Not just that he shouldn’t have died, but I can’t imagine how painful and fearful it would be to basically drown in air.

In Luigi I trust.

Speaking from my experience, I get very overwhelmed with empathy when someone close to me is going through something as difficult as an illness, divorce or job loss. I want to be as supportive as possible, but also know that there’s usually little to nothing that I can do, and then I get overwhelmed by the feelings of helplessness. I will let them know that I’m there for them if they need anything, and I will check in from time to time to see how they are doing, but I always find myself avoiding talking about the ‘real issue’.

I know that I’m included in the ‘people suck and are incredibly, inherently selfish’ - even knowing that, I have a hard time addressing it. Even when the roles have been reversed, after I lost my job and people stopped reaching out to me, I knew exactly why… I was making them uncomfortable and they just didn’t know how to deal with it. And even then, I had no idea what I wanted from them, other than for things to just be as they had been before.

Even after my own experience, when a close friend of mine lost his job I dreaded talking with him because of the helplessness that I felt at being able to do anything for him, and the reminder that at any moment I could be in his shoes again. It sucks, it’s a massive character flaw, and it is even worse that I’m aware of it but so far have been unable to change. I still love my family and friends, I just don’t know how to show them that during their times of greatest need.

Because if a company gets a refund on the tariffs they paid, they will surely pass that refund on to their customers who have already purchased the product at a higher rate.

‘And Another Thing…’ was fun, and I feel it belongs on the shelf right next to the others. I hope you give it a shot, and also enjoy it.

Yeah, that’s the one I wasn’t counting as a book, but from that list I can see why some would count it.

Six if you count Mostly Harmless.

I think you mean six if you count 'And Another Thing … ’

‘Mostly Harmless’ was the 5th book.

Same. I bought the lifetime pass on sale many years ago, my setup is still working fine without me having to have touched it for at least the past 3 years outside of applying an update from time to time. I don’t stream their free shows or movies and have those setup so that they don’t even show up as an option on my tv.

Do I wish it was still the same company it was a decade ago? Of course… but so far they haven’t impacted my experience to the point that I feel the need to replace it with something else. The second that happens I will be spinning up Jellyfin.

Once I flew to a city that’s about 6 hours away by car. Work was paying for it, and I figured it would be easier and less stressful to fly than to drive. A coworker drove instead. He left 2 hours after I left for the airport. After my plane arrived they were cleaning it out and one of the attendants hit his head and had to go to the hospital for stitches. I scrambled and was able to get on to another flight, although it took me about 2 hours into the opposite direction, where I then had to sprint from one end of the airport to the other. When I finally landed in my destination city my coworker had been there for over an hour. There was nothing easier or less stressful about that day.

That said, that was my worst experience flying, usually it is very easy - especially if I’m traveling by myself.

Except he was tried and convicted. According to our laws that means that he did it. This is the correct way to write about it, whether it is accurate or not.

I have an M1 MacBook Pro that I mostly connect with via ssh and it is currently running as an Ollama server, but it has run various projects over the past few years.

There have been killings of white South Africans, but police statistics show they are not killed at a higher rate than other South Africans.

Now, can we compare that to US statistics for the killings of black Americans vs other Americans?

I am aware and I don’t expect that everything on the internet is public domain… I think the models built off of works displayed to the public should be automatically part of the public domain.

The models are not creating copies of the works they are trained on any more than I am creating a copy of a sculpture I see in a park when I study it. You can’t open the model up and pull out images of everything that it was trained on. The models aren’t ‘stealing’ the works that they use for training data, and you are correct that the works were used without concern for copyright (because the works aren’t being copied through training), licenses (because a provision such as ‘you can’t use this work to influence your ability to create something with any similar elements’ isn’t really an enforceable provision in a license), or permission (because when you put something out for the public to view it’s hard to argue that people need permission to view it).

Using illegal sources is illegal, and I’m sure if it can be proven in court then Meta will gladly accept a few hundred thousand dollar fine… before they appeal it.

Putting massive restrictions on AI model creation is only going to make it so that the most wealthy and powerful corporations will have AI models. The best we can do is to fight to keep AI models in the public domain by default. The salt has already been spilled and wishing that it hadn’t isn’t going to change things.

No, it’s not feasible because the models are already out there. The data has already been ingested and at this point it can’t be undone.

And you can’t exactly steal something that is infinitely reproducible and doesn’t destroy the original. I have a hard time condemning model creators of training their models on images of Mickey Mouse while I have a Plex server with the latest episodes of Andor on it. Once something is put on display in public the creator of it should just accept that they have given up their total control of it.

There’s no way that’s even feasible. Instead, AI models trained on pubically available data should be considered part of the public domain. So, any images that anyone can go and look at without a barrier in the way, would be fair game, but the model would be owned by the public.

They wear magic underwear. It’s a whole thing.

Now I need to go reread it. I have the original comics, so time to go on a hunt!

I’m glad you enjoyed it.

I felt that Snagglepuss was even better. I don’t want to give any of the story away, but he’s a counterculture playwright in LA Hollywood during the McCarthy era red scare of the early 50s.

It’s an amazingly beautiful book and story.

This was supposed to be the truck that would be driven on Mars. On Mars!

Exactly… “Deepseek is a threat against our freedoms!!” also “No one can make any laws to put any restrictions on any AI models”. Cool.

My employer has stooped so low as to call it “return to work”. Like, what the fuck have I been doing the past 5 years!?

I’m currently in the final round of interviews for a new employer. I don’t expect that they will be nearly different, but at least they will pay more.