Gemini Ultra will, in developer mode, have 1 million token context length so that would fit a medium book at least. No word on what it will support in production mode though.

What an amateurish way to try and make GPT-4 behave like you want it to.

And what a load of bullshit to first say it should be truthful and then preload falsehoods as the truth…

Disgusting stuff.

So with that data point you’re saying China is the country to be born in 2024? Because while I’m not at all discrediting their incredible pace in improving the life of their citizens from an economic perspective.

But I’m personally far more concerned about questions about freedom of expression and of opportunities and as such would prefer to be born in any Nordic country as an example, or Switzerland as another. Sure you could argue the Nordic model doesn’t scale because a population of 10 mil is not the same as more than 1 billion. But that wasn’t really a part of the question here. To me economic growth is just one dimension, an important one but not the only one to judge a country against. So once again, from a political perspective, which is what we’re talking about here when we’re saying that the West is failing, how is China better? I mainly see the mainstream outlets and they show a bleak state of affairs from that perspective, can you counter that?

While the West is certainly struggling I fail to see how China is the preferable alternative from a political perspective. Care to enlighten me as to why it is better for its citizens which must be the goal and purpose of government no?

Yes, it’s the next step and an evolution because it is far more of a trust less approach. With VPNs you need to trust your provider. If they “give you up” then you’re well and truly fucked. For I2P there is no way for a malicious node operators to parse out who is doing what. And the source code you can vet yourself so no need to trust it. Still if you have actors working together in the nodes, the torrent provider and at the ISP level then you can most certainly find a way to break the layer of secrecy. The barrier is however vast and so far police haven’t spent that much effort on piracy because it isn’t a serious crime in the eyes of the law. And I don’t foresee that they will for many years.

It’s also far more accessible than say Usenet and VPN+private trackers. Which is a very good thing for privacy in general.

Hmm, the 4:3 versions did make it to DVD but finding the old version for things is never easy. It’s a common wish however, in Anime circles in particular.

Looking at a predb over scene releases and going back as far as they go I see that the naming standard, as I suspected, didn’t hint at neither aspect ratio or resolution.

https://predb.net/search/south.park.s01?page=1

However if you look for DivX or Xvid releases I’d say it’s fairly likely they’ll be in 4:3 since Xvid by and large had gotten replaced by H.264 / X.264 by 2017 which is the earliest release I can confirm is going to be the remaster since it’s from the Bluray that released then:

https://www.dvdsreleasedates.com/movies/4399/South-Park-(TV-Series-1997-).html

The above is likely not fully complete so the remaster might’ve happened between 2004 and 2017, and this might be readily available information but I’m running out of time…

So basically my tip if you’re lazy is look for Xvid/DivX and cross your fingers. If you’re not then correlate the remaster date/release date to the predb and look for a scene release from before the remaster dropped.

That’s what I’m saying. It’s like everyone knows some college kids smoke pot from the smell in the dorms, but Police can’t legally search room by room to find out who it is, they need a search warrant which they need more than a general suspicion that someone in the dorms smoke to get.

Same with I2P, it’s done in a public setting so from traffic patterns we can be pretty sure someone is downloading a shit ton, and that it’s likely illegal content. Residential IPs have little reason to consistently download several GB files on a daily/weekly basis, streaming and download also look vastly different profile wise and at least no one I know of go to those lengths to try and mask their traffic patterns by trying to make streaming look like download or vice versa.

But as I said and you reiterated, you still need to crack the encryption to actually prove it in court. But given a specific target there are many ways to do that. A generic approach is likely not going to happen. Which means that I2P is secure much like having a secret chat in a crowded place like Grand Central Station in NY. You know that people are meeting there to chat about illegal stuff but you don’t know who. It becomes much easier if you know who to follow and eavesdrop on, but of course still not easy.

It is however nowhere near as safe as communication over channels that aren’t public to begin with. But such of course do not exist outside military and other special contexts.

