Test Equipment Anonymous

Cerebus wrote: ↑Wed Jun 28, 2023 5:06 pm

AVGresponding wrote: ↑Wed Jun 28, 2023 5:27 am That'll undoubtedly get "repaired" and put back on the road. Most of the worst Russian car crash vids I've seen involve western "premium" brands (and alcohol, at a guess), and mostly because of the much higher speeds they are capable of.

Ladas seem to be mostly magnets for lorries, usually careering over from the other side of carriageway. The 'premium' brands seem to like having head-on crashes, possibly in some modern automotive version of Russian Roulette, or T-boning one another at junctions.

That's just probability. I'm not joking but my butt muscles have not recovered yet from being a passenger in Kyrgyzstan. And Russia is safer apparently!

Our guide said to hire older taxi drivers because they're clearly doing something right to live that long. Our van driver was in his 60s.

BU508A wrote: ↑Fri Jun 23, 2023 7:32 am The Economist about AI:

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation ... ma-shalizi

They describe AI as a monster like a Shoggoth from the H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu universe.

Quote:
"But what such worries fail to acknowledge is that we’ve lived among shoggoths for centuries, tending to them as though they were our masters. We call them “the market system”, “bureaucracy” and even “electoral democracy”. The true Singularity began at least two centuries ago with the industrial revolution, when human society was transformed by vast inhuman forces. Markets and bureaucracies seem familiar, but they are actually enormous, impersonal distributed systems of information-processing that transmute the seething chaos of our collective knowledge into useful simplifications."
[...]
"It is in this sense that LLMs are shoggoths. Like markets and bureaucracies, they represent something vast and incomprehensible that would break our minds if we beheld its full immensity."

It is only a monster because of our shameless willingness to foist off our own workload onto these idiot children of the silicon revolution. Like kids who grew up allowed to use calculators in grade school, the human supposedly in charge completely lacks the core skills to even know whether the answers the machine gives are correct.

Stupid, greedy people are inventing new ways to put competent human beings out of work by replacing them with this technology... when that's all it is, a machine with no actual intelligence. Just because it can speak and we think it makes sense does not make it in any way intelligent.

Yeah, we've had computers running our lives for decades now... I get it... but up til now, a human being has always made the decisions that the computer carries out. There is a huge material difference between that and where we are headed now at breakneck speed.

By the time we collectively realize just how well and truly fucked we are with that technology at the wheel, we won't be able to do anything aboot it.

mnem

Case in point:

Here we GO... Now the office drones don't even need to bother writing their own dron-eMail missives... before long we'll all just be paying Grammarly to talk to itself.

mnem

bd139 wrote: ↑Wed Jun 28, 2023 11:18 pm Our guide said to hire older taxi drivers because they're clearly doing something right to live that long. Our van driver was in his 60s.

Speaking as a man who is both in his seventh decade, and survived being a motorcycle dispatch rider on London in the 80s, I concur.

And also offer this as strong anecdotal evidence that my road safety advice is worth taking.

A nice parade of fifteen rare and unusual cars:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsQet7yDkhU

Start of Euclid with a Falcon-9 from Cape Canaveral.
They have also streamed the successful landing of the first stage of the Falcon-9

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FemwoIoX6-A

BU508A wrote: ↑Sat Jul 01, 2023 2:57 pm A nice parade of fifteen rare and unusual cars:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsQet7yDkhU

I actually had one of those BMW Issetta cars for a number of years. I moved house a few years ago and there was this car in its garage in pieces so I rebuilt it and got it running again and it was actually quite good fun to drive and un like the Messerschmitt KR200 also featured in this video, it had a reverse gear I used this as my daily driver to work as it was so much cheaper to run than my lovely Vanden Plas Princess 3 litre. I remember being issued with a petrol rationing book for both cars as it was the time of the 6 day war when Egypt closed the Suez Canal for eight years, and running the BMW made so much more sense at the time that I sold the Princess and brought a mk1 Ford Cortina for family journeys and retained the BMW for work days.

BU508A wrote: ↑Sat Jul 01, 2023 2:57 pm A nice parade of fifteen rare and unusual cars:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsQet7yDkhU

Sadly, full of historical inaccuracies, utter bullshit, and boring cars that really aren't qualified to meet the video title.

