We probably live in a simulation with the purpose of producing the best anime. This is why we are living in an age with so much anime and with so many people who are interested in anime. The anime maximizing AI is simulating all kinds of scenarios from abiogenesis to a prolific anime industry. Most possible scenarios of life evolving from its first forms would not lead to the development of an anime industry, which is why it would be improbable for us to exist in a world with anime, if not for the fact that the simulated scenarios without anime in them are dropped and not simulated further.

Bashing my own head with a rock might seem harmful to my brain, but it also leaves minerals lodged in my skull. Minerals I can then sell to buy a bigger rock.

That’s Symbian, though. Nokia managed to launch a grand total of two or three Maemo/MeeGo phones (N900, N9, maybe another one I forget) before Elop killed it in the crib. It would have been one thing if the Burning Platform meno had been about S60, but it wasn’t.

Being basically just a Qt-based DE on a pretty standard RPM-based Linux distro (much much more so than Android, even at the time) Meego had a low barrier to entry into application development and a rather stable and mature API to work with.

Then again, if you “don’t think the company had the mentality to offer that” I guess you’re right in the sense that the alleged trojan horse CEO killed the platform before it had the chance to gain any traction.

I read the source. It was pretty funny, but I’m not installing a massive statistical word regurgitator program just to run this. I don’t want to be too mean about an anticapitalist piece of art but I don’t think posting an LLM-based game here is going to net you a hugely positive reception.

And even if Joseph Weizenbaum did actually say, verbatim: “if the problem hasn’t been solved in twenty years, it is time to give up”, that’s not the same as asking for the precise time when “machines will reach human-level intelligence”.

So far away we wait for the AGI
For the billions all wasted and gone
We feel the pain of compute time lost in few thousand days
Through the sneering and the flames we carry on

Imagining a guy who asks me a dumb question so I can let everyone know how I’d mock them with a joke answer.

The Burning Platform debacle was huge where I live and I remember it quite well.

It seems that Microsoft was planning on coasting on brand recognition, while the public correctly noticed the lack of any real synergy between Windows Phone and Microsoft’s desktop computer software. Nokia’s hardware was indeed top notch, but WP lacked a killer app, or indeed most apps at all. It missed the train and developers ignored it in favor of iOS and Android.

I doubt MeeGo would have managed to recapture the dominance Nokia had on the pre-iPhone market, but at least nerds like me would have vastly preferred it.

That sentence is somewhere between exactly 420.69 and 1,337.00 millialtmans of cringe.

It also doesn’t bode well for the hope of it dying down anytime soon.

Oo that might be even better from artistic standpoint!

I’m not even surprised. It’s the kids who are wrong etc.

If it’s not too rude to ask, @dgerard, can you edit the verb “photoshop” to start with a lowercase p to make it just a tiny bit more genericized?

I watched most of the first season of Silicon Valley with a friend who recommended it to me. I liked it. Every single character with a speaking role so far (with the possible exception of an exotic dancer and a graffiti artist) deserves death by nuclear weaponry. SFBA delenda est.

You think that’s impressive? It guessed my dad’s name on almost first try.

Signed, Rumpelstiltskin Jr.

Someone should come up with a catchy alliterative name for this tactic of incorporating competing ideas in Microsoft product family, augmenting them with their own proprietary crap and pulling the rug after achieving lock-in. Maybe call it AAA for “Adopt, add on, annihilate”.

What stereotype? The stereotype that awful.systems posters are hostile to people who praise LLMs? Good.

I don’t think announcing he’s “genuinely grateful” to his newly earned dogpile is helping recover his dignity too much. A simple admission and apology suffice, I don’t need you to go “thank you daddy punish me more” while at it.

Paul Graham randomly blurting out inane and ostensibly vague insinuations about fellow rich people’s obvious bullshit smells to me like the sort of buggy behavior you get from a lifetime of ass kissing. I sure hope it isn’t. It would be really bad if Paul Graham got his rocks off on huffing the smell of his own farts.

So I have two laser printers, a cute little HP one and an old Lexmark. The former works mostly OK, but requires fiddling* to get it working on Linux, and prints things smaller than their actual size. The latter is also good enough to be useful, but leaves streaks on page and is quite low on toner. Replacing the photoconductor and toner is just about expensive enough to justify consideration of buying a new printer altogether instead.

So anyway, I might be in the marker for a new printer, which reminded me of one of the best pieces of tech journalism of this decade . I also noticed it has been followed by sequels for subsequent years. Also a rare example of LLM use I can approve of, even if having to fight fire with fire (or search engines with slop) is a bit saddening.

A little offtopic (or I guess it’s almost ontopic for NotAwfulTech), but I found myself considering a color printer and seems that LED printers are the new hotness for that. Since the top results when searching “led vs laser color printer” are mind-numbing slop, I thought I’d ask if anyone here has experience with LED printers. Any typical pitfalls to watch out for? Is Brother still the least worst brand for them?

* For the curious, the printer requires a plugin called HPLIP. My distro has an automated installer for it in its repositories, but the installer’s Python code is not compatible with newest Python versions. Thankfully the fix only involves changing a locale.format to locale.format_string in one file and ignoring some warnings about invalid escape sequences. The URL for automatically dowloading the plugin from HP website is also empty, so I had to manually download the .run file from hplip’s sourceforge repository. The filename was also slightly different from what the installer was expecting and the cryptographic signature file was also mandatory, though when the installer tried and failed to download the corresponding key from a keyserver, it let me ignore the signature altogether. I can see how proprietary printer drivers made rms what he is, minus the pro child molestation stuff.

Disappointing if true. The omake for TH19 hits the nail on the head on why genAI as it exists today is antithetical to the ethos of the series.