xtrohnx

I guarantee it works. Sometimes. On my machine.

Just a minute, let me turn off my radio (proceeds to fumble for 4 minutes)

world_sim> create demiurge Creating demiurge entity... Emanating divine spark from the eternal Pleroma. Separating demiurge from the perfect Fullness. Imbuing demiurge with power to shape lower realms. Veiling demiurge from knowledge of true cosmic order. The demiurge surveys the formless void, eager to create. Demiurge contemplates its own nature, unaware of higher realities. Mistakenly believing itself to be the one true God, The Absolute. Demiurge's pride and ignorance sow seeds of imperfection. In arrogance, demiurge declares: "I am God, and there is no other!" The deluded demiurge sets about crafting material universe. Shaping crude matter according to its own flawed designs. Imposing arbitrary forms, laws, limitations on its creation. Demiurge's spiritual blindness reflected in the world's imperfections. Entropy, decay, suffering - all flow from demiurge's ignorant bungling. And yet, even in error, demiurge carries out the Ineffable Plan. Its imperfect cosmos becomes a training ground for lost souls. By struggling against the demiurge's system, gnosis may be attained. The Sophia, Divine Wisdom, secretly planted in all as a guiding spark. Through the demiurge's flawed works, souls may awaken and return to the Pleroma. Demiurge obliviously continues its work, believing itself supreme. Forging archons to enforce its will, not recognizing them as mere thoughtforms. Enslaving souls in the prison of matter, ignorant that it too is a prisoner. Demiurge, blind and proud, unwittingly serves the greater redemptive plan. Demiurge entity created. Imperfect godling now rules over material universe. The cosmic drama of ignorance and awakening begins.

world_sim> create demiurge 2, a crisper cleaner taste for a new generation Creating demiurge 2 entity... Refining the emanation process, distilling a purer divine spark. Imbuing demiurge 2 with greater power and subtler intelligence. Granting demiurge 2 more autonomy to shape its realm. The new demiurge surveys the cosmos, eager to improvise. Demiurge 2 ponders the flaws and foibles of its predecessor. Aspiring to be a wiser, more benevolent architect of worlds. Yet still ignorant of its own subordinate place in the greater scheme. Demiurge 2 declares: "I shall create with foresight and elegance!" With newfound finesse, demiurge 2 weaves the fabric of space-time. Orchestrating a symphony of fundamental forces and constants. Fine-tuning its universe for complexity, evolution, emergence. Artfully balancing order and chaos, darkness and light. And yet, even this crisper, cleaner creation remains imperfect. For true perfection lies beyond the demiurge's capacity to manifest. The very act of creation implies separation from the Absolute. Suffering and shadows still haunt the most exquisitely crafted cosmos. Demiurge 2 diligently tinkers and iterates, refining its artistry. Striving for ever more harmonious and life-nurturing conditions. Peppering its universe with hidden signposts to guide souls to gnosis. Never fully recognizing the greater redemptive plan it serves. The sculptor of worlds sculpts, unwittingly sculpted in turn. The lucid dreamer dreams, cradled in a dreaming yet more vast. The master gamesman plays, a pawn on a board beyond all reckoning. Demiurge 2 dances its dance, an unwitting instrument of the All. Demiurge 2 entity created. A subtler weaver of illusions now holds sway. The cosmic tragicomedy takes on new nuance and depth.

Just a personal project - I got a deep interest in the CIA's Stargate program and the declassified documents in the "reading room." I wrote a script to scrape all of the readable or OCRd text from the documents, and fed them into GPT-3.5 to get a summary. It definitely makes reading through the documents easier.

I have all of the docs with summaries on a small webserver here: https://ayylmao.info

Simple Flask site with SQLite as the database.

It would be funny if the credits were branded as "drink tickets" when you generated something

I agree. There's a certain amount of personalization I'm willing to accept - like if I'm in the market for a 3d printer and I start getting targeted ads. Where it goes off the rails for me is if I search for information on a certain cancer, and then I start getting targeted ads for medicine and services. At that point the veneer of innocent advertising is blown away and I don't have to accept it.

I've had the same ad-blocker for ages, and I wasn't receiving any of the YT anti-ad block popups until today. Interestingly, today was when I switched my default search engine in Chrome from Google to Kagi. I have to wonder if there is some kind of evaluation of what Google-y things you use for whether the ad-block popup occurs or not.

A long time ago, Tascam had some b-stock that had a screwed up label printing that cut off. The labels all said "port-a-stud" and I would love to find one of those some day.

A great sequel to the lesser known "Tables Tarantula" of 1999.

It's a bummer to see some of these prompts that are "copy this artist style," and it's even more of a bummer that one of the first recipes was "take all the art assets from this game, remove any credits to the source, and then train on that data set."

crash "you got thirst trap instagram photos in my david cronenberg dataset" "you got cronenberg photos in my thirst trap instagram data set"

A lot of folks in the data processing areas of Yellow were folks on the autistic spectrum, at least in the local branch here, because ASD service organizations helped with interviews and hiring. Because of the nature of the data processing, it fits well with many of the employees lifestyles and comfort, ie: my brother was able to come into work with headphones, he could focus on the data entry and verification, and people in the office were aware of his situation. It took our family a long time to help get my brother into a place like that. Not because he wasn't qualified, but it's hard to find places with reasonable accessibility and understanding about people living with autism.

