Interesting findings on the internet

[mnementh]

He's still an annoying prick

So am I.

mnem
Fun fact: I was in contact with LMG while in the GWN during one of their "work fairs"; they wouldn't even start negotiations until I had my work visa.

[AVGresponding]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Cu1PKj ... p=gAQBiAQB

[mnementh]

RAS2.jpg

RAS1.jpg

I tripped over a ad for some random Rev-a-Shelf product on Gixen.com this morning; when I followed it and did a search, I found lots of very clever organized storage/wasted space re-purposing widgetry, and unlike all such gimcracky I've seen before, most of it seems pretty reasonably priced, given the solid maple construction and free shipping:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R ... f&_sacat=0

mnem

[mnementh]

Hmmm.... hand-freer for when you need to solder-splice wires in situ. Should also be useful for when you need to splice printer filament together.

These are available at all the usual gimcracky-vendor sites for $7-15 depending on how you get it delivered; search string is Soldering Aid Plier .

mnem
*pisses off to the dwagon-cave*

[BU508A]

I'd like to introduce the datagnome.

What is the Datenzwerg (datagnome)?
The Datenzwerg is a garden gnome with a mission: To collect environmental data and make it publicly available.



Edit:
Thanks mnerm for the hint with the imgp=10

[BU508A]

The only polite comment which comes to my mind is: "Idiots!"

[bd139]

I think that's a fine example of handing the writing over to someone who is a good writer but does not understand the subject matter they are writing about. This was then passed to an editor who didn't read it and printed by a publisher who didn't care.

Replace writer with programmer, editor with QA and publisher with release manager and you have the software industry summed up nicely as well.

[tggzzz]

I skimmed a couple of other pages on that site. Everything I saw was much of a muchness

And it will become source material for ChatGPT and other LLMs

With prescience, some people are already worrying about the general problem of LLMs (and other ML systems) consuming their own output and ensuring that machines reach a state of "Idiocracy" before people do.

[bd139]

The stages of LLM excitement are:

1. Fear.
2. Enthusiasm.
3. Realisation that the phrase "shit in, shit out" applies.
4. Fear of people who get stuck at stage 2 or have investments and don't want to think about stage 3.

bd140 has just reached stage 4 after a rollercoaster ride of a presentation on LLMs and their therapeutic applications. In this case someone was proposing using an LLM to provide therapy to people. That was until I showed Bing gaslighting people and helping them commit suicide. Suddenly the decade of training a human makes sense...

On training it with its own data, reasoning will be like a JPEG that has been recompressed a thousand times.

[tggzzz]

Yes, given the current state of the content of The Web, it is time to introduce youngsters to the concept of GIGO.

But never fear, you can use TDD to test quality into a product. Can't you?

I hate being a Cassandra, but Fukuyama was right

[mnementh]

The stages of LLM excitement are:

1. Fear.
2. Enthusiasm.
3. Realisation that the phrase "shit in, shit out" applies.
4. Fear of people who get stuck at stage 2 or have investments and don't want to think about stage 3.

bd140 has just reached stage 4 after a rollercoaster ride of a presentation on LLMs and their therapeutic applications. In this case someone was proposing using an LLM to provide therapy to people. That was until I showed Bing gaslighting people and helping them commit suicide. Suddenly the decade of training a human makes sense...

On training it with its own data, reasoning will be like a JPEG that has been recompressed a thousand times.

Iterative Machine Learning:



mnem
The overwhelming human response:

[mnementh]

I'd like to introduce the datagnome.

What is the Datenzwerg (datagnome)? The Datenzwerg is a garden gnome with a mission: To collect environmental data and make it publicly available.

That data is here: https://grafana.datagnome.de/d/f17a6449 ... efresh=15m

mnem
*toddles off to ded*

[mansaxel]

On training it with its own data, reasoning will be like a JPEG that has been recompressed a thousand times.

There are people stuck in State 2 at work. They're old video people. I'll mod the JPEG analogy to "Betacam SP generations" and hope for the penny to drop.

[Specmaster]

Damn and blast it, BD139 and BD140 are off again, just when I found this little gem about a car that he once owned (not the one in the video) and I know that many others also had one and have all told tales about their adventures and misadventures with these cars but here is news about the most famous one of all, the very first one of the production line has been found......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWCTmyO ... DRIVETRIBE

[bd139]

Will watch on the plane tomorrow

[mnementh]

Meh. Fucking latecomers to the party; the Willys GPW design was delivered in 1940, and was already legend by the time JUE was even dreamt of. Of course, only pampered officiers would be seen in something like a LandRover.

mnem
*agitating-ily*

[Specmaster]

Tsk tsk, just because we Brits took the basic Willys concept and greatly improved it so it became the go to number one around the world for a 4x4 do it all.

[vk6zgo]

Meh. Fucking latecomers to the party; the Willys GPW design was delivered in 1940, and was already legend by the time JUE was even dreamt of. Of course, only pampered officiers would be seen in something like a LandRover.

mnem
*agitating-ily*

Back in 1967/8 I drove around in MkII Landrovers whilst working for the "Postmaster General's Dept" in tropical Western Australia.

