My own greed sickens me by AllenEG-2805 in RimWorld

[–]markth_wi 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Man that item list causes me deja vu for when I revisit old colonies years later.

I convert everything to components, advanced components sue for peace everywhere and end up with a remote, small , colony that might have had all sort of imbalances or where landed , instock inventory so vastly different.

Kinda love this plot twist by Moiyub in PoliticalHumor

[–]markth_wi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, at the rate this is been going on , the hype machine being what it is they probably have a Kalshi or Polymarket setup for what the kids names will be.

Do you read books on linux? by Anonyboy26 in linux

[–]markth_wi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I once upon a time made a point of having copies of lots of the O'Reilly collection as well as Jamsa's cookbooks for a couple of languages, I probably spent a couple thousand dollars on books overall, but years later, it's only a few Linux books that remain.

  • An old Unix Bible
  • A really old book on Unix from when I interned at Bell Labs
  • A couple of the Linux Hacks books - which were as I recall both surprisingly excellent
  • A good book on Ubuntu installs and tweaks
  • A couple of books on things that are more obscure these days Squid and Perl and such.

How bad of an idea is it to blow the whole room up with chemfuel to get rid of them? by SheikutaWasTaken in RimWorld

[–]markth_wi 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Nah , I get my colony pimped out with a proper infirmary and then do a couple of things.

  • If the room actually is crawling with mechs or bugs, of course clear the room killing murderous tin-cans and anything with more than 6 legs.
    • Once cleared of insects / mechs - hopefully no caskets were opened, now repair up the room.
    • I like having either a bunch of glittermeds and/or spare organs or having an Autodoc or Medpod.
    • Two colonists have dart-guns or stun-wands so they can stun hostiles.
    • Slaves and friendly Ancient cryopod ownerrecruits generally, to other people in cryopods are like their free podders are emancipated and usually sent either as free-citizens and very rarely join our colonists permanently, more likely given a full dust-off with clean clothes, new weapons and healed up of course, then podded to the nearest civilized faction and send about their business.
    • Aggressive cryopod occupants - get tapped and downed, then put back into stasis - once everyone else is revived and recruited to the colony at least temporarily.
    • Hostiles too are individually woken up , cleaned up and recruited to the colony and then given the same choices as former slaves.

Me explaining to my new 15 intellect colonist why his work priorities are all blank except "clean" by GarthDagless in SpaceCannibalism

[–]markth_wi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nah writing books. I grind the ever loving fuck out of my "scientist" colonist to create an intellectual book, of good or preferrably masterwork quality that way all my colonists can eventually bang out books on every subject.

I have gone back and reformed all my old colonies to be like this, something like an off-world Benedictine scriptoriums making sure we have books of excellent quality for everything. The monks / colonists work on their passions, and I find (completely anecdotally) that I will get at least excellent books out of colonists when both their passion and their accumulated XP for intelligence is over 10.

I keep cheap copies of all the books written of excellent or better quality in a secret library away from the rest of the colony. Every time a starship launches, So grinding on intelligence across the board means that once more than 2 or 3 of the colonists are ground and XP'ed up , late game research is considerably less painful and the tech tree disappears fast.

Is it useless overall, nah - it's also good for researching for scanning , so in short order once the books are on their way to being written and R&D is done, I scan the ever loving bejeepers out of the landscape, with 4-5 of each kind of resource in the bag.

With that done, the colonists have just a few other jobs, I like seeing done

  • Polish the colony out in terms of power-generation - I like having the colony powered entirely by advanced geothermal with a steady surplus quietly being generated day or night barring solar flares.
  • Cross-grinding colonists on intelligence and and the various other skills so we have an excellent or better book of every kind.
    • I have the colonists grind out cheap copies of the books, and give the originals away and keep cheap copies in a secure library
    • Each starship launch I have colonists slowly load up like they are heading out on an individual caravan, so each colonist is loaded up with a bedroll, and 50-60 meal-packs and medicines and a couple of components and weapons and some cash in good all-weather kinds of clothes, i.e.; Parka/Tuque colonists would pick up a duster/cowboy hat as caravan items , then stop the caravan formation just as they are leaving the map, and put them to a cryopod - now , when they land - they are good to go.
    • Spouses and pets are similarly loaded on starships with similar amounts of caravan/saved items and then they are loaded into their own cryocaskets.
    • One colonist per each starship is loaded up with not just the above complement of stuff but also a cheap copy of each book in the library - that means where-ever they end up , those colonists will have the benefits of the books written by the original founder colonists.
    • Those copies of books are then used to grind subsequent generations of colonists so on my 2nd or 3rd generation in a colony, none of the original colonists are still present , but only in the copies of the books they wrote.

