I got up to 125 in my car one early, dry Christmas morning. Nobody out, a clear couple miles ahead with no emergency turnout for cops to hide in, decided “let’s see where I get uncomfortable”

Turned out, right up to 110, my car felt solid, at 125 it started getting squirrelly and I decided the exercise was over. Dumb, yes, but nice to know how far you can push it in dry, ideal conditions.

if you say so, whatever makes you happy.

I’ll concede the data plan dent thing; I hadn’t done any math regarding that. Thanks for clarifying that to me and everyone else!

I accept your concession, better luck next time.

But you did say “none” so I just pointed out the fact that it’s not none. It’s some. I wasn’t wrong to point that out. No matter how much of a stickler you find me for that.

pedantry is pedantry, if you interject with “well ACKSHUALLY” over literally a couple kilobytes of data in this, the Year Of Our Lord 2025 where common storage device sizes are in the multiple terabyte range, and 100mbps down/10 up is exceedingly common, expect to be called one. It is functionally none, because it is not 1993.

Autistic or not.

can’t even come up with your own insult for me, just gonna steal that sad attempt at bait from the other guy? how… underwhelming, must do better. 🤡

what a rude thing to say, especially considering I wasn’t talking to you.

I’m gonna keep it that way, best of luck baiting someone else champ.

lol

furthermore: lmao.

you’ve got to try a lot harder to “rustle” me, but I like your moxie for thinking you did, sport

doing the math, even the cheapest phone plans that don’t explicitly exclude data, nowadays include at least 1GB of data for free. Usually more. Almost any reachable amount of outbound requests to click on ads would barely put a dent in your data allowance.

by their very nature, they are not sentient. They are Markov chains for words. They do not have a sense of self, truth, or feel emotions, they do not have wants or desires, they merely predict what is the next most likely word in a sequence, given the context. The only thing they can do is “make plausible sentences that can come after [the context]”.

That’s all an LLM is. It doesn’t reason. I’m more than happy to entertain the notion of rights for a computer that actually has the ability to think and feel, but this ain’t it.

“AI freedom”

listen I am 100% here for the rights of non-human general intelligence, but no I will not entertain that kind of crock from an overambitious form of autocomplete.

Okay, fine, not enough to matter. Are you satisfied with that?

so use a VPN? if you’re the sort of user using AdNauseam, and is concerned about tracking, you’re probably also the sort of user who already uses a VPN.

1. not in this way
2. not enough to matter

the way it works is sending an HTTP request that registers as a “click” to the advertiser (thus costing them money), but then doesn’t actually let the browser download any content and fetch the webpage, basically pi-holes the destination site and any attached tracking cookies. Combined with the fact that it does this to every ad, it would basically poison any click tracking.

edit: pedants

and before I get any more of you, this is just what I remember reading about adnauseam, do not take it as gospel, go look at AdNauseam’s FAQ.

my friend, I want to impart something on you. I write this with the sincere hope it changes your mind.

The average user of a computer does not want to even think about the operating system it uses.

Most people, myself included, want to work on our computer, not work on our computer (which is why I use Mint). An operating system should be the software version of a motherboard – an invisible plinth upon which all the other things you actually care about, sit. In a hardware context the things you care about are all the components plugged into the motherboard – your GPU, CPU, RAM, storage devices, and so on. In a software context, this is email, web browsing, video games, and office software, the programs the average user actually gives a shit about. Notice: Nowhere in that list does it say getting up into the systems guts via terminal or command prompt or whatever flavor of blinking cursor you prefer. Most users just want their programs to run and to never think about the underlying system, and that is okay. Not everyone needs to be technical, and shouldn’t have to be to use a computer and reap the full benefits of using one. I choose to be because I’m a fucking spaz, but that doesn’t mean someone who doesn’t want to be should instead be condemned to inferior offerings from the likes of Microsoft and Apple. If Linux were, indeed, the best – as Microsoft seems determined to prove via Windows enshittification – then it should be, ideally, just as easy for nontechnical people to pick up as Windows. If it isn’t, that’s a problem with Linux that is yet to be solved, not a problem with people.

Fortunately, my experience using Mint for the past year has been largely exactly that. It’s very close to that ideal, if not already there – I’ve had a few very minor issues, but, nothing I was unable to fix via a quick internet search.

I say all this in the hope you’ll understand, if you want Linux to take off, it needs to be accessible to the average idiot. It must be, because I don’t know if you’ve seen the news, but we are not cumulatively getting smarter.

you know that article is dated September 28th 2023, right?

now, I’m not saying Israel doesnt have a history of acting like bastards, but that’s just a wee bit before they started ethnically cleansing the Gaza strip.

who says I think Germany would be on our side?

at this rate, the US is looking more and more like it’ll jump into bed with Russia than the rest of NATO.

thaaaaank you, that’s goin’ in the seedbox

what is this from I must see this immediately

also, yoink.

That is absolutely gonna be a relevant gif in the near future, I can just see it.

I’d like to believe they’ll kick the Nazis out of the bar before they reach the levers of true power, but I’m American and you see how well having that naive hope went for us.

Having said that, I imagine the Germans are at least slightly more cognizant of the risks involved than we are. Difference between “It can’t happen here!” and “It has already happened here and it was bad.”

for the first time, Germany possibly gets to be the “good guys” in a world war! Quite a turnaround.

I’m already judging you, if it makes you feel better.

low effort crap is low effort crap no matter how it’s made, that said, there is plenty of high quality, high effort AI art out there that has a lot of prompt engineering put into it; it is merely drowned out in a sea of sludge. It’s just about as easy for someone to put in zero effort and churn out AI sludge as it is for them to scribble in MSPaint, the difference being scribbling in MSPaint usually has some level of charm to it for its simplicity. That doesn’t mean the guy who spends a lot of time tweaking their prompt to get it exactly right isn’t an artist, it means they create art with different tools. Whether you use a rattlecan and stencils, or pencils and paper, or paint and canvas, or a wacom tablet and stylus, or type in carefully crafted prompts, art is art is art is art. But if you don’t spend the time required to get good at it, your art will be shit.

Also, watching the artist crowd melt down again saying “that’s not real art!” is absolutely hilarious. Those who weren’t around at the time may not remember, but when digital art was starting to become a thing, there were plenty of people who firmly attested that if it was digital, it wasn’t “real” art. Watching the same set of creatives having the same meltdown ~30 years later, “REEEEE YOU CAN’T JUST USE TECHNOLOGY TO MAKE THE PROCESS EASIER”, is extremely funny.

fair enough, I only switched to Linux last February. I do remember it being an absolute pain in the ass in the mid 2010s, I’ve tried linux a few times over the years. But insofar as now goes, on Mint, the terminal is much the same as the command prompt or PowerShell in windows – nice for power user functionality, but generally unnecessary for the average user.