I was going to ask how he knew it was Arch, but I feel like that is just setting up the next comment.

To be honest the answer is obvious, straight forward and impossible. Society just needs to reject entirely any company that embraces shitty “AI”.

I mean it’s not as though “AI” is in any way intelligence, it’s just utilising large data sets to make it look that way, think about it, you meet a person at a party who is entirely oblivious to social norms, incapable of understanding tone, not able to improvise and adapt to conversation, but is really good at stating and restating and respinning facts that they picked up in previous conversations, is that the smartest one in the room?

In every one of my interactions with AI it has reminded me of talking to my ex’s autistic son, he was astounding with the things he could remember and repeat (and would do so with absolute conviction) but would crash out when given too many explicitly contradictory tidbits of information.

So assume that any company that replaces workers with it is happy to embrace slop and ask yourself if that is a company worth your business?

Unfortunately the world is far too influenced by America and has spent too long buying into the narratives that have been used to strip Americans of all the characteristics that they like to believe define them.

So the general public is dumb, reactionary, intolerant and beligerent in far too many places around the world.

The tiniest trace of class solidarity and any company that opted to embrace the shit slop as anything other than a tool to enhance the existing workforce would be shunned and reduced to irrelevancy and the world could move on.

For what it’s worth I fully 100% believe that AI is attainable, but when we get there we will see LLMs as equivalent to alchemy and shake our heads about the amount of resources we spent trying to turn virtual lead into digital gold. I also wonder if our descendants will curse our wholesale destruction of the planet following these modern day charlatans down the path of environmental collapse just to explore a dead end that was never going to yield a positive result.

I have written and rewritten my response here trying to find the right tone. I feel like we are closer to agreement here than might be immediately obvious. I think a lot of what we are seeing now is a result of 50+ years of people who find the idea of your republic distasteful seeking every method they can to erode it away. All the details are just components of this project, seems to me that MAGA is a result of years of stoking xenophobia and anti-intellectualism. Turns out if you spend decades laying the groundwork you can make the situation seem completely hopeless to a whole populace. I sincerely worry the long term goal is to perfect the formula for dismantling democracy and then start exporting it to the rest of the world.

Or I could be a fool, I don’t know and I don’t want to rewrite this again. Sorry that this was so rambling.

From my detached non American (but still a citizen of the planet so likely to get fucked hard by the way Americans vote) point of view, seems like Americans are continually letting perfect be the enemy of least bad. “Well since Democrats are kinda bad in these instances maybe we should just go fully fascist theological doom cult. That will force the Democrats to improve, or kill us all.”

Actually I am misremembering, apparently capacitors are bad for audio, so to get the best you have to have chunky inductors and circuitry to do powerfctor correction to get a PF of 1. I was remembering big chunky power conditioners that look like batteries but are actually huge iron core inductors. They get your audio equipment “closer” to the power generation, which “improves your soundscape”. I’m sure he was using the stupid crazy priced audiophile powercords as well.

Oh, I was going to say you know a higher grade of audiophile than I do, but then I remembered that no I have met one. He had installed what was in effect a powerwall with supercaps and was generating his own waves through. His speakers cost more than my car, individually. I want to say Palladium Studio References. Wow yep. Thanks for that little blast from the musty vaults of deep memory… Well a 10 minute conversation 20ish years ago and a lot of “Ohs” and “Ahs” at his photo album.

Oh and the latencies, the really minimal processing that a CRT does compared to an LCD means that input lag could be insanely low. Subtlely different to refresh rate, I always felt it was the gamer equivalent of audiophile grade speaker cables personally, but some people swear they can detect it.

Oh that’s OK I just wanted to reminisce on the glory days, my backlog is so long already I could use all my spare time for the next year and still barely make a dent.

First time I attended a LAN party was with a group of 40 people who hired out the two conference rooms at the local library. First medal of homour game was a blast, especially 1 moment where I ended up last alive getting advice from the other 7 people on my team who were clustered around trying to coach me through taking on the last three Germans from the other team. Also helping to cart all the monitors in was some good cardio, kinda miss moving 24" Sony Trinitron CRTs around… Oh wait no I don’t at all.

You should give the Amiga version a go via an emulator. You might be interested in the differences. Loved that trilogy back in the day.

Oh I think I have seen this one, don’t the vampires get to go public now? And we find out werewolves and fairies are real too?

“Don’t get too excited. Don’t get too excited. Don’t get too excited. Don’t get too excited. Don’t get too excited. Don’t get too excited.”

