25 cigs in a pack, though?

Agreed. I have a Hero 10 Black and basically every time I go to use it I wind up wanting to hurl it into the sun by the time I’m done. My wife bought it for me as a birthday present a couple of years ago because I asked for one specifically (I didn’t know any better, apparently) so it would probably be rude to do so, though.

It overheats, it randomly shuts off, it routinely experiences a firmware crash that renders all of its buttons inoperable and requires pulling the battery to cure. Oh, and it also has a battery life best measured in seconds so you need to keep it plugged in to external power all the time which requires an aftermarket accessory. Brilliant.

With any luck mine will get taken out in some spectacular and marketable fashion, preferably while recording at top quality so I can post it and use the video revenue to buy an Insta Ace or something.

My father’s house still gets junk mail and allegedly “preapproved” credit card offers addressed to my cat.

I’m not 100% certain. Possibly the Brownell’s BRN-180, although I haven’t handled one personally to see if the endstop block it comes with relies on the rigidity of the buffer tube ring to stop the bolt carrier or if it attaches to the rest of the upper itself in some way. The recoil springs are entirely captive and attached to it, at least.

I suppose you could also just reinforce the shit out of that area in your design if you knew you didn’t need to have a big hole through it.

It should be totally possible to whittle a functional AR-15 lower. Especially if you wanted to mate it to one of those fancy new bufferless uppers, so you wouldn’t even have to worry about the stock and buffer tube.

I like the ones we have around here waiting at the bus stops on our main boulevard which is a perfectly straight road you can see up and down for about a mile and a half in either direction, but who will stand out in the travel lanes and craaaane their necks in this ridiculous pose apparently hoping this will allow them to see the bus coming sooner.

Well, you can always give this a shot.

It kind of worked the first time…

I’m generally not one for authoritarianism or much of a nanny state of any stripe, but while we’re at it I have a few fuckers in my town they can start with if they like.

From TFA:

The AI did not prove that its approach is the best anyone can do, though. In fact, mathematician Will Sawin has already improved upon the AI’s grid.

OpenAI privately contacted Litt, Sawin, Gowers and a number of other mathematicians to verify the LLM’s proof. Together (and without the company’s direct involvement), they wrote up their individual takeaways. (No external experts have seen the AI’s original output, however—just an edited version of its train of thought.)

What stood out, they said, was the AI’s preternatural patience and focus.

…

“AIs have an edge: It’s not just that they can try all known methods,” says Jacob Tsimerman, a mathematician at the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the work but was part of the companion paper solicited by OpenAI. “They can play for longer and in more treacherous waters than mathematicians without getting overwhelmed.”

…

The mathematical tools the AI used here are not novel, although their application in this domain appears to be. “The model did not invent something fundamentally new that nobody saw coming,” says Sébastien Bubeck, a mathematician leading OpenAI’s mathematical explorations. “It just executed like an amazing mathematician.”

So, it’s a monkeys-on-typewriters situation with the computer able to try and reject the hammering of who knows how many square pegs into round holes until it finally arrives at a workable conclusion, which a human has already bested. And we’re not allowed to see its homework.

This is categorically failing to set the world on fire, except possibly in the literal sense.

And it’s worth reiterating, the current crop of generative “AI” is incapable of producing anything new or novel. All it can do is reassemble existing strings, tokens, and patterns in slightly different ways. Innovation can never come from such a machine. That will have to come from a human.

The current push is the notion that “hyperscaling,” i.e. throwing even more hardware and space and power and money at the same concept, will magically make it something it isn’t. Obviously that’s not going to work. It’ll allow grifters to make a ton of money over it, though!

Competently designed drip coffee makers have a simple device inside them specifically for people like Kevin. It’s variously called something like “pause and serve,” and what it basically boils down to is a little spring loaded plunger with a gasket on it that is pushed up by a knob on the lid of the carafe when it’s installed. If you remove the carafe this closes like a little valve and water is allowed to accumulate inside the filter basket for some time, probably up to a minute or so, in order for you to pour a cup (or whatever else) in that amount of time before it finally overflows. It’s simple, broadly effective, basically free to implement, and goes a long way towards preventing the operator from hanging himself.

I suspect the gasket in yours is worn out or MIA. It happens eventually.

