wjrii

@ wjrii @lemmy.world

Posts

42
Comments

652
Joined

2 yr. ago

5h ago

Why I don’t use AI image generators
Jump
1

wjrii @lemmy.world 5h ago
Just feed in the resulting image as part of the refinement process. Eventually you'll get a horse...shoe crab.

2d ago

Texas slams on the brakes for 1,800 data centers, power grid requirements are 5 times higher than peak record demand — 474 gigawatts of power requests are now subject to new moratorium

Yes, I've lived in the DFW area for over twenty years. It's home, for better or (lately) for worse. Still, I don't think any place is hopeless, and even today in Texas there are four blue voters for every 5 red ones. We just need more Ann Richards, Molly Ivins, and Willie Nelson, and fewer of these Christofascist assholes.

2d ago

Texas slams on the brakes for 1,800 data centers, power grid requirements are 5 times higher than peak record demand — 474 gigawatts of power requests are now subject to new moratorium

Jump

wjrii @lemmy.world 2d ago

They also don't realize that there's a reason Abbott had to spend millions of Wilkes and Dunn's money to primary a bunch of Republicans in the boonies. Those Friday Night Lights rural school districts, the ones that provide any sense of place, any average-paying jobs, and any excuse to go ahead and raise your kids in BFE, those are the first ones that will get ground into nothingness by the path envisioned for vouchers and ending recapture, which the rich suburban districts want.

Of course, that frees up more land for datacenters and fracking, so...

2d ago

Texas slams on the brakes for 1,800 data centers, power grid requirements are 5 times higher than peak record demand — 474 gigawatts of power requests are now subject to new moratorium

Jump

wjrii @lemmy.world 2d ago

This is pretty much it.

The 2021 freeze still looms large in people's minds, so while the grid actually has seemed to be hanging on better in Summer and Winter, things that threaten the still-isolated power supply draw attention. Then, Oracle/OpenAI set the precedent with Stargate in Abilene that you just stand these things up in the middle of nowhere because of cheap land and easy regulatory capture of the local politicians. The evolution of municipal governance in Texas also meant that the metro areas have fairly small core cities densely surrounded by independent municipalities, which often means that the tech companies can push that model into somewhat more densely packed areas, though it's still often the exurbs (though not always... stupid Dallas city government). That means it's the reddest parts of the state that are seeing them spring up and fuck the residents' personal quality of life badly enough that they actually complain. There's a big emphasis on the "M" part of NIMBY for them (because isn't there always?) but the fact remains that no one else in the state has a big enough "BY."

Very few of these people are ready to bail on single-party state government because they still buy the line that everything is regulatory hell and woke BS anywhere but God's Own Property Texas, but if they see the state completely ignore them the one time they politely ask the republicans to not fuck them quite so roughly, then it's going to be easier to stay home during the midterms. This is particularly problematic in a year when the Dems found a candidate with a pulse but who likes the Bible and looks like a Republican, and the Republicans are stuck with their primary voters' pick, an asshole who is as corrupt as Trump but lacks even that weird sheen of "I'm your asshole" that Trump gives off to his base. Also, and this is shallow, when you're the party that tries to project strength and vitality, having a ticket that consists of a droopy-eyed slug and a paraplegic in a wheelchair is something you have to figure out how to downplay.

Worst part of it is that they're probably still gonna win. A little part of me hopes this is the year, but mostly I'm just hoping it's close enough to drag out the spending and fuck the GOP's budget in Maine and elsewhere.

3d ago

We're being hailed!

Jump

wjrii @lemmy.world 3d ago

Yeah, but it's only ever senior staff who gets to that, and the federation ships have an Enterprise rent-a-car full of Warp-4 minivans that apparently need very little skill to pilot or resources to operate over long distances. None of that is much of a match for the tenders, lifeboats, and helicopters on your average Navy ship.

