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Sounds like it’s something with some of the embedded ads. 🙁

Yeah, dealer fees are a bit insane. Unfortunately, we have laws that prevent manufacturers from running their own dealers so that the individual dealers don’t get priced out. Yep, the dealers lobbied for such treatment. And, if you try to special order something, it can get complicated. And let’s not forget the zebra fee! They need to get the horsepower from somewhere 😛

That’s one way of doing it! We could also go with one of the various vehicles designed by Dr Seuss! 😀

While we’re on the subject, here’s an oddly thorough list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_James_Bond_vehicles

[Spastic Hamburger]

Read Blake Crouch’s Run the other day. It was a brutal book and only recommended if you’re in the mood for something that gets the heart pounding. It’s really heavy.

Working on prepping for the upcoming cold blast. Weather report is not consistent with precipitation. The weekly forecast says 20% but the hourly says 80% so it’s pretty confusing. Need to make sure I round up all my blankets and heaters and then I also need to get the plants covered up. Originally wasn’t going to worry about it but the forecasted temps aren’t looking as good as they were the other day. Only 27F for two days but the precipitation is what has me worried.

[DeVaultSetter]

Ah yes, a fairly positive reader reaction at Goodreads. Having completed Wayward Pines, Dark Matter is next?
The hourly could mean 80% chance of the 20% weekly happening in the next hour, or could the weekly mean there’s a 20% chance of 80% happening each and every hour, as opposed to a random hour. 😛
Bunker up though, any plants in pots are best kept close to a brick wall for best results.

For the sheer delight of everyone, they played the Double BongCloud Attack, but hey wouldn’t that go down super well in the rapid tournaments. The game would be over even before the players had settled in their chairs!

[Spastic Hamburger]

Read Dark Matter a couple of months ago. 🙂 It was pretty fun and I liked the bit in the chatroom that was essentially a callback to Bender’s Big Score when an infinite number of them start popping up before he kills the chatroom.

Also read Recursion a while back. Not his best book, honestly. Great characters and interaction but the premise didn’t make much sense. How they get to time travel from simple brain mapping was preposterous and never adequately explained.

Could be! The weather reports are kind of hard to read sometimes. For example: the low for a day is actually the lowest temperature it’ll be the next morning around 0500. Makes no sense! 😛

Have had everything covered since Monday and brought the potted plants inside. They’re probably missing the sunlight but it’s better than getting frozen. 🙂

I definitely agree with the responses over there: if the result doesn’t matter, just have fun with it! Personally, I would have just used the Kings to dance around the board instead of simply moving them back and forth. 😛

Got colder this morning than it was supposed to. It was only supposed to be 28 but wound up being 25. No matter, I do like the cold. 🙂

[DeVaultSetter]

Oh nice, wonder if for those, anyone is good enough for a screenplay near enough as good as it was for (at least the first season of) WayWard Pines.
Funny thing about cold shock in some plants, for many it can be a delayed effect, they remain seemingly okay until early spring, and then fade. 25° is certainly about the limit for subtropicals.
Heard this guy on the radio today, what he says boils down to everything we say, write, or do is geared ultimately toward harm minimisation. As one reviewer put it:

Our sense of morality is rooted in avoiding harm.

A bit depressing actually, mostly on account of the fact it all boils down to reveal a hard kernel of truth. 🙁

[Spastic Hamburger]

About to finish Service Model. It’s a hilarious take on the robot apocalypse with tons of pop culture references. Highly recommended! My biggest issue is that I can read a book in a day or two so it’s hard for me to keep up with finding new stuff. Kobo’s algorithm has started breaking down and giving me the same stuff, most of which isn’t available from the library or I’ve already read. Going to need to come up with a better way to find reading material

Yeah. Some of them take a few days to display damage, most are immediate. Fortunately, it looks like the only ones that got hit are the ones that’ll come back in a few months. 🙂

Interesting idea. It can get complicated if there are conflicting concerns, though. For instance, you have a group of five deer and a group of five coyotes. The coyotes are going after the deer. Do you let the coyotes eat or do you save the deer?

[DeVaultSetter]

Well, morality kicks in a bit when you know how hungry the coyotes are. If they are moderately hungry, they would all be happy to share one deer, so in a chase, the slowest deer will lose, as it happens in un-biased settings. If they are ravenous, probably the same thing, as they may not be in good enough health to digest the meat properly, and if they are not so hungry, do nothing,. as the coyotes will probably do as well.
And so it happened, AI infrastructure begins with a bang and a crunch. The owners of Nvidia may not be too happy with the 17% drop, or not too surprised either, as they knew it had to happen. Even AMD shares went down 6.4%.
Leech season over here, as opposed to further north, down here the “anæsthetic” isn’t so strong, so can be felt earlier. The shortfall might be related to the recent extended drought, in which the poor critters exist mostly as a relatively dry withered bit of tube. 😛

[Spastic Hamburger]

I think part of it is that people are beginning to realize how far AI has to go. I have a lot of issues with it myself. Since Google added AI summaries to the search results page, I’ve been having more issues finding what I need. I find that the summaries are worded in strange ways that I find difficult to understand, or even inaccurate, and find it much easier to just find a link to an original article. Their old knowledge graph was much more useful to me. I even have to ask my smart speaker a question five different ways before it can understand what I mean.

