i think the “under god” stuff was added later…

yeah, 1954

here it comes in two varieties, one is about 10cm across, one about 5 and comes as a ring. don’t know how the big ones are made but i assume they are boiled. good sandwich spread.

there’s a smoked horse sausage here that’s great. it’s very different than beef or pork so it can’t be used in the same way, but it’s very good.

i was thinking of that as well, like surely land would still have value. don’t know if it’s ever addressed though.

only time i’ve ever tried it was in a duolith consisting of over half a million lines of python, all of them critical.

nope, big things are built with “industrial replicators”. the only thing they can’t make is a material called latinum, which is sought after by the ferengi precisely because it’s the only scarce thing left.

also, there’s a distinction to be made between “private” and “personal” property. people still own things, but it’s for sentimental reasons. like, you wouldn’t have a toolbox or a statue or a mansion unless it was your “lucky” toolbox or “antique” statue or a “family” mansion. things only have sentimental value, not monetary value.

but you’re right in that an economy exists, because the federation still needs to do outside trade and freight. it’s just more of a bartering system.

also, people on DS9 tend to carry latinum around due to the ferengi presence. the bar in ds9 just has the same replicators that all the rooms do, but it’s like a custom to buy a drink at the bar and gamble.

it could be below the table

cows have horns

i read The Black Magician series by Trudi Canavan back when they came out, and they may be a bit weird of a recommendation in that the magic there very much is “slam fireball into face” but there’s a heavy focus on the process itself. Canavan writes mage battles like WWI gruesome trench warfare, with battle lines of wizards lobbing fireballs at each other for hours until their shields break, and supply lines running up to the front with mana supplies. it’s an interesting take on the genre.

also, the Discworld books very much have magic as its own entity with its own will as a central theme.

it’s also one shipment.

didn’t it turn out to be like 10 kg of fentanyl total, ever?

i usually only play on tabletop sim because it’s so easy to make your own games, but maybe bga would be good for more “serious” games.

idk, for me board games are an inherently social activity and the ability to fuck around with the pieces really helps tts feel social.

that would make sense yeah

the steel toe is usually underneath the leather/fabric… what kind of cartoon-ass boots you guys wearing?

i may just have had bad teachers but i to this day have no idea what chemistry at pre-university level were supposed to teach. the labs were all about watching things change, with no explanation as to why. and the theory parts were all about balancing reactions. none of it connected.

horse is good eating. good for the climate too, since horses require so much maintenance. if we eat’em, they’re gone.

as a consultant this happens all the time because companies use brokers to find people. the broker only has a vague description of the project to go on, and they are not a domain expert.

i was once turned down by a broker because i “didn’t have experience in C”. i had listed all the versions of C i’ve worked with.

here’s a cure

it’s called the strangler pattern, where the new version is layered on top of the old and gradually replaces it.

it usually doesn’t work.

i’m personally not too fond of llms, because they are being pushed everywhere, even when they don’t make sense and they need to be absolutely massive to be of any use, meaning you need a data center.

i’m also hesitant to use the term “ai” at all since it says nothing and encompasses way too much.

i like using image generators for my own amusement and to “fix” the stuff i make in image editors. i never run any online models for this, i bought extra hardware specifically to experiment. and i live in a city powered basically entirely by hydro power so i’m pretty sure i’m personally carbon neutral. otherwise i wouldn’t do it.

the main things that bother me is partially the scale of operations, partially the philosophy of the people driving this. i’ve said it before but open ai seem to want to become e/acc tech priests. they release nothing about their models, they hide them away and insinuate that we normal hoomans are unworthy of the information and that we wouldn’t understand it anyway. which is why deepseek caused such a market shake, it cracked the pedestal underneath open ai.

as for the training process, i’m torn. on the one hand it’s shitty to scrape people’s work without consent, and i hope open ai gets their shit smacked out of them by copyright law. on the other hand i did the math on the final models, specifically on stable diffusion 1.0: it used the LAION 5B scientific dataset of tagged images, which has five billion ish data points as the name suggests. stable diffusion 1.0 is something like 4GB. this means there’s on average less than eight bits in the model per image and description combination. given that the images it trained on were 512x512 on average, that gives a shocking 0.00003 bits per pixel. and stable diffusion 1.5 has more than double the training data but is the same size. at that scale there is nothing of the original image in there.

the environmental effect is obviously bad, but the copying argument? i’m less certain. that doesn’t invalidate the people who are worried it will take jobs, because it will. mostly through managers not understanding how their businesses work and firing talented artists to replace with what is basically noise machines.