Last time I recommend Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series, I got crucified over it. Imma do it again. It was a formative work to me, and I frequently quote the wizards’ rules. Content warning though: some scenes are quite disturbing, and some of Terry’s political opinions leak into the text and are questionable at best.

Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series is another of my favorites, and I think I can recommend it without content warnings but it’s been a long time since I read it so I don’t really remember.

Louis McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga is also very good. Scifi instead of fantasy, but how often do I get the chance to recommend books?

Put the installer on a usb drive (or a cd if you’re cool) and hand it over to the person you want to “transfer” it to. Physical media, like the good old days. Except it’s better because all the drm is gone.

Makes me miss my old CRT. I don’t miss the coil whine, but fuck that bitch could change channels instantly.

I’ll be sticking with my Sceptre then

Sounds great! I’ll gladly pay $200usd for it.

I skimmed the article and didn’t see any mention of price, but I expect it to be 10x what I’m willing to spend on a display.

Also if it’s a smart tv I’m no longer interested at all.

Functionally, yes. Legally, no.

google doing their best to make me move to a different platform for my next phone.

anybody know of other options?

I’m suggesting arm the poor and kill the rich.

If you had asked me this 15 years ago, I’d probably describe a housing complex with low rent and with on-site grocery store, post office, liquor store, and other amenities.

shit’s gotten quite fucked since then.

Today, my answer is guns and ammunition.

If you made all the training data yourself, or ethically acquired the training data, then go nuts do whatever you want with it. See Corridor Digital’s ai chroma key thingy.

If the training data isn’t ethically sourced, then it gets iffy.

I use ai primarily for my own entertainment. None of it are things I’d want to share with the world. Is “dicking around” justifiable? Eh. I eat meat and shop at amazon, both of which are things that some people would find “not justifiable”, so someone is going to be upset with me no matter what.

In the case of artistically, I don’t take offense to ai tools being part of a process, what’s important to me is that the ai isn’t the entire process. You wouldn’t go to a cinema, record the movie with your phone camera, then post it online saying “look at what I made”. That’s nonsense. But if you took clips of that same movie, rearranged and dubbed over them thus creating a new unique work, you could post that online and say “look what I made”. Whatever the ai output, no matter how detailed your prompt, should be treated as being made by someone else. You don’t get to say “look what I made” unless you actually do something with it.

Another use case is summarizing conversations and compiling notes. This is another one that I do often. I could go on for hours about a subject (usually while drunk) and at the end I tell it “compile a detailed report on everything discussed, be verbose and leave out no details” or something similar, and that output goes into my notes documents. It’s fine to copy pasta that, because it’s not going to be anything that anyone ever actually sees.

I’d like to let people know that Sceptre still makes dumb tvs and they’re pretty good.

there’s legitimate complaints against valve, but I don’t think this is one of them.

I have a source I believe to be reliable about such topics, who probably would want to remain anonymous. If this isn’t true, then they’re fucking with me, which is entirely possible but I think unlikely about this.

It’s very specific, and you won’t be mistaken for one of them if you do it “wrong”, and you will do it “wrong” if you’re not in the know. I’m not in the know, so I don’t know how to do it, but I know someone who is (in the know, not in one of those groups).

Ladder lacing. specifically on boots, is a means by which white supremacists / neo nazis identify each other in public.

Glad that I’ve switched platforms. sam altman should probably be in prison or something.

I’ve been using Venice lately, they claim (I have done zero research to determine if this is true) that they’re privacy focused. They do run uncensored models, which is a big plus.

That said, I find myself using the lying machine less these days. It was like a fun video game when I first got my hands on it, entertaining for a while, and I’m moving on. Maybe I’m not imaginative enough to use it to the fullest potential, but I’m having more fulfillment actually writing and actually drawing (even though I am very bad at both).

I used to work at a thrift store a decade ago, it was pretty common for people to drop off laptops (some of them pretty sick at the time), I’d ask why and the response was always “we have ipads”. I doubt things have improved since then.

I’m in the process of migrating my community to Stoat (formerly Revolt). It’s janky as all balls because new platform, but it’s going well.

So seamless that I didn’t even notice

google can get bent