In some eras, leeches were available at your local pharmacy. In fact, it looks like they’re using leech chemicals in actual medication. We’ve come a long way from bloodletting 😛

Bad air pollution down here for the last week or so. As a result, my lungs have been spasming a bit. It’s been worse outside. 🙁

[DeVaultSetter]

They should really provide an option to hide the AI, or at least put it at the bottom of the page, if it gets any worse, then another browser is definitely on the table. As an afterthought, wonder why ungoogled-chromium isn’t mentioned on the Chromium page?
All the way from California? Checked the air quality for your area just now, the maps say pretty good, there are some fires around, not too close though, and the southerlies should clear the air some. Has it improved recently?

[Spastic Hamburger]

Sadly, it’s all opt-out if they even let you. Really getting tired of forced AI content on the web 🙁

It’s not really the browser, it’s on Google’s search results. Bing has similar issues. When I typed in Beetlejuice just now on Bing, one of the suggested search results called it an “American Actor” instead of a film. Ugh. To be fair, him popping up in other films would be a riot.

I smelled and saw a lot of smoke so it was probably controlled burns. Air quality has greatly improved now and I’m no longer having lung spasms so that’s good. 🙂

[DeVaultSetter]

Oh, was thinking a browser would have a policy of showing a search engine’s search results, but not the AI blurb as default. In any case, it can be turned of by plugins or this:
https://www.theverge.com/24162621/google-search-ai-overviews-get-rid-of
What about him popping up in an ad for sarsaparilla, or even better, betel nut beer? 😛
Ah, breathing again, know the feeling well. 🙂 Hot with fires over this part of the world, rainy up the top end, some had more than half a metre of rain in 15 hours, and well over a metre for the week.

[Spastic Hamburger]

Only 38 comments on that post? Blogs are definitely becoming less popular, I see 🙁

Thanks! Now if we can figure out how to disable it for Bing. May be a toggle, haven’t looked yet 🙂

Someone needs to license the character as their betel nut mascot 😛

Yeah, I still need to get an air purifier for the living room. That will surely help. We’re really dry right now save for the fog. Last good rain we had was over a week ago and none is predicted for a while yet. Fortunately, the wet season is just around the corner but it’ll be pretty dusty until then.

[DeVaultSetter]

A family member has passed on some links with a political bent including one for this guy whose antics have landed him in court opposite rather powerful and colourful opponents on several occasions. Also in the invidious predicament of riling up Joe Hildebrand, someone who comes off as generally being tolerant and of good nature. Still, Jordie is one that likes a bit of street theatre and fun, so we’re on common ground there, wonder where he will be 15-20 years on when his youthful looks and charms have all fled?
Of interest as well is this author and economist, Yanis Varoufakis, and his last work, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 2023, also read by him. Here’s a snippet from that books:

From factory owners in America’s Midwest to poets struggling to sell their latest anthology, from London Uber drivers to Indonesian street hawkers, all are now dependent on some cloud fief for access to customers. It is progress, of sorts. Gone is the time when, to collect their rent, feudal lords employed thugs to break their vassals’ knees or spill their blood. The cloudalists don’t need to deploy bailiffs to confiscate or to evict. Instead, every vassal capitalist knows that with the removal of a link from their cloud vassal’s site they could lose access to the bulk of their customers. And with the removal of a link or two from Google’s search engine or from a couple of ecommerce and social media sites, they could disappear from the online world altogether. A sanitized tech-terror is the bedrock of technofeudalism. Looked at in totality, it becomes apparent that the world economy is lubricated less and less with profit and increasingly with cloud rent. And so the delightful antinomy of our era comes into focus: capitalist activity is growing within the same process of energetic capital accumulation that degrades capitalist profit and gradually replaces capitalist markets with cloud fiefs. In short, capitalism is withering as a result of burgeoning capitalist activity. It is through capitalist activity that technofeudalism was born and is now sweeping to power.

Does all this matter to the way we live and experience our lives? It certainly does. Recognizing that our world has become technofeudal helps us dissolve puzzles great and small: from the elusive green energy revolution and Elon Musk’s decision to buy Twitter to the New Cold War between the USA and China and how the war in Ukraine is threatening the dollar’s reign; from the death of the liberal individual and the impossibility of social democracy to the false promise of crypto and the burning question of how we may recover our autonomy, perhaps our freedom too. Today, to own our minds individually, we must own cloud capital collectively. It’s the only way we can turn our cloud-based artifacts from automated means of behavior modification, that poison our social reality, to automated means of human collaboration and emancipation.

And, being an obedient and faithful technoderf (typo intented), went and proposed an idea to make the names of all deleted Wikipedia articles accessible, downside is they don’t like it much for the sheer bulk of the undertaking, upside is that it would take a little pressure off Wayback resources.
Edit: Oops, they do have a deletion log!