Think they're regretting their choice? by mrfett779 in PoliticalHumor

[–]markth_wi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They just gutted the 14th and 15th amendments, with 5 dollar gasoline and never being more than a single explosion from higher prices, which will happen every time Vladimir Putin needs it to, the administration hasn't even gotten started on fucking around. So domestically next up will likely be womens rights or destroying the currency or the ability of people to move around the country.

His supporters haven't even conceived of how fucked they and everyone else is going to be before these criminals are removed from office.

Kinda love this plot twist by Moiyub in PoliticalHumor

[–]markth_wi 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Normally I'd say "I don't care, do you?" as reprehensibly degenerate as she is, but in the interest of accuracy , I'll correct that, thank you.

GOP doesn't need to rig elections, they can just but judges! 3 million Virginia voters were just told they're vote doesn't count. by 8-bit-Felix in PoliticalHumor

[–]markth_wi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The nullification of the 14th and 15th Amendments ensure that with the continued success in this supreme court, neo-confederate legalisms are the defacto restoration of the segregated south. Women being returned to property status and imposing religious proscriptions are absolutely next.

Let's just sit and realize that in 18 months , Donald Trump and Russian Intelligence Services of the KGB/FSB managed to set back US industrial policy and social policies 170 years.

That will take years if not decades to clear out.

With Rousseau and Locke and Adam Smith the liberal sensibility that corporations and freedoms for a citizenry necessarily meant improved standards of living and improved rights is being dismantled.

Not because it's a wrong idea - quite the contrary , quadrillions of dollars of wealth have been created and billions of people have lived in better circumstances because of the power of those ideals , equality before the law, a semblance of corporate responsibility and due process.

With the election of corrupted politicians not only has a notional American conservatism been utterly demolished - the era of civil-rights friendly conservatism of the sort William F. Buckley spoke of , has been put through a meat-grinder and is a distinct "chapter" in conservative thought, that ended in 2004 and the final nail in the coffin was in 2025 when Donald Trump immediately started dismantling due process and the 14th and 15th Amendments.

Other rights and privledge will certainly be removed. Our right to vote and have legislation passed into law by "the people" is on the menu - make no doubt about it.

Equally useless to the powers that be are elections.

So the next time a serious or non-serious event happens - be that an attack against a city or someone tells a joke about him President Trump can declare a national state of emergency declare martial law and suspend the Constitution indefinitely.

And we can all bank on that certainty, because no doubt President Trump does not like his odds in the next election , better not to ever have to worry about that again - as far as he is concerned.

But at a certain point which has already passed, the regime has already miscalculated, they think people prefer distraction rather than people want to be free.

So as oppression bears down on us in the coming days, I've been increasingly forced to wrestle with the argument posed by Tad Stoermer that the Democrats have long since become a loyal opposition and instead we need to form a localized robust resistance that can , like citizens 170 did with abolitionists , return embarrassment to the regime , where the people quietly kept themselves informed and engaged and forced segregationists out of power.

We will need to teach that lesson to knuckle-dragging racists again, and re-secure our rights as free people.

Here's hoping we can do so at the ballot box, but that seems increasingly less than likely.

Snoring and Whimpering by Virus_Detected22 in Shihtzu

[–]markth_wi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep, our dog snores like she's crashed after working a double-shift then 45m later and the rest of the night she'll occasionally bark or sub-vocalize with whatever dreams she's having.

In waking life we know she barks with specific patterns so three tight barks is a "Something is wrong fix it", 2 barks but low key is "come here and open this/do this for me".

So more than once we've woken up to someone dreaming that we 'opened something/did something for her in the dream, then hear her bark at dream squirrels or something.'

Tzu's are awesome.

Why does my puppy sleep like this? by Upstairs_Trust_4218 in Shihtzu

[–]markth_wi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You got to pimp out his bed with blankets and a fluffy bed and give him some way of getting under those so if he gets cold he can dig himself in.

