lopsotronic

6 ms·

31.
by lopsotronic 3mo ago
What I'm seeing here, reading this thread, is that "intelligence" isn't a thing. "Thing" in terms of a quantifiable that you can measure with tools and reason about, reproducibly. Everyone's got some idea
32.
by lopsotronic 3mo ago
I can't believe I had to scroll down to see this. Victory always flows down; you can have the most badass of technical equipment or cunning tactical victories in the field, then still quite enthusiastically lose the war, due to bad str
33.
by lopsotronic 3mo ago
I have heard it confidently stated, repeatedly, by extremely technical coder types, that "once we have enough data, we don't need Statistics" It's a pretty funny sentiment. It's also, unfortunately, reflective of
34.
by lopsotronic 3mo ago
My first decent *NIX computer was an SGI Indigo that I rescued from a dumpster at a military-adjacent subcontractor that was also my first tech job. Hmmm. Probably it wasn't sterilized by the book. I took that beast home and loved it
35.
by lopsotronic 3mo ago
One of my favorite horror films of the 1980s, Andrzej Żuławski's 1981 Possession . One quote I heard about it, is that some movies are about madness, and other movies seem to be themselves mad, and Possession is one of those movies.
36.
by lopsotronic 3mo ago
The sheer quantity of "mislabelled"[1] PRC origin parts passing through the logistics chains as Primo-A-grade-American-Made - even in Defense - is deeply disturbing, and that's the stuff that they do catch. Transshipment i
37.
by lopsotronic 3mo ago
You also have to ponder how it looks when you remove the Chinese supply chain for all those commodity parts. Which will almost certainly be the case if we decide to punch that dance card. Having a boundless cornucopia of servos and radios w
38.
by lopsotronic 3mo ago
Refrigeration and freezer cars completely inverted a lot of prices in the late 19th through the early 20th century. Coming home from the Appalachian Trail I stayed at the Inn at St. John's in Portland ME, waiting for my flight home. Th
39.
by lopsotronic 4mo ago
Precisely how early Heliocentrism began to be seriously considered is a very much open question, but of its more lucid proponents, very little survives, if anything at all. Usually only in snippets told by others. And that's just one t
40.
by lopsotronic 4mo ago
For all the editorial hay to be made from the "The Victory of Capital" or the purported "Inevitable Self-Destruction of Communism (with Russians In It)", the process of nations transforming into "security state zomb
41.
by lopsotronic 4mo ago
Ah, I love CircuitiTikZ. Only way to do simple text-based circuit diagrams. https://ctan.org/pkg/circuitikz?lang=en https://github.com/circuitikz/circuitikz Some years ago I wired it up with `asci
42.
by lopsotronic 4mo ago
Oh, this gold rush has breathed new life into the old school Semantic guys. Lord knows the DITA priesthood has been running low on rubes, so this new era is a godsend. Re-coding all of your org's content into a verbose granular schema,
43.
by lopsotronic 4mo ago
Much more informative than I thought. So it's not Pluto, it's something like variant 2 of the NB-36's engine, a direct air cycle nuclear turbojet. A bit less insane than Pluto, but it raises a whole other herd of questions. I
44.
by lopsotronic 4mo ago
"just for adopting . ." OK, I'm really sorry, but " just for adopting " is doing some heavy lifting here. Watson's other greatest hits: worries about Big Black Dicks; melanin injections as boner pill; what I ca
45.
by lopsotronic 4mo ago
The retrogression perception is correct; but the specific timeframe is so incorrect that the back of my head blew out like a pinata. The goal is - and I am not picking on the reactionary wing alone, this impulse has broad support across our
46.
by lopsotronic 4mo ago
I've been a very vocal advocate of Asciidoc as replacement for thick granular XML-based CCS (component content system) specifications, but Typst is the first one that gives it a run for its money. And then some. If Asciidoc beats up DI
47.
by lopsotronic 4mo ago
As long as the "learning" part is more pleasure than the sensation of not caring about other human beings, I think you're solid, man. The problem with the nerd-kings-tycoons of today, is that the idea of being feudal lords ma
48.
by lopsotronic 4mo ago
Where the self-identifier of "nerd" as "I don't care that I don't know how to make people like me" is given precedence over "I care more about esoteric knowledge than about how to make people like me"
49.
by lopsotronic 4mo ago
"Stay 'til 2300 codepounding or watch your child die of a medieval disease" seems to work really well for productivity, though. Oh, no, people stopped having children. Whatever could be the reason.
50.
by lopsotronic 4mo ago
Maus is a great work, and a breakthrough for its genre, but I've always found the animal metaphor troubling for reasons I could never quite pin down. It was only recently that I realized the problem I have with it: it's a tacit
51.
by lopsotronic 4mo ago
Even with open weights, there's a legit reason to be careful when making stuff for defense. Let's say I am making sensor software, and I say, huh, let's bring in a tiny little vision model for my EO sensor - then it can ident
52.
by lopsotronic 4mo ago
Block 4 is the only version they'd dare put up against a peer air defense, and Block 4 is delayed, delayed, delayed, and . . nowhere in sight, at the moment. There has been two and a half decades of FUD billowing around the entire prog
53.
by lopsotronic 4mo ago
It's the deep desire for a sort of restorative authoritarianism: someone who can reduce the complex state of the world into "the way it should be". The resentment is not versus fate or calamity but against those people who st
54.
by lopsotronic 4mo ago
There's a parallel in Maus , where the PoV character runs increasingly into his Holocaust survivor's father's racism, even as he explores his father's threading the needle of 20th century Central Europe[1] . He calls hi
55.
by lopsotronic 4mo ago
Scuttlebutt I've heard is that the revenue mechanism of the whole complex is essentially a gigantic depreciation machine. Starlink sats de-orbiting all by themselves get considered "depreciation". That one mechanism basically
56.
by lopsotronic 4mo ago
Is there an actual quantitative check that says "AI or not AI"? I'm genuinely curious. So far as I can tell, AI prose checking - at least vs the frontier models - has been little better than vibe-based. Which, well, that&#x27
57.
by lopsotronic 4mo ago
First off, say a private prayer of thanks that the core of the current reactionary movement is operating as a scaled up dropship scam. Intellectually and organizationally focused, the end product would rival or even dwarf the great autocrac
58.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
I wanted to say, I probably disagree with you on more or less everything that plagues this nation, but thanks for dipping your toe in strange waters both here and in your judgement of leaders. The fact you're even willing to talk puts
59.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
Hell yeah. I've run WEG d6, d20 Saga, FFG and I have to say, from a mechanics perspective, HERO + prefabs is my favorite system to run Star Wars in. A small but significant part of that is the vehicle/ship rules use the same comba
60.
by lopsotronic 5mo ago
I've retrofitted the Morale mechanic into DND5 and PFRPG1 as a Will Save. I generally run HERO System, though, for both Fantasy and for Star Wars. In HERO, minions of all sorts have to make EGO[1] rolls with cumulative minuses[0] for c

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