Wildmimic

As i am blessed with really great bread here in Austria, the only thing more annoying about bread is the extra weight/bulk compared to cheese.

At this point it would be smart to simply hook up any old pc to your tv and watch in the browser.

This might be right up your alley: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/imagus-mod/
pop-out on mouseover for media whereever you want

That’s why I said go voluntarily if you need to. It sucks, but it’s better than the alternative. I know psych wards have a bad rep, but i can assure you that it helped me when i was at my lowest point in my life.

Especially if you consider self-harm, it is very important to be honest with your therapist. Even if it leads to an extended stay in a psych ward, that’s better than throwing your life away.

When my depression took over so hard that i was sitting in my room with a knife in my hand and pondering cutting open my wrists, instead i went directly to the psych ward and institutionalized myself for 3 months, until my medication and therapy made me stable enough to leave without danger. Without this step, i would probably not be here anymore and would have caused untold pain to my surroundings. It led to many happy memories in my life which i wouldn’t have experienced.

The 3 basics are always the same: regular sleep, regular eating, regular exercise. If these things don’t work, the rest gets infinitely harder.

For me personally: try to get a feel where my personal limits are, and act on them. That often means taking a step back, leaving a social situation and not feel bad about it; canceling appointments if they would be too much for me, even if i miss out on stuff (like not using cards for the theater even if i paid for them). Telling myself that I have innate worth regardless of what i do or not do; internalizing that being pensioned doesn’t make me worth less than when i worked. Accepting that my issues will never be gone, and that i can only work on fixing my reactions and reducing the time to counteract.

Currently i am failing at literally everything except that i still tell myself that i am worthy of a fulfilling life.

I’m reading a lot here and also read a lot of your posts. Sometimes I agree with what you post, sometimes I do not agree. But reading your name next to a post title has never discouraged me to not click on your postings! I would be missing a lot of content if you weren’t there.

But ultimately, neither I or anyone else should matter for if you post or not - if it’s good enough for you, and you aren’t breaking any rules, post away! I for my part do enjoy the content you post.

Cool Graffiti i saw recently!

These crimes are always about power and control, not about sex. I think a part of it comes from feeling powerless (or having felt powerless long ago) in other areas of life. This is obviously no excuse and absolutely abhorrent behavior, but as we can read in the article these men will walk the streets again after a few years, so psychotherapy for them should be mandatory, with their sentences extended if the therapist thinks it’s necessary to prevent further victims.

It still sets your phone in a state that marks it as security compromised. This could lead i.e. to banking apps not working. I’m not so sure about the “acceptable” state of things here.

Don’t forget about your other acquaintances CaNaCl, it wouldn’t be the same without them ;-)

I know that they are fine - but i haven’t had the need for color prints for ages now outside of 2 occasions where i needed like 5 copies each. For myself i prefer digital only either way. Just in case i really need something like return tickets a b&w printer is enough.

The B&W one costs under 100€, the cheapest brother color laser 300€; the 200€ difference should last decades in the print shop, and the toner cartridges are a lot cheaper for b&w only.

I must argue back, sadly. For someone like me who knows how to search the web for exactly the wording that is relevant for my issue, because i know how PCs in general work, how to scour through log files and how to formulate my search terms, Linux is fine, even if it has (still) some rough edges. (why the hell is there no graphical service manager installed on fedora per default for example? I know how to use the command line for this, others might not.)

If someone just want to use their PC for gaming with no issues at all, don’t want to research workarounds if you run into hitches or want to play current multiplayer titles, windows still has an edge (even if it’s a bit of an artificial one regarding anticheats). If you leave the safe environment of Steam, Epic, GoG and Amazon (with Heroic), and want to just install a game with an downloaded installer, the learning curve gets steep pretty fast for someone who doesn’t know shit about computers. Under Windows it’s a doubleclick (or a singleclick in your browsers download manager) and clicking next/finish. Flatpak has helped here in some circumstances, but comes with it’s own limitations if you don’t know why your downloaded program can’t access anything outside your home directory for example.

