The weirdest thing about all this is that by sheer accident, the QAnon freaks actually managed to find a tiny sliver of truth: There really is a cabal of powerful child abusers. It’s just that they got every single other detail, including who the child abusers are, insanely wrong.

I have a work-supplied laptop with Windows on it. I use it maybe once or twice a month, just for the things requiring a VPN. The rest of the time it sits there gathering dust while I get real work done on my Linux laptop.

The specs on the work laptop say it should be a performance beast, but my Linux machine (with half the RAM) runs circles around it.

I’m watching that happen in my industry (software development). There’s this massive pressure campaign by damn near everyone’s employers in software dev to use LLM tools.

It’s causing developers to churn out terrible, fragile, unmaintainable code at a breakneck pace, while they’re actively forgetting how to code for themselves.

A while back, I was thinking about upgrading my living room entertainment PC. It’s got a decent video card in it, but some of the other hardware is getting long in the tooth.

Now, my plan is to focus on software tweaks to squeeze the absolute best performance I can out of it, and keep the hardware as-is until it starts physically breaking down. And when that happens, I’ll find refurbished hardware to upgrade it with, rather than spending the exorbitant fees to buy anything new.

What mystifies me about all this is that it’s obvious what the end goal is: No more PCs, and everyone just rents dumb terminals connected to AI data centers that run everything and have all the compute power. The problem is that literally no one but AI companies want that. Not consumers, and not other companies that sell software and services to consumers.

When cars replaced carriages, it was because people actually wanted them. Cars had real-world benefits over horses. But this shit? No one wants it. Gamers want game performance you simply can’t get with streamed games. People who work with computers for a living don’t want their ability to do anything to vanish if their ISP has an outage.

Shit’s gonna get stupid, fast.

Jails concentration camps

???

We can’t vote with anything but our wallets here, so this is a thing we can do to at least reduce their income. And considering they’re losing close to $100 million every day already, I can’t help but suspect nickel and diming them a bit still hurts.

The fact that we no longer respond with horror and outrage over the knowledge that we have children in prison camps is itself horrific.

At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re working on it. He’s destroying their bottom lines.

That said, if you go after the king, you’d best not miss.

Neither does Trump.

I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Honestly, if I were in his shoes, I’d sue the pants off DHS, then head back to Ireland anyway, because fuck this shit-hole country.

The AI boom

They misspelled “bubble.” None of the AI providers have a path towards profitability.

Yes, it’s base64. And what’s behind it could be anything that can be attached to an email.

In this case, it’s a PDF. If the base64 text can be extracted accurately, then the PDF that was attached to the email can be recreated.

The challenge is basically twofold:

1. There’s a lot of text, and it needs to be extracted perfectly. Even one character being wrong corrupts it and makes it impossible to decode.
2. As the article points out, there are lots of visual problems with the encoded text, including the shitty font it’s displayed with, which makes automating the extraction damn near impossible. OCR is very good these days, but this is kind of a perfect example of text that it has trouble with.

As for my approach, I’m basically just slowly and painstakingly running several OCR tools on small bits at a time, merging the resulting outputs, and doing my best to correct mistakes manually.

Could someone who is more familiar with Japan’s politics explain what this means? Is a Japanese conservative at all like an American conservative?

I’m not having trouble with it as such, it’s just a slow and painstaking process. The source is crappy enough that an enormous number of characters need to be checked manually, and it’s ridiculously time-consuming.

Long story short:

• Some of the emails in the file dump had attachments.
• The way attachments work in emails is that they’re converted to encoded text.
• That encoded text was included - badly - in the file dump.
• So it’s theoretically possible to convert them back to the original files, but it will take work to get the text back. Every character has to be exactly correct.

Source: I’m a software developer and I’m currently trying to recover one of these attachments.

Welcome! Isn’t it a breath of fresh air to use an OS that isn’t trying to turn your computer into an advertising and upselling platform? It has its issues, but it’s a huge relief to escape the constant inundation from Microsoft.

(Obligatory: I use arch BTW)

I wish Trump would rupture, like the pestilent boil on America’s ass that he is.

I expect a lot of countries will welcome vaccine tourists, because those will be the sane Americans who don’t support this madness and are trying to change it. If there’s to be any hope of getting the US back on track, the sane people living here have to be healthy.