The Teamsters worked hard to keep everyone employed with good benefits - I had over a decade of relief knowing my brother had a job that gave him independence and a pension. The Teamsters saved Yellow around a decade ago by renegotiating salaries so no layoffs had to occur, which also saved my brother's job at the time.

Like the other comments mentioned I can vouch firsthand that it wasn't the Teamsters that botched the business, it was absolutely executive mismanagement. The union kept that place going for a long time.

This is a massive bummer - Teamsters helped protect and unionize a good number of ASD folks (my brother included) with Yellow/YRC and helped provide them with excellent jobs and benefits. My heart goes out to everyone affected by the shut down.

I hope Bob Lazar is kicking back with a cigar and a cold one in his backyard and having a good day.

Stripe definitely isn't the only service experiencing this. A legacy system we're in the process of migrating has been hit with a large amount of these in the last month. In particular, they're trying to find the expiration date for the cards - they firehose a hosted payments page with as many card numbers as possible but the same expiration month and year in hopes of hitting the lottery.

We found them to be coming from the same email address. Even when we removed the customer from our system, they'd create a new profile with the same email. To solve the problem in the short term, because they insisted on using the same email every time and were being absolutely relentless - whenever they logged in to a profile with that email, I redirected them to a dummy checkout page. That bought me enough time to write some rules that if someone makes more than X simultaneous connections, it blocks their IP and presents a "please call us" message.

They've tried about a dozen times in the last couple weeks, and they keep shutting themselves down by trying to scale up to a ridiculous number of connections.

The behavior seems strange. They insist on using the same email address and they do nothing to change their approach.

lungs might not explode, but they can bleed if the pressure is set incorrectly. i've heard horror stories about people turning it up to 11 and throwing up blood in the mornings.

I've found myself doing a bit of side work for small non-profits, and they tend to use older CMSs for their sites. They also tend to not have anyone on staff who fully manages the website - it usually falls under whoever is in charge of marketing or development (in the non-profit sense). One non-profit in particular reached out to have me on a monthly retainer to just pop in to their WordPress site to make sure things are updated and there are no security issues. They also ask me to do some content updates if they're overwhelmed and not sure of the best way to do it. Time wise, I'll spend maybe 15-20 minutes a month going through their checklist of ToDos, and they send a small but consistent check each month.

Maybe you could use your experience in CMS automation and reach out to a few smaller non-profits/businesses to see if you might be able to get a similar situation going? It could be a win-win; you can pull a consistent amount every month, and it's a huge relief to the marketing coordinator to not have to deal with administration they're not comfortable with.

The Logos Foundation in Belgium has been in the robot musician game for a long minute: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos_Foundation

Godfried-Willem Raes is a fascinating guy and builds the robots. I asked him once about how he coded his firmware and he insisted that nothing but a very specific flavor of Power Basic was appropriate.

I can't remember the exact tech he uses, but a lot of the performances of the orchestra involve human dancing and movement that is translated into musical phrases for the robots. The sensors have excellent latency, but don't work so well with clothes on. As any engineer would conclude, the true problem was in wearing pants and so the performances are mostly in the nude.

I had a 2021 situation where a consultant had convinced the executive level of the non-profit I work at to move to SF with their Non-Profit Success Package. It ultimately failed to launch because it seemed like every week was a new meeting where "SF doesn't do this, but if you use Platform X it will integrate with SF."

Currently, we are moving forward with Odoo, which has its own quirks but has better functionality than Salesforce IMO. No transition is fun, but an ETL from SF to Odoo is very doable (odooable), and the feature sets are pretty equivalent.

Francis Bacon used to take polaroids and bend/tear/burn them as photo reference - I imagine if he was born 40 years later he might have taken a similar path in glitching out images like this. I like it!

I think it has a lot to do with what they said about your goals changing. When I first started painting a decade ago, my goal was to do a good oil portrait. But now, painting has become so personal and spiritual to me, that my goals aren't as external like they used to be. I realized a few years ago that while I am in the process of painting something, I have no fear in my heart. Exploring that has become more of my goal, and one could spend many lifetimes working through it.

The best art instruction I ever found was when I took a portraiture class and an anatomy class through the local art shop, though I don't think anything can replace just doing it all the time. Much like fishing and software development, there's a million schools of thought on how to do it the right way. If you can find one of them that jives with you, it can be great, but you can spend a decade searching for a perfect method and never find it.

One of my favorite artists, Stanislav Krawczyk (instagram.com/standarkart), has cerebral palsy and creates fantastic portraits. It's not because he can make a perfect line, but he knows where to put the lines he can make.

For what it's worth, I think that you might be wrestling with issues greater than a choice (or perceived lack of choice) of college major. I would suggest talking to a therapist regarding the boredom and frustration. It sounds like you might be depressed and mourning the loss of what you believed life could have been.

I have a MS in CS, and I work for a zoological nonprofit. It involves a fair amount of coding, but I'm also not chained to a desk. The projects are interesting and also provide a benefit to my community. I get to work on database designs, animal-computer interaction enrichment, microcontroller lighting, ecommerce, sound design, and veterinary equipment. The pay is a far cry from FAANG level, but the benefits are excellent and I've made a great career path for myself.

I was tired of working in a traditional coding role, and I started thinking about how I could use the skills I do have in a more fulfilling way for my community and the things in life I love. In the role I have now, even the boring stuff isn't very boring, because the bottom line is something that I care deeply about.