For someone who has used only windows in the last 20 years and is used to a specific workflow for whatever they wanna do (like people who digitize VHS tapes or similar “legacy” tasks), it will most likely be hard to switch over too - and why should they? (We both know why they SHOULD, but it will not be obvious or easy for those people)

Then there is another aspect: if you can’t speak english most good sources for troubleshooting are out of your reach. I’m in a german language country - if i had to limit myself to only german language sources everytime i run into some issue, i would have given up pretty soon. Baby boomers in this country have atrocious english language skills in general.

So you see: Everyone should consider Linux, but if you are old, don’t have technical knowledge, don’t speak english, do some task you have done the same way the last decade ,… the difficulty of switching might be too much without someone who helps them and is available when something breaks.

If you take away the polemics, the reality of majority opinions here is:

At the current moment in time only terrible or completely uninformed people vote republican, and everyone should consider linux, but i can understand if someone wants to use windows for ease of use.

and those are well reflected, humanistic viewpoints. There are other viewpoints too, but i would say they are not well reflected or accusatory out of their own failings. Reality HAS a left wing bias after all.

But it would make a good law outlawing corporate assholery as a whole and might make a difference. Imagine a world in which corpos are not allowed to fuck over anyone, not their supplier, their partners or the customer… the world would be different.

Me too - the print shop can deal with the issues, i have no problem paying a little extra for not having the headache of troubleshooting printer crap. Although I might get myself a B/W Brother printer for the everyday stuff - my ex sadly got my old one.

Yeah, the colors will always be off in a random direction in the RGB spectrum, this is easy to blame on the cartridge manufacturer

They are marketed this way? Holy fraudulent ads Batman, I would never want to work at technical support for an OEM who does this, the phone lines will start glowing a bright orange after a year!

Of course, i was just fixated on the GenAI-Aspect of the question. Climate modeling, Medicine (especially diagnostic and neurosciences), physics, chemistry and even social sciences can benefit a lot. In the manufacturing process it can be used for control of industrial processes (e.g. balancing of a chemical process; i know it’s used in QC in production of electronics). This IS the next big thing, but not in the way the corpos try to sell it to us.

Yeah, for the moment, this is it. We will need more research in how to actually read the data inside of a neural network to be able to a) reroute pathways that are problematic and b) enable a process to hook inside of control points to modify it on the fly.

Machine learning by itself is already paying off. LLMs the way normal people use it are fine, but not the way bosses want to use it - you can’t rationalize away employees with this, you can only give them them a tool that empowers them; there will be a lot of heads rolling in management in the corporations where this hasn’t been realized yet.

Code Generation might get better over the next years, but looking at the current trajectory i would say with current tech there will never be a point reached where you can simply replace a dev with an agentic AI without the generated code being full of inefficiencies, bugs and security issues.

It also might open up the first therapeutic LLM (without the current fuckups) if there is a focus in development - THIS would be something that is labor intensive, priced so that exactly the people that need it can’t afford it on a regular basis, and definitely possible to attain without much of a technological limit.

ImageGen can also pay off in some areas - creating tons of “stony wall” textures isn’t fun, but implementing a tiny model that creates as many “stony walls” as you want in your game with differing amounts of stones or dirt as a variable might be worth the effort.

Prototyping is also a big thing in both of those areas (Code Gen/ImageGen), but i think that’s no secret anymore.

Videogen in the current way is a waste of energy. The models need something that anchors them, to make sure that the Coke truck in one camera angle stays the same Coke truck in the next angle; currently it’s just ImageGen *25/second, which causes those issues - and the massive energy consumption. This is the only area where the generation process itself chews through more electrons than the global energy bill allows for. Someone smart will probably crack that nut too - i believe that the solution to those 2 issues (energy consumption and missing object permanence) might be linked.

Edit: The missing permanence might also be a reason for many of the issues of LLM’s, some kind of “self” with a sense of the passage of time to return to. I’m pretty sure i’m not the first one who thought of that, and there are probably a lot of people with even more PhDs at work here.