33886 replies to this topic

[PItiful Boar]

34 just curious which billionaire did you have in mind? musk? he's actually more sane than the rest of them and Trump is hardly a billionaire now

 

It is wrong but cynical evil people get promoted to the top of the social hierarchy because it is an evil and cynical wheel ,,, 

 

is your eyes red? my eyes are red ... and i feel tired

[PItiful Boar]

last night i drank some flavored water drinks i got from costco - had 5% alcohol content - was tired at 10 or so and fell asleep 

sigh am i missing out on life

[pokari]

35

I mean there's the top-teir megarich idiots like Musk (not so sure about him being sane at this point) or that one guy with the submarine who crushed himself and some other billionaires into fish food because he wanted to ignore his engineers telling him that what he was doing was unsafe. And I was referencing that sort of bloke flippantly a bit...

But much more than that there's just the banal parasites whose skillset is simply to use money to form connections to ensure they stay on top of the food chain where they receive more money from other people's efforts. There's so many examples of the guys at the top being totally out of touch with reality (thinking of software industry here) and people having to get their job done despite the upper echelons going off into la-la land. Most all of the real innovating and hard work is done by the little guys; the billionaire's 'job' is mostly to figure out how to own the result.

is your eyes red? my eyes are red ... and i feel tired

*hugs*

My eyes aren't especially red but I am definitely tired. I hope you are sleeping well as I type this!

[PItiful Boar]

36 yesterday i got into an explosive argument with the sales manager who is really a retard... like she doesn't understand the fact that she has do not disturb on so i cannot call her and i have to wait for her has to call me ... and like, she doesn't understand how much work it is to go through the entire email directory list looking for forwarding of emails... and she thinks it could be done in an afternoon... and she demanded i do it, and i said can't do it and she finally said let her handle it, and she doesn't even remember the password that i setup her account with...

this has some traction for office space level of dysfunction ... why do some of these people speak so fast

yesterday i had a guy on the phone and he was spitting out numbers and i was like wuuuuuut slow dowwwwwwnn man

[PItiful Boar]

and then today like the boss ask me, well,  can you verify that they paid? I'm like bruuuu i copy you on every credit card transaction that i do

[pokari]

*hugs*

37

and like, she doesn't understand how much work it is to go through the entire email directory list looking for forwarding of emails... and she thinks it could be done in an afternoon... and she demanded i do it, and i said can't do it and she finally said let her handle it, and she doesn't even remember the password that i setup her account with...
this has some traction for office space level of dysfunction ...

And I'm sure she's coping with her own personal hell, too. XD At least if the vibe of the company is anything like what I'm getting from here. There's a certain sort of organisation where after a while you start to wonder if there isn't a shrine to a lovecraftian madness deity in the basement. ~w~;

Remember, when all else fails, toss the slowest person behind you for the zombies and start running.

In other news I started playing with video-generation AI and so far they're awful >.> Really fun despite that, tho. And the nice thing about running them locally is I'm not wasting electricity because it's winter and physics says my PC is in fact just a space heater! Yay!

[PItiful Boar]

sora right? the new upgrade chat gpt for videos?

 

so yeah i got another one yesterday from offshore team complaining i'm not automating this job to insert orders and i'm like now you know how i feel when i ask you to do something and you guys don't do it for two days

 

 

38

[PItiful Boar]

in another news i got asked this question from a customer - whats the plan, are you guys going to unload your inventory and stop doing business? me: LOL that's what i want to know

[pokari]

X'p

39

And no, not Sora, only fancy-pants people have access to that, and it's OpenAI so it probably takes a literal supercomputer to run like the big GPT models (including chatGPT) do.

The one I'm using os Stable Video Diffusion, which jas been public for a couple months. There's also something similar out from Tencent's AI division (yeah that phrase was weird for me to but apparently that's who in China has caught the AI bug) but I haven't tried it.

[PItiful Boar]

40 sora is by invite only? damn...

i want to get some knowledge about the ai video generation stuff but alas... are you training your own model using your library of legal-or-not-so-legal cache of pictures and videos?

Edited by PItiful Boar, 24 February 2024 - 05:07 PM.

[pokari]

41

No, I'm just playing with the existing toy right now.

Serious training of these things seems to usually fall into one of two categories for me—things where someone else already did it better (see: a dozen anime/manga models), or things where I lack the technical know-how and-or hardware (and-or datasets, for that matter)

Kinda wondering if I shouldn't try to make a tryhard pass at picking up the know-how. If I can somehow find the motivation, getting a grasp on machine learning does seem like the thing to do at the moment, doesn't it?