[Spastic Hamburger]

Part of the issue is also the hoarding of resources. Instead of investing it back into new markets and advances, corporations are simply letting the resources accumulate. This kills growth as there is little to no incentive to continue purchasing more services and products so things tend to stagnate over time. It also does harm to general society. We’re also reaching an oversaturation of similar companies and products. This is actually a relatively recent trend. A hundred years ago, there were only a handful of large corporations, so they were better able to advance their market as resources were more concentrated. As it was early days, they were focusing a lot on production advancements such as conveyor belts and factory automation. We need to focus more on the people than on the hunt for profits. Society will be much happier. If the world as a whole combines its resources, it will help make up many regional shortcomings but I don’t see that happening anytime soon sadly.

I recently found Beth’s gear store (surprised I didn’t know about it earlier) and wound up getting a Fallout themed backpack. It’s really nice!

[DeVaultSetter]

It’s the culture of corps too, many of the denizens in existence within their hallowed walls have no choice but declare there is no such thing as life outside, before, or after the corp, therefore the corp is seen as the provider and maintainer of all the means of existence and sustenance for the present and incumbent. So why (on earth) do those poor sods have to elicit any concern about this other thing called “world” at all?
Nice! 🙂 What once ground these gears was why pay $32.99 for $20, and why they never came up with a version 2 of the sweet roll plush? Their not so gender specific Daedric Prince is on special. 🙂

And so another No Brainer Day passed, would anyone be the wiser for it?

[DeVaultSetter]

I suffer from a weird variation of the Kruger-Dunning Effect in that I think I am better than whatever individual I ever once aspired to be. Aspiration brings on the mythos of evolution, the true test is confidence, really, one has to be confident whatever in whatever they think of themselves, because confidence is a clear and foggy prism through which the mind visualizes and experiences its world. For those gifted in the world of experience, a trick of confidence is guaranteed to disappoint neither the beauty nor the beholder of the spectacle. 😛
One spinoff is the Dunning-Kruger Times, with such gems as Bernie Sanders Received a 44 Million Grant …

Bernie Sanders Received A $44 Million Grant From Usaid To “explore The Benefits Of Democratic Socialism In The Us”

Another spinoff is the Dunning Kruger Operatic Effect, also requiring further analysis:

[Spastic Hamburger]

On DeVaultSetter said

It’s the culture of corps too, many of the denizens in existence within their hallowed walls have no choice but declare there is no such thing as life outside, before, or after the corp, therefore the corp is seen as the provider and maintainer of all the means of existence and sustenance for the present and incumbent. So why (on earth) do those poor sods have to elicit any concern about this other thing called “world” at all?
Nice! 🙂 What once ground these gears was why pay $32.99 for $20, and why they never came up with a version 2 of the sweet roll plush? Their not so gender specific Daedric Prince is on special. 🙂

And so another No Brainer Day passed, would anyone be the wiser for it?

In the past, it was pretty common for large corporations to manage their locations as small cities. Ford notably did this a hundred years ago. Nowadays, it’s not as common but we still see it in Asia and on oil rigs. Especially on rigs where they’re pretty much cut off from the rest of the world.

Thought about grabbing the sweet roll plush but sweet roll thefts are always an issue…. 😛 Wish they had more ES stuff in general. Love Fallout but variety is always a good thing!

Cool! Will definitely be celebrating the holiday in the future! And good site! We have Pi Day coming up this week. I always try to celebrate Pi Day!

Do they have a full list of holidays or is it just on a per-date basis?

[Spastic Hamburger]

I hate online shopping. I’m trying to find a lamp in the shape of the constant π and it’s not going well. First, I tried Google for “pi lamp”. Instead of lights, it gives me results for the LAMP stack on a Raspberry Pi. I do most, if not all, of my searches in a private browsing window to get out of the tailored results so this is just their algorithm being trash. I would have said “raspberry pi lamp stack” if I wanted the server software. Amazon wasn’t any better. It just gives me diodes and not even lamps and nothing even related to Pi! 🙁

[DeVaultSetter]

Wikpedia has a general list and a per country list of official holidays, a more detailed list is per day. U.N. days is a handy list but Fun holidays serves us best. 🙂
Fire Rooster over here, what’s your zodiac beast?
A quick search for “π lamps” presented some rather expensive pieces, some of the less costly were Universo Positivo PI Lamp (Available In Various Colours), Casanova White Scandi Pi Lamp and Lamp made of polypropylene, LED, and felt. Lean pickings all around other than stuff like the Pi spinning top lamp and the Raspberry Pi-powered Jack-o-lantern. 😛

[Spastic Hamburger]

Ooh, the list of fun holidays is just the thing!

Metal horse here! Do find it interesting that Wiki doesn’t provide some details regarding the personality traits like they do on the place mats in Chinese restaurants.

Those are neat! Do miss Think Geek. They used to sell this sort of funky stuff.

Really like the pumpkin! Could be improved by using a real pumpkin 😛

We’re going to be getting fiber Internet in my area soon. Probably will switch when it’s available as it’ll be the same price as I’m paying now but will get a much better connection. They’re currently across the street and the neighborhood just got the letter a couple of weeks ago so it won’t be long now!

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