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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • The issue is that if you accept it, there will be no better option. Once you get out of the evangelists (who rarely actually contribute much code…) you are looking at professionals who are choosing to spend their free time contributing to the community. And having a few users (or, in this case, ad watching customers in the android app…) goes a long way. You don’t get that if everyone has decided the vibe coded slop is “good enough”.

    Is human written code necessarily better? No. But, at the very least, if someone cares enough to obfuscate their project so it is not obvious it was shat out by Cursor? Maybe they care enough to provide support.



  • Eh. Some stuff does make sense to centralize.

    Like, the concept of a thin client (what these basically are “close enough” to) is a really good one. They drastically simplify security and costs for corporate environments. And, even in the before times, it might genuinely make sense to just pay for a month/hundred hours of GFN if you wanted to play the latest AAA game rather than upgrading your five year old computer that handles everything else you play perfectly.

    The bigger issue being that it now increasingly makes sense to pay for years/thousands of hours of GFN because of how broken the everything is. And the vultures (like Amazon and nVidia) smell the decay.

    And… I didn’t want to crap on the other person too much but I do think p2p is why so many people think this can’t work. There is a big difference between streaming from your computer over starbucks wifi and connecting to a major data center. And there are also arguments for power and ecological impact but that becomes a MUCH bigger mess full of bad actors and incomplete comparisons.







  • Sort of.

    Yes, the nobility and the royals basically had comparable lifespans to those today. Pretty much uniformly throughout human history.

    The average peasant? Wikipedia so grain of salt, but it lines up with much of what I have seen over the years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy.

    Life Expectancy at Birth (LEB) in the Bronze age is believed to be around 24. Now, this is going to be skewed because we are generally finding the sites of battles (easier to find 20 corpses than 1…). But, at the same time, LEB in the medieval period (30-33) is going to be skewed by most records caring a lot more about the nobility than some rando on a farm.

    LEB has 100% gone up as wars become less common and medicine becomes much more effective and plentiful. And I’ll admit I was exaggerating for comedic effect here. But also… not that much.

    Because maybe you DO have good odds of living to your late 50s if you make it to your early 40s… the average is low for a reason and it isn’t JUST infant death. It is working hard to survive day to day and being incredibly vulnerable to crop yields (whether starving or being sent to war because said nobility got hungry/bored). And when you are seeking knowledge from those more experienced around the village… they are gonna skew a lot younger than Lord Farquad’s uncle.



  • Can we not pretend the problem is solely performance based? People keep doing this with generative AI and it keeps resulting in “oh shit, ghibli AI is so awesome”.

    Especially since… can you watch a twitch stream? Congrats, you can stream a desktop. Even back with Stadia it was very much viable to play games like AssCreed over streaming and have a very comparable experience to it being local. And stuff like Geforce Now actually work REALLY well.

    The issue shouldn’t be “can you make this perform well enough I want to use it”. It should be about ownership and the implication for… everything if all “personal computers” exist solely in a data center and all documents exist solely in The Cloud and so forth. Preservation of anything becomes nigh impossible and you suddenly have to pay a monthly fee to ever see your kid’s pictures again.


  • No. It really hasn’t.

    Much of the historic (so not recent) idolation of the elderly (even when “the elderly” meant folk in their 30s and 40s…) was specifically about the pursuit of knowledge and self betterment. It was knowing how to make your spears fly farther or how to properly rotate the crops in the field and so forth.

    Fast forward and The Rich would outright buy philosophers for the prestige of being the patron of someone so intelligent and influential. Which continued on to the arts and so forth.

    Hell, not too long ago it was “work hard so you can get into a good school and make something of yourself”.

    Now? it is outright vilification of “intellectuals” and people who think “Too long, didn’t read” is an insult rather than a condemnation of their own attention spans.

    Or, to roll way back: it is people saying “Fuck you old man. I don’t need your sharp pointy sticks. I am gonna go punch that tiger until it turns into chicken”.


    Which is another aspect of the stupidification of humanity by conservatives the world 'round. MANY people have this idea that “Medieval Times” were some no woman’s land where women existed to be housewives and to be raped and sometimes not even in that order. And historians constantly face palm as they have to explain that the george r r martins of the world are just racist old white guys and that women were generally just… people. Yes, they tended to gravitate more towards some occupations than others but there are plenty of historic records of female mercenaries and even Ladies having to lead their feudal troops into battle for one reason or another.

    But people have this mindset that “the world has always been shit”.

    Its the same as how so much white supremacist bullshit is built around the idea that “We are just being historically accurate. There was no melanin in Bohemia in the 1400s so really, you are the racist. Deus Vult!”. When all signs are that, while not insanely common to see a black dude, it was also not so uncommon that it would be written about in every single business transaction done for months on end.

    And that most of the Othering was almost entirely about war. One week you might have no problem with the people across the river and the next week you might have been taught that those red headed bastards have no souls and it is your godly duty to go murder them and enslave their children.



  • Trying to get into the mind of a deranged fascist is a futile effort at the best of times.

    But my speculation? He understands that trump is a real shit asset. Way too impulsive and he is rapidly reaching the point where even video of him sucking off bill clinton won’t make a difference (and, thus, won’t be a threat). And putin is competing with all the other people pulling trump’s strings who don’t need to get on a plane to intimidate him.

    So either way works. The point is to negate the US as a threat (either by turning us into an ally or letting us murder each other) and, as a result, negate NATO as a threat. Because most of NATO aren’t fucking lunatics who put a massive percentage of one of the largest GPDs in the world into a standing military. WE were the army of NATO. And… yeah.