I was always more of a fan of the Pennsylvania Railtoad than the competing New Youk Central.

It knows and demands blood.

Wouldn’t two half-sized sticks perform better?

I thought dual-channel RAM was a thing at least as far back as the original Socket A nForce chipset.

Yeah, but it was the norm prior to 1909 and was a little more aspirational than “he just got perforated, let’s slap his face on the half dollar.”

What’s sad is that the obverse of the 250th dime is probably the best of the redesigns. For the first time since 1946, we’d have a circulating coin with an idealized figure of Goddess Liberty instead of a dead politician.

The typography is atrocious though. And the lack of a cohesive design language sucks. The Charles III coinage from the UK are so much better as a thematic set.

This will go great with the “i eat solder” shirt Mastodon bullied influenced me into buying.

Fedi people have the best taste in clothing.

Maybe the sheen of tech and finance is limited. You’re, at best, enabling other people’s visions and at worst contributing to enshittification.

It was appealing for a while with the promises of big paydays, but if they stop keeping that up, it won’t stand on its merits.

Making actual things has an emotional charm. I work for a fintech and the best I can do is point at a card terminal and say “maybe my code is one of 932 obscure steps towards you financing a $2.59 hot dog…”

Then maybe the West shouldn’t have spent 50 years selling the PRC the rope they’re using to hang them with.

Even some of the near east is starting to think about what happens when the goo runs out. Only the US is doubking down.

One huge issue is that LLMs do weird and stupid things differently than how humans do them.

If you’ve developed an eye for reading human-made changes, you’re not necessarily going to recognize new and surprising failure modes as easily. It’s literally harder than regular code review.

Humans with modern tooling, for example, rarely hallucinate field/class/method/object names because non-spicy autocomplete keeps them on the rails. LLMs seem much more willing to decide the menu bar is .menuBar and not .topMenu, probably because their training corpus is full of the former.

Same picture but non-swimsuit issues of Sports Illustrated.

Day 5?

Memes are at 9 hours. Day 5 is full erotic fanfic.

Many things still fall back to VGA, like old projectors.

I was disappointed they didn’t say anything about when they built him into his distinctive aerodynamic casing.

I assume there was some Machine Spirit crap going on there since it was almost 50 years after his death.

Just finished 580 pages of steamship and railway business dickering.

Now on to something where the vampires are less metaphoric.

This probably does offer better long-term economic prospects for their citizenry.

Wouldn’t students who were taught in (insert minority language here) be at a disadvantage trying to compete with first-language Mandarin speakers for jobs outside of their narrow region?

Even in the US, there’s been intense debates over schools offering core instruction in Spanish,

Trying to sell consumers on “scaling solves everything” is going to be a hard sell.

If we look at general purpose computation, which had decades of actual scaling-solves-everything growth, you had two influences that made the message resonate with customers:

• Clear existing applications where more power made the experience straightforward better. Your spreadsheet took an hour to recalculate at 8MHz and 20 minutes at 25MHz. A lot of the “bigger model” stuff is plateauing with marginal or spotty gains. If I feed another 5 Internets of data to ChatGPT, will that summarized email be that much better?

• New applications that could be demoed on specialised low capacity hardware and scaled down to consumers as more power became available. Think of early CGI on hardware costing tens of millions, and now you can run Blender on a $149 laptop. Since most commercial AI plays are hosted services, there’s not much opportunity to tease that way anymore.

I figured SDF were the sort of people who would consider uptime a badge of honour.

I should probably be on Hexbear but I didn’t know of its existence at the time. Very problematic, my Xibuck direct deposits keep bouncing.

I feel like I missed out. By the 3rd year at my programne, you were down to 1-2 women per class. Maybe because it was a state school, they didn’t have the budget to forcefem the students.

Transhumanity would be exciting if they had cool visions. I’d be all over raising a creche of draconic children.

But no, it’s just rich people gluing a Palm Pilot to their cerebrllum or doing a dance to shoo away the reaper.

The Crystalline Entity was made of rock candy, I bet.

I’ve always wondered what would have happened if the Confederacy was left to its own devices. Thry had a clear vision, but it was intensely nearsighted.

Free chattel labour was appealing for a farming economy in 1860, but it’s less of a selling point elsewhere. You’re right on the cusp of major industrial and trchnological advancement, while clutching to a labour pool that you don’t want learning to read and probably wouldn’t trust with machinery. You’re not moving up the value chain that way.

So you’ve got a cash-crop dependent, export centric economy, who is about to be caught with its pants down when other countries start to fire up steam and petrol-powered agricultural equipment. You’re also pointing a target on your back as consumers are becoming more sophisticated and concepts like boycotts and sanctions are developing.

Give it 50 years, and they’d halve their per-capita GDP and either be a weird novelty for slavery tourism, or the “secret sauce” behind sketchy impossibly-cheap clothing and foodstuffs where the vendor doesn’t want to proudly boast “made in CSA” on the label.