dr_analog
razorboy
No bio...
User ID: 583
dr_analog
razorboy
14hr ago
Not the person you replied to, but not that obnoxious, since I don't know which ones you're referring to?
dr_analog
razorboy
14hr ago
On behalf of oil interests? Oh, you mean the part where Western nations invested in Iran to develop its oil infrastructure under a rev sharing deal that was considered mutually beneficial at the time only to then be seized by future socialists?
dr_analog
razorboy
1d ago
Can they do that? Doesn't Congress need to sign off on that? Reagan's "amnesty" was a law passed by Congress.
dr_analog
razorboy
2d ago
Yes it does something. Namely, makes you a lot more interested in women from a dopamine/seeking perspective. Whether that's a benefit is up to you. It can be intoxicating though.
Aren't you describing usual power law stuff though (w.r.t. art, the top <1% is the best and the rest is generally ignorable)? Is the ratio that different from human generated content?
Also, it actually lifts up people who do not have money and allows them to make art like the people who have money do. Look at this VEO 3 shitpost. Genuinely funny, and the production value would be insane if it was real, for a joke that probably wouldn't be worth it. But now, someone with some Gemini credits can make it. This increases the amount of people making things.
Yes but artists are a holy protected class and anything that takes their jobs away is evil. Nevermind that it has been known for centuries that art is an extremely bad way to make a living and that cameras already caused a crisis in the art world that every sophomore art student has a postmodern fit about.
My view is opposing AI art is anti-humanist. For every artist that can produce something anyone wants to look at, you have perhaps 1000x as many people who see something in their mind's eye but they don't have the skill to render it. That thing, maybe even that stunningly beautiful thing, never sees the light of day and dies with them.
Rest assured, most people have nothing beautiful to render or interesting to write in the first place, so it's not like we have some insane well of cognitive surplus waiting to be tapped into. Even with amazing AI tools most people will never put out anything interesting. But the true intellects and creatives only have time to specialize in so few things right now and I look forward to any leverage AI tools give them.
EDIT: lol, I posted that VEO3 video to my Facebook timeline saying something about how even kings could not commission shitposts like this and two different libtards unfriended me over it because of how wrong-side-of-history it is to support this technology that puts artists out of business. Of all of the gray tribe stuff I post that gets me a bunch of unhinged leftist reactions, praising AI stuff was The Line.
Biking is a fairly pleasant way to travel if you have bike paths and your town has moderate year-round weather. I pretty much always take my kids that way in a cargo bike instead of driving. It typically only turns a 10 minute car ride around town into a 20 minute bike ride.
I definitely make sure the ride is mostly bike paths through parks though, since I'm too paranoid about cars.
My cargo bike has an e-assist, so it's not exhausting. I don't even think it gets my heart rate up (I get my exercise by running 6 days a week, instead). It's also capped at a fairly low speed, since crashing at 30mph with your kids is bad.
Also it's actually more expensive per mile than driving my car, so it's not even really an efficiency thing. It's just awesome to ride around on a sunny day with my kids. We can stop by the farmers market and then have a picnic in the park. And then hit the splash pad in another park. It's great.
I live in an unusually bike friendly US town and I'm having a hard time imagining moving because I don't want to give this up.
I'm not saying we need to radically redesign society to accommodate this, but it's also not the worst thing.
dr_analog
razorboy
3d ago
I used to do this with reddit.com but always ended up removing the entry after a few days.
dr_analog
razorboy
3d ago
TRON bike lighting update
Stuff finally came in from Ali and I got to work doing more proof-of-concept.
Firstly I found the batch of clear heatshrink tubing from Ali was too big. It never shrank down enough to provide the weather protection I needed for the WS2815 solder points, so I gave up and ordered something slightly smaller off of Amazon and then a bigger batch of it off of Ali to arrive at some future date. The smaller clear shrinkwrap tubing arrived 2 days later and worked well.
Of course I had to buy a new heat gun too since the one I was using died. And by that I mean melted itself. You have one job, Harbor Freight heat gun: don't melt yourself.
Then I got around to trying to control COB LED strips. These are much brighter and meant for visibility during the daytime rather than "art". I ended up with way too high gauge but-can't-hurt-right MOSFETs that, when I finally sat down and soldered them and put together like a half dozen different wires between the MOSFET, power source, breadboard, ESP32-C3 and COB LED actually worked fine the first time. I was able to turn them on and off entirely via software and then adjust to dimming them via software. Sweet.
I'm using white COB LEDs but I note they make RGB COB LEDs which seems like so, so much more wiring but the effect might be worth it. They're so bright! We'll see how the WS2815s handle the heavy lifting for now. I guess.
I think nothing really stands in the way of going into full production at this point. Production here meaning put WS2815 and COB LEDs on helmets and the cargo bike and seeing if I can coordinate them via a smartphone app via BLE. Then I guess branching out to vests and other accessories.
I am trying to decide between putting 18650 batteries on each helmet or just kinda having a bigger battery on the cargo bike that each helmet's logic board plugs into via barrel jack adapter. As long as they're not screw-tightened together it shouldn't be a strangle/whiplash risk.
Also I just randomly found these RGB LED backlights on Adafruit and I'm looking for an excuse to incorporate them.
Also, I'm really enjoying how tiny the ESP32-C3 chips are and something about them being RISC-V makes me feel like I'm finally getting the future I was promised.
Also! Were you aware you could just hide a whole accessible via WiFi system-on-chip in the head of a USB-C or Lightning cord? https://shop.hak5.org/products/omg-cable
Homies: Ride or Die update
Spent awhile trying to rotate the wheels on the car model while it was in motion.