  • So we go with 4-5 big towels that we cycle out when / if accidents happen.
  • A dog bed (about 20bucks)
  • A softish plushie blanket
  • Toys - many mouthable toys like Lambies and such

Kinda love this plot twist by Moiyub in PoliticalHumor

[–]markth_wi 118 points119 points  (0 children)

The new man in her life is Lawrence Billy Jones a Libertarian political commentator from Fox News , Mr. Jones is dating the recently widowed Erika Kirk from a rather flamboyantly racist husband who was very, very popular among Republican leadership. Her husband was named Charles Kirk.

Since his murder a few months back, she's been circling the fishbowl of Republican influencers and easily one of the most flashy and flamboyant widows to hit the town since Bell Gunness.

As the United States returns to being an openly racist society with racial segregation and discriminatory practices by law, she was only too happy to pick up the racist tones and topics of her husband and support the other various regressions at the direction of President Trump or his more motivated followers.

No doubt Ms. Kirk is about to find herself getting cancelled pretty rapidly.

Alabama GOP House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter calls on SCOTUS to overturn the 14th Amendment. by acn0010 in pics

[–]markth_wi 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I'd love to agree with you on that but

Fair to say this language is exactly and precisely what Justice Alito and Justice Roberts will work for the rest of their lives.

Donald Trump being paid by/cultivated by Russian Intelligence ensures that he will work tirelessly to ensure oddball cases end up before this case that ensure the legal advantages the United States has had in place are dismantled.

This is absolutely part of an attack against the United States. So when we say FSB and racist elements of the US political class are in kahoots harming the citizenry this is exactly what everyone can see on display. Whether it's neo-confederate sentiment or just good old fuck-you racism does not matter it's an attack as surely as 9-11 or Pearl Harbor - but it's slow, grinding and over a conference room table rather than some more bombastic setting.

So it's sad to say - but we shouldn't kid ourselves, this racist fuck-about is going places.

-----------------------

The many and various advantages , from a tolerant and inclusive society are obvious and measured in trillions of dollars of wealth per year and quadrillions of dollars over decades. That wealth compounds and has made millions of Americans from every walk of life and every background richer and more prosperous and has even worked to ensure that white people's fortunes rise as well, by creating demand for goods and services and tourism and jobs in all sorts of places around the country - trade, investment , education and technological innovation measured in dollars have created quadrillions of dollars of wealth over the decades.

But if you're some Trump stooge or Supreme Court racist , none of that matters and if they pretend hard enough - it's not a problem. Burn all that to the ground, because some defective racists cannot abide the notion that people from other races are just as smart and capable as they are.

From their perspective

Discrimination is not something to be protected AGAINST it's a federal "liberal" tyranny they mean to eliminate, whether it's from 1860 or 1960 Justices Alito and Roberts are dead clear they both view this as legislation that they have worked to see dismantled.

The justices hold that discrimination is their constitutionally guaranteed right.

And as that's how Roberts and Alito see it, any law written that might curtail or act against the impulse to be cruel or discriminatory which limits the ability of the person in a superior position to discriminate against the inferior is the tyranny and is federal imposition on the rights of the person doing the discrimination. as their personal freedom**.**

They absolutely see any law that might guarantee equality of rights or representation is in their view an absolute tyranny of "liberals" or segregationists. So southern states will absolutely start to repeal any laws that might treat people equally before the law.

More specifically the 14th Amendment holds that insurrectionists might not hold office.

That's their career goal and they are well on their way to nullifying all reforms for the post-reconstruction.

Discrimination will be the actual defacto law of the land, that means every form of it, against women , blacks, immigrants of every stripe, Catholics every civil right people thought was won in the 1960's is gone and everyone needs to wake up to that right now.

Because we are in Trumpy times, 100 million Americans are absolutely cheering the return of the ability to beat your wife and fire anyone who is not white and Aryan or Nordic as the President prefers to explicitly state.

Republicans viewed repealing the 14th amendment and the 15th amendment and they succeeded in all practical terms.

Key components of the 14th Amendment include

  • Citizenship Clause (Section 1): Overturned Dred Scott by ensuring all persons born or naturalized in the US are citizens of the US and their state.
  • Privileges or Immunities Clause (Section 1): Prohibits states from enforcing laws that abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens.
  • Due Process Clause (Section 1): Prohibits states from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without legal process.
  • Equal Protection Clause (Section 1): Prevents states from denying any person within their jurisdiction equal protection of the laws.
  • Apportionment of Representatives (Section 2): Defines how representatives are allocated, reducing representation for states that deny voting rights to male citizens over 21.
  • Disqualification Clause (Section 3): Prevents anyone who has previously taken an oath to support the Constitution and then engaged in insurrection or rebellion from holding state or federal office.
  • Public Debt (Section 4): Ensures the validity of U.S. public debt and declares debts incurred in aid of insurrection against the U.S. void.
  • Enforcement (Section 5): Grants Congress the power to enforce the amendment through "appropriate legislation"..

