I luckily stocked up on storage before the prices got crazy so I’m good there (although my RAID is gonna have to sit unfinished for a while), but I didn’t upgrade my RAM when I should have.

I’ve been saying for a while, IMO the thing with AI is that it is actually pretty useful in certain circumstances. The problem I think is, we’ve taken something that’s a handy tool and blown it up to world-altering proportions. This has also made everyone very polarized - there’s the camp of “It’s going to take over the world and do everything” vs. the camp of “I can’t wait for AI to go away” and I don’t think either of those will fully happen. I think when the dust settles it’ll just be more of a correction back to where it should have been in the first place, which as I say is more of just a handy tool in the toolbox.

I think some of it is how you apply it personally too. Like I’m an arts person, but I don’t let AI do any actual art stuff, because that’s what I want to do. What I think it can be useful for is all the paperwork like grant applications, form letters etc. AKA the sort of mindless paperwork clutter that doesn’t need a lot of brain power but still needs to be done and eats up time. I’m fine to let AI do that stuff, so I can spend more time doing the actual art myself.

high horse

I see what you did there

Favourite/Current Distro/Distro I’ve used the most: Arch btw.

Distro liked the least: Ubuntu

First Distro Used: Corel Linux (I am old lol)

Honourable Mention: Pop!OS with the COSMIC desktop is pretty nice considering how new it is IMO.

Future Distro: I’ve messed around with NixOS a bit and I kind of want to try it. I like to tinker a lot though so sometimes immutable OS-es kind of interfere with that.

I’m up to Wyrd Sisters!

I happens as a Brit too. Recently I casually used the phrase “use your loaf” around some North Americans. I then had to explain that loaf = loaf of bread = head. They were like “why” and then I had to try to explain the concept of Cockney Rhyming Slang, and then there was a barrage of questions about the origin of Cockney Rhyming Slang and all the other examples. I don’t know, I’m not even Cockney!

I hope he receives the same amount of respect and care that he showed to others throughout his life.

Having his twitching, lifeless carcass hooked up to a machine to keep it functional enough to be used as a ghoulish puppet to subvert democracy one last time.

Maybe for an encore he can have his corpse injected with Ebola and launched at a food bank lineup from a catapult.

One I always find weird is how often we reuse the exact same word with the same spelling and pronunciation to mean wildly different things. For example, the word ‘jam’ can mean:

• a fruit preserve
• to play music
• heavy traffic
• a door that won’t open
• to cram something into something else
• a difficult situation

Or ‘saw’, which can be to look at something in the past tense or to cut wood. The word ‘run’ apparently has over 600 different meanings!

We also have contronyms, which is when a word also means the opposite of itself. For example ‘dust’, which can mean to add dust or remove it. Or ‘left’, which can mean remaining (“I only have three left”) or departing (“They left.”)

Chinese has something a bit like this too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den

I also tried to learn German and I remember this about gendered nouns:

The man = der mann (masculine)

The woman = die frau (feminine)

The boy = der junge (masculine)

The girl = das mädchen (neutral)

Not even genders themselves have the genders you’d expect lol

Also in French once you get past about 60 the numbers turn insane. E.g. 97 = Quatre-vingt-dix-sept, or literally Four-twenty-ten-seven.

I did an experiment with this - knowing nothing about this guy, I was like “I bet he either worked or currently still works for the oil industry.” Then went to Wikipedia and the second sentence of his article is:

Before leading the U.S. Department of Energy, Wright served as the CEO of Liberty Energy, North America’s second largest hydraulic fracturing company

Nailed it lol

I’m working on that currently. I think I’m on book 6, so only about 40 more to go lol

Mine is Siamese Dream

I started building a RAID before the prices of hard drives popped off, so I got the enclosure and one drive, I was going to buy the other drives when I had some spare cash. Now a single 8tb HDD (not even solid state!) is $450 CAD and there’s no way I can spend $1350 to finish this thing so it’s just sitting there.

The Index of Economic Freedom is created by the Heritage Foundation, which should tell you all you need to know about that as a source.

I’m in a pretty mercenary mindset about it these days TBH. I’ve got some money on the table, whoever can provide 32gb of RAM and three HDDs for my RAID at a price that’s not ridiculous can have it.

China seems to be working on it.

Microsoft’s entire business plan seems to be to produce the shittiest possible interpretation of every single piece of software they can think of, and then have it become the default that everyone uses for some fucking reason.

I really hope China or someone else can step up and just flood the entire market with cheap components eventually.