The first problem was figuring out how to isolate the wheels from the model mesh. I was about to rig some scheme where I would take shots in the dark to come up with relative points in the centers of each wheel and then try to eyeball a definition of a cylinder that would fit them, then write some selector that would pick all of the submeshes contained inside of the cylinder and then I could apply transformation matrices just to those that will match the spin of the wheels at any given time. But then I realized the model file actually already identifies the wheels and I could just process the "group" directive. With the hard part done, it was a trivial but surprisingly annoying amount of transform math to translate (ha!) into code.
So, the wheels spin. Now I'm trying to get them to also turn with the steering. Should be able to use most of the same code, just rotating the wheels around a relative Y axis instead of a relative X axis, but of course I'm missing some detail and they barely move even if I have the car turning 30 degrees at a time.
dr_analog
razorboy
3d ago
Reality has a surprising amount of detail. A musical greeting card (open card, plays tune) has a bill of materials of like 30 discrete components.
When you look at something and say "surely this part is done by a machine and not by humans" stop and consider that no maybe this is actually still produced by a human.
I thought The Hardware Hacker by bunnie, while a bit dated by now, had a fascinating tour of Chinese electronics fabrication.
The Nintendo Switch 2 probably doesn't have humans soldering individual components to boards and instead uses more automated surface mount tech, but I presume there's still a lot of manual bullshit involved. You probably don't just have trucks backing up to the factory and dumping raw parts on one end and on the other end out pop Switches.
A tick, actually :/
https://www.themotte.org/post/1986/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/331290?context=8#context
When he woke up paralyzed I was about to start the usual techbro thing of asking ChatGPT but said no, don't be that guy, lets just take him to the ER.
But then after we found the tick through no thanks to the ER, I plugged his symptoms and circumstances, exactly what we told the ER people, into ChatGPT4 classic and it listed ticks as the second thing to check for.
dr_analog
razorboy
3d ago
No. Just a person who has taken my kids to the ER too many times.
I had a personal experience almost turning into one of these sitcom characters. The pull is bizarrely tempting.
A little before the election I made a deadpan joke about a domestic annoyance that was completely misinterpreted and then quote tweeted by a major culture warrior. I got so much insane negative attention from that. Death threats. People following me around the Internet leaving shitty comments. Even phone calls of people threatening me.
It got so tense I was looking out my front window regularly and making sure I had my gun nearby whenever I went.
And then it subsided and I was relieved, but a major recurring thought since then has been "I should troll these fucking idiots again. Maybe I can make some money off of this"
I don't. But I can see how if I had a different temperament this would be totally irresistible.
dr_analog
razorboy
4d ago
don't they limit model choice
I'm not really sure anymore. I think they were at first but this led to people trying the free version, seeing how crappy it was, and deciding AI was a fad.
dr_analog
razorboy
4d ago
They can't do medicine/math/..? Have you tried?
Yes. The number of times I've gotten a better differential diagnosis from an LLM than in an ER is too damn high.
dr_analog
razorboy
5d ago
I found that one a bit mid and kept skipping the flashback chapters.
My favorite one so far is Surface Detail. Player of Games was decent, I thought. I also enjoyed Consider Phlebas as a good introduction.
Definitely don't read the short story book.
People here say they liked Matter but I thought it was snoozeville and gave up after 3 chapters.
I'm reading Look to Windward right now that's going okay.
dr_analog
razorboy
5d ago
It's not about spam. It's that the models they give you access to for free are expensive to run and they throttle you pretty fast. They don't want people creating tons of free accounts to circumvent the limits.
dr_analog
razorboy
6d ago
Unclear. Employers in the US vary on how comprehensive a health plan they will buy for their employees. Additionally, some households will have one spouse enroll in their employer's family plan while the other opts out entirely (and maybe even gets a monetary rebate for declining it).
Another complication is even with 65%+ total employee cost going to taxes, professionals in France opt for additional supplemental insurance so they don't have to share services with the poors.
dr_analog
razorboy
6d ago
I believe what's missing from this analysis is the employer-side taxes in France are an additional 40-45% of employee compensation, whereas in the US the rule of thumb is more like 10%
dr_analog
razorboy
6d ago
It's ironic that the Buffet quote about how he personally pays less tax than his secretary stimulates outrage about capital vs labor, but if this outrages you then you should be especially outraged by how much of the tax burden is being carried by the middle class in more socialist nations.
dr_analog
razorboy
7d ago
AI would need to deliver, like, 8% annualized growth or something to pull out of our debt problems. Our historical average has been 2%
Basically, this is in crack pipe fantasy territory. Not that a man can't hope though...
I have to wonder if social media and smartphonification is making people give up on relationships.
They're simultaneously encouraged by toxic groups and subreddits to dump that gaslighting abuser already!! while also being programned to feel shitty about themselves. You shouldn't have to compromise so much when it comes to love!!, after all.
There's an endless doomscroll of ways to learn how your partner is a narcissist taking advantage of your empath nature while he weaponizes his incompetence to leave cleaning the bath tub to you.
Maybe the Great Awokening is not the cause of relationship collapse so much as another head on the social media-smartphone serpent frying people's brains.
The West developed many nations in the way it did Iran. At some point you need to make it clear that stealing the West's investment in your nation has consequences.
The counterfactual world where we just let Iran get away with it and then emboldened socialists the world over to run on a platform of stealing Western investment is worse.
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