But at the same time I2P is still built upon TCP/IP so it’s still like encrypted yodeling. Finding out who’s likely yodeling down movies is rather easy. The protection instead lies in the high barrier to prove exactly which movie and when so as to pass the barrier for court admissable evidence.

Now don’t misunderstand me, I2P is great stuff and I’ve used it on and off for years, but it shouldn’t be treated as the holy grail of safe and secure communication. Nothing can truly be that if it’s built on TCP/IP for fairly obvious reasons.

You’d go insane from the isolation looooong before finishing a fat Steam library. But first you’d be completely bored of gaming. Even if you feel no fatigue, hunger, tiredness etc it would quite quickly lose meaning. There’s a reason most retired people don’t do that thing they love 24/7. We just can’t derive enjoyment from something we can and get to do all the time. Waiting, longing and planning to is vitally important to enjoyment.

If you’re deeply autistic but still functioning you might be able to survive the isolation. But you’d need an insanely rigorous schedule set up for yourself where you treat observing the universe form as a job and treat yourself to gaming or whatever activity. But even under those circumstances that individual would likely go completely insane and be a vegetable within a thousand years. After a billion, if you literally can’t die no matter what you do, then you wouldn’t even be able to form thoughts, your brain would be so fried you’d present as someone with lock-in syndrome and just lay there until you finally get to die. Torture is putting it so mildly it’s like calling Carolina Reaper Peppers about as spicy as vanilla ice cream.

1337x is probably the biggest these days and it just needs a free quick and easy account to upload a torrent. If you’re concerned about privacy then use a mail relay like Firefox Relay which is free.

I don’t know why the article doesn’t bring up Valve being the company to bring loot boxes and that business model to gaming as the prime example. Valve earns extreme money from the skins market and gambling in CSGO / CS2 since they sell the keys and take a cut of trades as well. They’re far more concerned with money than actually caring for the people involved. Gambling ruins lives and Valve is the gambling company that faces by far the least vitriol in that horrendous crowd.

I disagree because the biggest they did and continue to do is loot boxes. I argue that it was Valve that popularized that business model with CSGO and it is the most predatory shit that has ever entered the gaming sphere. It’s a complete cancer and Valves implementation is amongst the worst there is because of their market giving the items easily accessible real money value. This makes it not just like gambling in my extremely firm opinion, it makes it actual gambling. They’re also double dipping with the community market since it also takes a cut from aforementioned gambling. How Valve has escaped the vast majority of loot box hate is completely beyond me. And how they’ve managed to so far avoid a world wide crackdown on the unregulated gambling is also to me mind boggling. I despise Valve for this to the very core of my being because I know first hand how easily that shit can ruin lives and I know people that have got hooked and fucked up their life big time from CS skins. Left at the altar fucked up levels.

Yeah, for the most part. I’m working towards my dreams and they feel within reach even though I know the path there is both long and arduous. It will require a lot of me, but that is more due to what my dreams are than any circumstances around me.

How it happened is of course a hard question to answer. In some ways, perhaps many ways, dumb luck, I met my wife in an unlikely place and she has built me up brick by brick over many years by now. Without her it’s hard to imagine I’d, we’d, be in such a good place all around.

But that isn’t really helpful, focusing on the parts I had no and have no control over. If we instead look only on my actions I think there are a few but more importantly a few key insights that helped me:

Actions:

• Fake it till you make it. Confidence is all important in our society, if you don’t have it naturally then you need to fake it. Over time it becomes second nature.

• Take care of yourself, first. Like they say in the preflight security rundown, put on your own mask first before you attempt to help others.

• Take responsibility for your own well being. Related to the one above but this is more on the emotional level, while external factors will of course impact your well being you don’t have direct control over them. You can’t expect anyone else you make you feel good/well so you need to shoulder that burden.

Insights:

• You rely on society and it relies on you: while work sucks and is often times completely meaningless and seemingly detrimental to the world from a long term macro perspective it’s still the case that your dream life involves amenities and comforts that require people to work. And you can’t expect that of others unless you yourself put in the same effort.

