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.

I wonder how OpenAI’s investors feel about that expense, considering they’re losing somewhere around $80 million every single day.

At the beginning of the year, they projected a $14 billion loss for 2026. They’ll almost certainly exceed that by quite a lot, and may have lost $12 billion in the previous fiscal quarter.

They aren’t bleeding money. They’re a veritable cash volcano, blasting it into near-Earth orbit.

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.

Try it on a large screen. Once details are visible everything looks super strange.

Neither does Trump.

It’s very much in the uncanny valley. Hard to point my finger at exactly what’s wrong, but no one looks quite real. I keep expecting their too-rubbery skin to start doing weird shit.

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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.

Neil Gaiman. I fucking loved Sandman and damn near everything else he wrote. Finding out he’s a total scumbag has basically ruined a lot of very dear memories.

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.

Dude. I mean this in all sincerity: Eat my entire ass. Conflating voting with support for genocide might not be the stupidest thing I’ve ever encountered, but it’s gotta be in the top twenty.

You’re an advocate of not voting? Then I hope you get the day you voted for.