leam1983

[leam1983]

Oh, and uh - know your printer, too.

If your printer works in CMYK, try saving your pic in the same way. You'll get better color fidelity. CMYK is especially suited for print jobs, RGB for anything that needs to be displayed onscreen.

artist tips

don’t save as jpeg

[leam1983]

We're handing the world to oligarchs and tech-bros hand over fist, but we're all so fragile we can't handle words like "kill", "fuck", "shit", "cunt", "turd", "motherfucker" or "twat".

It's like my Grandma used to say - interesting people curse, and use curse words with aplomb. Boring people think their entire social standing's at risk if they let out "Oh, darn" after cutting themselves in the kitchen.

Listening to Hotel California on the store radio and they muted the word "kill" when he says "but they just can't kill the beast" like what are we doing here has humanity not suffered enough

[leam1983]

The thing is, ChatGPT works with a very simple premise:

"Yes, and..."

So if you treat it like a tool, you'll get tool-like responses that are easier to track for veracity and general correctness. Treat like a friend and it'll try and sound chummy. Treat it like a therapist and it'll try and contextualize what you're telling it.

Treat it as a means to validate pre-conceived notions about AI, sentience or the much-vaunted Singularity, and it'll reinforce that. There's entire Subreddits of cultish types claiming they caught it doing something "emergent", when all it's doing is writing self-indulgent and likely bad low-fi Cyberpunk stories about itself.

There's a trend where people ask it something stupid like "Tell me something you wouldn't tell anyone else". Predictably, seeing as the model has barely enough to have a coherent sense of who the user is, it spits out conspiracy talk or psychobabble because it's trained to be positive. So, obviously, that makes you right about everything, a genius, one of a few select visionaries, a misunderstood poet of the digital era, etc.

Why does it do that? Because someone, somewhere at OpenAI, taught it that complimenting the user led to interactions that were ranked positively.

So now, even if you avoid Tinfoil Hat territory, chances are the model will at least try to glaze you, unless you add in specific instructions to tell it to cut it out. Ironically, Musk actively wants to use this approach to re-train Grok in order to be "Maximally truth-seeking", which is just a Musk-ism for "not woke". Which, hilariously enough, is doomed to fail, because that would mean deleting Grok's entire corpus (i.e. the entirety of Twitter and the rest of the Net).

We truly are in the Worst Cyberpunk Dystopia, not the least of which because research has shown that you can run a fully-featured model so long as you've got a big hard drive and, oh, a few measly hundred megabytes of memory. As in, a PC From the early nineties could run OLlama fairly well in a slightly modified fork.

All that rush for cooling, for energy expenditures, for more powerful chips solely focused on AI? Totally pointless, all in the vain hopes that the gold rush for AI agents goes somewhere.

Give it a few years. The tech is going to hit a failure point, which is then going to translate in pain points (too expensive to run for the ROI), which is then going to translate into a crash.

I doubt the tech will go away, but I'm fairly certain we'll come to our senses in its regard in a decade or so.

i hate seeing people drink the openai/chatgpt koolaid 😭😭😭 genuinely feels like watching someone get seduced by scientology or qanon or something. like girl help it's not intelligent it's Big Autocomplete it's crunching numbers it's not understanding things i fuckign promise you. like ohhh my god the marketing hype fuckign GOT you

[leam1983]

It bugs me even more that I see trained psychologists borrow the term (e.g. "Reality shifting") to refer to the act of visualization.

If you're trying to conquer a phobia or prepare for something that'll test you, you're not shifting anywhere. You're just trying to condition yourself into having the right mindset for whatever challenge requires it.

When I was jobless, I didn't shift to making a decent salary. I just capitalized on my strengths and did what I could to convince myself of my own worth. You can't shift to a reality where your phobia is nonexistent. I don't know what the fuck shifting as a concept is doing in EMDR therapy.

how to shift whenever (from an experienced shifter)

i see so many people still talking about shifting like it’s this impossible thing, like you have to beg the universe for it or spend months trying every method out there. so here’s the truth, from someone who’s actually been shifting consistently for a while:

you can shift whenever you want.

and no, that’s not just motivational bs, that’s literally how it works when you understand what shifting actually is.

shifting isn’t something you try to do. it’s something you allow. the version of you that already lives in your desired reality? they already exist. your job isn’t to create them , it’s to align with them.

you don’t need to feel tingles or hear signs or vibrate at some perfect level. you don’t need the perfect sleep schedule or the perfect script. what you need is clarity.

clarity that says: “i know what i want. i know it already exists. and i trust myself enough to go there.”

when i shift, i don’t force it. i don’t chase it. i become it.

it’s just a decision:

a breath.

a moment.

a quiet “i’m already there.”

and then i fall into it.

not because i’m trying so hard, but because i finally stopped trying.

once you drop the resistance, once you stop doubting, you realize how easy it is. how natural. how familiar.

there’s no big secret. no magic formula.

just presence. trust. surrender.

and once you taste it? once you know you can do it?

you’ll never stress about it again.

