Maybe it’s a regional thing, but I don’t think it’s a common phrase. I’ve heard “nothing-burger” a lot, and this may be someone playing off that.

AI Slop code base. Did Microsoft go open source?

I have two:

1. Waves glowing with bioluminescence during a red tide. We didn’t know it would be going on and were just camping by the beach. Walking on it at night, we all saw the waves glowing and weren’t sure it was real. As we got closer, our footsteps in the area where the waves were rolling in and out were glowing as well. Just surreal.
2. A house blowing up. Guy opened a natural gas valve in the house and touched it off. Insulation shot way up in the air and the house itself bowed outwards in basically every direction, stayed standing though. At least until it burned down.

I remember working in environments where management had decreed that we would not install updates ever. . .

That’s…definitely a decision that puts a lot of trust in Microsoft’s security. Lol

It was a very different time. Security was still something that happened mostly at the network perimeter, and even then not much. Routers without firewalls were very common and things like SQLSlammer were much more possible.

Ya, I’m sure the AI code isn’t helping, but is it materially any different? I spent way too many long nights trying to unfuck Windows servers after updates failed to install correctly. And that was well before the AI Slop Boom. Even more fun is when the update reported installing correctly but the Nessus scans came back showing the old version of DLLs still in the System32 folder. There is a reason no one installs Windows patches on day 1. At minimum, you give them a week to let the foolhardy and fanboys get their disks slapped by Microsoft, again.

Going back to my days supporting Window 2000/2003, I remember working in environments where management had decreed that we would not install updates ever, because of too much downtime due to bad updates. Even today, updating in OT environments can be very difficult due to shitty software running on really old versions of Windows. At least that stuff can usually be kicked off the network and left to rot in isolation.

one day when we will hopefully be living in more peaceful times without imperialists

You don’t read much history? Humans have never lived in widespread peace for any length of time. We have evidence of violence between groups of humans well back into the Stone Age. We are not a species prone to peace.

One of the things to look at is the interest rate you would be paying for either loan and how that would effect the total cost of the loan. Also, there is the question of the utility of any money spent up front. For example, if using a loan on the existing house would result in no up front costs and a 5% interest rate over 30 years, and the standard mortgage would cost $20,000 and have an interest rate of 8%, you’re almost certainly better to use the existing house as backing and throw that same $20K in a long term interest bearing investment (e.g. government bonds). All this assuming you plan to hold onto the second property long term.

Compounding interest is a fantastic tool and a fearful master. If you can make it work for you, then do it. If you are facing the possibility of paying it, you almost always want to lower it as much as possible.

When did Right Click -> Set as Wallpaper -> Desktop involve writing code?
Yes, older versions of Linux may have had that setting buried in a config file somewhere, which required editing in a text editor. And that sort of UI was shit, is shit and will always be shit. But, if we’re going to bring up old versions of an OS, let’s talk about Windows Me.

Principal photography on Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew

Color me truly surprised. From the headline, I expected yet another The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe remake. I always assumed that The Magician’s Nephew would never be turned into a film. It’s just such a big break from the previous books.

It tends to be much more focused on bringing products to market, but of course they do. The transistor, the base unit of all of the microchips which make this conversation possible, came out of Bell Labs. And, as much as we might hate them for it, you have companies like Monsanto doing a lot of work on chemical engineering and genetics. Much of the work on AI (for good or slop) is being done in private sector labs now. Aeronautics research happens heavily in companies like Boeing and Airbus, though they are often working hand in hand with government labs (e.g. NASA, JPL, EASA).

Where Universities and Government really shine are areas like basic research and research which doesn’t have obvious commercial applications. Which is why support for those organizations is so critical. Those areas of research often have long term effects and can result in entirely new areas of knowledge, research and products.

It’s easy to think of large corporations as soulless organizations hell bent of accumulating wealth at the cost of anything else, because they are. But they are also surprisingly good at focusing wealth and effort to find new ways to do things cheaper, faster and more efficiently. Specifically because those things make money. Veritasium had a video on a good example of this recently.

This is it exactly. I made a hard cut with Reddit, but I’ll admit to missing the sysadmin subreddit. The place was full of very smart, helpful people and also cranky. The PowerShell subreddit was another great resource. I haven’t been willing to go back, but those sorts of communities only exist when you hit a certain mass of people on a platform.

At a previous job, we had to deal with scientific equipment (oscilloscopes, at the like) running on Windows XP (in the lat 2010’s). On the positive side, we were able to kick them off the network entirely. On the downside, nearly every single one of them was infected with Conficker and we’d get alerts when the operators used USB drives to move data between the equipment and the production network. By the time I left, we’d gotten a few of the devices reloaded with a factory image and then turned off autorun, but I’m sure the problem is still widespread. And, of course, upgrading beyond Windows XP wasn’t possible and applying OS hardening to the devices was a pipe dream. There should be a special place in Hell for the management of companies which create these sorts of devices. They are happy to charge vast amounts of money, but do fuck all to ensure the security of them.

I’m in, though I’m curious what “turns you into a reptile” means. Does it just mean I become cold blooded. I’m fine with that, it just means I’m moving somewhere tropical. Do I grow scales and a tail? Certainly not ideal, but I could probably live with it, especially if the tail is prehensile and if I get claws in the mix. Do I get a really long, controllable tongue? Can’t think of any uses for that. Nope, none at all…

Attraction, sex and reproduction would be interesting questions as well. Do I still find human women attractive, or is my brain rewired to want a lusty argonian maid? What does my new plumbing look like? Are there others of my new species around for me to do the monster mash with?