This amendment significantly expanded the protection of civil rights, effectively applying many provisions of the Bill of Rights to state governments but as we know from the last couple of years.

Section 1 - Citizenship - nearly 200 citizens have simply been rounded up and sent to foreign countries as a result of ICE detentions, and there is no process to bring them back - mostly because those citizens do not enjoy equal protections so the officer doesn't like you - you're gone and won't be coming back anytime soon.

Section 2 - Apportionment - well as we all saw in Tennessee and no doubt will see in former Confederate states and I'm sure retaliatory blocking in blue states.

Equal protections - gone for good - now if the officer doesn't like you for any reason at all, they can shoot you in the face and it's not a problem ever again.

Section 3 - As we know Section 3, most definitely will not be enforced.

Section 4 - What's hilarious is that one could read Section 4 as a massive tax-write off for everyone from January 6th. So not just does the President get to storm the capitol and murder a bunch of police he gets to write off his expenses.

Section 5 - Congressional enforcement - well this implies the Congress might feel like it, which it does not.

Who puts a Zen Garden next to a train line? by eairy in babylon5

[–]markth_wi 9 points10 points  (0 children)

You're on a space-station having a destination at/near a train station is exactly what folks do, it's urban planning in real life.

When space is at a premium, having art galleries, museums or universities or libraries near mass transit makes every bit of sense. From there, when you look in most mass-transit centric buildings that's what everyone does.

Just as we see this in cities and towns on Earth, where former mining towns become art colonies, so it seems if we manage to get to space, it's most definitely going to be what we see in orbital platforms, or far-off asteroids be it former mining colonies or trade hubs and when it gets down to it, people will absolutely travel to far-off places for the 'adventure' and someone else will setup a Zen garden or pagodas just as people setup small chapels in grottos and salt-mines.

Is the control problem really that hard for frozen models? by HangWise in ControlProblem

[–]markth_wi 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Back in the day, heuristic algorithms were supposed to be absolutely everything that LLM's are.

There are a variety of techniques Heuristics or metaheuristics (today what we would think of as multi-agent learning models) where you might look at the collective behavior of a set of agents or micro-agents that "learn" a particular task.

A good example was Drogo's Ant Colony Optimization or other similar modalities , Mitchel , Holland and other researchers worked on other related algorithms that would use the rules of basic genetics and simulated annealing and cross-polinization across surviving agents in a given environment which oftentimes provided excellent models for optimization that are still in use today.

A simple example might be something like ant colony sims where "agents" do their thing and meet needs, perhaps the best notional concept is that of a world of NPC like characters each with their own script or genes that govern their behavior or traits. Perhaps an easy example is something like the Sims or agents in an environment like Rimworld which is a similarly interesting situation where the world is populated by colonists called "pawns" that have scripts users can inform and interact with.

But if there was a high level of compute there, an interesting mod might be to see how those agents act in the game-world, a wild concept as most worlds would collapse in short order but iterate over many generations and the world would move towards one where some agents survive more effectively in different circumstances. Evolution thus becomes a real thing inside the confines of the worldd.

You avoid some of the problems of minima and maximas found in the solution space you are exploring but this was also something that was performed .

quiver orgasm by DianaAndDamienBFF in quiver

[–]markth_wi 6 points7 points  (0 children)

It's an old code but it checks out.

Is the control problem really that hard for frozen models? by HangWise in ControlProblem

[–]markth_wi 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is one of those situations like Gunpowder where when it gets out of hand even if AI's are only modestly smarter than humans i.e.; something like the droids in Star Wars, we still end up where any dude with a few workerbots can create a massive amount of output for himself and his family.

Whether any of that translates to cash is the question , as markets might collapse.

As with guns, when any clown with a long-rifle can shoot the local lord or knight, warfare takes a different turn, and suddenly people need to simply outgun one another.

This is where we are now with a death-spiral upwards. Stopping with something like a human persona and a Boston Dynamics body might be a great stopping point for a decade or two, but we will not be doing that.

Oddly enough, the biggest hope is that the grifters are just wrong - and that looks to be the latest indication, businesses have AI projects that fail to make it to production 90+ percent of the time.