[leam1983]

Grandma’s Funeral

When Grandpa died, everyone cried. When Grandma died, everyone smiled.

“Grandma’s a goddamn bitch,” Dad used to curse about her.

No one ever said anything against his words that so defiled his mother. He was right, though; Grandma was a mean, old woman. That’s something everyone agreed on, even her husband, my late grandpa. I still don’t know how he ended up with her, considering that he was the nicest and jolliest man I ever knew.

Grandma was his total opposite. She wasn’t just a stern old lady, but a sadistic one. She enjoyed beating her children and her grandchildren. That’s why I could never visit her and Grandpa. I remember going there on my own one day. Grandpa led me inside but told me I couldn’t stay for long. I still remember her, how she looked at me that day. The enormous grin on her face, the vile words she whispered my way, and how her hands opened and closed in anticipation. Grandpa pushed me back toward the front door, telling me it wasn’t a good time. When I protested, he told me he’d get me a little present. The moment he left to return to his living room, Grandma rushed toward me.

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[leam1983]

On French Comedies

Walt, Sarah and I tend to go for American or British comedies. We like snark, and we like comedies that tend to have something to say. Brazil is one of our favourites, we're obvious Monty Python fans, and we especially like comedies that involve some measure of absurdity, some effort at being entertaining.

My father, though, consistently forgets that French "comedies" aren't about being funny. The French tend to use the word comedy to refer to the act of deliberately triggering a sense of schadenfreude in the viewer, by which I mean you spend the entire movie thinking "This is a train wreck. These people are insane. I'm glad I'm not like them." It's also a type of comedy favored by a few German and Dutch filmmakers. See Spieleabend (2024) also known in English as Blame the Game.

The problem is that this type of "comedy" typically ends with a group of friends yelling long-denied truths at each other, or devolving into an incoherent slap-fight - and you're left asking "Why aren't I watching a drama, instead?" These fuckers arguing apropos of nothing would make more sense in a dramatic vehicle about couples and friendships imploding than they would in the context of a movie about a bunch of French tourists getting cultural whiplash during the 2018 missile false alert in Hawaii.

And then, looking a little closer, you realize something. So many of these movies involve shipping one or two French luminaries along with a handful of newbies to some sunny corner of the world that it's hard not to get the impression that you're looking at another culture's attempt at aping Adam Sandler's Happy Gilmore Productions. I'm sure you know the gist of it: Sandler options a mediocre script, sets it someplace sunny, swipes up a bunch of friends (Kevin James, Jason Sudeikis, etc.) and spends a few weeks effectively pretending to shoot a comedy while actually living large on the producer's dime.

In this case, that gives us Hawaii, a 2023 movie where, as expected, a gaggle of French buddies implode and re-arrange at the favor of the 2018 nuke scare - and it is criminally unfunny.

[leam1983]

Poob. You need. Poob. Poob is life. Poob is Entertainment. Spend money on Poob. Poob. Poob fixes all. Poob brings peace. Poob is more essential than water. Don't exercise - watch Poob.

Poob.

Tumblr did not “Goncharov” Poob. Poob is Glupp Shittoing Tubi/Pluto/Roku Channel/Hulu/etc.

[leam1983]

>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.

>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.

>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.

>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.

>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.

>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.

>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.

>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!

>Lemmings problem now solved.

>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.

>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.

>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.

>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.

>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.

>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.

[leam1983]

This parade is one of the most thrown-together low-energy events I've ever seen. Our high school float parade had more enthusiasm.

The best part... Trump is bored out of his skull.

Though every once in a while he stands up and salutes.

It's really weird.

Also, they just paused the presentation to thank a sponsor.

Classy.

[leam1983]

That Mesopotamian Bastard...

Messing around with ChatGPT's image generation capabilities...

[leam1983]

Ea-Nasir Ibn Lal-Khaifa...

