EldritchFemininity

Isn’t cough medicine more cost effective per alcohol percentage? That’s what I remember the alcoholics drinking when I was younger.

And Republicans claim that the US is a Christian nation all the time, despite half the Founding Fathers being either atheists or at least agnostic and specifically and expressly stating that the US is not beholden to any one religion.

I am in no way defending Putin or Stalin, but just because he claims to be honoring a former leader doesn’t mean that he actually is. So long as it suits the propaganda narrative, people like him, the Republicans, and Israel will claim whatever they want about history.

Agreed, and I vaguely remembered something along these lines from my time cooking them, but I also know how many that I was cooking in a day as just a small scale operation at a local fish market cooking and shucking for lobster meat and cooking for the occasional customer to take home with them (I think the most we did in a day was close to one metric ton), and how unfeasible it is to do on a large scale.

I was doing 50 lbs at a time per pot, with 2 large stovetop pots at a time. That’s 25+ lobsters per pot, averaging probably about 60 lobsters per hour that I was cooking by myself. Imagining trying to do that at an industrial scale sounds like the kind of thing that would effectively kill lobster meat as anything other than an expensive specialty item.

And although maybe it should kill mass market lobster meat (why in the hell does McDonald’s sell lobster rolls in the first place???), I also have a visceral gut reaction to the idea of effectively making a food the exclusive domain of the rich. Especially when my boss at that job would make a big stink about people buying fish with Social Security money like poor people don’t deserve to eat anything other than rice and beans.

I feel like chilling them is even worse. They usually live in cold waters, and chilling them in cold air (like a fridge) will just mostly make them suffocate for a while before you boil them alive. They can live a long time out of the water in a cold environment/on ice (think 24 to 48 hours long, not 2 or 3) because it just slows down their biological processes since they’re cold blooded. They’re just going to warm up again as they’re boiling, and it will probably take longer to start boiling as they have to come back up from a lower temperature.

Even the shock method seems kinda useless. It would need to knock them out for about 20 minutes to ensure that they’re unconscious until they’re dead.

The most humane thing to do would be to kill them somehow in one moment, like with a concussive force or stabbing through the brain stem, but that then runs into the issue of how quickly dead lobsters go bad (also the issue of presentation - people don’t want a crushed lobster staring at them from their plate). It’s actually illegal in plenty of places to sell dead lobsters (or even cook them!) due to this, so they would have to be killed on site just before being cooked, which is a tall order when 1lb of lobster meat requires about 5lbs of lobster to make (roughly about a 20% yield on lobsters) and it takes about 5 years for a lobster to reach 1lb in size (and then about 2 years for every pound after that).

All of this said, it’s all still probably more humane than that one company I used to work with back when I was in this kind of industry that was experimenting with getting raw lobster meat out of lobsters by tossing them into a pressure vessel.

Maybe you should learn the meaning of words before you start using them. Somebody responding to what you say isn’t censorship. Not even close.

Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.

Quite honestly, I don’t think the average person even knows what open source means. They just know that Mozilla, like every other company, is shoving AI into their product, and that AI has either been useless or actively harmful to their user experience.

I mean, I bet they’d make a killing off of Firefox themed thigh highs…

People don’t trust that it can be truly turned off and that it won’t act maliciously in some way. That’s really the crux of the whole saga. We’re at a point where phone companies are getting survey results that say that 80% of users either don’t care about AI nor use it or find that it actively makes their user experience worse.

I think the big defining question is what will the AI features that they will implement do exactly and how will they run. If it’s something that runs in the background (even as unintrusive as the summaries on a search engine like DDG), then it’s opt out by default as it’s constantly running whether you want it to or not. If it specifically and exclusively runs when you hit the button to activate it and doesn’t run at any other time, then I’d say it’s unequivocally opt in. And regardless of what a company says that their software will do, at this point I won’t believe it until somebody has done a full teardown and discerned what exactly it does behind the scenes. I’ve seen enough nonsense like the Epic Games Store accessing your browser history and recording keyboard inputs or whatever the other absurd incident was.

If it starts reading pages or doing things without you pushing a button, that’s an issue.

And therein lies the rub. The question is whether or not people trust that it won’t be doing that regardless of whether or not you hit the kill switch.

Except, right now, they absolutely are. The tools are largely as you describe - though thinking about it, I think I’d describe it more as an airbrush vs a paint brush - but that’s not the way that upper management sees it for the most part, and not how the average supporter of GenAI sees it even if they don’t recognize that that’s their view. Both of these groups see it as a way to cut costs by reducing manpower, even if the GenAI folk don’t recognize that that’s what their stance is (or refuse to accept it). It’s the same as in the programming side of the conversation: vibe coders and prompt generators being hired instead of skilled professionals who can actually use the tools where they’re truly useful. Why pay an artist or programmer to do the work when I can just ask an LLM trained on stolen work to do it for me instead.

I read a great post probably a year ago now from somebody who works for a movie studio on why the company has banned hiring prompters. The short of it is, they hired on a number of prompters to replace some jobs that would normally be filled by artists as a test to see if they could reduce their staff while maintaining the same levels of production. What they found was that prompters could produce a massive volume of work very quickly. You ask the team for pictures of a forest scene and the artists would come back in a week with a dozen concepts each while the prompters had 50 the next day. But, if you asked them to take one of their concept pieces and do something like remove the house in it or add people in the foreground, they’d come back the next day with 50 new concept pieces but not the original. They couldn’t grasp the concept of editing and refining an image, only using GenAI to generate more with a new set of prompt parameters, and therefore were incapable of doing the work needed that an artist could do.