But overall, yes I’d probably go for it. I don’t delude myself into thinking that I will somehow continue to exist after death; so, not dying seems like the better alternative. Sure, if the downsides are really bad, I can accept that death is a better outcome (e.g. you live forever, but have locked-in syndrome forever). But, living as a lizard person doesn’t seem too horrible.

A solution exists: ignore the upvote/downvote buttons and use the reply button. You can then address the points you agree with and more importantly the points you disagree with, why you disagree with them and make your own points. It takes more effort, but it provides a lot more value than the mindless voting buttons.

I trust every AI group to do their level best to separate me from my money. Beyond that, I wouldn’t trust them with a stolen identity.

Most of those US services (YouTube, Twitter, etc.) arose to fill a niche which was opened by expanding access and bandwidth. Take YouTube as an example, the idea of sharing a video on a dial-up connection was simply silly. Just downloading the contents of a 1.44MB floppy on a 14.4kbps modem took forever. Even when we got to a 56kbps modem, pictures could still be slow and GIFs were painful to download. It wasn’t until home DSL or cable connections became common that sharing a video was even close to reasonable. In that environment, we saw the start of media sharing services rushing to fill a previously unknown “need”. The most well known was Napster for music sharing, but we also saw the start of bittorrent clients. While not exactly legal, early music sharing and torrent sites showed that people wanted to be able to download media. And with sites like MySpace or GeoCities cropping up, it was apparent that people wanted to also create and share media. YouTube simply married up those two desires at a time where the technology could reasonably support it. And they have massively capitalized on the first mover advantage. With them also having Google money to scale the service, they now sit in a fairly privileged position in their niche.

I bring this up to say that, were US based services snapped out of existence, new services would arise to fill the gap. If you look at somewhere like China, where access to US services is highly regulated, they aren’t simply doing without, they are creating their own alternatives. TikTok is a good example, while it lacks the longer form videos of YouTube, it did provide media sharing in China. Were YouTube to be blocked at the Great Firewall, TikTok is in a good position to expand into the longer form videos. China also already has WeChat which fills much of the Twitter and FaceBook nice. Russia has VKontakte for those spaces as well. Basically, any place which isn’t well served by US based media giants has their own solutions to fill those gaps.

Western Europe (using EU as shorthand, though yes I know the EU isn’t all of Western Europe) has the issue of being closely linked with the US economically and culturally. US based services can operate in most EU countries with little friction. Sure, they have to figure out GDPR and Data Privacy issues, but that’s not a major barrier, despite US companies’ whining. So, given the size, first mover advantage and money behind the US based solutions, there hasn’t been space for reasonable EU based replacements. Why use some second rate EU based system, when the US system works so well, and the EU and US are such good allies and closely linked?

Of course, that last bit is changing (which is part of why you’re asking the question, no doubt). With the US Government going quickly off the rails, and US tech giants doing their damnedest to enshitify everything, the deep cultural links between the US and EU are starting to slip. There might now be space for EU based services to try to step in and replace services like YouTube or Twitter. And that’s the answer to your question. If those services go away, they will be replaced by something else. In time, they are probably bound to be replaced anyway. At one time everyone though MySpace was here to stay, these days I suspect some folks had to google it to figure out what the hell I was going on about. It may be a long time to come, but I’d bet on YouTube eventually being replaced. I have no idea what will replace it, but nothing lasts forever.

relevant XKCD.

That aside, I think the book I am Legend handled the initial outbreak in one of the best ways to actually make it stick. There was a worldwide dust storm which infected everyone. A large fraction of the population succumbed to the infection and died or became “zombies” (more vampires really, they retained a lot of intelligence. The Will Smith movie really fucked the plot.). It’s one of the few ways to get past the problem of the various world militaries just curb stomping the initial zombie outbreak. Sure, there would be some confusion and some losses while people figured out the various rules for the zombies, but WWI is kinda instructive here. Massed charges into machine gun fire didn’t go well for the soldiers in the charge. As another historic example, the Banzai Charge employed by Imperial Japanese soldiers during WWII was not only suicidal by nature, it was worthless against a well armed, organized line. Yes, zombies might be more resilient and less prone to morale breaking, but they’d still be mowed down en masse. And that’s before we consider air strikes, artillery and napalm. A combined arms assault against a mass of zombies wouldn’t be pretty. Especially considering that zombies wouldn’t have the strategic thinking to attack supply lines and depots.

Zombie outbreaks are fun in media. I’m currently playing 7 Days to Die, again. And I’m having lots of fun. I also don’t spend too much time thinking about what the backstory might be. There’s zombies, and it’s my job to survive. That’s all the setup I need to enjoy the catharsis of zombie heads exploding in gore.

A what now?
I’m just here to read memes and rant about crap no one else cares about. I can’t be arsed to dig into all the random profile crap the developers poured hours of blood, sweat and tears implementing.

If the only place you are seeing this sort of behavior is Reddit, it’s not worth worrying about. If you are so obsessed with what other people are doing on Reddit that you feel the need to ask about it on Reddit/Lemmy, it’s probably time turn off your devices and go touch grass. Always remember the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. People with pseudo-anominity say a lot of stupid stuff.

I’ll extend the truffle hate to all mushrooms. If I wanted food covered in fungus, I would have waited for it to start rotting.