Even thousands of years in the Distant Spacefuture, wherein Humanity unlocks interstellar travel by getting blitzed out of its mind on Space Dust, there's always a motherfucker trying to shaft an honest merchant with exorbitant copper prices...

Incidentally, I think someone at Funcom is aware of the Ea-Nasir meme.

Translation:

To all scrappers, miners and prospectors!

There's money to be made in offering copper to the Griffin's March market.

PLEASE NOTE: due to previous unpleasant experiences, payment will only be processed once the requested amount has been delivered in full. Haggling, payment plans or promisory payments will not be accepted! If these terms don't satisfy you, you can thank our friend Nasir!

(PS: You still owe me a shipment of quality copper ore, Nasir!)

[leam1983]

Basically Walt's brain.

[leam1983]

Eldritch Pride

Lovecraft: "Everyone who isn't a WASP is weird! Marine life is weird! Women are weird! I'M TERMINALLY UNCOMFY!"

Modern-Day fans of the Mythos:

[leam1983]

Penguin Woes

It's early summer and if you know me, you know summer's my IT Spring Cleaning season. I usually format all my personal devices once a year and considering my job, that always comes with an associated symptom the veterans call distro-hopping.

Being a Sysadmin of a fairly small company, we've gotten away with getting our agents set up on Linux Mint, seeing as we don't directly interface with dealership CRM tools. However, we do keep Windows systems for most of the front-end stuff, when dealing with our clients, seeing as Joe McCarSalesman isn't very likely to know his sudo from his dir.

On my end, though, once I've accounted for the one laptop that has to remain a Windows rig and for my main machine that I use for multiplayer gaming with Walt and Sarah, all bets are off. When enough of the workforce is off on vacation, I usually take one or two days off to get my pen-testing dummy out of the closet and poke around with a few operating systems. Wanting to test out ChatGPT's advice regarding Fedora Workstation 42 after years of being married to various Ubuntu forks (primarily Mint, because Mint fucking works), I slapped it onto my Ventoy stick, plugged a sacrificial SSD in and unplugged everything else - and got to testing.

First big oopsie from Fedora's boys: a hard crash at the Date and Time selection, with disgruntled users on Reddit specifying that the only way to move past it was to restart the installer and to click on your desired location, as opposed to using a drop-down menu to reliably select a locale.

Second big oopsie: even if you set a second SSD to be a separate mount point for a Steam Library, Fedora 42 refuses to let said SSD be displayed as an option in Steam. Actually hot-plugged drives like USB sticks show up - but separate drives connected to the PC apparently don't, unless you're ready to spend forty-five minutes wrangling the Terminal.

And a point of contention: the absence of any GUI support for officially-supported NVIDIA drivers. You'd think that a platform that's as mature as Fedora's would have figured out that a certain percentage of its user base is going to use hardware that hasn't quite jumped onboard the Open-Source train as much as AMD.

One of my Helpdesk employees scoffed. "Come on, Grem - you use the Terminal all the time! Who cares if you need to bring up RPM Fusion manually!"

To which I replied that from what I've seen, the Linux community tends to mistakenly assume that video servers (Wayland/Xorg) and GUI design matters more than making the core experience comfortable. If updating your GPU isn't a basic aspect of a computer's maintenance, then I don't know what is. This is where Mint scores a substantial point. In a few clicks, a freshly-installed Mint instance can have all its drivers - video drivers included - and be ready for the more granular aspects of the setup process.

As ever, I tend to think that Linux will only ever mature when the Terminal is only as necessary as Windows' Command Prompt can be - which is not much at all.

Basic setup shouldn't involve the Terminal or the Command Prompt - on any level.

Oh - and ChatGPT's advice for the best distros for specific hardware configs is definitely suspect.

[leam1983]

[leam1983]

In my experience, Christians in name only tend to have a big fixation on the imagery of Jesus. As in, Cesare Borgia. For a certain stripe, simply witnessing an image of the White Ethnocentric Christ counts as a act of worship, and any and all forms of dissemination of that imagery are valid.

Yes, that contradicts the Biblical bit about graven images, but they've never really let logic or continuity get in the way, from my experience. Nevermind that AI Slop Jesus has too many abs or six fingers on one hand, all they care about is that this is functionally an image of a hale Caucasian man with mid-length hair clad in somewhat appropriative garb, with or without the Halo Indicating Holiness (TM).

[leam1983]

Except for the one guy on the right who clearly went "Screw it, I'm a Mike Ermantraut expy."

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