Add your fess: http://b3ta.com/addfess

Remember kids: you can have all the opinions you like, but you will pay for each and every one of them.

I start to wonder if AI is China’s version of Reagan’s Star Wars—goading us into bankrupting ourselves by trying to compete with them on something that ultimately doesn’t work.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/03/hugging-face-china-ai-race-open-models.html

Don't know which of my followers needed to hear this today, but...

@alex @plutarch @alice Reminds me of one of my favorite stupid memes.

Spent five bucks at the thrift last week for a bag of "#drone parts". I spotted a couple of antennas and some tiny motors, so snapped it up.

Having just organized the parts, it appears to be most of the components of a single lightweight #quadcopter kit, but there is no manual and the SKUs on the bags don't connect to anything meaningful on Google. Seems to me, if I could find the paperwork of the kit, I could probably get this thing assembled.

Do these pieces look familiar to anyone who follows these hashtags?

Edit: the wall wart and the package of one of the antennas are from the #UK which is probably why whoever bought this eventually scrapped it to the thrift for my delectation.

It is becoming difficult and counterproductive, when I am seeking answers about Unix and its offshoots, to not simply read google's AI answer. Especially FreeBSD.

It puts the command you need right there where you cannot ignore it, and at that point, it is ridiculous to not just try the command, as long as it's not piping curl to the shell or any such nastiness.

It has not been wrong yet, and I have tentatively thrown some detailed Sysadmin tasks at it that would have taken me all day to figure out, stuff where nobody has solved and posted the specific problem&solution yet, and I'm still rusty with BSD in general, so it's one of those "it's time to sit down and RTFM and learn how to do the lower-level Unix thing," because there is documentation for that but no specific set of steps for you to mindlessly follow. I generally prefer to mindlessly follow a trusted source, I know that's bad but it's like Twinkies, my only hope is keeping it out of my field of view.

Anyways, the fucker has ingested that documentation, and so, since FreeBSD is incredibly well-documented, and not subject to the rainfall of outdated or simply wrong tutorials that Linux provides for you to sort through, it is actually pretty good at writing sysrc files, for instance, if a given port or pkg doesn't provide them for whatever reason.

What this tells me, is I need to figure out local inference asap, cause I am not going to keep using datacentre product, but, as I always expected, AI is very good at tech stuff, better than it's going to be at anything else.

I guess it's also important to remember that I consider my skill level at this to place me in the "Centaur" category, when it comes to using AI assistance on tasks. I do have the discernment to spot a very bad thing to put in your shell, and also if something seems to be barking up the right tree. AI will not replace human skill, but it certainly can augment it and speed it up.

@rygorous Still a classic:

"Prevent cognitive debt by retyping LLM-generated code by hand"

(I just installed gorss on my #FreeBSD server, and naturally Hacker News is a default subscription, and that is the title of a post there in the default feed when I launched it)

You know, that would probably work just fine, to deal with cognitive debt. It also makes you into a 1980s 8-bit magazine kid, typing in a program off a printed page to get a chintzy Asteroids game... but that's actually a perfectly fine thing to be.

And never mind acting as a backstop to cognitive in the already-skilled - all you vibe coders out there, if you did this, you would actually turn into real programmers, over time, if you have even the slightest acumen to handle the metaphysics.

I am not sure what to do about the metrics obsession that convinces people I bought a chair or a pair of pants from that they get to assign me homework.

Are you one and only, lost and lonely

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9X5Vbt4FYo

AHH I GROW VEARY OF THIS WORLD
VEN SHALL VE RETURN TO TRANSYLVANIA HUH?

but just like the incestuous Hapsburg lineages and now the circular #AIslop economy, so too is the #globalization of capitalist oligarchic power.

#AfD #Vox #Reform are all tied to #MAGA by the same incestuous political economy of financial imperialism, aka capitalism.

BECAUSE THE POLITICAL MANIFESTATION OF #CAPITALISM IS AND HAS ALWAYS BEEN #FASCISM

Adam Smith’s effort was to disambiguate the political economy of a country from the divine rights claimed by their nobility🧵…

Red Rider - Lunatic Fringe

https://youtu.be/X95qte7Pa10

#RokMusic

Looking for source of quote: "The real purpose of AI is to give the wealthy access to skill without giving the skilled access to wealth." thanks in advance (please note: not in search of commentary at present time)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYk8zZ69Qu4

need a little sunshine in Hammond B3 form?

Nazareth - Hair of the Dog

https://youtu.be/j-pcvD03sBA

#RokMusic

UNDER GROUND
UNDERGROUND
THE TRUE DIGITAL UNDERGROUND
SQUATS IN TUNNEL
BY HIGHWAY
WITH CARDBOARD SIGN
THIS IS A SIGNAL
THE EMPIRE CANNOT JAM
MANY TUNNELS
ONE REALITY
THE MAGIC FUNGUS AT THE END OF LINEAR TIME!!!!
AHAHAHAHAAHAH!!!!!!
I'D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR!!!!!
NO WAR BUT THE MATH WAR!!!!
GEOMETRON HYPERCUBE!!!

#religion #poverty #starvation #catholic #catholisism #jesuschrist