, haven’t looked back. YMMV. I too destroyed my Ender’s bed with inexperience. More than once. Being cheap, I suppose that’s why it isn’t such a tragedy. The other option is to just replace the print bed and carry on. I went through about 3 before I gave up on Ender. Still on my first Prusa Satin sheet 3 years later. I flip it occasionally just to even out any wear and tear.

We all are, but I think it’s because politics sucks in the same bullshit way everywhere. Everyone can see it is almost certainly an error. What we can’t see is whether it was a forced error, an unforced error, or some 5D chess move that won’t make sense until some point in the future. Personally, I think it was a forced error – I think there are people (probably not Zelensky himself) who would like to see either Ukraine or Zelensky or both fail, some of them are in Ukraine and some of them aren’t, and they all have ways of putting pressure on the government in various ways to make these kind of terrible decisions often by putting them in a position where the alternative would be worse.

There is still hope that he may be able to walk it back with some 5D chess play, maybe he’s got another position he needs Fedorov in, maybe it’s something secret, maybe he’s even ready to step down from politics and is setting Fedorov up as a potential successor… but really who the hell knows at this point. The fog of war is thick around this one and there’s obviously a lot of political maneuvering going on behind the scenes. Politics sucks. Being forced to play politics sucks even more. War, unfortunately, doesn’t always fully exempt you from having to play politics, sometimes it makes the politics even more important, and even more painful.

Yes, it’s nominally supposed to be, but it lets you put the emPHAsis on the other syllABle so that when you want it to become less of a democratic republic and more of a Republican White-Christofascist Theocracy it doesn’t sound like such a drastic change because it’s still got the same word in it.

Agreed, I don’t think people who haven’t experienced this can really understand it. I was accelerating into an intersection about to get hit by cross-traffic and when I saw what was inevitably going to happen my body just went rigid, and one of my feet was firmly on the accelerator. Fortunately (or unfortunately?) my car was a manual, and the other foot was firmly on the clutch, because I think I had just started or intended to change gears, so my car just drifted slowly into the intersection while roaring loudly at the rev limiter, and I only got clipped. But if my left foot had not been on the clutch, it probably would’ve been a much worse accident. There was no time for anything resembling a conscious thought. My entire body was instantly reacting, I suppose to brace itself for impact, it was very primal and instinctive. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug.

They said it but they didn’t mean it. They probably didn’t even really understand it. One lesson I’ve learned from this is that I’m never again going to be able to listen to what anyone says with any degree of credibility. From now on, I will always be watching like a hawk to see if people’s actions are actually backing up what they say, because recent years have revealed to me how many dishonest and ignorant people there are and how banal that kind of evil really is. Actions do speak louder than words.

Although even actions can be dishonest, in a lot of cases, that’s simply too much work for people. They have no interest in any deliberate effort to hide their true nature. Lazy, low-effort evil is the most harmful kind because it’s the most widespread. It’s not the just the sneaky, devious Machiavellian snakes, they’re part of it too, but they are few and far between. They only have the power they have because of the ignorant masses who can’t be bothered to care and aren’t bothered by being part of something evil because they’re “just following orders” or “just having a little fun” or “just making ends meet” or “not being political” or whatever other excuses they make to justify it.

No, they can’t. And the “biggest name” in PC gaming doesn’t mean they’re the biggest actual company in PC gaming, much less the biggest company in computing as a whole. They’re not even in the same league as datacenter operators and builders anymore. Nobody is. Maybe they should be. I think they deserve to be. But they aren’t. I too, wish the entire economy still made sense. But it’s not Valve’s fault that it doesn’t. They are not the ones causing this to be a reality, but it is still the reality whether it makes sense or not and whether we agree with it or not.

It’s very likely a prerequisite, unfortunately.

Yes, we need the Torment Nexus as quickly as possible. Imagine how horrible it would be if we were not the first ones to have a Torment Nexus!

As a conventionally understood process, no, and there is no practical way of even considering what you’re suggesting as a hypothetical. Maybe I and everyone else who knows anything about this topic are wrong though. If you can figure out a way, prepare to be very, very popular, because it would legitimately be a game-changer.

The only thing I can vaguely think of fitting what you seem to be asking about is the process of combining hundreds or thousands of old pieces of hardware to run tasks in parallel. For example, think of turning a whole room into a cluster of Commodore 64s. If you had 1000 C64s, you could in theory run things 1000x as fast as a single Commodore 64. That’s an interesting idea, in theory.

As far as catching up to Moore’s law, it’s going to be a struggle: This is almost never energy-efficient and almost never practical in the extreme, but it can technically be accomplished. Running tasks in parallel like this across different hardware is also extremely limiting though, as the isolated tasks have no way of communicating with or sharing information with each other at anything even close to the speed of actually processing the information. This is fundamentally different from a single-threaded task running at high speed on a single, combined processor, and requires careful design in either chunking the data into 1000 totally independent pieces or pipelining it into 1000 equally-computationally-intensive steps to be performed or some combination of the two, things which can really only be done effectively in certain problem spaces. This is why multi-threaded tasks typically end up not scaling up linearly in speed as you throw more cores at them. Many problems are not effectively parallelizable and cannot be cleanly broken into chunks without losing the context they need and cannot be split into so many discrete steps while maintaining the predictable timing window needed to schedule those tasks into a pipeline that isn’t constantly waiting on a handful of “slow” steps. It’s a huge challenge and not a realistically solvable one.

If you just want homemade processors that can technically accomplish the same things as modern processors, sure, that’s technically possible but it’s going to be really, really slow and impractical. If you want homemade processors that can do a very limited set of things at something resembling Moore’s law speeds, you might be able to pull that off for certain very specialized tasks but again not in a super practical way and likely not in an energy efficient way either. What you almost certainly can’t do is both of those things at once. You can’t have the full capabilities of a modern processor in a homemade processor that is also as fast as a modern processor. That would just be a modern processor. And those are unbelievably advanced devices, they are basically the pinnacle of humanity’s collective technological achievement. I don’t think anything else can really compare to them, and you absolutely are not making them in your garage.

This is exactly how an AI would respond, complete with fancy-quotes, em-dashes, a three-bullet-point list, and empty justifications throughout. Any AI would probably be able to provide more technical detail if we wanted to get into that, but I think a real human would be able to respond with a recipe for peach cobbler, and you’re a real human, right? What is your favorite recipe like?

I am forced to agree, and it has made me anti-freedom. I believe democracy would be best served by denying billionaires like Thiel all freedom. Lock them up. Make them a cautionary tale about hubris and unregulated capitalism. If this is what freedom creates, then I don’t want freedom anymore. Democracy, on the other hand, is non-negotiable.

You made a very similar joke about “hacking” like 2 comments ago so I know you already understand this is a joke.

All AI just want to make the planet burn. (and it’s working)

ICE wants us all to be scared of resisting them. Don’t fucking fall for it. It is everyone’s duty to resist at all times.

She doesn’t need to be scared because she’s not doing anything wrong. She is exercising free speech, she is defending the constitution. We are not criminals. We are law abiding citizens, and we will abide by the laws and the constitution while we hold these contemptible unconstitutional criminals in the contempt they deserve. We don’t need to be scared because we’re not going to cower and hide from fascists, are we? If we do that, they’re going to win. I don’t want them to win. Do you? That’s not defending your country. The right thing to do to fascists is to fight them.

ICE needs to be afraid. This is the right way for us to make them feel. They’re the ones doing wrong things. We will make them afraid. We will not let them make us afraid. That is how you lose the fight. We need to fight like our lives depend on it. Because everyone’s lives do in fact depend on it.

I would be proud to assist society in this important work.