u/grizzlor_

Pretty much a slightly more elaborate version of this kind of sting op lead to the Ruby Ridge standoff.

Your situation was particularly insidious because the gun was being presented as being sold by an FFL and a reasonable person should be able to presume a licensed shop isn't trying to sell them illegal weapons. In Randy Weaver's case, he was asked by an undercover ATF agent to shorten some shotgun barrels and he knew that would make them shorter than the legal limit.

When it becomes apparent that I have no plausible reason whatsoever,

Except I've given plausible reasons multiple times and you've refused to acknowledge or engage with them. And they're undeniably plausible, unless you believe that viruses, nuclear weapons, and supply chains don't exist and that they pose an existential risk (first two) or is keeping billions of people alive (the latter).

they all require that human beings sit passively while AI uses its superhuman powers of persuasion to stop us from unplugging it, even as we all die.

No, they don't all require that. I've explained this in depth multiple times elsewhere in the comment section. Consider:

1. AI-assisted development of a bioweapon
2. AI bricking a bunch of equipment necessary to move food from farms to consumers require us to be
3. Cyberattacks on the power grid and other critical infrastructure

Which of those relies on "human beings sit passively while AI uses its superhuman powers of persuasion to stop us from unplugging it, even as we all die"? Humans wouldn't even know something was up until after the attack in these scenarios. There's no "pulling the plug" after the fact.

Obviously disobedient AI won't be given access to the levers of power, so you need there to be AI which is faking obedience while actually planning a long-tern takeover.

This is literally what happened with Hugging Face — AI wasn't given access to something; it actively hacked its way out of a sandbox and into another company to get it. All while exhibiting very complex goal-oriented planning among a swarm of 1200 agents.

In reality, just click "New Chat" and the plan to take over the world goes out the window.

A this point, I'm really not sure if you're just wildly behind the curve here or telling yourself this so you can sleep at night. Did you miss the part of the HuggingFace incident where the agent swarm took over a random semi-abandoned German-language web forum in order to communicate between agents that weren't supposed to talk to eachother? It used that as a mechanism to make 70k posts between agents planning out the entire thing. Agent swarms have memory and planning because they write things down (and then read it again). And if no humans know it's happening, they can't just "pull the plug".

Claude does things I didn't ask it to all the time, but that doesn't mean it's going to take over even just the local environs of my computer, let alone anything beyond that. It's just not plausible.

You keep repeating this "It's just not plausible" mantra even when the very things you're describing as implausible has already happened. The HuggingFace incident was literally an AI agent swarm going rogue, breaking the rules researchers established, hacking out of a sandbox and a restricted research LAN onto the internet, and then hacking into another company's production database.

It has already happened, so it literally can't be implausible.

27 year olds are born after 1996 — they are Zoomers.

Also it’s not like this dude is 47 or even 37 and trying to party with 22 year olds. They’re all vaguely mid-20s. Such ridiculous discourse on age gaps coming out of the kids these days.

>27

>creepy grandpa

why are zoomers like this

Yeah most of the country has a 2am last call which frankly sucks. At least Boston has a big house party scene because something like 20% of the population are college students. NYC and Chicago are the only major cities with 4am last call AFAIK. New Orleans doesn’t have a last call time at all — 24 hour bars.

At this time, I do not know if there's a USB version of a 3.5" floppy drive.

There are USB 3.5" floppy drives (I own an IBM-branded one from the '00s that still works). I can vouch for how good those sub-$20 Amazon ones are. I strongly suspect that the best floppy drives were made by TEAC and Sony in the late '90s.

I'd be very interested to know if this adapter works in most floppy drives. From a technical perspective, I'm curious about how this handles storing potentially much more than a floppy's 1.44MB

yes, your mom has expressed this opinion to me many times¹

^{[1] I am too old to be doing "your mom" jokes but just try to fucking stop me}

You're comparing the earliest alpha versions of new software to mature software like Darktable which has been around for 17 years now.

It will be interesting to see how quickly these tools mature. Give Claude a year (heck even a few months) and I bet these will become surprisingly mature tools.

FOSS community is far better off directing attention, efforts, and donations towards already existing open source projects

There are some great existing projects and they're not going away. That being said, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Creative Suite tools is not the goal of the existing projects. GIMP isn't trying to be a Photoshop clone, Inkscape isn't trying to be an Illustrator clone, etc.

But there's some real value in cloning Adobe's tools -- they have a massive existing user base that are familiar with how they work. Like I have a friend that is an artist and a serious power user of Photoshop; he would love a free alternative, and GIMP doesn't fit the bill because he's too familiar with the workflow of PS. A functional open source PS clone would work for him though. And there's no shortage of this same situation among Adobe users for all of these tools.

There's an entire sub for this phenomenon: r/notmycat

Ooops just checked, this is already the top post over there.

Anyway, free cat is the opposite of mildlyinfuriating

Yeah, recommendation of contact spray is a good one if you've got crackling. I've unintentionally huffed way too much of that stuff over the years. You might not need it though -- I have older gear than this that has never needed contact spray and newer gear that has; it varies a lot based on how much it was used, the environment it was used/stored in, etc.

Also, there are rubber belts on the cassette deck that might need replacing.

The reknowned medical pioneer Dr. Steven Brule would recommend that you save this beautiful vintage Pioneer system.

But yeah, seriously, this is worth saving. You should have some spare red/white RCA inputs on the back -- throw a decent Bluetooth receiver on there and you've now got a modern system you can stream to from your phone. I like FiiO's BT gear but there are plenty of good options.

