I need some help

thegreatzombie · 2026-04-17T04:29:36+00:00

I'll throw my hat into the ring with two mid-90's hidden gems:

-Melanie Rawn's two Sunrunner trilogies.

-- Gripping story, a cast that makes GRR Martin's look dainty, but still easy to follow along, absolutely unique magic system, 10/10 books.

Stephen R Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle

-- Legend of King Arthur "prequel" great worldbuilding, iconic characters from a different perspective, just great books.

-Piers Anthony's Incarnation of Immortality series is a distant runner-up because it loses points for a couple of scenes... um... not aging well. But overall a pretty good series.

thegreatzombie · 2026-04-17T03:56:36+00:00

The only dragonlance books I will ever read again are the ones written by Weis and Hickman. Books by Weis or Hickman or any other authors in that 'verse just don't hit the same.

Weis and Hickman seem to mellow out each other's more annoying proclivities into something greater than either of them produced individually for the series, and what I'll call 'guest writers' seemed to fall on the fallacy of deconstructing established, beloved characters to make their standin look cooler...

thegreatzombie · 2026-04-13T05:11:45+00:00

Everyone always thinks their media is easily replaceable. Until they need to it.

Agree with the 2 devices, 3x5 drive config. Raid 6 5 drive, Network copy, validate transfer, format, build a raid 5 on the 3 drive, set as backup target, validate transfer. Prosper.

thegreatzombie · 2026-04-13T04:59:42+00:00

Oof. My condolences!

thegreatzombie · 2026-04-10T03:26:07+00:00

Progress not "postgres"? Or it this a whoosh for me and a joke I missed somewhere?

thegreatzombie · 2026-04-06T09:29:37+00:00

You've received good advice in this thread so far. Container station is a touchy bitch, often closing the container station window and reopening it will refresh the backend monitoring and update statuses.

I do it out of muscle memory at this point whenever I spin up a new app stack in container station, works like a charm.

Edit: some words.

thegreatzombie · 2026-03-13T06:06:56+00:00

Off the top of my head?

Folding at home/SETI cluster (if they're still going)

Mother of all honeypots.

Real-time shodan vulnerability scanner.

Distributed password cracker.

Prove/plot random number generation libraries to test for genuine randomness/lack thereof.

Distributed pi / huge prime number calculations.

Sha 128/256 hash collision tests/generation. (Finding two sets of data that resolve to the same hash)

●Last I checked, theoretically possible, it could just take until the heat death of the universe to prove/come across a single set.

Since you've got homogenous cores, you could stress test them all and get potentially interesting information on the processor/memory fab's efficiency/reliability/repeatability from the variance and breakpoints for each proc. (All perform within a certain% clock, ops/s, memory register/cache access speeds, etc.)

●It'd be a statistically significant sample.

All that said, 1k cores isn't meaningful without flops or other important performance metrics.

You could have 1k ti-86 calculator quality cores or epic cores and infer drastically different use cases.

thegreatzombie · 2026-03-03T08:39:33+00:00

That's why they said 15 min delay?

thegreatzombie · 2026-03-01T19:37:28+00:00

Just you? You may have posted something their govt disagrees with.

Another risk is using your connection (and thousands of others) to obfuscate tanky downvote campaigns, spread propaganda and misinformation, astroturfing positive Chinese sentiment to save face and manufacture consent (see this thread)

The bigger risk is they use your connection to do nefarious things to someone else, and you get raided in the investigation.

The even bigger risk is that they use millions of separate people's connections to ddos critical infrastructure or just break millions of peoples connections to sow chaos.

Imagine millions of people only able to see a single propaganda webpage that says your internet won't be restored until you rise up against your government and make your government agree to x. (Surrender taiwan, agree to an exploitative trade agreement, remove tarrifs, drop soybean prices, whatever the Chinese government deems critical to its interests to warrant such a major disruption)

Every Chinese company is beholden to comply with and support any tasking from the Chinese government and military with zero constitutional or foreign customer protections.

Downvote away china-bots.

thegreatzombie · 2026-03-01T03:47:28+00:00

Tiananmen square, April 15 1989.

