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Captainant

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by Captainant

  1. Just now, DixonHur said:

    Even stranger than confusing the Cloak Room with the Daily Texan? 😉

    No I know I'm in the CR lol, just moreso commenting that it's a trend to label any sort of disagreement or negotiation as "politcs" as soon as a participant runs out of things to say. Especially for something like trade or economics

    • Hook 'Em 1
  2. 2 minutes ago, DixonHur said:

    Is lack of politics still politics?

    What about if I trade you a fish for a few shells...is that politics?

    Well if someone disagrees with you about it on the Daily Texan, it somehow transmutes into politics. Very strange phenomenon 

    • Haha 5
  3. 39 minutes ago, mdmost said:

    One decent thing I have on my phone to help block telemarketers to my cell is Active Armor by AT&T. I swear it blocks 9 out of 10 calls I get but nothing from verified people. It shows you the blocked call as it comes in so I can do a quick Google search to make sure it isn't a bonafide person calling me. Before the app, I was getting deluged with spam calls, a lot of them with my same area code and close to my same cell number. The masking these people do is not enshitting. They're quite good at it. I made my elderly mother put it on her phone as she's the perfect target to get scammed.  

    The enshittening is that telco providers have the solution to the spam and scam calling - add fucking authentication like the STIR/SHAKEN framework so that some dudes in in office in Chennai can't call me from my own cell number to tell me about my cars extended warranty. 

    But the telcos won't, because it would take away a significant revenue stream from the number spoofing service for outbound calls that is used by legitimate businesses, and abused by scammers. Plus, implementing that authentication framework would finally push the telcos to upgrade the 60 year old systems that they've been taking money for to upgrade for decades. The executives don't want to spend the money because it would mean less payout to shareholders. 

     

    That said, I'll check out that active armor solution because I have been getting upwards of a dozen scam and political calls a day and it's fucking driving me crazy because it's interrupting meetings and coming from area codes that I have customers in, so I have to pick up. 

    • Hook 'Em 2
  4. 49 minutes ago, Balcones said:

    It has exposed what Willis and Wade are willing to do in court. And if they are willing to lie under oath in this case after being embarrassed by their own actions, they shouldn’t be trying the case.  


    Lots of others that can bring the case to the court.

    Man you sure are enthusiastic about continuing to delay any sort of trump trial. 

  5. On 2/21/2024 at 10:19 AM, ajax said:

    No one?

    Well, I have to fly halfway around the world twice this year and reports are that while the Ally outperforms the Steam deck in nearly every way, it's an absolute pig when it comes to power consumption so I might go with the Steam deck to keep me occupied during flights.

    So I guess the OLED model is the way to go?

    How much gaming time are you guys getting out of your deck?

    Everything I've read is that while the Ally has better specs on paper, Valve has really done the yeomans work to make the steam deck incredibly easy to use. If you're getting a steam deck now, definitely get the OLED

    I can get a good 3 hours on a big fancy 3D game, and 4 or 5 on a less demanding game. That said, I pretty much always have a battery brick or wall charger hand when flying so battery is less of a problem I've found. 

    But for context, I've played through all of BG3 on my steam deck and my wife is able to play all the Skyrim her heart desires

    • Hook 'Em 1
  6. Again, these LLM chatbots are not actually thinking! They have no conception of what is "right" or "wrong", they only are aware of whatever unstructured data was fed into the neural net. I would bet that they didn't add a ton of pedophilia related content - or more likely- there is a bias in public datasets and media coverage to bury those stories so there is a weaker association linguistically between "pedophile" and "evil". 

     

    And truly, you can get these chatbots to say almost anything. There is generally poor understanding of what a governance framework even could be with LLM's, much less an actual practical business use case for them. 

     

    IMO, it says more about the folks seeking and mining these sorts of responses than it does the Gemini team. Rather obsessed and fixated on pedophilia. 

    • Hook 'Em 1
    • Rage+1 1
  7. On 2/21/2024 at 9:59 PM, Zepol87 said:

    Anyone playing on Xbox X? Get home tomorrow and have 2 weeks of nothing before another trip. Deciding if I should buy it

    It's one of the biggest, best, and most complete games I've ever played. I'm a sucker for CRPGs, but goddamn BG3 hits 

    • Hook 'Em 3
  8. That night footage of flares coming down and tricking some missiles before a big BOOM is something else. I wonder if Ukraine shot the missile or if they used some EW tricks to coax russia into a red on red situation, like spoofed IFF signals or something else to trick a junior LT ivan to fire on his own jet

     

    Edit: Also reading tea leaves... degrading russias air radar is a key step in obtaining air dominance and then supremacy, which will be very handy with Ukrainian F16s

    • Hook 'Em 6
  9. 4 hours ago, InkaUtexas said:

    My daughter studies aerospace engineering on the east coast. She is so excited about this and of course Artemis. Lets keep going.