• You aren’t in control and you never truly will be: while this might be a hard pill to swallow you need to make peace with the fact that you could get cancer the day you reach your ultimate goal and that’s just part of this reality. You can only impact your actions and improve your chances, you can’t guarantee shit. Celebrate your victories no matter the source of them and learn from your own mistakes but don’t let external circumstances crush you.

• Life just isn’t far: relates to the above. Some people smoke and drink and do copious amounts of drugs are still wildly successful and rich and live to 100. Some work their asses off, are the nicest people ever, live clean and healthy and then die in cancer in their 30s with two young children left behind. Dwelling on this solves nothing. It’s just a part of our reality and isn’t really meaningfully changed or impacted by politics.

Those are my two cents

EDIT:

Hmm, I skipped something that might be super obvious but I shouldn’t assume:

Action:

• Smile and the world smiles at you: not in the sense that you’re guaranteed or owed a smile but rather that being kind and putting out good vibes makes life smoother and happier for us all. This is not to say that we should accept bad things of course, but make sure to reduce the collateral damage of your negative emotions and feelings, think surgical strike on a specific, deserving, target and not carpet bombing everything and everyone.

• You need friends, or at the very least someone to talk to: Ties in to the above in that if you don’t dump your negative emotions on the world then we’re do you dump it? Because carrying that shit around or just eating the bad emotions yourself is not a viable approach. No, you need to have people to vent to/with. Be that your partner, friends, family or a professional. This goes for all bullshit like getting sick and missing an event you’ve looked forward to and had tickets to for months. Or being passed up for a promotion in favor of Kenny who by all metrics does a worse job than you. You need to vent that shit out because being in a shitty mood and making everyone else uncomfortable is not going to make your life any better or happier.

And dont forget the lifelong political philosophers that love spaces like Reddit and the Fediverse where they can debate and argue. It’s not that Communism is inherently bad from any theoretical or philosophical stand-point. And I’ll even agree that at least some part of the failure of pretty much all communist states was caused by external actors working hard to make them fail. But even if we could get everyone aboard on that thinking the step is still absolutely massive to go from any western nation today to full on communism. And this isn’t some new line of thinking either. It’s why SocDem even became a thing way back, which was very unpopular right from the start and opposed by Marx himself (the notion of gradual reform, one policy at a time and of compromising to make at least some progress).

In some ways I admire the 50+ year old die hard commies that have spent so much time and energy into this, that really know that it’ll work. But that can at best get 20 people to attend a meeting because most of us actually live OK lives, we want changes yes, we want progress and not conservative measures yes but full on revolution? Forgo private ownership completely and everyone gets a fair share? We can’t even trust our neighbors to not steal our packages from our porch, nor our representatives to not fuck us over for some low ball lobbyist money and we are to trust them with basically absolute power for however long it will take to set up a new nation, constitution and government post revolution. Just… No.

And dont forget the lifelong political philosophers that love spaces like Reddit and the Fediverse where they can debate and argue. It’s not that Communism is inherently bad from any theoretical or philosophical stand-point. And I’ll even agree that at least some part of the failure of pretty much all communist states was caused by external actors working hard to make them fail. But even if we could get everyone aboard on that thinking the step is still absolutely massive to go from any western nation today to full on communism. And this isn’t some new line of thinking either. It’s why SocDem even became a thing way back, which was very unpopular right from the start and opposed by Marx himself (the notion of gradual reform, one policy at a time and of compromising to make at least some progress).

In some ways I admire the 50+ year old die hard commies that have spent so much time and energy into this, that really know that it’ll work. But that can at best get 20 people to attend a meeting because most of us actually live OK lives, we want changes yes, we want progress and not conservative measures yes but full on revolution? Forgo private ownership completely and everyone gets a fair share? We can’t even trust our neighbors to not steal our packages from our porch, nor our representatives to not fuck us over for some low ball lobbyist money and we are to trust them with basically absolute power for however long it will take to set up a new nation, constitution and government post revolution. Just… No.