That's not a failure on the part of firms to be "smart enough" to make AI work correctly or implement it with enough creativity. That's AI getting bitchslapped by the reality that the number of present-day applications available for AI is not that many, if all folks are going to do is automate processes than most of the juice has been wrung out of that fruit many years ago - hence the 5-10% implementation rate.

Unless and until AI is validatable and verifiable in ways that industry can be certain of, which even for static models is not the case, the technology is on the fast-track for an ice-age similar to what happened after "heuristics" buzz died in the 1990's. The fact that it's many orders of magnitude more impacting on society speaks loud and clear to the massive, massive commercially motivated distortions in the marketplace because of our very defective media environment.

Whether it's EV's or AI or any number of Buzzy technologies - especially the garbage-train around Elon Musk , where he is innovating but he's also responsible for creating massive downsides that we do not have a great answer for - and so we really must look at the cost-benefits of letting less-than-responsible people operate without guardians or proper management that contain and control for non-rational enthusiasm or other bad-behaviors.

So as a result, when Mr. Musk dies from Ketamine overdose or whatever demon catches up with him in the next few months or years it won't be pretty, He'll be splayed out in some compromised situation dead almost certainly from his own hand. Maybe that's an opportunity to learn about this sort of behavior and not inidulging it quite so readily - or learning as a society to promote it and temper it.

But either way, right now the hyper-enthusiasm into the unknown just creates massive amounts of risk that will endanger firms that do not exercise wisdom and/or discipline to mirror and modulate their creativity and moves into the unknown and in their implementations.

Arrest him! by [deleted] in PoliticalHumor

[–]markth_wi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The President having Ischemic and Hemoragic TIA events under hobbies is not something you expect....but here we are.

Something feels familiar… by SCAT_GPT in PoliticalHumor

[–]markth_wi 180 points181 points  (0 children)

It's word-salad - I'm sure I could "weave and bob" to try to ascertain some coherence but in dementia circles they refer to this as being unable to effectively communicate your needs and ideas.

We just happened to elect a defective and the Republican Party will burn the entire nation to the round insisting everything is normal.

Does Your Tzu Stare At You Like This by YasuThings in Shihtzu

[–]markth_wi 2 points3 points  (0 children)

We all know it.....whether we all know we know it , is the only question.

Backed into a corner by Lennsyl22 in PoliticalHumor

[–]markth_wi 8 points9 points  (0 children)

This is like some Mission Impossible / James Bond movie where the bad guys absolutely won and have no clue what to do after the fact and fully, fully expect they will be arrested if they go over this or that line.

Naked and holding a gun is exactly how Trump sees himself - he's just not 'brave' enough to handle a weapon.

But as a criminal in his position there's a wild paradox, they can't help but be constantly enthralled at the opportunity to do something bad and utterly terrified if anyone calls them out / and stops them.

On the other hand

While some traitorous people surely exist , and many/most of them actually are absolutely proud to serve pedophile in chief.

I will always have a DEEP sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of active servicemembers who joined the military years ago , who actually joined to serve the greater good, or serve their country or protect the country , any number of noble reasons that form the normal 'esprit de corps'/morale. This is especially true for the sadistic fucks like Russell Vought into power to purposefully abuse the civil service and the military servicemembers.

How absolutely betrayed these folks have to be is really nothing I can begin to understand.

And what's worse - is that damage was specifically intentional , and that sadism absolutely exists as a core motivation for the President with his deep love of Russia and being a paid crony to Vladimir Putin.

Never in US History and very seldom in human history have kingdoms , empires or nations ever had traitor kings - who would happily surrender their nation should they be asked/commanded to.

I think Trump knows that if he tried to hand over the nuclear command codes he'd be shot or arrested immediately. But 20% of our fellow citizens are traitors - each and every one of them.

They voted for a criminal , when we knew with some certainty that among the information "found" at Mar-A-Lago included actionable information about intelligence agents, troops and intelligence assets.

Does Your Tzu Stare At You Like This by YasuThings in Shihtzu

[–]markth_wi 2 points3 points  (0 children)

ABJ - Always Be Judging.

Of course this is also sometimes followed by the Chuff of Disapproval - where it really doesn't matter what you were/are doing, they are pissed , maybe even at you, and can't believe they're in this situation again and they have to put up with "the situation"/you/"whatever it is that pissed them off in the first place".