hackingonempty

> Men have souls.

Is it not a lie to assert something is true when you do not actually know it to be true?

Secretary Hegseth earned a BA from Princeton and an MPP from Harvard.

Princeton and Harvard are graduating idiots?

>Last week, I posted a visual demonstration of the sameness of AI-generated content. This makes the output easy to spot even if all the individual pieces are perfect facsimiles of what a human could create:

I think a point missing is that this output all looks the same because the prompters are not specifying much more than the barest minimum to get what they want. If you just prompt "generate a cover for my book 100,000 whys which is childrens book that answers their questions about science" then you get images like from TFA using the models default style. However, the models are capable of reproducing any great artists style and any content you want.

If you have seen the prompts for images on communities of enthusiasts you may notice that they can be quite long and specify considerable detail about both the content and the style of the output.

Here is one of the four above the fold on the front page of CivitAI for me right now, it has both a positive and negative prompt. Not that long because this is a fairly simple image. However the image doesn't look like the slop in the 100,000 Why's book covers or the many commercial signs and advertisements I'm seeing when I leave the house.

https://civitai.com/images/134444826

> it is only natural that the mechanical world picture would initially think of natural phenomena as operating according to externally imposed influences (motion imparted from outside, laws of nature, or what have you) rather than something intrinsic to them.

Laws of nature are not externally imposed influences. They are human descriptions of what we observe to happen under certain conditions. They are called laws because we have no reason to think they are ever violated.

Doubling your distance from a point source will quarter the energy you receive from it. Not because of any externally imposed influence but because an intrinsic property of a sphere is that surface area increases according to the square of the radius.

> as the mechanistic conception of the world developed, it essentially came to be about eschewing anything that smacked of final causality

Scientists would love to know if there is final causality other than the universe itself. However, evidence is the only way to separate reality from make-believe and there is not one scintilla of evidence that anything exists apart from the universe we see all around us.

"Under President [Donald J.] Trump, the War Department continues to take decisive action to once again restore freedom and strength to our joint force. We're seizing this moment to discard any absurd overreaching mandates that only weaken our warfighting capabilities." - Secretary Hegseth in April 2026

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

More reason to ditch C, C++, and C#!

Sure, a simple enriched bread like challah you can go by feel but you're going to have a lot more trouble succeeding with sourdough panettone without a tested recipe exactly because it is a living organism.

Of particular importance are the ratios of starter-flour-water when refreshing your culture (thrice daily! then bundling or floating for overnight storage...) It influences the ratio of Saccharomyces to Lactobacillus which has an effect on the pH of your dough after the first or second fermentation. If pH goes too low the gluten will dissolve and your dough will disintegrate when you try to knead in more ingredients.

One of the USA panettone masters, Roy Shvartzapel, insists you need a pH meter to be successful but after flailing around with one I found copying the refresh ratios of one of the Italian masters to do the trick. Unfortunately, refreshing is usually not part of published recipes!

It might come to be that maintainers have to begin accepting llm-authored or llm-assisted contributions just to maintain control of the project. Otherwise users will gravitate towards forks that offer the functionality they want.

If you are incapable of doing more than "spring init my_app" then the current models are like magic.

The only one you mentioned was existing factories extending production hours. AFAIK they already operate 24/7! Apple can't switch suppliers because everyone is selling out. Semiconductor factories are specialized and can't be easily switched to other types. It takes time and money and it stops making money for the duration, leading to a similar risk analysis as building a new one.

All of the time and money put into trying to reduce mass shooting deaths would save more people if it went into trying to reduce vehicular pedestrian deaths. No enumerated rights are involved in driving, making it vastly easier to implement legal solutions.

Schools and Corporations now have "active shooter drills."

Instead of trying to make our streets safer, the USA has responded by not allowing kids to walk or bike to school and have insane lines of cars and elaborate drop-off/pick-up procedures. Paradoxically, all of the additional vehicles on the road makes our streets more dangerous.