(I'm not talking about the know-how for the hobbyist "train your model to reproduce you favourite waifu/husbando/car/duck/render style" stuff. More like, it naively feels like I should be able to make a little headway some problems that I run into—like video generation only going for a few seconds max—and even just knowing how to try would be fun)

[PItiful Boar]

42 yesterday i finally got around visiting my friend and her 8 year old daughter... better late than never I suppose. And I played a game in the food court w/ the 8 year old coz she wanted to try it, it's a VR ride... put on goggles and they turn your hand into guns and you zap targets machines as you go on a roller coaster ride  

i actually got quite dizzy.... its expensie $15 bucks, maybe for 7 minutes or so ? i also got beat btw

afterwards i went walking up powell station (have you ever ridden the cable car?) and got quite the workout

i was huffing and puffing

around 5pm the chinese paradise celebration got started , but there were too many people there ... was not able to see much , but hey, at least i was there

[pokari]

Sounds like a fun day :3

...okay maybe that's a demented response to what you just wrote, considering, but IDK sounds fun to me XD

43

I genuinely can't remember if I've ever been on the cable-car. I know what it is and where it is and how it functions and... Have I ridden it? I dunno. (If I have, though, it must have been in the first half of my life XD)

[PItiful Boar]

43 there's a sad story about her tbh... she lost her husband (my college roomate) to an asthma-induced cardiac arrest and i tried to be nice to her but its so damn far and hard to get into the city.

 

Also the city isn't as nice as what it was, so many druggies and hobos and police guarding outside the shopping malls. And the food was expensive! I got a small dish of pakistani food at the food court and it costed me $18 which turned out to be $20 after tax and tips! It was nice tho... I like lamb... but still! 

[pokari]

Interestingly, as far as our best attempts at headcounts go, homelessness shouldn't especially be up in SF compared to a decade or so ago, in the grand scheme of things. Headcounts are difficult, of course. But if so, I wonder what's going on that's making it more "visible"?

About a third of the current set were homeless when they came to San Francisco. Interesting question to spark rabid and unhelpful internet debates: If that means that SF is a nicer place to be homeless than most, and that that conversely is part of why SF has so much so visibly—does that in fact mean SF is doing morally well, comparatively speaking, taking on some of the brunt of everyone else's NIMBY abandonment of those who can't make enough money to take care of themselves?

Not something you or I is going to solve, though.

44

*hugs*

Anyway, I'm sorry that so much of it was disheartening. I do hope you did have at least a little fun. And helping people out when you have the capacity is good! So, good job :3

[PItiful Boar]

45 so yesterday i was watching this donghua called demon hunter, made by youku animations, was 25 episodes... if you put everything together its roughly 3 hours, and i fast-skipped things that a lot... 

it was just enjoyable enough for me to continue watching... 

there was that one cheesy scene where one of the side characters, who was really a moral upstanding character, made a pledge to the spider demon queen to let her unhatched youngling go in exchange for intel, and then kept his word... only to have the youngling take an arm and a leg in the next scene.

and from there it was all down hill... he basically got captured by another demon and was turned into a demon... and the way he died was well done... like he knew he couldn't go back so he had the mc stab him ... and in his mental conscious world (demons use mental attacks ) he relived some of his most beautiful childhood memories, like kicking a ball with the mc like kids, and then he sort of just faded away

personally i would have done the scene slightly different, i would just have him walk into the beach , wade through the river and disappear 

yah makes me wonder why good guys finish last

[pokari]

46

I mean in the case of that story (at least as I understand you describe it), it's a bit of a Tragedy of the Commons -ish thing, innit?

That is, the person might have personally been safer if they'd reneged on their promise and killed the spiderling. But in so doing they'd be doing their part to make everything worse for everyone in the long run—no deals can be made, nor trust nor reconciliation achieved, if you can't trust anyone to keep their promises.

(I am deliberately ignoring for a moment the likelihood that the author intends the demons to be Just Evil™ without regards to circumstance, because that sort of artificial conclusion would be really boring with respect to this conversation)

Some of the "nice guys finish last" (noting that they certainly don't always) scenarios are indeed going to be approximately this—game-theory often says that you can make things a little better for yourself if you're willing to make everything a little bit worse for everyone. And, if everyone adopts the asshole approach, it doesn't fix any problems —the world just becomes increasingly unliveable.

So in that context, maybe the question shouldn't be "why do nice guys finish last", which isn't that mysterious. It should be rather "how do we get (ideally) everyone to be nice guys".

Something-something-thank-you-for-coming-to-my-ted-talk :'p

Edited by pokari, 28 February 2024 - 11:06 AM.

[pokari]

47

Leap days should be an international holiday.

Just enjoy the extra day in the year, as a freebie.

[PItiful Boar]

48 were you able to acquire some beautiful memories because of that day? If you had, then the day was not wasted...

Edited by PItiful Boar, 02 March 2024 - 04:46 PM.

[pokari]

49

There weren't any particular memories. I just like the day, wasted or no :'3