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Comment A bit more maybe (Score 1) 25

I'm even OK with using AI to do minimal graphics work. Some nonsense playing on a TV in the background of a bar. Graffiti in an alleyway. Grunt work stuff not important to the game itself, but makes the world feel a little more lived-in. Not character design, or voices, or the layout of a level, or clothes, etc...

Comment Re:Too bad the physical media landscape isn't good (Score 1) 89

No, HD-DVD and Bluray don't count...both of them were too expensive, too limited and too encumbered by the format war between them, and never became as attractive as DVD.

I think "Were too expensive" is operative here. Blu-Rays are pretty cheap these days. You can pick them up used at thrift stores for a couple bucks each. If you deal hunt on Amazon you get get them for $5 new. Even UHDs aren't bad, especially if you buy in bulk. You can get the Alfred Hitchcock Ultimate Collection UHD box set on Amazon for $112. That's 14 movies, which averages $8 per film.

Comment Jellyfin (Score 1) 134

How do you like Jellyfin? I've been using plex on TruenNAS, mainly for a huge number of ripped CDs and a few dozen movies. I don't need anything fancy, it's just a nice interface on a TV for the movies, and a cheap tablet streaming music to some remote controlled speakers.

Comment ZFS (Score 1) 134

My TrueNAS server takes forever to boot, 80% of it is loading ZFS pools. 19% of it is Dell's derpy server firmware that meticulously inventories every chip and cable in the server before thinking about booting something.

My Gentoo install running in Qemu on Windows 11 takes about four seconds to boot from the time Qemu launches to sddm.

Comment Not bad (Score 2) 134

Roughly 20 seconds from hitting the power switch to the login screen. The desktop comes up within a second of typing in my password. 13th gen Core i9, 32GB RAM, Samsung 990 Pro. MSI hardware. Windows11.

Bootup seems to be faster when you shut off all boot options except for the Windows bootloader. I shut off as much diagnostic, peripheral searching, and legacy boot stuff as possible.

Comment I agree (Score 1) 54

You have it about right. AI can code fairly simple programs and do a halfway decent job. It can't write complex software, it falls apart quickly as features are added. As a programmer, you can use AI to write the chunks of code needed to make a complex piece of software.

A podcast I listened to used AI to write a Linux/Qt based broadcast clip management program. It didn't do all of it by itself, but he wrote up requirements and asked it to write the pieces of code that filled those requirements, and pieced the resulting code fragments together himself. It didn't generate perfect code, he had to play around with prompts to get close to what he wanted, and there was a bit of cleanup and refactoring, but it whittled a, probably, two week long project down to a couple of days.

Comment Re:Seems pretty obvious (Score 1) 143

While it seems likely that he gave out the information in exchange for access to girls to rape, or because Epstein was blackmailing him, the chances of anything that harms Trump coming out of this are low.

He was involved with Epstein because of money. Epstein could funnel money to companies and organizations Andrew wanted funded. Getting girls for his friends was a side-hustle for Epstein. If you were that rich and powerful, you don't to to some money manager guy to get a prostitute, you just fly to Amsterdam. Now if you were at a party thrown by Epstein and there were girls there, and you are a sleazeball, you go for it.

There really isn't a lot of evidence of blackmail coming out. There might be, but I haven't seen any concrete examples, beyond rumor and conjecture.

United States

Andrew Yang Warns AI Will Displace Millions of White-Collar Workers Within 18 Months (andrewyang.com) 85

Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate and longtime Universal Basic Income advocate, published a blog post this week warning that AI is about to displace millions of white-collar workers in the U.S. over the next 12 to 18 months, a wave he has taken to calling "the Fuckening."

Yang cited a conversation with the CEO of a publicly traded tech company who said the firm is cutting 15% of its workforce now and plans another 20% cut in two years, followed by yet another 20% two years after that. The U.S. currently has about 70 million white-collar workers, and Yang expects that number to fall by 20 to 50% over the next several years.

Underemployment among recent college graduates has already hit 52%, and only 30% of graduating seniors have landed a job in their field. Yang's proposed remedy remains the same one he ran on in 2020: Universal Basic Income.

Comment Issues (Score 3, Interesting) 141

There are definitely groups pushing a narrative. There are also legitimate problems that need to be addressed. We have a hybrid and a pure EV, and there are definitely issues that would prevent us from going full EV. Several of them involve cold weather. Road trips in the summer aren't a problem. Road trips in the winter are. There needs to be a LOT more chargers in cold regions. Around us there are a ton of chargers going in the big metro areas, but none being built out on the boonies. If you want to drive more than a couple hundred miles out of town in the winter, it gets dicey quick.

Comment Tara Quantum (Score 4, Informative) 101

I bought a garbage bag full of audiophile cables from an estate sale for something like $30. I replaced the Monoprice cables on my stereo with them. I notice no difference, but they do look nice. It's also amusing to me having the $30 Logitech Bluetooth audio receiver hooked up to my stereo with $200 Tara Quantum IV cables. One of the cables weighs more than the receiver itself.

The only thing I've noticed about cables is that RCA ended cables tend to fail eventually. The cheap ones are glued on and, after time, the glue dries out and they'll loose connection. I'll shell out a couple extra dollars for a balanced Neutrik ended cable. Not because they sound better, but because the ends are soldered and clamped onto the wire. I've never had one fail, while I've had a half dozen RCA cables fail.

Comment Lost Media (Score 5, Informative) 75

A sci-fi fan Youtuber posted a video a few months ago about how the streaming version of Babylon 5 are pretty bad. Apparently, most of them have been upscaled to HD, and stretched to make them widescreen, which the originals were not. The only original 4:3 versions are the DVDs, which were mediocre transfers.

So your options are tracking down an old DVD copy and putting up with the soft desaturated transfer, or watching it on Blu-Ray or streaming, poorly upscaled and artificially stretched to a widescreen aspect ratio. The live shots are passable, but the CGI shots now look terrible.

Comment Suits (Score 1) 95

Some ski areas have bathing suit days for charity. You do as many runs as you can in your bathing suit, each run gets a donation. There are a few hot tubs at the bottom of the hill to warm up. Of course, when falling at those speeds the snow won't sandpaper your skin off like a ski jump would :)

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