4d ago

Jackpot

Jump

wjrii @lemmy.world 4d ago

I'd say The (US) Office's highs might be a little higher than P&R's, but P&R had an optimism that kept it better for longer, or at least for a longer percentage of its run. IMHO The Office already had the check-fuel light on by the time Jim and Pam got married, and by the end it was just some strangers physically pushing the thing a couple miles farther down the road. P&R for me didn't start declining until they got back from London, and S6 still had a lot of good stuff. I'd have to look into it, but I really do feel like they thought that was the end, but somehow got renewed for S7 and had to do the entire weird coda of a season with a three year time skip that, I guess, made it technically Sci Fi, LOL

4d ago

Jackpot

Jump

wjrii @lemmy.world 4d ago

I'll second the other commenter. With your preconceived notion being "terrible," you might be pleasantly surprised and find that it's merely "rushed." GoT is partly a cultural artifact as the last genre project that truly captured the monoculture's attention (it laughs at Severance's or Stanger Things' so-called impact) before the internet shattered it, so everything good and bad about it was dramatically amplified.

4d ago

Jackpot

Jump

wjrii @lemmy.world 4d ago

Yeah, it's peak The Office cringe, but it's not bad exactly, just that Carell was doing that bit much better. If one skips anything, it's the last two seasons when everybody is flanderized all to hell, they're out of things to do in Pawnee, and some of the new additions don't work as well. I'd say skip any episode in S6 that feels off, and then just ignore s7. Feels like Babylon 5 where thy're like, "We got another season, WTF do we do now?"

1w ago

Only the true ones rhyme

Jump

wjrii @lemmy.world 1w ago

But if you make your meter scan, you'll seem an even wiser man.

1w ago

Every fighting game has the same general ↺ ↻ ⇄ ⇅ input combos you’re bound to get something right

Jump

wjrii @lemmy.world 1w ago

This is also why I lose fighting games to twelve year olds, and have since I was a twelve year old.

1w ago

Katy Perry Gets Trapped in Giant Bottle During Performance as Fans Ignore Her Pleas To Roll Her Back

Jump

wjrii @lemmy.world 1w ago

If you don't assume treble clef on sheet music, then you're really not, LOL.

1w ago

In your opinion is reading War and Peace the same accomplishment as listening to the audiobook? Why or why not?

Jump

wjrii @lemmy.world 1w ago

If both people come away with the same understanding, what difference does it make?

You're not wrong, but this statement is doing a LOT of heavy lifting. By the time I am paying close enough attention to something on audio for there to be no difference, reading would have been more efficient.

1w ago

Codebase

Jump

wjrii @lemmy.world 1w ago

And inspired the original name of everbody's favorite meme-stock/would-be Ebay owner. Babbage's was always way classier than Games n Gadgets.

1w ago

TIL the 1980 Winter Olympic Village was built with the intention of converting it into a federal prison after the games ended.

Jump

wjrii @lemmy.world 1w ago

While National Olympic Committees typically need to pay on their own if they choose to find new accommodation, IOC Director Monique Berlioux said, "This time the accommodations are so poor that delegations will not have to pay for them if they move somewhere else."

2w ago

TIL the 500-year-old tradition of Turkish coffee reading (kahve falı) started in the Ottoman harem not just as magic, but as a clever social loophole. Women used the "fortunes" in the cups as a safe…

Jump

wjrii @lemmy.world 2w ago

That's probably because it's a repost of a reddit slop account. Link if you're feeling brave and indignant.

2w ago

Schools across America are quietly admitting that screens in classrooms made students worse off and are reversing years of tech-first policies

Jump

wjrii @lemmy.world 2w ago

Their books are on these devices. They don’t have physical books anymore.

Frankly, probably the best part about them, potential eyestrain notwithstanding. Having a sack of bricks strapped to your back all day, or constant retreats to a locker, wasn't contributing to my quality of education, LOL. Having an electronic device as a reading and writing and proctoring tool, sensibly extended with the bare minimum of other capabilities, is not a bad thing at all, IMHO.

