zogwarg

I was also a Elon skeptic back-then, but I'll admit I did get a kick out of the "don't panic" dashboard.

But golly does he read H2G2 completely wrong (transcript):

I think and it highlighted an important point which is that a lot of times the question is harder than the answer. And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part. So, to the degree that we can better understand the universe, then we can better know what questions to ask. Then whatever the question is that most approximates: what’s the meaning of life? That’s the question we can ultimately get closer to understanding. And so I thought to the degree that we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness and knowledge, then that would be a good thing.

It's backwards! It misses the joke! It took thousands of years and they got a nonsensical answer before any question! It took a thousand more and they got a nonsensical—incompatible—question! It has been theorized that should someone understand the universe it would be replaced by something more complicated! It has also been theorized this has already happened! Also regarding scale of knowledge, Trin Tragula definetly showed that the One thing you can't afford to have in this universe, is a sense of perspective!

Surely his reading comprehension isn't actually this bad, and he only got a bad meme-cliffnotes version of the radio-series/books/movies!?!

I wouldn't swap it for the world ^^, but maybe a tad fewer existantial crises would be nice (no monkey-paw curls plz)

• I don't know Matt Mullenweg, but I'm afraid to ask
• I love the nonsensical misleading QR code onliner, conflictingly using both echo "<URL>" | and mac-only getoutput("pbpaste") (yuck).
• It is famously easy to maintain a job and mental well-being when you have no stable home and few sets of clothes! Famously you don't need a registered address to open a bank account, and you don't need a bank account to get a registered address!
• I guess you could run the GPU for 1000 years.
• One needs to learn that interpolation = confabulation = useless bullshit.

How nice it must be to never ponder how large humanity is, and how each and every person you see outside has a full and rich interior and exterior world, and you that only see a tiny fraction of the people outside.

Personally one of my "oh other people are real!" moment, was when our parents (along with my sisters) took us on a surprise ferry trip to England (from France) and our grandparents that—at least as far as kid me remembered—we only ever saw in their home city, were waiting for us in Portsmouth, and we visited the city together (Portsmouth Historic Dockyard is quite nice btw).

I knew they were real, but realizing that they weren't geo-locked, made me more fully internalize that they had full and independent lives, and therefore that everyone had.

How about people here? When did you realize people are real?

No no no it's fine! You get the word shuffler to deshuffle the—eloquently—shuffled paragraphs back into nice and tidy bullet points. And I have an idea! You could get an LLM to add metadata to the email to preserve the original bullet points, so the recipient LLM has extra interpolation room to choose to ignore the original list, but keep the—much more correct and eloquent, and with much better emphasis—hallucinated ones.

The video about Anime and Propanganda is very good and reccomended. As a progressive weeb living in Japan, a very cathartic watch.

From para-social to faux-social!

SaaS = ~~Storage as a Service~~ Sneer as a Service

Pedantic note: Yes, Meditations (a phisosophical treatise) was written in Koine, Commentarii de Bello Gallico (veni, vedi, vici—self-aggrandizing combat-reports meant for the senate and propaganda) or other "published" works from Caesar were not.

Although bonus points, the ancient sources portray Caesar (a proper educated major family Patrician) as speaking his dying words—if reported saying anything at all—in Greek, not in Latin: "Καὶ σὺ τέκνον" (Even you, child) rendered in Shakespeare as "Et tu, Brute".

1. First furious madman scribbling: I had a toy was a "quizz" machine with "A, B, C, D" buttons, that read colorful perforated cards and a speaker of a "ding-dong" sound for a correct answer, I worked out what set of holes corresponded to what answer (which to the toymaker's credit, each card with the same answer did not have exactly the same holes) so I could always answer correctly. [The way I remember it I wanted to make custom cards, but maybe I was just a little cheater ^^]
2. First program: One fond memory from middle-school, where our introduction to programming was writing GCM and LCM programs using TI-BASIC (or Casio, but the school really pushed the TI models forward). Also having access to a "worms" (somehow in basic and not assembly) clone copied from a friend's calculator, I reverse engineered the more easy aspects of graphical display, and input handling make a tic-tac-toe program. Since I didn't know about lists yet, inspired by the GCM and LCM bits, I used prime numbers to store the state of the board, and used divisibility tests to check it. (Some years later i would refactor it, to discover that lists are much much slower in non-assembly TI-BASIC, so it was accidental optimization) I also miscoded the bot, which was vulnerable to exactly one fork attack, but decided to leave it in because it was more fun that way.
3. First hack: Discovering that the highschool's poorly designed web portal, for sharing homework and assignments, allowed forced browsing, which the files uploaded by anyone was fun. [I reported it to the school's sysadmin team, I swear]
4. Cringe blog: Following in my geeky dad's footsteps I had a very teenager cringe website, that I look fondly on, with garish colors, self-made HTML, css and animated gifs.

And also closing with:

Nvidia insists that it “wins on merit, as reflected in our benchmark results and value to customers.” And Nvidia does have the best stuff — but that’s not what the DOJ, Warren, or France are concerned about, is it?

To tie the bow nicely.