A feel-good story for artists showing what AI is actually capable of and what it isn’t, except for one thing: the company still replaced artists with AI before they learned their lesson, and that’s the phase most of the world is in right now and will probably continue to be in until the bubble bursts. And as Alanah Pierce so eloquently put it when talking about the record setting year over year layoffs in the gaming industry (each year has been worse than during the 2008 financial crash): “Most of those people will never work in games again. There’s just too many people out of work and not enough jobs to go around.” These companies currently in the fuck around phase will find out eventually, but by then it won’t matter for many people. They’ll never find a job in their field in time and be forced into other work. Art is already one of the lowest paying jobs for the amount of effort and experience required. Many artists who work on commissions do so for less than minimum wage, and starting wages in the game industry for artists haven’t increased since I was looking at jobs in the field 15 years ago.

“Something something piracy is a service issue.”

-Gandhi, probably

Yes, but it’s not a big deal because it only will run once the humidity gets above a certain level - especially if you’re using it to cover multiple rooms where any heat from it running will disperse across a wide area. You set it to something like 60% and it will pop on occasionally for a few minutes to maintain that level.

In a closed room with a swamp cooler it’s a bit of a different story, but that’s why I recommend that only for a short period of time, a couple of hours at most. Just long enough to cool down yourself and the room.

So you leave the dehumidifier on all the time on an automatic setting in a central location in the house to keep the air in the house fairly dry, run a swamp cooler late in the afternoon to cool down your room, and if it isn’t too hot and humid outside, open a couple of windows in the house to get some cross ventilation going and air out the house once the sun goes down.

Also add “-AI” without the quotes to the end of your search. Booleans still work with DDG at least, I don’t know if they do on Google anymore.

Dry is key, wet and cold winters are awful.

I think this is a key distinction between the people who generally like one over the other. If you live somewhere where winter is wet and summer is dry, you probably prefer summer. And vice versa.

The other big thing that I never see anyone talk about is the wind. I think the wind is probably one of the most impactful things for a season. Hot summer with a cool breeze bringing cold air from over the ocean? Fantastic and refreshing. Snow on the ground and gusting 8-16 kmh? I don’t care how sunny it is, that wind is cutting through every single layer you put on. I woke up the other day to a wind chill that brought the temp from -10°C to -17°C. That’s 14°F to 1°F.

A dehumidifier plus a “swamp cooler” (a bucket of ice in front of a fan) works pretty well so long as you keep it to one room and only expect it to work for a few hours or so. Otherwise you’ll be buying a lot of ice and doing a lot of work dumping the water from the dehumidifier.

No. What makes you feel colder is the air moving faster and therefore absorbing sweat off your skin more quickly. If the air is already moist then its capacity for extra heat goes down. You should look up what Wet Bulb Temperature is. In short, it’s when the humidity nears 100%, which prevents the air from absorbing any heat from your body because it’s no longer pulling sweat off of you. At this level of humidity, even special forces units have found themselves incapacitated within hours due to heat stroke during army tests of soldier capabilities in those conditions. There was a heatwave of about 70-80F in the UK a couple of years ago where multiple people died of heat stroke related organ failure because the humidity was so high that their organs couldn’t cool down and overheated until they just stopped working.

If you want to cool down, ideally the first step is to get a dehumidifier to pull water out of the air. This is how air conditioners work as well, they pull moisture out of the air which carries heat, and then transfer that heat and moisture somewhere else.

In the short term, you can use a “swamp cooler” as an ad hoc air conditioner to help cool down. A swamp cooler is just a big bucket of ice in front of a fan. The ice will cool down the air in front of the fan as it blows over it, allowing it to absorb heat from the rest of the room. This only works short-term though, because it won’t do anything about the humidity in the room and will actually increase the humidity as the ice melts.

So you’re saying that the ChatGPT’s and Stable Diffusions of the world, which operate on maximizing profit by scraping vast oceans of data that would be impossibly expensive to manually label even if they were willing to pay to do the barest minimum of checks, are the most vulnerable to this kind of attack while the actually useful specialized LLMs like those used by doctors to check MRI scans for tumors are the least?

Please stop, I can only get so erect!

When it comes to Epic, a quote from the great Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of many beloved Nintendo icons, comes to mind: “A delayed game is eventually good. A rushed game is bad forever.” First impressions are incredibly important and trust is a hell of a lot harder to gain than to lose, and Epic not only made a bad first impression but they also kept doing things that people generally disliked.

IIRC, the sale on unreleased games was only some big AAA titles, but not only was it scummy, it also was clearly a part of a larger strategy that Epic was using to try to force people to use their store rather than actively compete with Steam. They had nowhere near the number of features Steam has, the store was difficult and frustrating to use, and the launcher was performance hungry as well as acting similar to malware - it checks through your internet browser’s history for one thing (or used to, I haven’t touched it since it launched).

People disliked exclusives even when they were relegated only to consoles, and the lack of exclusivity was a selling point of PC gaming for a long time (until every publisher under the sun tried to wall off their titles behind their own launchers and stores, and people hated that as well). But the big sin Epic made was when they bought out devs who had plans to release on Steam and demanded that they pull their games off of Steam - sometimes for a period of a year, sometimes permanently. These were games that people had paid for, either through preorders or as backers for Kickstarter funding or something.

And then you get into some of the more…beliefs and values side of the system. Where Valve has made a stand against NFT and AI games to general applause, Epic has embraced them and the store has filled with all the things that gamers expected to see as a result of those: asset flips and scams. They’re already an issue on Steam, but keeping NFTs and AI off the platform has mitigated some of it by eliminating some of the tools that make it even easier to make them than it ever was before. I believe they also got in some hot water with devs around the same time that Unity did for some policy change that negatively affected people using Unreal as their game engine (that they later backed down on).

Yeah, but it’s not a 1 to 1 comparison like people like to make it out to be. Valve takes a higher percentage but offers more for that higher price.