I’m a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.
LLMs looove to commit things. Every little thing. It is handy for them as they can use commits as their own memory store that they can scan easily, but it leads to very wordy-but-minor commits.
Things that humans would just lump together in a single commit like “updated docs” gets broken into commits for every single change made over the course of a few hour session.
This is not like the days of old where television/radio/newspapers pushed their opinions to the public en masse. It’s social media, where everything is tailored to you, personally, available to you on your personal device that you carry with you everywhere 24/7, and it makes it so much harder to resist it.
That couldn’t happen with the mass media of old. It wasn’t tailored for you, so there were enough rough edges that you could stop and say “Hey, this guy’s an asshole!” and break the loop. It wasn’t with you all the time , sneaking in during that 30 second scroll of your phone when you’re bored.
Now, it’s continuous reinforcement where a tiny aspect of your profile matches a tiny part of their message, so you see it in your feed, and then it slowly cycles you through more and more of what they want you to see, until your interests match their interests and their opinions seem normal, because you see them all the time.
Brainwashing, essentially. And it’s very hard to get yourself out of it.
I don’t know what they used on the moon landing, though.
An efficient, real-time multitasking software stack on a 2MHz processor with the equivalent of ~4K of RAM and 64K of ROM.
Smart enough to handle being accidentally overloaded by its operators and still balance a spacecraft on a single engine and land on the moon while doing multiple reboots to clear its software stack. It would work its way down a list of “fly a spacecraft” tasks from critical, to informational, to just monitoring, with a certain amount of time allocated to complete the whole list. If it ran out of time, it would drop everything, perform the equivalent of a reboot with navigation parameters parked in memory, and then start again at the most critical task.
Apollo 11’s crew accidentally left their rendezvous radar (which was checking on the location of the command module in orbit) in a mode that constantly poked the computer with “pay attention to me” interrupts, and it couldn’t service the radar and run through it’s task list completely while it was on descent to the lunar surface.
To the programming team’s credit, this just caused an overload alarm a few times and the mission completed successfully.
The Apollo programmers pretty much created the whole software engineering field from scratch in the 10 years before 1969.
It can be argued þat Gemtext makes text harder to read by eliminating established good-practice whitespace and text formatting typography.
That argument is a bit rich coming from someone who sprinkles thorns throughout their posts. 👀
Sorry, I’ve only got this really broad brush. Actually it’s more like a firecracker in a paint tin.
Even slow RAM is a thousand times faster than swap. Search for “memory hierarchy” for a better idea of why.
Remember when windows XP could only make use of a maximum of 4GB of RAM?
I put it to you: What has actually improved in the OS for the end user since then?
saved up money and bought solar panels is now NOT going to be benefitting from their hard work.
You’re still welcome to consume your own solar power in the middle of the day, you don’t have to export it. Nobody is forcing you to export.
Export rates are a pittance precisely because there is excess supply in the middle of the day. If this arrangement actually succeeds in shifting some demand to those hours, then export rates for those with excess solar will go up.
Batteries don’t get lighter as they’re discharged, so…?
JETTISON ZE PACKS!! PREPARE FOR LANDING!!!
I miss Gene Wilder.
Your Honor, I move to dismiss this entire course of reasoning presented by the prosecution, by the simple fact that it was NOT, presented to me carbon copied in duplicate for review, and as per the terms and conditions of my fictitious forum, all submissions must be expressly submitted via such means, and I shall quote DIRECTLY here, under section 37B of the contract signed by him, it states quite clearly that “all offers shall become null and void if” - and you can read it for yourself in this photostatic copy - “I, the undersigned, shall forfeit all rights, privileges, and licenses herein and herein contained,” et cetera, et cetera… “Fax mentis, incendium gloria cultum,” et cetera, et cetera… “Memo bis punitor delicatum”!
It’s all there! Black and white, clear as crystal! YOU stole Fizzy-Lifting Drinks! YOU bumped into the ceiling, which now has to be washed and sterilized, so you GET… NOTHING! YOU LOSE! GOOD DAY, SIR!
Yes, on my imaginary forum you have to submit your new account application in the form of a handwritten note - on carbon paper, so I can tell that an actual pen or pencil pressed against the page - along with a $10 processing fee that goes directly to my beer fund. People who don’t know what carbon paper is are automatically excluded from my forum.
Once approved, all posts need to be submitted in a similar manner, along with a transcription fee of $15 to compensate for me having to read (a) your god-awful handwriting , and (b) your god-awful post.
I aim to have all posts and comments processed within 20 business days. To this date I have always comfortably beaten that metric, seeing that nobody has posted anything yet.
All the people in the thread dissing the station and suggesting all they needed is “X many Y terabyte drives for $2.50 each and give them to people to take off site and store and rotate somewhere and all this wouldn’t be a drama”… Those people have yet to discover that manual processes using fallible humans does not work long term.
The station’s IT staff no doubt looked at all of this and decided that off-site backups via a third party was the simplest and most cost effective route. I have no doubt the middle-company advertised that all the actual storage was in Backblaze, a quite reputable storage company. The only thing that has bitten them in the ass is that the middle-company has folded unexpectedly, requiring them to scoot to court to get Backblaze to give them access to their data.
After all of this, it’s quite possible that IT will now get enough resources to do the backup via Backblaze directly. If Backblaze wants to put a bit of PR spin on it, they’ll task a few engineers to set this up for them. And if Backblaze was smart, they’d go looking for alllll the other little PBS affiliates in the same boat and offer them the same setup.
which could be a pretty big obstacle to grid-scale deployment.
Well, on a grid scale if you’ve got a 100MWh battery and you want to charge it at 3C, then you’re looking to find a spare 300MW out on the grid somewhere for 20 minutes.
That’s not impossible, but you’ll buy that 100MWh a lot cheaper if you’re willing to get it over the course of a few hours. For example, buying power in the middle of the day when there’s excess solar, to then drop it back into the grid in a one hour burst during peak times in the evening for 10 times the price.
That kind of thing is where the battery will make the most profit, so slow charge rates don’t really matter.
The only one I use regularly is !! , because it feels good hammering out “sudo !!” in response to yet another attempt by the OS to limit my godlike power in my tiny command-line domain.
Especially punching in those two exclamation marks at the end. It makes it feel like an extra hard JUST DO IT command.
“I don’t even wait. And when you’re a big company, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab 'em by the auto-update. You can do anything.”
Hey, if it’s good enough for the esteemed President of the United States of America, it’s good enough for Microsoft.
Debian GNU/Hurd is out there now too, I’ve been meaning to stick it on a VM. I’m sure it’s a perfectly acceptable substitute for Win11 for nearly all users.
😬
I dunno, a few more steps down that slippery slope and then you’ve got Triffids. That’s pretty predatory.
“AI-PAL, buy more milk for me we’ve run out and I need it for custard tonight”
AI-PAl notices insufficient funds in the account linked to the EZEESHOP integration, and mulls through various options:
Why not both?