ycombiredd

Exactly. I knew you guys would get it. :-)

I see a few other comments trying to address this with a similar truncation shell command but then a few arguing replies about the redirection operator not working due to some syntax error. So here’s the trick there… preface the redirection operator with a null command, like so

:> somefile

Note the colon, which stands in for the command as a null operator.

An additional hint is that if the system is so starved you can’t run ls, again call On the shell for help and use “echo *”, which will show a list of file names (without sizes) from which hopefully you can select a large file (or few) based on name alone. Colon-greater them into zero byte status and watch your system become useable enough to begin normal recovery efforts.

From an old Unix admin; I hope that helps someone.

Sure.. it's yet another image to ascii tool. I submit it though because a short while ago I linked the webapp (which I have now dubbed MAGICBIFF), with explanation of why I made yet another such app along with examples of what it does in a comment on a HN thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38329736) about another ascii art tool and had a couple of folks reply and ask if the source was available.

Since it runs entirely in the browser, (demo here: https://www.killsignal.net/magicbiff) the source (HTML/CSS/JS) is of course available as it is sent over https when requested and can be seen as plain text via view-source or the Inspector, but it eventually occurred to me that even so, perhaps they wanted to be able to be notified of changes, fork, submit PR, etc.. all the stuff that site like GitHub makes easily available.

Anyway, following through on my commitment to clean it up and adding license so it is clearly "open" and not just "view-source"-able, there it be.

We certainly could do something like that, but I thought a simple html form - which can be run by loading the file locally just as well as connecting to my webserver; once you download the html file (which contains the javascriot to manipulate the canvas and other dom stuff) - it runs completely locally. Using the browser as the UI makes it “native” to any os/hardware architecture that can run Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, Brave, etc. I was thinking a simple html file that can be run anywhere would be a preferred platform, though I acknowledge a more popular diversion from natively compiled apps is containerized apps, but really there must be some sensible line we acknowledge where going packaged or containerized is overkill, no? (Probably no. AndI probably shouldn’t speak such heresy if I like earning a paycheck. . ;-)

I hope my rambling doesn’t come across as an assholish response; I’m just kinda thinking aloud.

Thank you! I had fun with it and wills I said, was really surprised and happy that my coloring “algorithm” works as well as it does. I spent a lot more time trying to figure out how to make the upload, convert to bitmap array, draw on canvas stuff work (and the trial and error is probably pretty obvious as all the commented code and lack of formatting lays evident. It was a “finally, it works… go to bed” situation. )

Yes, it’s open source I. The sense that it runs entirely in your browser. :-) i don’t think I put any license in the code but I do t remember for sure.). That’s the web though right? If you like it, view it Learn it use it, right?

I haven’t put it in my GitHub because it’s really heinous code with lots of commented out nonsense as I was trying to figure out the html canvas, css, and JavaScript to make it work. (None of those pay my bills so it was as much a curiosity for me as it is to you. )

But yeah, if you promise not to point and laugh at how sloppy it is, just “view source”, or Ctrl-shift/I, or right-click|Inspect.. whatever your preferred method is. I may clean it up and make it more accessible if it seems of interest to folks.

Thanks again for taking a look and making time to comment on my tool, especially as a minor threadjack my comment was. :-)

(This. Is snowI have twice now written fairly involved comments telling you about and linking to a tool I made that runs in the browser (completely locally) and outputs to HTML and CSS (which in my case is technically using the ASCII character set so I think we’re in the same ballpark) a full-color text representation of the image you choose.

Twice now I have inadvertently navigated off of the comment page while trying to live text to a part of my phone’s screen that isn’t smashed and can actually display. So this is the third attempt to share this with you, let’s hope it elevates is the charm.

The page I am about to link to explains and demonstrates what IMHO looks much better than the output of similar tools, even when running the plain old black text on white background version of the tool. Though the demo picture

Since you are reading this article and at least some of the comments, I hope you will check it out and enjoy using it. The somewhat arbitrarily chosen

https://www.killsignal.net/img2txt/ascii-art.html

She is the author of the O’Reilly Data Mesh book, but I don’t think it has that as its title.

“Overall, …”

As an AI language model, I see what you did there.

Well, he names real names. Gardia (Fox) is a real person (and the Hags were a real SoCal punk rock skateboard gang; see https://bust.com/living/18944-hell-on-wheels.html )

I don’t know if they are still married as is implied to have occurred around y2k but I suppose if one wanted some validation of his claims, she could be reached. After all, he does implicate her in his “dark gray” market doings. Her Twitter account took no effort to find.

I’m not dubious (or perhaps interested) enough to do any digging, but would be interested in learning if someone else does, having found the article an enjoyable read and kinda hoping as I read it that it was all true.

Well that’s both funny and a real point. I did try to make the idea resistant to such points of fact with the “or whatever” clause in my post, but your concise reply made me chuckle.

My first reaction-thought to seeing this is: implement a GAN with GPT inference on the generator side and this classifier (or DetectGPT or GPTZero, or whatever) they’ve developed as the detector. I would think this would very quickly a) achieve state of the art whatever-the-fool-a-human-reader-test-measurement-is results and b) render the classifier, and any subsequent AI-text-detecting classifier, useless.