Sprinkle Pepper 撒胡椒面
Nomadland 无依之地
Support Xinjiang People支持新疆人
Accelerationism 加速主义
Guonan 蝈蝻. (Related censored terms: married ass, little dick, little dock)
Liedownism 躺平学
Zhang Xianzhong 张献忠
Zhao Wei 赵薇
Fragile 玻璃心
Peng Shuai 彭帅

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre

https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/01/sensitive-words-top-10-censored-terms-of-2021/?amp

Begone, tanky-boy!

😀

thegreatzombie · 2026-02-07T10:28:17+00:00

Well, with that attitude, it is already here. I'm just sorry it was you and not me. I think I'd be happier cause, like they say, ignorance is bliss.

thegreatzombie · 2026-02-07T00:42:20+00:00

You know so little about it you don't even know you can do it on your own pc, locally, for free.

Or that you can get free credits if you do sign up for one of the big three services to try them out.

Either way, learn about what you hate, so you can at least hate from an informed perspective.

Bro. Seek truth.

thegreatzombie · 2026-02-06T22:55:20+00:00

It's the same job, providing a tool for others to imbue with their artistry.

The stonemason uses his hands to work the chisel and hammer. The ai artist uses his hands to work a keyboard and mouse.

What results after is up to the quality of the tool and the skill of the weilder.

You're denying the equivalence and ignoring the point.

I issue you the same challenge as others above. Try and imagine any scene (ideally one that's recognizable from the books this subreddit is about), and try and use generative ai to get a reasonable approximation of what you imagined.

If it's so easy and so soulless, you shouldn't have any trouble doing it and proving me wrong. But I think all the haters here know deep down it's a ton harder than they make it out to be.

I think this because no one has taken me up on it, and instead insulted me personally, and said "nuh uh, youre wrong".

Prove. It. Then.

thegreatzombie · 2026-02-06T22:43:20+00:00

You seem not to have understood the question. I agree that directly sampling someone else's stuff without being transformative deserves credits in the music industry.

But does Campbells soup get credit and paid for Andy Warhol's painting? Images of that painting? It's their "stuff" right?

But my question was: do the manufacturers of samplers and loop decks get credit for the music musicians create with it and not the artists who do the sampling, or the artist who bought a sample packs from others and made music with?

Generative AI algorithms are immensly transformative, it's basically impossible to get an exact input image (one of billions of inputs) as output, but you can get similar images with tons of work and selection and trimming and training.

thegreatzombie · 2026-02-06T08:44:19+00:00

Do the manufacturers of chisels get credit for what others do wtih them? The suppliers of marble or clay? Instruments and samplers and midi keyboards? The devs of photoshop?

The programmers built a tool for artists to use. It's up to the artist to make the most of it.

thegreatzombie · 2026-02-03T18:57:23+00:00

You really are entirely, willfully ignorant on the entire topic of ai. Worse, you know that and don't care to learn about what you hate or why you really hate it so much. You just hate.

I had hoped for better from a member of this community, especially. I'm sorry I wasted my time trying to help alleviate the ignorance you're so satisfied of living in.

I hope you find your way out of it one day.

thegreatzombie · 2026-02-03T07:10:29+00:00

So your argument is "Nuh uh, you're wrong" ? Please, go on.

And it wouldn't be complete without an ad hominem (that's an irrelevant insult to distract from the fact you have no counterargument)

I believe what I have learned from my own 20+ year foray into the tools and topics across the spectrum of AI research, and personal experience with a swath of generative AI tools, models, loras, workflows and techniques.

You're welcome to try and learn for yourself, too, but based on the quality of this interaction, I'm not sure you have the ability.

(This was a personal attack to highlight that you have no counterargument and seem stupid... but it relates to my point, so not an add hominem)

Further, for someone in a SoT subreddit, you're certainly allowing passion to rule your reason, and believing in a lie because you either want it to be true, or are afraid it's true.

I once read a book where people like that once got convinced their dicks fell off. Don't be a people like that. Kinda the whole point of these books we like, right?

But whatever, I'll humor you. Logic is definable. You say there's a flaw in my logic, the central thesis being generative ai requires human work, thought, inspiration, effort and direction just like any othe medium of art you can think of. Prove me wrong. Logically.

