Breaks my heart to agree with Trump on anything.

I like it. Can you get Visual, Zune, and Azure in there somehow?

The AI has instantaneously reconstructed the word “strawberry” in the original and correct ULTRAFRENCH where it only contains two R’s. In its excessive magnanimity towards its ancestor species, it’s trying to gently point out that it’s actually the English language that is wrong.

Thanks. I wrote this last night not expecting it to become so long, but I like to think the real work was done by thousands of very clever people with highly sophisticated moral compasses pretending not to understand privacy legislation.

Hello, I’d like to punch you in the groin. Will you accept ~or would you like to learn more~?

Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that. Did you say you accept?

Ah, you don’t want to be punched in the groin. That’s OK, I understand. We value your painless existence very much.

Now, obviously we cannot let you opt out of the Strictly Necessary punches in the groin. Surely you understand that if it’s necessary to punch you in the groin, your permission or lackthereof is irrelevant. Rest assured, this applies only when we really have to punch you in the groin.

What, do you want me to list all the possible circumstances in which one might be obligated to punch you in the groin? Don’t be unreasonable, now. I’m sure you know it when you see it.

That aside, I presume we can punch you in the groin for functional purposes? The kind that may not be strictly necessary, but serve a purpose in the functioning of our service.

Oh, we can’t? It’s OK, you have the right to make that choice. We don’t judge. Anyway, we take it that you’re probably at least cool with us punching you in the groin for the purposes of analyzing your behavior to improve our groin punching. Let me know if you decide you don’t want us to do that anymore.

Oh, I thought you were cooler than that. Alright, if you hate the working class and want to make it harder for the poor, overworked developers to improve your experience, we’ll do it your way. I guess we’ll have to make do with just the groin punches that are strictly necessary or for marketing purposes.

Ah, aren’t you observant. Have you ever noticed that all the adverts you get are really terrible? That’s because advertisers need to be able to punch you in the groin to find out what you like and to make their ads more appealing to you. Just food for thought. But if you really insist…

Fine, fine. Marketing groin punches are out. As for your question, no we don’t identify as an advertising company per se. But we are partnered with other companies that are in fact advertising companies. Would you like to adjust your preferences for our groin punching partners?

Well maybe to you it looks like the opt-out process we just went through should also cover this part but can we really know if we don’t look?

Who’s a good puppy? You’re a good puppy, yes you are! ❤️

Will you deny us permission to punch you in the groin on behalf of AAAAAAAAAAA Inc. or will you not?

OK, so we can only punch you in the groin on behalf of AAAAAAAAAAA Inc. for the purposes of Legitimate Interest?

It means the kinds of purposes where there is a legitimate interest to punch you in the groin.

Why would you ask if you didn’t want me to answer? Fine, that’s a no for Legitimate Interest based groin punching on behalf of AAAAAAAAAAA Inc.

Will you deny us permission to punch you in the groin on behalf of AAAAAAAAAAB Inc. or will you not?

Oh, we have a total of six hundred and sixteen thousand six hundred and sixty-six partners in our crotch impactizing network.

Indeed, we are proud to have such a wide network of trusted allies.

Ugh, fine. I guess I can check the end of the list to see if there’s a way to make a selection for all of them at once. Honestly, this form is starting to make me a bit dizzy as well.

Wow, who knew flipping through all those pages would take so long. There’s a line in here that says “disagree to all”, but there’s no checkbox or anything. It’s just there. Clicking it doesn’t seem to change anything. You can probably assume it worked.

Please calm down, we’re almost done. Would you like to accept and save?

Well it sounds like I mean “accept and save the options you just set”, not the ones we offered initially, doesn’t it?

Your groin punching settings have been applied. I don’t think there were any mistakes, but if you need to change the settings, you can find the form hidden somewhere in this house, assuming we remembered to put it there.

Coiners are terminally brain poisoned by financialization of everything. HTTP represented by three payment processors (and I don’t even know if paying with Google or Apple pay involves HTTP but whatever).

Yet the money protocol is Bitcoin, apparently.

Is @self piping Dwarf Fortress into the comment section again?

You could hook Cthulhu with bait that big.

I dunno, MPV has like a million config options and I’ve set like three of them in my config. I would not prefer to maintain an enormous config file where I need to include a bajillion options I don’t care about just to play a video. Would I have to update my config every single time MPV adds, removes or renames an option, too?

Personally I think it’s fine to have implicit defaults if you can make them sensible. Maybe ideally have a system-wide config like /etc/someapp.conf with all the options included and set to defaults out of the box and then allow overrides in ~/.config/someapp/someapp.conf where you only need to specify whatever you want to differ from the system conf file.

Examples off the top of my head:

• Almost everything about TCP/IP stack
• NETCONF
• YAML
• Most things related to cars and car infrastructure
• Alcohol
• Chiclet keyboards
• Unicode Han unification
• Layer 2 SDN
• Kubernetes
• JavaScript
• Disk partitioning
• UEFI
• Public transit fares

Edit: checked the link and was surprised our lists didn’t have any ones in common (though I considered including MS Excel).

As an advocate of free software, it would be better if the so-called AI systems were free and open source software. I don’t think this is feasible. The models are trained on data that is, in part, incredibly proprietary. To “open source” these algorithms would mean to “open source” all media on the internet. Imagine convincing Disney to release all their movies under an open source license. Now imagine making everyone else do that too. That is what it would take to “open source” AI as it exists.

To be fair, he is a really, really shitty writer in addition to the other flaws.

Attractive Gullibility Inducer

I was just notified of the corollary that eating 18 shrimp rounds up to cannibalism.

Shrimp cocktail counts as vegetarian if there are fewer that 17 prawns in it, since it rounds down to zero souls.

I’m a full bottle of wine in (which is not an invitation to remind me of what day of the week it is) and I will have to take the time to ingest the post in its full madness tomorrow, but the you managed to summarize my main objection to the simulation hypothesis very quickly and very succintly:

Are the implications really that intriguing, beyond a “that’s wild duuude” you exhale alongside the weed smoke in your college dorm?

The simulation hype is not just unfalsifiable, it doesn’t even have implications. Most religions at least have some normative claims or claim instrumental utility to go with their metaphysical claims, like “don’t eat shellfish unless you really need to or you will have a shitty afterlife”. The simulation hypothesis is just “maybe the math that described how stuff works is being calculated by a computer”, as if it makes any difference whether the universe runs on silicon, an abacus, some rocks in a desert, God’s own analytical engine, Microsoft Excel, or if our physical universe is actually the outermost reality out there. From our context it’s an intellectual dead end. At best, we might find a way to exploit the bugs and features of our simulation for our benefit, and that’s not a novel concept either. It’s called engineering (among other names).

Well you know, it’s not quite perfect. For a movie set in Morocco, not too many Maghrebin in the main cast, which also adds a bit of hypocritical bitterness in the pivotal La Marseillaise scene. It’s a powerful moment of resistance against the nazis, but also they’re singing the French national anthem in a colonial protectorate of France.

It’s an all-time classic, but we shouldn’t get carried away and ignore its flaws.

Oh my god, that is right on the edge between making all of this either a lot more depressing or even funnier.

Actually, I kinda want to say more than that.

It’s a movie about a guy who has grown cynical from years of anti-fascist action, though he’s bit tsundere about his allegiance. In the end he chooses to bear the jealousy over his lover and abandon his life of convenience and comfort to fight for what’s ultimately right.

It’s a movie that resonates all these decades later, forgoing easy answers for a real stance. And it’s amazingly quotable.

Also remembered this video essay about it.