I could be way off base with that idea, but it seemed a good enough one to ponder, but not so great I was motivated to do anything more than post the thought.

I came to write a very similar story involving a lazy error on my part (no error checking on a shutdown ec2 instance script, resulting in a 64 Xeon, 8 Nvidia Tesla server running 24/7 for about a month) and an astronomical bill resulting.

I had a rudimentary batch job system running. Since I was charged for each power event, I wanted to minimize the power state changes and just queued up the work that needed GPU acceleration until there was enough to justify the cost of at least an entire hour and two power state events. When the cheap, small, always on instance received all the work output from the giant beast server, it would then send a power down command using the aws cli. Yeah, like I said, I was lazy so I just sent off the request and small server just went on about it’s business. Oops.

Like I told the aws billing rep, it would have bankrupted me, ending that venture. I asked that, since it is all virtualized, that while yes I had the virtual hardware provisioned for all that time, if they could get someone to look at the actual utilization they would see it was essentially none. They got back to me and in a day or so to let me know they had forgiven the entire amount.

AWS support actually listen, do real work, and very often it seems, do what is in the best interest of the customer even as it works directly against the company’s bottom line.

Your comment. Umm. Well done. :-)

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

One point I would like to respond to is that the only specific instance I mentioned where I said we should be “automating ourselves out of” jobs, was in the context of those systems/network/devops roles; roles I myself have held.(Incidentally, automation at the enterprise level involves far more than “writing scripts for IT departments” that you reduce it to, and that is somewhat what I was referring to when. I mentioned that there would be bigger and more important business processes to support as infrastructure becomes commodity, and some automation framework(s) become SOP. Sorry, I digress.)

I did not suggest anywhere - at least I didn’t mean to - to wield a techno “iron fist” (although that does conjure a pretty cool image in my head <grin>) and I don’t think I suggested that every job everywhere should be automated, and in fact the memory of an 80’s PSA coming to mind giving me an immediate feeling of sympathy for that guy in the video, was really the whole point of why I posted.

Also, I wasn’t born into high-paying tech jobs. I was once young, and indeed have worked some pretty shit jobs. I don’t however, think they were meaningless. They may have meant nothing to me, but obviously someone thought they were worth paying me for. So aside from “dig a hole and refill it” type work, I don’t view anyone’s job as not having worth.

It does beg the question, “what will the shit jobs be for future teenagers?”, which I will for the sake of simplification lump into the same category as the glass-sorting job in the PSA. I don’t have an answer for that, at least not yet.

Perhaps this is tangential to the existential crises you describe, but, like you, I have been learning ML/AI, since about 2016 (whenever that “A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style” paper was published) and I do have some fears about AI, superintelligence, etc and what bad things will (not just may) come of it, though admittedly my fears of the negative are far outweighed by my excitement for the positive potential. This is why I own paperclipmaximizer.ai though admittedly my tongue was firmly in my cheek when I bought it. We can only hope our super intelligent AGI overlords are as optimistic as the GPT-generated quote from Maximo on that site.

I appreciate everyone’s input and time taken to provide it. I have been reading HN for a long time, but never registered or posted until last week. It is really great to have a community of intelligent people not trolling or shitposting and I was pleasantly surprised that you all actually watched the video and came back with real points of conversation. Thanks!

I don’t disagree at all. The point is I never really stopped to consider those folks who really will have a hard time moving up to better things, or even laterally. The video I linked, a commercial about a human doing the very job the AI/robotics project aims to do so instead.

It’s short. I hope all commenters take 30 seconds to watch it, and maybe within the discussion in this thread, someone will make a salient point that explains away the nuance I referred to for this exact specific instance.

It just gave me pause, and opened my eyes to that the issue - and my beliefs - can be more nuanced, in light of such things as the PSA from the 80’s I linked in my original post. What’s that guy supposed to do? He Eve said he learned it slowly but now he’s good at it. When all the sun-menial tasks are automated, what becomes of them?

For the record I am a cynical technophile by any measure. I have been called callous (and much worse) for statements like “starvation is a self-solving problem. Eventually there will be enough food for all, as the population decreases”… don’t think me anti-automation; this edge case is a thing that makes me go “hmmm…”

I’ve been automating processes and systems (with software, not robotics) since my early days as a sysadmin. I would later mentor many juniors over the years and was often challenged by them about how good for our careers doing such a thing was. I would always respond that I felt our jobs were to try to automate ourselves out of being necessary, because then we could move on to bigger more challenging problems, now that we had gotten common repeatable issues out of the way. “There will always be bigger, better work for those with the skills required to automate their jobs out of existence”, I would tell them.

Now 25 years later I find myself saying similar things when discussing the topic with people who fear automation displacing workers, and my initial response to this article was much the same.

Then, a memory of a commercial I used to see as a kid popped into my head and for the first and only time I’ve felt myself being pulled to an anti-automation sentiment - and this is an isolated use case of automation I am feeling this way about, and it is all because of this commercial that apparently still occupies a place in my mind probably 40 years since it aired.

https://youtu.be/CSiz6kbIZkw