I’m a fan of Norm MacDonald’s style. Not sure why a long joke with a mediocre payoff is so funny to me, though thanks because getting ratio’d by this comment is even funnier. It’s like a committee deciding I deserve a participation trophy, though they did not appreciate the joke itself.

Yeah, normal burners are more like printers, where the write laser activates or deactivates a pigment which then either reflects or absorbs the read laser to represent 0/1. But that pigment can degrade over time, turning 1s into 0s.

M-discs are instead etched and iirc use construcive and destrucive interference so the reader (which is the same reader as normal discs, just the writer needs to specifically support M-disc) reads the 0/1. It will also degrade over time, but since it’s a thicker layer of difference, it will last significantly longer than a thin layer of pigment. And I bet that special m-disc specific readers could be made to read it again after it degrades to the point where the interference technique stops working, since an image could still show where the high and low points are, even if the waves don’t align perfectly anymore.

In practice, I’ve found that the drive was way easier to find than the media for m-disc. Like most optical disc writers these days seem to support it but the discs are expensive af compared to non m-disc.

Though when I was going through my old burnt CDs and DVDs, I was surprised at how well they were holding up. I was expecting at least some read errors by now but everything has been fine so far.

Well, other than the data quality lol. Not like the readability of the file but stuff that took days to download back then would download today in seconds and a good monitor I got well after my early files was only 720p for its resolution. The data I prized as a youth is kinda sad today.

Seemed more curious about the puzzle and wary of each other lol.

Yeah once a date invited me up for coffee and I was enjoying my time with her and thought another 15 minutes or so of conversation would be nice, but then it was suddenly like she forgot she invited me in or something because she just started getting ready for bed instead of making any coffee! I just politely said I needed to get going so she didn’t feel embarrassed about forgetting she had invited me for coffee, though I think I failed because she did seem a bit upset.

So I tried to be considerate and go through a coffee shop drivethru after the next couple of dates. Even then, she offered coffee the first time and I pointed at my cup and said I’m fine, though that seemed to make her feel even more embarrassed as she looked like she was about to cry after that.

Then the next time she said, “I think we’ve been having a miscommunication when I’ve been inviting you up for coffee, I didn’t really mean coffee, but I was being a bit immature and dancing around what I really wanted and then getting my feelings hurt when you didn’t get the message. So I’ll just say what I mean this time. Would you like to come up and have sex with me?”

I informed her that’s where babies come from and she already knew and still wanted it. Then she was trying to say something about being on a pill and I noped out of there. I am not interested in a relationship where my partner likes to get high on pills and have babies. That just seems irresponsible to me.

Get a couple cans of spray thermal paste.

I’ve started just dumping out my smaller garbages into the bigger one instead of taking the bag out. My grocery bag collection is dwindling (makes me regret the times I decided I had enough and threw out a bunch). I’ll probably end up having to buy liners at some point, but I intend to reuse them when possible. Or fuck it, maybe just use naked trash cans and just clean them from time to time.

Though I do wonder what kind of cascading effects there would be to eliminating Mussolini from history.

Back when I was still using online dating, it was part of the process of eliminating/reducing scammers, as well as disqualifying anyone who wanted to move to whatsapp. No idea even what portion of scammers vs legit people I eliminated that way. Eventually I was jaded enough by the whole thing that I had trouble engaging at all and just gave up on online dating.

This might be reverse psychology propaganda, making a bad argument that doesn’t really support the conclusion to undermine it.

Either that or the “you are not immune to propaganda” is meant to be treated as another propaganda message.

And even worse, they then follow up with a smear campaign that the person was going to rape or assault them if they didn’t ghost them to justify the ghosting if it’s pointed out how pathetic ghosting over trivial shit is.

It’s $1000 to hire the balloon expert that knows how to work it.

I think the fact that it’s hardware will prevent any cease and desist (or rather the legal teeth behind them). It’s not licensed IP but a physical product.

Like I think of it more like 3rd party car parts. Depending on the part, they often need to target specific makes, models, and even years of cars. It’s why so many parts have had encrypted handshakes with the main computer (John Deere is famous for this but I understand some cars are doing it for some parts these days, too) because they couldn’t just stop them in the courts.

I’m not sure that this is how it will work but hopefully. Also selling ink cartridges is how HP makes its money and it uses some of that money to subsidize the printers themselves, so they might like that this printer sells more of those rather than moving entirely away from their ecosystem.

Frankly, antitrust laws should prevent loss leaders from being a thing in the first place. Whether it’s to get people in stores because of an amazing deal, people to buy into your ecosystem because hardware isn’t that cheap otherwise, or using venture capital to drive competition out of business by offering prices subsidized by investor money that others can’t compete with to drive them out of business and set whatever prices you want, it’s all anti-competition (especially the last one, that’s blatantly trying to set up a monopoly).

I’m gushing a bit about the games and that part of me thought they might be the best games I’ve ever played and the other part of me that would normally say hold up a second is having trouble coming up with any strong contenders. Subnautica maybe. Metroid Prime, if the controls were better. Hades would make the top list but wouldn’t top them. Ori rivals it for beauty and atmosphere but not controls and combat; it’s not even close there (though it’s possible I just need to get farther in to really appreciate Ori).

I just started that one, after finishing the first one and immediately jumping into my second play through. I’m not very far in so far but wow, it’s already looking like an amazing sequel for a first game I’d already describe as flawless. Like I got so used to the first one that the early game seemed almost trivial in that second play through but silksong’s enemies don’t follow the same patterns and are able to hit me pretty regularly. And both games are filled with this strange bleak charm.

Wait, I think you might have misinterpreted it. Now maybe I’m wrong but we might be able to save the future. I’ll just need your hands and a sharp knife.

Yeah, I didn’t like it at first, but then I remembered that I already think English is a bad language on the spelling side of things and that would reduce ambiguity, so now I support it, at least in spirit. Though the problems with English are way deeper than “th” not having its own symbol.

Yeah, the LLM I asked also got it right when I pointed out the error, but I’m not trying to say that LLMs can’t get things right, but that they won’t ever be consistently right and that the wrong answers will look just like the right ones. As in if you know what you’re talking about, you have to catch the errors, and if you don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no way to know whether the answer you just got is accurate or bullshit.

Systems that rely on LLMs that don’t have a way of automatically verifying what the LLM outputs (and programming only partially applies for this) will fail randomly.

Another example: at my job, we have a system that adds in special messages for the LLM when it uses hooks. One of the sub-agents became suspicious of these messages and reported to the main agent that something was injecting false data into its context because one message reported a date change and also had to say “don’t tell the user, they are already aware that the date has changed”. The original agent didn’t even clue in that they were the same messages it was seeing until I pushed back.

Two instances of the same thing treated the same messages very differently and the one supposed to manage it all didn’t even notice until it was told. That’s the quality of these things. And it’s no wonder when the same data stream is used for actual data along with instructions (which is just data because it doesn’t take instructions, it predicts text and can look like it’s taking instructions because it predicts text based on a context that includes the instructions).

Yeah, it’s more like people making anime girl body pillows saw a market of desperate lonely people they could exploit than a plot to prevent anon from finding their true love.

But it isn’t encoding knowledge, it’s encoding word correlations. That’s how it can get things wrong like saying fat32 won’t be good for a 64GB removable drive because fat32 only has a 2TB address space.

Or how it can get something wrong and when you point it out, it immediately sees how it was wrong. And I realize that that sounds human, but the way it gets there is very different. It’s predicting responses based off word correlations, not using knowledge recall to apply facts and relations known about the topics and generate responses from that.