    I am very concerned about Artemis. Their mission planning has more holes in than swiss cheese, and none of the NASA leadership are willing to say the emperor has no clothes. They still haven't even had a successful full stack systems test, much less a single flight that completed all of its primary mission objectives. 

    And each time they light a candle, it's one of the most expensive rockets ever launched.

     

    It's a boondoggle as it stands, and they have been producing far more failures than successes for the last decade. In the same timeframe it took us to go from Mercury to Apollo to men on the moon, Artemis hasn't even been able to get humans into their capsule for a flight. It's maddening.

    • Hook 'Em 1
  10. 3 minutes ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

    Like Carville stated, this is a deeply held belief, and yes, the American version of religious extremism is going for broke.

    The fascists figured out long ago that if they claim their awful stance is a ""''deeply held religious belief""" that most of society will let them get away with their bigotry. We are in the end stages of that particular fuck fuck game now. 

    • Hook 'Em 1
    • Like 1
    • Rage+1 1
  11. Also I know it doesn't surprise anyone this point, but the judge who issued the ruling is a qanon loon.

    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tom-parker-alabama-ivf-embryo_n_65d7ea34e4b0cc1f2f7b3e26

    Quote

    Parker was the featured guest on “Someone You Should Know,” hosted by Johnny Enlow, a Christian nationalist influencer and devoted supporter of former President Donald Trump. Over the course of an 11-minute interview, Parker articulated a theocratic worldview at odds with a functioning, pluralistic society.

     

    “God created government,” he told Enlow, adding that it’s “heartbreaking” that “we have let it go into the possession of others.”

    As reported by Right Wing Watch, Enlow has claimed that Trump “is on assignment” from God to work with the angels Michael and Gabriel to take down George Soros and Bill Gates, among others; he has claimed that Russian President Vladamir Putin is fighting “Luciferian pedophiles” in Ukraine, in a battle to stop them from deploying vaccines and 5G that would turn people into transhumanist semi-robots; and he has claimed that the majority of other world leaders are “satanic” pedophiles who “steal blood” and “do sacrifices.”

    So yeah a real straight shooter that believes in covid vaccines being mind control, that putin is doing good things in Ukraine, and that satanic pedophiles are stealing blood from and sacrificing children. 

    Totally the guy who should be dictating reproductive rights. 

    God bless America, we are fucked. 

    • Rage+1 4
  12. 6 hours ago, wild_turkey said:

    We have one amazing child through IVF. We were late 30s when we started trying to become parents and had one natural pregnancy that resulted in miscarriage. After about a year of trying, we saw a fertility specialist who recommended skipping straight to IVF due to our age, and we got lucky on the first egg retrieval and implantation cycle and now have a happy and healthy one year old daughter. I know 4 other couples who are at various points in the infertility struggle, some of which are failing IVF, and I feel awful for them.

    We also have several embryos frozen that we are unlikely to use because the first childbirth and recovery was physically very difficult for my wife. We don’t have much of an ethical dilemma over that because we don’t consider frozen embryos to be people.

    I don’t understand why or how someone could define an embryo as a human being, and assuming most people who take that stance are doing so for religious reasons (radical Christianity), I’m genuinely curious where in the Bible this is even close to being defined? If not the Bible, then how do they arrive at these ideals?

    (I realize the definition of when life begins is pivotal to the abortion debate, which I admittedly have mostly ignored until recently, so probably this has been beat to death.)

    Also, it would be nearly impossible to argue against IVF without also opposing oral contraception and IUDs. Those methods allow fertilization to occur in vitro, but then prevent the fertilized egg from implanting into the endometrium. So I suppose everyone in Alabama is committing murder when they have sex while taking birth control?

    It will be interesting to see if this gets adopted in other states. I thought IVF would be untouchable due to the fact that most people on both sides of the political aisle probably have family or friends who have used IVF and witnessed firsthand the joy it brings to the world, but here we are. Everyone who was paranoid about gay marriage, trans rights, and oral contraception was absolutely right to be worried.

    Aside from the transparent attack on women's bodily autonomy, the logic of declaring every potential pregnancy a fully viable baby is fraught. A solid 20-30% of fertilized and implanted embryos fail to result in a healthy birth and viable baby, and end in miscarriage. That's not a moral or personal failure, biology can just be messy. But now can those women be prosecuted for """killing a child""" when they miscarry? 

    It's just gonna get worse from here for women. 

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