Building a RAM factory is a major investment and takes a lot of time. There is a big risk that by the time you enter production the rain will have stopped in the form of reduced demand and/or algorithmic improvements that reduce the memory required to produce good results. All of the attention is on the well funded frontier labs who may be buying up RAM as much to starve out competitors as anything else while in the background there is an army of researchers all over the world who only have a handful of consumer GPU to work with.

Unfortunately, RAM is more like a taxi than an umbrella.

> Anyone who’s spent any time in New York City knows that when it begins to rain, two things happen immediately: It becomes easier to buy an umbrella and it becomes harder to hail a cab. As soon as the first few drops fall, people appear on the street selling cheap umbrellas, while a lucky few pedestrians occupy all the available cabs.

http://shirky.com/2001/01/

No mention of whether the product is actually good.

(2010)

Best time to get them is when they are riding a bicycle.

TFA addresses this.

> The issue isn’t mass alone, but also height. Yes, spreading impact over a greater area reduces the force experienced by any given part of your body, but when that surface area rises further and further from the ground, the impact point on your body rises with it. If you’re hit below your center of mass, you’re likely to fall toward the vehicle. If you’re hit at or above that point, you’re likely to be knocked down in front of of the vehicle instead. The latter becomes less survivable due to the poor visibility offered by taller trucks and SUVs.

> “We see a lot of devastating collisions even at lower speeds because the pedestrian gets punted forward,” said Shawn Harrington, whose company, Forensic Rock, conducted crash testing for the report. “Before the driver knows what’s happened, the pedestrian’s head is under the wheel.”

In the USA, an order of magnitude more people on foot are killed each year by people driving cars and trucks than are killed in mass shootings. [0][1]

It is a massive problem that receives a disproportionate amount of attention.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/pedestrian-bike-safety/about/pedestrian-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...

> The US govt is going to ban foreign models

The people have a right to make and use whatever models they want, protected by the constitution. At a minimum, the models are described in research papers that are unquestionably protected speech. Skilled devs turn those into programs, also protected speech.

This is like saying Twitter isn't worth much because every web framework tutorial produces a "Twitter clone."

> If San Francisco was nuked tomorrow, the world would feel a weight off their shoulders.

Who Would Jesus Nuke?

Even the authors name seems to be generated in many cases. Look at how often "Bright" appears: Andrew W. Bright, Nolan Bright, Bright A. Jeffery, Pamela Bright, Thomas Bright, Daniel Bright, Mayan Bright, Henry Brightwood, Leo Brightham, Milo Brightspark.

There's also Molly Wonder, Elliot Wonder, Professor Pax Wonder, and Theo Wonderquill

Don't forget Lucas Thinkwell!

I've tried this a couple of times but it doesn't work for me, probably because I'm not willing to let Google follow me everywhere on the web. It looks like YouTube is required for music and won't start without it.

Instead of using giant Opus files that require you to rely on Google to make your site affordably hosted, how about using the "tracker" technology of yore? It let folks enjoy downloaded electronic music back in the dialup era. Formats include MOD, XM, IT and S3M and there are a bunch of semi-abandoned JS implementations.

> THese systems are only ever defensible as an investigative lead, neve as probable cause.

That's why the cops followed up with a photo lineup shown to the victim before applying for a warrant.

The article says the cops used "AI" to find a suspect then the victim identified them in a photo lineup. That provided the probable cause to get a judge to sign a warrant.

> pause and ask yourself when you last encountered software were you said "how the hell did they do that?"

Like every month for the past 5 years? The progress in machine learning is dizzying. It is astonishing what can be done now with text, images, audio, video, code, etc...

If you don't study it, however, you have no idea how it works or how to do it yourself.

oblig. xkcd https://xkcd.com/1425/

> Bread made with flour, water, salt, and yeast (plus maybe olive oil, butter, eggs, sugar, herbs etc) is not considered ultra processed.

Cake and cookies are bread and made with the same ingredients: flour, eggs, butter, sugar, salt, herbs.

I didn't think about it that way, thanks!

People are mortal. C.S. Lewis died over sixty years ago.