[-] gerikson@awful.systems 2 points 10 hours ago

also on my fav book torrent tracker - even has an audiobook version!

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 3 points 1 day ago

whoah that looks interesting, how can I access it (semi-)legally?

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago

The FDA is a response to people just making shit up and selling cough cures full of opium. "Raw milk" pushers are cut from the same cloth.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

I don't wanna pull national stereotypes here but aren't Germans really quite open about stuff like homeopathy? "be your own pharmacist" sounds like right up that alley

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 2 days ago

Governments have criminalized the practice of managing your own health. Despite the fact that for most of human history bodily autonomy, and self-managed health was the norm, it is now required that most aspects of your health must be mediated by an institution deputized by the state.

JFC

go back 200 years before the "gubmint" got involved in public health and tell me that average life expectancy was better than now

before the pandemic it was possible for people to believe that libertarianism was an answer to everything, turns out if it was a tiny minority would have hoarded all the PPE while the people they were gonna sell it to died of the plague. libertarians have not been able to square this circle since

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 3 points 2 days ago

It's a wrap!

One of the easier years imho. Better than last year in any case.

I get the feeling that this is Eric's way of saying goodbye, and that this might be the last year, but I might be wrong.

Puzzles by difficulty (leaderboard completion times)

  1. Day 21 - Keypad Conundrum: 01h01m23s
  2. Day 24 - Crossed Wires: 01h01m13s
  3. Day 17 - Chronospatial Computer: 44m39s
  4. Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
  5. Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
  6. Day 20 - Race Condition: 15m58s
  7. Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
  8. Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
  9. Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
  10. Day 22 - Monkey Market: 12m15s
  11. Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
  12. Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
  13. Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
  14. Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
  15. Day 18 - RAM Run: 05m55s
  16. Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
  17. Day 23 - LAN Party: 05m07s
  18. Day 25 - Code Chronicle: 04m43s
  19. Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
  20. Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
  21. Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
  22. Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
  23. Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
  24. Day 19 - Linen Layout: 03m16s
  25. Day 01 - Historian Hysteria: 02m31s
[-] gerikson@awful.systems 3 points 2 days ago

congrats! I still have 6 stars to go, but I still think this was easier than last year.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 3 points 3 days ago

day 23

this is one of those days when it’s all about the right term to google right

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submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by gerikson@awful.systems to c/notawfultech@awful.systems

current difficulties

  1. Day 21 - Keypad Conundrum: 01h01m23s
  2. Day 17 - Chronospatial Computer: 44m39s
  3. Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
  4. Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
  5. Day 20 - Race Condition: 15m58s
  6. Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
  7. Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
  8. Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
  9. Day 22 - Monkey Market: 12m15s
  10. Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
  11. Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
  12. Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
  13. Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
  14. Day 18 - RAM Run: 05m55s
  15. Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
  16. Day 23 - LAN Party: 05m07s
  17. Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
  18. Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
  19. Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
  20. Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
  21. Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
  22. Day 19 - Linen Layout: 03m16s
  23. Day 01 - Historian Hysteria: 02m31s
[-] gerikson@awful.systems 3 points 5 days ago

so many off by one errors

also first time I had to run the code on a desktop machine because my VPS was too slow

12
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by gerikson@awful.systems to c/notawfultech@awful.systems

Problem difficulty so far (up to day 16)

  1. Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
  2. Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
  3. Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
  4. Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
  5. Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
  6. Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
  7. Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
  8. Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
  9. Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
  10. Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
  11. Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
  12. Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
  13. Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
  14. Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
  15. Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
  16. Day 01 - Historian Hysteria: 02m31s
6

The previous thread has fallen off the front page, feel free to use this for discussions on current problems

Rules: no spoilers, use the handy dandy spoiler preset to mark discussions as spoilers

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 81 points 2 months ago

This is the inevitable evolution of climate change denialism - accept it's real and happening, just that it's too late / too expensive to do anything about it.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 74 points 2 months ago

"tenant of white supremacy"

White Supremacy is the worst landlord.

17
9
19
40

This season's showrunners are so lazy, just re-using the same old plots and antagonists.

91
71

“It is soulless. There is no personality to it. There is no voice. Read a bunch of dialogue in an AI generated story and all the dialogue reads the same. No character personality comes through,” she said. Generated text also tends to lack a strong sense of place, she’s observed; the settings of the stories are either overly-detailed for popular locations, or too vague, because large language models can’t imagine new worlds and can only draw from existing works that have been scraped into its training data.

25
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submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by gerikson@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

The grifters in question:

Jeremie and Edouard Harris, the CEO and CTO of Gladstone respectively, have been briefing the U.S. government on the risks of AI since 2021. The duo, who are brothers [...]

Edouard's website: https://www.eharr.is/, and on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/edouard-harris

Jeremie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremieharris/

The company website: https://www.gladstone.ai/

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submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by gerikson@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

HN reacts to a New Yorker piece on the "obscene energy demands of AI" with exactly the same arguments coiners use when confronted with the energy cost of blockchain - the product is valuable in of itself, demands for more energy will spur investment in energy generation, and what about the energy costs of painting oil on canvas, hmmmmmm??????

Maybe it's just my newness antennae needing calibrating, but I do feel the extreme energy requirements for what's arguably just a frivolous toy is gonna cause AI boosters big problems, especially as energy demands ramp up in the US in the warmer months. Expect the narrative to adjust to counter it.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 88 points 1 year ago

I believe the scientific consensus is that it originated in a wet market in Wuhan.

The "lab leak theory", while not impossible, is also shorthand for a morass of conspiracy theories grounded in racist attitudes towards China. It somehow conflates that the pandemic is China's fault, if not an outright attack from China, while simultaneously downplaying any efforts to mitigate such an attack.

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gerikson

joined 2 years ago