The seats were a slab of foam rubber straight onto a fixed part of the aluminium body, the one I mostly drove had one windscreen wiper operated by reaching up & flicking a rotary switch on the body of the wiper.
No wind-up windows, just sliding ones, ventilation was a couple of small rectangular doors that opened up under the windscreen, no door trim or roof lining.

Mine was "on hire" from another Govt Dept, the "Dept of Supply", who had been doing unknown things along the beach near Port Hedland & was delivered to Wyndham as "deck cargo" by the WA "State Shipping Service".
The sea water had got to the aluminium body & corroded it, so it leaked when it rained.

And did it rain? Holy shit it did!
When the "Wet" hit, water cascaded through the holes AND the ventilation doors, which had to stay open to slightly alleviate the windscreen misting (demisters? what are they?).

If the "officiers" thought that was pampering, they needed their heads read!

[vk6zgo]

Tsk tsk, just because we Brits took the basic Willys concept and greatly improved it so it became the go to number one around the world for a 4x4 do it all.

Meh!
When my Landrover arrived at Wyndham jetty, I was "chuffed" as I had something to drive between the separate jobsites, but the first time I drove through quite an average puddle it stopped dead!

Sitting halfway inside the engine compartment trying to dry out the distributor with Methylated Spirits & a "dunny roll" wasn't my idea of a "4x4 do it all"!
In fairness, the "D of S" hadn't looked after the poor old beast very well on their watch, so there was crud all over the dizzy, but you would think that a "go anywhere" vehicle would have a high mounted distributor, (The later 6cyl ones did), or at least a deflector plate underneath it like some quite ordinary Pommy cars had!

Or, they could have used a Bosch distributor which didn't allow water ingress to the same degree as those fielded by "the Prince of Darkness".

I had already forded streams with my EH Holden station wagon without problems, as had people with other generations of Holdens, Fords & the scary old Standard Vanguards!

As soon as Toyota Landcruisers started appearing in quantity on the market, Landrovers started to disappear from the Outback.

[bd139]

To be fair the first land rovers were built on jeep chassis. The objective was to produce a superior vehicle. And they did. Then many other people produced superior vehicles to the land rover. The end game was that owning a land rover was about trying to pull horse girls. Those horse girls got rich daddies so you needed a nice land rover to drive around in. This exponentially lead to the current line of SUV class land rovers designed to pick up women who don't ride horses any more but will ride on a suitably rich looking car owner. Obviously to buy one of those you have to have done something morally wrong in your existence thus they are usually narcissistic bastards who drive like morons.

To quote my mother: "never date a man with a nice car; it's all he's got" (referring to both possessions and intellectual interests)

Anyway something completely different. Some germanium physics which is quite amusing:

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html

Last post for a bit. bd140 and myself are now off ...

[tggzzz]

Meh. Fucking latecomers to the party; the Willys GPW design was delivered in 1940, and was already legend by the time JUE was even dreamt of. Of course, only pampered officiers would be seen in something like a LandRover.

mnem
*agitating-ily*

Back in 1967/8 I drove around in MkII Landrovers whilst working for the "Postmaster General's Dept" in tropical Western Australia.

The seats were a slab of foam rubber straight onto a fixed part of the aluminium body, the one I mostly drove had one windscreen wiper operated by reaching up & flicking a rotary switch on the body of the wiper.
No wind-up windows, just sliding ones, ventilation was a couple of small rectangular doors that opened up under the windscreen, no door trim or roof lining.

Mine was "on hire" from another Govt Dept, the "Dept of Supply", who had been doing unknown things along the beach near Port Hedland & was delivered to Wyndham as "deck cargo" by the WA "State Shipping Service".
The sea water had got to the aluminium body & corroded it, so it leaked when it rained.

And did it rain? Holy shit it did!
When the "Wet" hit, water cascaded through the holes AND the ventilation doors, which had to stay open to slightly alleviate the windscreen misting (demisters? what are they?).

If the "officiers" thought that was pampering, they needed their heads read!

I had a Mk2 in the 80s I sold it in an unroadworthy condition for the same price I paid for it. Allegedly it is still on the road, but I have my doubts. The one major concession to comfort was that the driver's seat had been replaced with a remarkably comfortable bucket seat from a Mini, held in by a couple of angle brackets.

Why were you concerned about rain entering? There were plenty of holes/gaps in the floor for it to flow out. Those had the major advantage that when fording rivers the car didn't become a bubble that floated down the stream - see the acceptable yootoob vid below (adverts longer than the clip, moving pictures beneficial ! ) Given the number of people taking photos, that looks like a car trial I might consider visiting.

The entire windscreen could be rotated so that it was flat; I never did that since it would have required fiddling with the hardtop roof.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_m-DsrhlpM

[mnementh]

mnem
*agitating-ily*

mission. fucking. accomplished.

mnem

[BU508A]

Birds nests made from anti-bird spikes

https://www.hetnatuurhistorisch.nl/file ... _et_al.pdf

[mnementh]

The Irony is strong with that one.

mnem
it's all fuel for The Churn.

[mnementh]

https://variety.com/2023/music/news/rob ... 235692172/

mnem
*sad, tired sigh*



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