Its not working.

Having prepared sandwiches at industrial scales yo would be surprised how much you can scale down costs, bulk purchases can make a suprising difference. I really envy the system that most Japanese schools have in place. They seem to be focussed on the outcomes, not the cost or social engineering. I have talked with some Japanese friends about this and while a few are from wealthy families and attended schools without a formalised school lunch program the majority talk about how it opened their horizons as far as food options, gave them a sense of community, and was just a defining characteristic of their school life.

Not American, but here in Australia there is a growing trend towards supplying some level of food at school, quite a few schools are introducing Breakfast Club to offer food before school, and a lot of schools find they can get better nutrition for students by supplying balanced options to students directly via a variety of programs.

Food and Kids can be quite complicated and my own son can be quite resistant to the idea of even having food in his school bag as his medication supresses appetite and he feels pressured if we make him something as opposed to providing shelf stable packaged foods that won’t spoil if he can’t bring himself to eat.

From what I understand of the situation in the US this is an intersectional issue where it has been identified that:

• Preparing food in bulk is a lot cheaper
• Food can be fresh and thus encourage kids to eat it more readily
• Nutritional outcomes can be targeted

Which is intersecting with:

• America is a capitalist hellscape where no opportunity to profit of anyone, no matter how vulnerable, can be overlooked
• There are multiple levels in the school lunch program where private companies can invade to engage in some rent seeking
• Social pressure can be exerted to make sure families feel obligated to participate no matter how expensive or predatory the program
• Never ever should a poor person be allowed to feel a modicum of support or relief, if that can be achieved by leveraging their children so much the better.

You know I never considered that, I guess I just saw the Asian influences and never considered the parallels to Christian allegory. Makes sense.

Its funny because the overlap of people who are in to Star Wars and Evangelical Christianity really took me by surprise. How are those two things so closely aligned? And let’s face it, remove the people who fundamentally believe it is their obligation to proscribe how and what people think and you get a whole bunch of people who realise that peoples gender identity is none of their damned business.

I like it, however are you concerned about having something made out of hard plastic, glass and metal at roughly head height in the event of a crash?

Having seen a few improvised claymore mines in cars (rhinestones or diamontes on steering wheels or dashes) it’s always something I consider.

I guess what I was trying to say with my rambling 1am slightly drunken screed, is that all of us swim in a sea of ignorance. I sure as hell do, I know little to nothing about mining, a lot of farming practices are completely unknown to me and the logistics used to coordinate the delivery of healthcare at a national level are frankly mind boggling (I live in a country with a somewhat functional healthcare system, ignore this example if you live in the US).

The biggest thing, IMHO, that seperates me from a lot of the younger (and older) people I meet and interact with, is that I am happy to say “I don’t know.” And if it’s important I can and will go and find out how it works, at least well enough to approach the cliffs of competency and decide if it’s worth the effort to scale them.

I cannot tell you how many topics I have learnt enough about to decide to eat the steak and declare that “Ignorance is bliss.” Thankfully I haven’t had to do so while betraying my colleagues to the agents yet.

Maybe the writers at Games Workshop pulled a bit of prescience out when they did their exercise in hyperbolic projection of trends across 38,000 years.

Or maybe it was influence of the warp and Tzeentch…

I am not arguing in any way that there should be some basic competence required of everyone who uses tech, in the same way that despite my aversion to cars I know how to change a tyre, check and top up my oil, feel the windshield wiper resevoir and check the radiator level. It is incumbent on me to have that knowledge as a foundational level of being a driver and car owner, and yes I am aware that there are a number of drivers who do not know these things, but that is another discussion.

I think that far, far more important than all this is teaching critical thinking, media literacy and scepticism. A grade 11 & 12 (I’m Australian so not sure how closely that maps but 17-19 year olds) health teacher I was talking to recently told me that more than 80% of her students admit to recieving the vast majority or all of their health information from TikTok. It genuinely does not matter if they understand the finer points of say file system structure, if they are uncritically listening to a shitty AI voice over a video of three people doing a synchronised “dance” telling them that oranges cause shin splints.

If our society, not just a segment of it, was taught to understand what media is, how it interacts with culture, and how rich people use it to establish and maintain control. That control from a ruling elite via newspapers, or TV, or the Internet is IMHO far more responsible than anything else for the state of your country… And my country… And the world. With that in mind I put my effort into trying to get my kids to research things for themselves and to look for the hidden motivations behind the facade of everything they do.