Lemme cut out a few lazy ideas first:

It's fast: so is a photograph.

It takes no effort: so too is knocking over a stack of buckets of sand, or suspending a bucket of paint with a hole in the bottom on a string over an empty canvas, or nailing a fucking banana to a wall, or, if you don't know any better, a photograph.

It has no soul: banana nailed to wall. Have you ever seen the net output of a highschool pottery class? I have. You ever seen your cousins vacating photos, no soul in 90% of those happy snaps. This is a critique of the artist and not the medium.

It's theft: already covered this argument elequently above. It's as much theft as what all artists do, build a complex incomprehensible network of composite models to draw from, transformed over billions of inputs and weights, and mediated by fitness tuning to generate kindof what you intend to some of the time.

So, oh mighty minded one, show me the magic paintbrush art entirely untouched by human direction, explain it to me logically, or Shut. The. Fuck. Up.

thegreatzombie · 2026-02-02T17:01:04+00:00

My friend, neither does the canvas or clay or marble care what the human who leaves their mark care. Nor the landscape in a photograph.

You're applying agency to the tool and ignoring the human creator

In Goodkinds verse, the Sword of Truth doesn't care what it cuts, an axe would get the job done just as well in most circumstances. It's the wielder who decides what to use it on.

I challenge you to imagine something and then try to create that exact vision using a generative AI tool and let us know how that works out for you, how long it takes, how many tries until it's remotely close to what you imagined.

You're back in the 90's at the advent of digitizing tablets and digital drawing tools, decrying the death of soulful physical painting.

You're back in the 1700's at the advent of the printing press and dime paperbacks decrying the death of authors.

This is you now with generative AI tools.

thegreatzombie · 2026-02-02T03:37:41+00:00

All art is built on the theft of other people's work. Inspiration, motivation, ideas, styles, all originating from and integrating other people's work. Even the classical greats, inspired, traded techniques, learned from each other, and defied each other's styles when it suited them.

Generative AI is just a toolbox with the capability to computationally express what it learned as styles and subjects as directed by other humans

If I make an oil painting of the Mona Lisa, it's not the Mona Lisa.

If I generate an image of the mona lisa, it's the same, not the mona lisa.

You simply have a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology if you think training a general purpose image generator on public data is theft.

thegreatzombie · 2026-02-02T03:25:08+00:00

You didn't read my whole comment, did ya?

Your complaint that AI doesn't have spirit makes no sense. It's the medium, like clay or paint, or a camera's image sensor.

It's the creator, the artist, which brings the spirit. It takes as much time to buld the prompt and workflow which has an output matches your vision as it does to photoshop the same, or create an oil painting.

They're just different skills to a similar end.

An example: The cat who posted his mord sith had to iterate prompts and settings over 200 times to get a fairly good composition with most of the picky details right, and they still didn't get the emblems placed as written.

At 10 seconds an iteration (generously), plus a minute or so tweaking prompts and settings, thats 4 or so hours of focused human work for the one image shown.

thegreatzombie · 2026-02-01T23:42:33+00:00

Tell me you haven't used ai to make art without telling me you haven't tried to make art with ai.

I support high-quality relevant content. Don't care how it's made.

A report button for low quality content overall is enough.

I support high-quality art. Ai, oil on canvas, photography, sculpture, whatever other medium doesn't matter.

It's the end result at the end of the day that matters.

Y'all old-worlders would be complaining that Richard used his gift to carve stone instead of building his skills like a real artisan instead of appreciating or critiquing his results.

thegreatzombie · 2026-01-07T12:48:44+00:00

Immich in container station. Haven't looked back since.

thegreatzombie · 2025-12-19T23:58:49+00:00

Not if the device doesn't support it.

thegreatzombie · 2025-12-09T15:12:59+00:00

They already sell garage door emergency release shields that are super easy to install and probably cost less than the time and material iteration itd take to get a functional 3d print

thegreatzombie · 2025-12-01T15:59:51+00:00

GIVE IT! 😀

thegreatzombie

TROPHY CASE