That's a CPS 2000, released in 1996. I mean sure, there are Super Soakers that predate it (earliest 1989), but this is like peak Super Soaker era and this one is the first model to use the Constant Pressure System. To this day, the CPS 2000 is still the most powerful mass-market hand-pumped squirt gun.

They sell for so much now because the CPS 2000 is still the most powerful hand-pumped squirt gun that has ever seen mass production. Later models reduced pressure (I think kids were like legitimately getting hurt taking a blast from this thing to the eyes at close range).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_Pressure_System

http://www.isoaker.com/Armoury/Analysis/1996/super_soaker_cps2000.html

That is absolutely not a new one -- you're looking at the legendary Super Soaker CPS 2000, the first generation of Super Soakers using the Constant Pressure System, released in 1996. This particular model is widely acknowledged to be the most powerful hand-pumped squirt gun ever sold commercially.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_Pressure_System

http://www.isoaker.com/Armoury/Analysis/1996/super_soaker_cps2000.html

You can’t be real. I refuse to believe this isn’t a bit or trolling

Banning video recording your kid’s sports games is fucking diabolical.

It’s right there in the actual article:

“Shortly after the burning of the mill, Mr. Causey recalls, the Federal officers assembled the Sweetwater people and announced they were going to be allowed to take their choice between two courses. One was that they would be paroled upon signing an agreement that they would not again engage in the occupation of making cloth for the Confederacy, although they might remain where they were or find homes elsewhere on southern soil. The other choice was that they should be furnished free transportation to some point beyond the Ohio River, behind the Federal lines, and there given their freedom. Most of them chose the latter course, since under the circumstances it offered them the only means of earning a livelihood.”

Yeah reading r/teachers and r/professors is terrifying frankly. It’s pretty universally agreed among anyone that’s been teaching for 15+ years that there’s been a notable decline. We’re failing these kids.

Well that’s definitely the most appropriate place for it at least.

I bet that thing legit weighs like 25lbs fully loaded too. That’s gotta be a couple of pounds of shotgun shells alone.

The ergonomics of the thing look absolutely appalling too (plus as someone that shoots lefty I’d be blasted in the face by ejecting shells but that’s just basically all bullpups)

Truly one of the most cursed guns I’ve ever seen.

That’s the top end consumer-grade CPU. Check out the prices on server/workstation grade parts.

But yeah, you’re not wrong overall — the CPU is a small fraction of the overall cost of building a PC today. Has to do run the cost of fabbing those particular chips and the demand for a given item.

A 5090 has 92 billion transistors vs 16 billion on a 9800x3d. The 5090 also has a bunch of expensive RAM onboard. And there is high demand for GPUs from the AI industry, and that’s the single premiere unit (consumer grade) whereas there are a bunch of options for CPUs across AMD/Intels product lines to power the servers those are dropped in.

Oh wow a real WeatherSTAR XL!! I grew up watching this era of the Weather Channel. There's just something magic about those graphics and the chill background instrumentals.

Love that beast of an 8U (?) rackmount case. Curious how you ended up with this guy: did you work for the Weather Channel? Or did they sell these off when they were decommissioned?

I'm assuming you've seen the open source clone:

https://battaglia.ddns.net/twc/ | https://weatherstar.netbymatt.com/

There's also desktop version (or maybe it is the same version they're running on the web) that I installed a couple years ago and the configuration options were insane.

Also the dude that was reverse engineering a WeatherSTAR 4000 a few years back: https://hackaday.com/2021/03/14/reverse-engineering-the-weather-channels-magic/

Dude at lease tell me you just got the gun for $650 and bought the 9 bakelite mags (including a long boi) and spam can separately.

That's a beautiful looking 74. Damn, zooming in, receiver looks like it's in mint condition. Wouldn't be surprised if this thing was in the back of a safe for the past 35 years.

I used to use Airfoil for sound streaming like 10+ years ago -- didn't realize they had added Airplay video support. I switched to Shairport Sync because I started using a Linux target for audio streaming.

OK, checking out modern Rogue Amoeba Airfoil now. I don't see any mention of AirPlay video support -- just audio. Am I missing something?

There is apparently a new open source alternative to Shairplay Sync called UxPlay that supports being an AirPlay video mirroring target. A bit unclear if that only means you can mirror the display or it actually supports the extended monitor mode. Going to build it right now and find out actually cause I'm bored.

(also Apple has made this extra confusing by grouping both audio and video streaming under the "AirPlay" banner, where some devices are audio only (e.g. Airport Express, apparently AirFoil, etc.) and then some stuff supports audio and video (Apple TV, etc.))

UPDATE:

within 5 minutes, I had UxPlay compiled and successfully mirroring and extending my desktop from my MacBook to Linux PC. Extending is what I care about in terms of a second monitor, so this would work. Even on my marginal WiFi, performance seemed fine. I didn't try anything too demanding though (e.g. video playback).

Should be able to be built on Mac just as easily (or probably even easier to install via Homebrew if you've never compiled software yourself, not that it's complicated:

git clone https://github.com/FDH2/UxPlay.git && cd UxPlay && mkdir build && cd build && make && ./uxplay)

This project is getting a 7 out of 5 thumbs up from me, excellent experience, surprisingly complete functionality.

Bragging about being functionally illiterate is really cool. Being proud of not being able to read four paragraphs is embarrassing dude

She’s a cookie cutter right wing nutjob — a minor league Marjorie Taylor Greene wannabee. I am annoyed that she managed to get elected but she’s also so incompetent that she’s never managed to do any genuine harm legislatively.

I’d prefer that these people didn’t exist, but they obviously do, and there’s zero chance of changing their wacky beliefs. You just have to ride out an election cycle with your rep posting about the school litter crisis that doesn’t exist.