From the "Most Creative Waste of Fucking Time and Money" Dept...

bigthink.com wrote:3D-printed, laser-cooked meat may be the future of cooking:

A recent study suggests that future kitchen appliances could make it possible to 3D-print entirely new recipes and cook them with lasers.



https://bigthink.com/the-future/laser-cooking-meat/

mnem

BU508A wrote: ↑Sat Jul 01, 2023 4:23 pm Start of Euclid with a Falcon-9 from Cape Canaveral.
They have also streamed the successful landing of the first stage of the Falcon-9

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FemwoIoX6-A

The video above got removed, here is a video of the launch and the landing of the first stage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdt9fh7C8oI

While watching that, this came up in my feed:


Hmmmm... Elvis' private jet discovered abandoned in Roswell, NM and offered at auction by Mecum...

mnem
Dammitt, I knew K was tellin' the truth...

And this wingnut spent a quarter mil on the damn thing...

mnem
"A fool and his money are some party..."

And he will more than likely spend another half a million at least on engines and other bits and bobs in an effort to get it airworthy, I guess he is just a big fan of the King and a kid at heart

I'd bet long odds it'll be way more than half a million for engines - it needs four of them. I tried looking up replacement costs earlier, but of course nothing plain is listed. It looks like it might be as much as $800k to do a major overhaul on one, so getting replacements will certainly be a pretty penny. Hell, it’s now north of $20k to do a major overhaul on an O-360 (a common 4 cylinder reciprocating engine used in things like Piper Archers) - when you get into those rapidly spinning blowtorch types, prices get way up into the flight levels or even low earth orbit in the blink of an eye!

-Pat

Well, if you look into the crap he's shilling on his yoobChoob, it looks pretty likely he's a "alternative investment marketeer". The name of the game there is "go big or stay home" and above all else, spend OPM if you can.

I can sortof see it; even if he spends 2-3 mil getting it all back together, there has to be some revenue-generating potential in owning Elvis' last private jet, and the only one not a static exhibit at Graceland.

mnem
Rich Rebuilds, eat yer heart out.

mnementh wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2023 1:59 pm Well, if you look into the crap he's shilling on his yoobChoob, it looks pretty likely he's a "alternative investment marketeer". The name of the game there is "go big or stay home" and above all else, spend OPM if you can.

I can sortof see it; even if he spends 2-3 mil getting it all back together, there has to be some revenue-generating potential in owning Elvis' last private jet, and the only one not a static exhibit at Graceland.

mnem
Rich Rebuilds, eat yer heart out.

Yeah, I think you may have a good point there, there probably is a certain cache to having the only airworthy plane with that provenance, especially if he can get it back its original condition. I can see many fans would be willing to pay handsomely for a flight in the Kings plane.

I found this amusing: https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html

It's a miracle anyone gets anywhere...

I ignored all communications from everything, slacked off for 11 months, and then went home before the last deadline.

Am I ready for middle management now...? Or am I now overqualified, and must take up politics?

mnem
ehhh, fuck that too.

mnementh wrote: ↑Thu Jul 06, 2023 12:40 am I ignored all communications from everything, slacked off for 11 months, and then went home before the last deadline.

Am I ready for middle management now...? Or am I now overqualified, and must take up politics?

mnem
ehhh, fuck that too.

Sounds like you're an IT contractor to me!

It was the "ehhh, fuck that too." pushed me over the line, wasn't it...? . . .

mnem
[YOUR AD HERE!!!]

Any Tesla drivers here from the UK?

https://electrek.co/2023/06/30/tesla-gi ... and-drive/

If all yootoob videos were as informative and brief as this, I might watch more of them.



Yootoob vids would be full of ums, ahs, face shots, and take 30 minutes to give you a half-baked idea of some of this.

Modern TV documentaries would be 1 hour, but probably have better composed information.

Oh yes, that's how to build a bridge in Prague in the 14th century

Link to the video of that bridge building?

That animated gif's URL is all I've got.
https://twistedsifter.com/wp-content/up ... at0747.gif

Google would probably help.

EDIT: It did, "prague bridge construction gif" leads to...

https://www.openculture.com/2020/10/an- ... ntury.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJgD6gyi0Wk
and hence to
https://www.youtube.com/@praha-archeologickacz/videos

Nonetheless, the gif is only 5MB, and that's elegant in itself.

The video appears to have been created by/for Praha Archeologicka; a site devoted to the history and study of Prague. English version of the site is here:

http://www.praha-archeologicka.eu/

Here's their article on the Charles Bridge, which that video/gif are specifically about: http://praha-archeologicka.cz/p/212

mnem