2w ago

DS9 in a nutshell

Jump

wjrii @lemmy.world 2w ago

Yeah, it seems almost like a perverse point of pride that the weirdos who join Starfleet don't really participate fully in planetside culture, and getting retired from it would almost like a kind of death or imprisonment. Now, why Picard and O'Brien don't get assigned to a cushy Starbase gig in Sol is beyond me. Those two are, mentally, hundreds of (very traumatic) years old each.

2w ago

People with touchscreen laptops, how often do you use the touchscreen features?

Jump

wjrii @lemmy.world 2w ago

This is me. I use it just often enough that I'll occasionally embarrass myself smudging the screen of a non-TS laptop trying to zoom a map or tap a shutdown icon.

2w ago

DS9 in a nutshell

Jump

wjrii @lemmy.world 2w ago

There is a line you see quoted from time to time the ST:TMP novelization, which I understand Gene Roddenberry had a real hand in crafting.:

We are a highly conservative and strongly individualistic group. The old customs die hard with us. We submit ourselves to starship discipline because we know it is made necessary by the realities of deep-space exploration.

He seems to have struggled with what his vision for a future society would be, versus the realities of making a sellable media property in the late 20th century. He posits that our Starfleet friends are actually socially conservative space cowboys by the standards of the UFP, which makes it easier for the audience to identify with them without compromising the rest of his post-scarcity utopian vision (e.g. that same passage indicates that James Kirk was partially named after his mother's first "love instructor"). However, it also means we're seeing a bizarre subculture of quasi-exiled psychological luddites who take on the eldritch horrors of service in Starfleet in return for not being slapped down into conformity.

It's clearly not a guiding principle for how Starfleet is generally portrayed in ST media, but it's interesting to think of them in terms of being distinctly apart from the rest of humanity while dedicating themselves to protecting it and expanding its understanding of the universe.

2w ago

Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32 students cheating on their midterm with AI

Jump

wjrii @lemmy.world 2w ago

(goes back to No Child)

In the US, that shit goes back at least to the GI Bill post-WW2 and the Cold War STEM obsession that took root after the Soviets launched Sputnick. For better or worse, and to be clear a very real portion of it was for worse, before that time College or University was a finishing school, hopefully to include intellectual development, for future elites. Well-read, well-rounded and well-spoken were the expectation, and it was a ticket to opportunities.

After the war, we simply adapted the existing educational infrastructure to a vastly expanded audience who were now told that some degree was the ticket to any promising white-collar career; teachers colleges, technical colleges, and completely new institutions all moved to a model based on the prominent pre-war universities, but with very different "customers". The students were there to get a professional credential, not to secure social cachet. The democratization of higher education was very real, but the number of people who needed to be college graduates far outstripped the number who wanted to think deeply about literature, history, and philosophy (or at least the number of people who understood that pretending to do so was part of the social contract).

Then, to make sure we didn't fall behind the Commies, as many resources, financial and social, as possible were poured into STEM programs. This was again within this same "University" paradigm, so students who had no particular desire to study history or philosophy were being required to do so, but 95%+ of the institutional and cultural signals they got told them this was busy work required by ivory towered non-entities who didn't do anything "real."

The humanities professors and department chairs see all this too, so they take steps to avoid making waves and keep their jobs, and keep their departments as healthy as possible. Undergraduate coursework, both the assignments and the expectations, gets watered down, especially for GenEd required courses. There's genuine stuff to unpack as to why, how, and how much STEM kids and jobseeking kids should be required to study the humanities after high school (Peter Thiel comes to mind as someone who maaaaybe should have avoided college level philosophy courses), but the particular way it went down in the US was not very healthy. Ironically, in fighting to preserve the vestiges of a liberal-arts education, its defenders may have undercut its perception.