I don’t believe I’ve ever seen shape utilized in generated ASCII art

Ah, someone’s never seen 8088 Corruption. The encoder was a brute-force comparison of source pixels with downscaled / blended characters in CGA’s few available colors.

… wait, AAlib definitely uses shape. Is the author just new to ASCII art?

Killer effort, regardless.

Please un-clickbait submission titles.

Stolen valor tweet.

Cats understand where they’re not wanted and seek it out.

Christ, could you miss the point any harder?

Salt?

Cutting people off financially is the gentlest possible rebuke against in-person behavior. It’s a big deal, and a due process nightmare - but it’s as bloodless as state power can be. You wanna buy gas to do this again tomorrow? Ask nicely from the people you’ve been honking at since last month.

This ruling isn’t wrong about some guys in trucks falling short of a national security threat.

This ruling is wrong for ignoring the threat of city and provincial governments allowing a mob to terrorize people, at length.

It’s always fascinating how these models can merge complex concepts in specific and congruent ways, and then reliably misalign the roof and seats in public transit.

Fascist agitation was politely tolerated by residents until the national government had to step in to tell them, nothing’s happening, fuck off.

This wasn’t a sit-in. It was a harassment campaign against an entire city, by ignorant bigots, for weeks. If you endured a fraction of that you’d be ugly-crying on the phone for your local cops to do something about those poor innocent souls and their right to express HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK at four in the god damn morning.

Mixed bag.

Always nice to see some constraint on “emergency” powers… but a mob starting shit over nonsense was ignored by all lower levels of government. Telling people to just go home after an entire week of aimless provocation is not exactly cracking skulls the minute someone in a keffiyah holds up sign in an empty field.

And if bricks started falling through windshields after three days of nonstop noise, well, that would have been a riot justifying any state power… toward the people saying “leave us alone.”

pictures for sad children.

Your Google account is typically connected to your YouTube account, so if (like mine) your YouTube account is old enough to vote, you may not need to verify your Google account at all.

My Youtube account predates Google buying it, and I still get nag screens on the dumbest shit.

So I leave.

“It must have come from upriver!”

A hacker quote that’s stuck with me is that physical security only exists to slow down intruders so they can be caught.

Generally this means, before they get in… but it does also work when trying to rout some milk-drunk cavalry.

It’s a chatbot.

It literally just guesses the next word. The least-stupid versions have an extra mechanism to go, ‘given this pile of pre-processed text, what’s the next word?’ The problem in full is people “deploing” a stupid chatbot as if it’s one of Asimov’s robots.

The introductory complaints echo Socrates railing against writing. ‘It will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own.’ ‘You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever.’ We let the encyclopedia talk, and it’s going to end civilization! Nah. On the list of current existential threats - not in the top ten.

It spends seven pages glazing institutions as the only good thing holding society together… then basically leads with “Admittedly, our institutions have been fragile and ineffective for some time.” Later: “It is unreasonable to expect the kind of superhuman willpower necessary for all of us at scale to indefinitely avoid the worst temptations of AI.” Given the spread and vigor of kneejerk opposition to even the least uses of AI - surely blaming the robot is perfectly doable. Certain business institutions live quarter to quarter, and will gladly jettison this latest foolproof guarantee of infinite growth for the next salesman’s promise of same.

“There has been much written lately about how the rule of law has broken down among celebrated democracies,” citing a paper about twenty years of alarming decline. This tech is five years old.

This is erudite nonsense. A moral panic wearing elbow patches. I’m not reading past yet another slippery-slope morality tale where making [blank] easier makes people worse at [blank] so we must always do [blank] the hard way. As if Desmos ruined mathematics and now there’s no more mathematicians. If you do engineering with a slide rule instead of longhand, you’re a thief of expertise.

Rubbish.

Conservatives think jokes are things you mean, but other people aren’t allowed to get mad about.

When did “controversial” come to mean “obviously just awful?” There was a point it required moral ambiguity.

Initial thought is reducing incentives to invade Taiwan - but that’s 4D chess horseshit on my part. That’s yet another sensible person asking ‘but what is he really thinking?’ and coming up with sensible answers, when The Idiot’s thoughts are more like six fireflies blinking in a jar.