There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.

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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • I just put Linux Mint Cinnamon on an old MacBook and it’s running pretty well. I had an SSD that I could use and an extra RAM (total of 3GB now), and it made all the difference. Planning to get two 4GB RAM cards to max it out, yay for old memory that’s still cheap.


  • That was not suggesting a different version of this article, but was more a reference to the fact that the US government has always been less than forthcoming about the true state of the economy and how well people are doing. A classic example would be how many people are underemployed but are still counted as being part of a healthy system. Or how working two or more jobs means you’re “employed”, with no suggestion of the workload needed to maintain the household. And now, the current administration is more willing just to disappear numbers than to try to make them look correct.





  • A complicated question, but in short, yes, it’s finite. The amount is actually far more than we could ever use possibly, but the real limitation is accessibility. As we extract and use up the easier to get oil, it costs more to get the harder to get. At some point we won’t be able to get to oil that’s there, and what we can get will cost so much that usage will be limited.

    In some cases we’ve still extracted from places that had a low or negative ROI, such as tar sands, because at the time investment was persuaded that it would pay off. Then there’s the changes that make hard to get places suddenly an opportunity, as the arctic areas might soon be.

    We should be changing not because of supply, but because of what the use of oil does. But we haven’t changed in the right direction after decades of saying that.



  • I’m sure that’s the condition, to use your data (that they protect of course) to better improve the browser. And I’m sure they are in a country where they don’t have to show logs (that I’m sure they don’t keep, yet somehow use your data).

    They need to stick with just the browser, period. Stop trying to drift into other areas. Firefox has unfortunately gotten too heavy for what it should be, and adding even more features (good or bad) doesn’t help the core performance.

    The other options out there have their pluses and minuses, but if Firefox keeps pushing people will live with the negatives of the browsers that seem to care about the browsing experience of their users.



  • Not a fan of reimagined stuff of any sort, it usually doesn’t hit well. But from a tech standpoint I can think of ways one could use the tech to improve game performance for new games. Usually making a game run faster or feel more realistic is all about fooling the player, not drawing what’s not seeable, showing hints of things that aren’t really there. Hell, that’s been true for movies and even stage, right?

    So my thought on how this could work is to have the actual core models be lower polys, enough for details but not as high as the best we’ve seen done, and minimal texturing. Then the generator uses that as a base to form the image it puts over the top. Still don’t see how that can be done that fast, but apparently we’re there now.


  • Unforunately the latest stuff I’ve seen is all about keeping character consistency, which is basically having a fixed frame of reference for every generation. What I don’t get not knowing much about the details is how LLM generation is faster than actual 3D modeling with more details? Perhaps overall it is faster per frame to generate a 2D image vs. tracking all the polys.

    Not saying which is right to do, there’s lots of baggage with discussing AI stuff, just wondering about the actual tech itself.


  • That’s what happened with ours. They were pushing to have longer and more complex passwords, which was great, since forever they had stuck with an eight character requirement (which I couldn’t believe, that’s breaking a few basic rules of security that I knew about, and this is a large corporation).

    So I figure okay, I’ll make my next password something that’s finally decent. Except when I go to use the older terminal based systems that are still crucial to operation, they won’t take anything past eight characters… because that’s what they were programmed for. Turns out IT had jumped on the better security bandwagon before they either had gotten to migrating things at the core level, or they didn’t think that far until the tickets started hitting. Likely the latter.

    It all works now, but it was funny having to go back to a less secure password for a while because of a slight oversight or assumption on IT’s part.





  • I actually do this. I have a small power bank I keep the mouse hooked up to, and when it falls low enough it taps into it. Every few weeks or even a month I recharge the bank up. But wires being a problem will depend on your setup and desk real estate. This doesn’t bother me, but having a wired keyboard would lose some space, so I’m glad for my wireless there. And that’s even less of a hassle, as it’s still running off the original batteries it came with years (and years!) ago. Makes sense, there is very little power usage there being a boring old Logitech non-backlit keyboard.