All of the above notwithstanding, I don’t imagine you’d have much success explaining to Kevin that nothing other than clean water should go into the reservoir and thus the heating chamber, and certainly not partially brewed coffee which will allow the water in it to boil up into the percolator tube and leave the increasingly scorched little coffee particles to burn against the heating element forever. Or at least in a very difficult to reach and clean place.

I’ll leave you with my own coffee related anecdote, revolving around “Vic.” Vic was our resident office coffee freak. And if I of all people am describing someone as being just a trifle too obsessed about coffee, you have a problem. If it wasn’t directly work related, basically everything Vic talked about was coffee. “How’s the coffee today? Has anyone refilled the coffee machine? Do you want some coffee? I’m going to go up front and get some coffee.” Et friggin’ cetera.

I’m ashamed to admit that this plan was not mine, but rather hatched by another coworker. He deliberately and meticulously (I believe scales were involved — this was after all a building full of engineers) began blending decaf into the office coffee machine over the course of a couple of months. Progressively, ultimately weaning Vic off of caffeine entirely. This was not only brilliant, but also completely diabolical. My metaphorical hat is off to him, even all these years later.

He kept the office running purely on decaf for a couple of weeks, and then one morning abruptly switched the entire shebang back to 100% regular coffee.

Vic spent the next couple of days living life on speed dial. Talking fast, walking fast, bouncing around all over the place and off the walls. He was like a squirrel on amphetamines. He absolutely did not notice. Everyone else did, though. It was hilarious.

Indeed, contact with the public will do it quickly.

I work with a long list of clients at my work who seem to lack any type of critical thinking skills whatsoever, a significant fraction of them are apparently functionally illiterate, and a shocking number of them are actually incapable of understanding abstract concepts. These people cruise through life just as happy as you please, at least until they run up against some frustration that they can’t understand at which point their default response is typically to get violently angry, and as an outside observer it’s equal parts fascinating and deeply troubling. I can’t imagine existing that way. Being unable even to read, and with every new concept or technology being an inscrutable puzzle box so terrifying that your only recourse is to scream and tantrum and threaten until someone else comes along and makes it go away.

And yet, most of these same stupid people are highly derisive of smart people. This notwithstanding that without these purported nerds, geeks, Poindexters, and wimps they’d be freezing in the dark as they starved to death. Somehow they’ve managed to get jobs, afford cars and mortgages, and they’re allowed to vote, procreate, and even buy guns. It’s enough to make me never want to leave my IT dungeon or, perhaps, never return from the mountains. But I have to, so here I am.

I interact with truly stupid people on a daily basis. I could tell you all some whoppers from my time in the trenches.

But LLMs are not the path to the final state of AI, either. And that’s assuming only if — and this is a very big “if” — a true general artificial intelligence can even be created using traditional silicon computing methods in the first place. Blithely assuming that it can be is really rather asking past the sale.

Yes, but at least at the end of the day you can use nukes to blow stuff up. Presumably your enemies.

If your enemies win the generative AI “arms” race they can use it to, uh…

???

(Yes, I am aware there are military/governmental applications for neural net learning technologies but they’re the types of pattern recognition and signals analysis stuff we already do without needing to build a football stadium sized datacenter every 50 miles and burn the entire nation’s GDP on electricity generation. Most of the other applications appear to revolve around a regime using it solely to shoot themselves in the foot, e.g. powering a fantasy army of likely to be highly defective murder robots or using it to propagandize at and spy upon their own population in order to ensure a ready supply of destabilizing internal dissent always exists.)

'98 does have a banger attract screen song, it’s true.

The following game choices are objectively correct from a long time Neo Geo nerd. What anyone else tells you is wrong. (I kid, I kid. Mostly.)

• Twiklestar Sprites
• Samurai Shodown 3 specifically
• The Last Blade (not its sequel)
• Twinklestar Sprites
• Money Puzzle Exchanger, but only its attract screen
• Viewpoint
• Twinklestar Sprites
• Blazing Star
• Waku Waku 7 (and to a lesser extent its predecessor, Galaxy Fight)
• Aero Fighters 2
• and lastly, Twinklestar Sprites

If you’re going to play KoF or Metal Slug anyway, the best King of Fighters is '99, and the best Metal Slug is 2.

Relatedly, you can lead your boss to the facts but you still can’t make him think.

They very often could be, in the later years. Except when they couldn’t.