And dont forget the lifelong political philosophers that love spaces like Reddit and the Fediverse where they can debate and argue. It’s not that Communism is inherently bad from any theoretical or philosophical stand-point. And I’ll even agree that at least some part of the failure of pretty much all communist states was caused by external actors working hard to make them fail. But even if we could get everyone aboard on that thinking the step is still absolutely massive to go from any western nation today to full on communism. And this isn’t some new line of thinking either. It’s why SocDem even became a thing way back, which was very unpopular right from the start and opposed by Marx himself (the notion of gradual reform, one policy at a time and of compromising to make at least some progress).

In some ways I admire the 50+ year old die hard commies that have spent so much time and energy into this, that really know that it’ll work. But that can at best get 20 people to attend a meeting because most of us actually live OK lives, we want changes yes, we want progress and not conservative measures yes but full on revolution? Forgo private ownership completely and everyone gets a fair share? We can’t even trust our neighbors to not steal our packages from our porch, nor our representatives to not fuck us over for some low ball lobbyist money and we are to trust them with basically absolute power for however long it will take to set up a new nation, constitution and government post revolution. Just… No.

And dont forget the lifelong political philosophers that love spaces like Reddit and the Fediverse where they can debate and argue. It’s not that Communism is inherently bad from any theoretical or philosophical stand-point. And I’ll even agree that at least some part of the failure of pretty much all communist states was caused by external actors working hard to make them fail. But even if we could get everyone aboard on that thinking the step is still absolutely massive to go from any western nation today to full on communism. And this isn’t some new line of thinking either. It’s why SocDem even became a thing way back, which was very unpopular right from the start and opposed by Marx himself (the notion of gradual reform, one policy at a time and of compromising to make at least some progress).

In some ways I admire the 50+ year old die hard commies that have spent so much time and energy into this, that really know that it’ll work. But that can at best get 20 people to attend a meeting because most of us actually live OK lives, we want changes yes, we want progress and not conservative measures yes but full on revolution? Forgo private ownership completely and everyone gets a fair share? We can’t even trust our neighbors to not steal our packages from our porch, nor our representatives to not fuck us over for some low ball lobbyist money and we are to trust them with basically absolute power for however long it will take to set up a new nation, constitution and government post revolution. Just… No.

My recommendation falls squarely on the Omada series from TP-Link. It’s their SMB (small-medium business) offering and its very wallet friendly for what it is. Though WiFi 7 stuff is of course not cheap if you want the bleeding edge. I suggest going with the EAP6 series with WiFi 6E. No need to buy the physical controller, instead DIY a router with opnsense or pfsense and the Omada software for managing the APs is what I recommend. You of course need a switch with PoE like TL-SG2008P. PoE is a game changer for making wiring up the APs easy, and I do recommend wiring them because then you don’t need to think about having a strong signal between the APs.

Criteria being stability mainly, all consumer stuff is much more prone to the occasional drop and just plain wonky ness. Another criteria being upgrade path, the Omada stuff can easily be sold when you upgrade because they retain value pretty well (and you can find them used to start with as well). They also don’t ship with the bloat consumer devices come with. With features you don’t need and router+AP combo is fine if you’re in a single room apartment but it doesn’t scale to a multiroom setup well. I’ve used Asus “AI-mesh” and you really waste more money than you save in my experience.

For phones that infrastructure is just so much more costly since it needs near constant replacement with newer tech. 5G is far from completely rolled out and the next project looks to be dismantling GSM and 3G after that it won’t be long till 6G. Meanwhile Fiber is all but ubiquitous by now, hell several vacation homes in the extended family has fiber ny now and the cables won’t need to be switched for a long time I reckon, I’m betting 30 years at least of only needing to change the switches every 10 or so years, which is infinitely cheaper and easier than building/replacing a mobile network mast.

In my experience beepers tend to be very simple. My cheap B-board, but major brand (MSI), only beeps when it POSTs. If it doesn’t post then there’s nothing. Good for when you’re using it headless but otherwise pretty pointless imo.